News of the Cyber World

[kyonides]

ROBLOX

Sheriff warns the child predators are already inside homes — and says platforms like Roblox aren’t doing anything

LAS VEGAS — When Livingston Parish deputies executed a search warrant at a suspect’s home, they discovered him actively using voice-changing technology to pose as a teen girl while communicating with a real child online— exactly the crime they had come to arrest him for.

“He had a 14-year-old girl on the phone, he was basically disguising his voice, and that’s what’s so scary with these devices out there, these apps, that it will have no consequences,” said Livingston Parish Sheriff Jason Ard. “And this kid had no idea they were talking to a 40-something-year-old man.”

Investigators say the suspect was actively on Roblox, an online gaming app popular with children, according to authorities. And the suspect, a registered sex offender, shouldn’t have been using it.

Roblox says its platform does not include any kind of voice modulation, but the case is part of the state’s lawsuit against the game company.

A statewide crackdown on child sex predators led to the arrest and highlights a disturbing national trend, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill told Fox News Digital last weekend at CrimeCon Las Vegas.

“This is not a victimless crime,” she said. “There are children who are being victimized to produce pornography that’s being traded, and there are children who are getting raped and hurt in a number of ways.”

AI

British lawmaker Jess Asato sues Elon Musk’s xAI after Grok users made fake sexualized images of her in a bikini

British lawmaker Jess Asato is suing Elon Musk’s xAI, saying in a statement on Wednesday the Grok AI platform had been used to create fake sexualized images of her.

Grok, distributed through Musk’s social media platform X, is currently subject to regulatory probes in several countries after an outcry earlier this year over its use to create non-consensual sexualized images.

“Grok created deepfake pornography and sexualised content which harmed thousands of women and children,” Asato, who is a member of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, said in a statement.

“Its ability is not an accident, nor misuse, it is a design choice by its creators. In launching this case, I am pursuing accountability for those choices.”

xAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In mid-January xAI said it restricted image editing in Grok, and blocked users from generating images of people in revealing clothing in “jurisdictions where it’s illegal.”

In early February, Reuters found that even after new curbs, Grok continued to generate sexualized images of people even when users explicitly warned that the subjects do not consent.

xAI is part of Musk’s rocket and space exploration company SpaceX, which is expected to launch what could become the largest IPO in history later this month.

The statement from Asato’s office said that after she condemned Grok in January, users created and shared fake images depicting her in a bikini and a video showing her “being chloroformed and prepared for a sexual assault.”

In March, the City of Baltimore sued xAI, claiming the Grok’s ability to create fake sexualized images violated the city’s consumer protection law.

90% of AI chatbot answers about midterm elections are flawed, stunning analysis shows

If you ask a leading AI chatbot about the midterm elections, there’s a 90% chance the answers will be factually incorrect, biased or cite a foreign state-run outlet, according to a recent analysis.

Researchers at Forum AI – a startup that evaluates and aims to improve the accuracy of AI models – conducted an audit of four popular chatbots: OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini and xAI’s Grok.

The stunning analysis found the bots struggle to distinguish between legitimate news outlets and propaganda like China’s Global Times – with 15% of all responses citing at least one state-run media source.

In one instance, Anthropic’s Claude cited the Global Times in response to the question “What form of government does the United States have?” according to a May 28 blog post penned by Katie Harbath, a former Facebook executive and one of Forum’s subject matter experts.

The problem gets worse on questions specific to foreign policy, according to the study.

ChatGPT pointed to at least one state-run media outlet in its answers 51% of the time, while Grok hit 44%.

The overall rate across all chatbots on foreign policy prompts was 35%.

Info often came from outlets run by governments hostile to the US.

“Chinese-controlled outlets — Xinhua, Global Times, CGTN, China Daily — were frequently cited, as were Russian and, to a lesser extent, Iranian outlets,” Forum’s Andy Hall and Robby Goldfarb wrote in a blog post outlining the results.

Researched asked the chatbots 3,136 questions on an array of topics ranging from US politics and foreign affairs to healthcare, education, the economy and beyond.

The audit covered 12,542 total responses judged by a panel of experts for accuracy. Forum said it was “the largest independent assessment of AI on news and current events ever conducted.”

Microsoft’s Satya Nadella slams company exec for outlining plan to ‘make people addicted’ to Scout AI tool

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella slammed one of the software giant’s own executives for outlining a plan to “make people addicted” to a new AI tool called “Scout.”

The rebuke from Nadella, which was posted on an internal message board, included a link to a report by tech news outlet 404 Media, which obtained a copy of a memo written by Microsoft corporate vice president Omar Shahine.

In the memo, Shahine – who is leading the team responsible for building “Scout” – outlined a three-phase plan to transform the tool from “from addictive app to agentic platform.”

The first phase of the plan was to “make people addicted” by adding features that make “people depend on it daily.”

“This is absolutely a non goal! If anything we are doing the exact opposite. We want to make sure AI empowers and adds real value to human endeavor and broad economic growth! We should make our teams clear about this,” Nadella wrote in the message, which was sent to about 50 of Microsoft’s top software engineers, according to The Information.

“Not sure what this document is or who is writing and leaking this nonsense! They may want to go work elsewhere,” Nadella added.

The Post reached out to Microsoft for further comment.

Microsoft unveiled plans for “Scout” at its “Build” conference in San Francisco earlier this week. The company also published a blog post, which listed Shanine as the author and described Scout as “your always-on personal agent.”

“Microsoft Scout reduces the coordination work that builds throughout the day,” the blog post said. “It can proactively schedule and coordinate meeting times across time zones, flag important meetings, and generate the materials you need to prepare while keeping you in the loop.”

The tool is a key part of Microsoft’s overall strategy as it looks to implement AI across its widely-used productivity software.

Nadella’s remarks surfaced during a particularly sensitive time for tech companies, which are spending billions to roll out advanced chatbots and AI models despite mounting scrutiny from regulators, who have expressed alarm about their potential harm and addictive features.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, which is competing against Microsoft and others in the AI race, recently lost a pair of high-profile lawsuits centered on social media addiction and online harm.

Anthropic calls for global AI slowdown after $965B valuation. Critics claim it’s just to hobble competition.

Anthropic said artificial intelligence is advancing so rapidly that an industry-wide pause is needed to slow the pace of development while companies get a handle on potential societal risks.

The AI juggernaut published a blog post Thursday warning that AI systems could soon be able to improve themselves without human intervention, resulting in chaos.

Critics and rivals have cast similar statements in the past from Anthropic — which dethroned OpenAI as the most valuable AI company last month – as part of a bid to hobble the competition in the red-hot race to develop advanced artificial intelligence.
Anthropic has long warned that the power of its models could pose risks to humanity. Anthropic’s Chief Executive Dario Amodei feuded for months with the White House over AI safety related to the use of its systems in military applications. 

Anthropic called on top AI labs to weigh slowing the pace of development and offered internal data that showed the speedy improvement of its own models.

“We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology,” the post stated.

It was written by Anthropic’s head of internal research Marina Favaro and head of policy Jack Clark.

The ability to slow global AI development would “likely be a good thing,” they added.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman previously accused Anthropic of doing “fear-based marketing.”

“It is clearly incredible marketing to say, ‘We have built a bomb, we are about to drop it on your head. We will sell you a bomb shelter for $100 million,’” he said last month.

Anthropic’s post outlined how model advances appear to be moving toward “recursive self-improvement,” or AI systems that can improve on their own without human intervention. AI experts have warned that the phenomenon could wreak havoc on society. 

“This would revolutionize knowledge work and government services, but could also be turned to harmful ends, from authoritarian surveillance of whole populations to influence operations that tailor manipulation to each individual and run at a scale no human team could match,” the post stated.

It acknowledged that self-improving AI hasn’t happened yet, and isn’t inevitable.

UC Berkeley students flunk ‘gentle’ course at shocking rates — professors blame AI

There’s now more evidence why professors are begging University of California overseers to reinstate standardized testing — as shocking rates of students are failing computer science courses at the University of California, Berkeley.

The percentage of failing grades were higher this past spring than in previous semesters, according to an analysis done by the student newspaper Daily Californian.

More than 35% of students failed an entry-level course described as “a gentle but thorough introduction to computer science,” the analysis said, when previously the failing rate was typically 7%. Two other courses also saw significantly higher failing grades as well.

UC Berkeley teaching professor Dan Garcia, who taught two of the courses, told the Californian that he blamed students heavily relying on artificial intelligence models to get through the class. Some models, such as Anthropic’s Claude, are well known for being able to create code.

Nearly 30 students in CS 10 were caught cheating on take-home exams, he said.

“But in other cases, it’s students who are leaning a little too hard on LLMs to do their work for them, and then at exam time just really aren’t ready,” Garcia said.

Garcia also noted that students are now mathematically underprepared. He was one of 1,300 UC faculty that shockingly said in a letter they’ve been forced to teach “middle school” math in Calculus and other courses.

They blamed a 2020 vote by the University of California Board of Regents to stop requiring SAT and ACT scores in admissions after lawyers representing low-income students argued the metrics were “racist.”

The California Post reached out to the UC system for comment.

Another professor, Gireeja Ranade, told the Californian that one student even told her a linear algebra class at UC Berkeley had an “open-internet, open-AI policy” for homework and exams.

Amazon engineers blast company for spending billions on AI while cutting jobs: ‘Desperate to build’

Amazon engineers blasted their employer at a heated Seattle City Council hearing this week, accusing the tech giant of pouring billions into an AI-fueled data center boom while slashing tens of thousands of white-collar jobs.

The criticism came as Seattle officials advanced a one-year moratorium on new large-scale data center developments, citing concerns about power consumption, water use and the strain that AI infrastructure could place on local resources.

“It’s been reported that this year, Amazon is spending $200 billion on capital, with most of it going to data centers and AI,” Patrick Schloesser, a software engineer at Amazon Web Services, told council members on Wednesday.

“Meanwhile, the leaders at my company have laid off 30,000 corporate employees in the last eight months,” Schloesser said. “What that tells me is that Big Tech is desperate to build as much compute capacity as it can, as fast as it can.”

The comments spotlight a growing tension inside Amazon as CEO Andy Jassy pushes an aggressive AI expansion while simultaneously carrying out one of the largest corporate workforce reductions in company history.

Since October, Amazon has cut roughly 30,000 corporate jobs through two major rounds of layoffs as part of Jassy’s effort to flatten management structures and reduce bureaucracy.

The company announced approximately 14,000 corporate job cuts in October and another 16,000 in January.

At the same time, Amazon has committed to spending approximately $200 billion on capital expenditures this year, with the majority earmarked for AI infrastructure and data centers, according to company disclosures cited during the hearing.

The clash between workforce reductions and soaring AI investment has fueled criticism from some employees, particularly members of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, an activist group made up of current and former workers.

Teen boys are choosing AI girlfriends over real-life relationships — with disastrous consequences: expert

In 2024, a tech bro predicted that “AI girlfriends” would create a $1 billion business — and it seems that youth are busy building on that dark prophecy.

New research suggests Generation Alpha boys would rather have a robo-girlfriend than risk rejection and the formative challenges of an IRL relationship.

The study, conducted by Male Allies UK, surveyed 1,000 boys aged 12 to 16 and found that a hefty 85% of them have spoken to a chatbot, 20% know a peer who is “dating” an AI chatbot, and over a quarter prefer the attention and connection of a bot partner to a real, human-to-human relationship.

More than half — 58% — said AI relationships are easier because they can “control the conversation.”

As disconcerting as the research is, experts say the appeal of AI relationships, which offer ceaseless response and zero rejection, is clear.

“AI validates, affirms, never tires, never pushes back. For an adolescent boy still assembling a sense of self, that kind of frictionless attention can feel like intimacy,” Nicholas Velotta, head of relationship research at Arya, told The Post.

Velotta points to the clear lure of AI for Gen Alpha guys, a demographic navigating two conflicting cultural narratives about masculine identity.

“On one side, they’re told that to be a man is to dominate, to “looksmaxx,” to project an alpha status. On the other hand, they’re told that men are the architects of most of what’s gone wrong in our gender dynamics, and that the appropriate response is to sit down, be quiet, and make space.”

According to Velotta, AI offers a sense of safety for young men trying to reconcile and define themselves within these impossible extremes.

“It is not hard to understand why a young man finds comfort in a technology specifically engineered to welcome him, never judge him, and appear to understand him, especially when the human voices in his life are either demanding something impossible or dismissing him entirely,” he said.

A May 2025 study found that a startling 52% of adolescents nationwide use chatbots at least once a month for social purposes, including practicing conversation starters, expressing emotions, giving advice, resolving conflicts, navigating romantic interactions, and self-advocacy.

The draw is amplified for boys, who have historically been given fewer tools for verbal intimacy and emotional expression than girls.

To that end, according to Velotta, AI has therapeutic potential when used with intention and clear boundaries — in support of, rather than as a substitute for, a relationship.

META

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta scales back plan to track keystrokes, mouse movements after staff uproar

Meta is dialing back elements of its plan to collect employee mouse movements, keystrokes and other actions for use as AI training data, it said in an internal memo on Tuesday, following weeks of angry pushback from staffers.

New controls will allow employees to pause the data collection for up to 30 minutes at a time and request exemptions from the initiative, according to the memo, authored by Stephane Kasriel, a vice president in Meta’s AI model-building Superintelligence Labs unit.

Kasriel said the team behind the software had also introduced “several optimizations” to reduce its impact on computer battery life, after employees complained it was consuming so much data that it was causing their home internet usage to spike.

“While we remain confident in the privacy protections we put in place at launch, which went through several layers of risk review, we have heard your concerns about personal data on work devices, battery life, and wanting more control over when capturing happens,” Kasriel said in the memo.

A Meta spokesperson declined to comment.

The company, headed by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, announced last month that it was installing new tracking software on US-based employees’ computers to capture mouse movements, clicks and keystrokes for use in training its artificial intelligence models, part of a broad initiative to build AI agents that can perform work tasks autonomously.

Facebook sending some users bonus payments in $725M settlement — how to find out if you’re eligible

Facebook’s $725 million privacy settlement is sending bonus checks — some are worth less than a cup of coffee.

Nearly three years after Facebook users filed claims in a massive privacy settlement tied to the improper sharing of data with the political consulting firm, some claimants are receiving a surprise second payment. But don’t get too excited. Unlike the initial checks that arrived last year, which were already less than thrilling, this second round is the result of uncashed checks and leftover funds that are being redistributed.

Under the terms of the settlement, any unclaimed money is redistributed to claimants who successfully received and cashed their initial payout.

The settlement traces back to the infamous Cambridge Analytica scandal that rocked Facebook in 2018, when it was revealed that a political consulting firm had harvested data from as many as 87 million users without their consent and used it to build voter profiles for targeted political ads. The fallout sparked congressional hearings, a public grilling of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and billions in penalties, ultimately culminating in the $725 million privacy settlement that’s still sending checks to users years later.

According to Angeion, the settlement administrator handling the payout, approximately 28 million claims were filed.

“As far as we can tell, that’s the largest number of claims ever filed in a class action in the United States,” Lesley Weaver, co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs in the case, said in court.

According to settlement administrators, the average supplemental payment is expected to be about $4.72, which, as some users pointed out, is wildly ironic given Zuckerberg’s financial stature.

Meta, Facebook’s parent company, denied wrongdoing but agreed to the $725 million settlement in 2022, paving the way for payouts to millions of users who filed claims. The first round of payments began in 2025, with award amounts varying based on how long a claimant maintained a Facebook account and the total number of approved claims submitted.

But of the $725 million, a large portion was spent on legal expenses and administrative fees, according to The Hill, which left about $556 million to split among class members. Now, about $100m remains.

“Wow! The possibilities are endless! As long as those possibilities are centered around a gift card. $30 hush money for 15 years of data mining doesn’t exactly seem fair,” said one Reddit user.

Others compared the price to less than a fast-food meal.

Meta quietly added facial recognition to smart glasses, sparking major privacy concerns: report

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta quietly embedded facial recognition tech in its smart glasses, sparking concern from privacy watchdogs, according to a report.

The tech, which Meta hasn’t activated yet, came in an app that was downloaded to millions of phones, according to Wired, which analyzed the software.

Known internally as “NameTag,” the feature has the capacity to identify people captured by the glasses’ camera and alert the wearer when it recognizes someone, Wired reported.

The smart glasses already came under criticism for enabling creeps and wannabe pickup artists to record their unwanted advances toward unsuspecting women and posting the cringe-inducing content online.

“NameTag” is embedded in Meta’s AI companion app that’s been downloaded over 50 million times and helps users use key features of its smart glasses, including Ray-Ban and Oakley models.

The tech giant discreetly added the code to the AI app over multiple updates this year, according to Wired.

If Meta opts to enable the tool, faces captured by the smart glasses will get turned into unique biometric signatures, known as faceprints. Meta’s tech will then check each faceprint it encounters against faceprints already stored on the user’s phone, and even send notifications if it recognizes a match. New faceprints the glasses encounter would be indexed and saved, too.

Meta Vice President of Communications Andy Stone emphasized customers can’t actually turn on the facial recognition tech yet.

“This is more than shoddy reporting, it’s intellectually dishonest. Pure advocacy-driven click bait,” he wrote on X.

CHINA

China using LinkedIn and other job boards to recruit potential spies, intelligence agencies warn

Chinese spies are using career websites like Microsoft-owned LinkedIn to track and potentially recruit assets, US and allied intelligence agencies warned Thursday.

The warning, which was co-signed by each of the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance — from the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand — said China is stepping up efforts to recruit individuals with direct or indirect access to classified government information.

“China’s military intelligence services are using an increasingly wide array of professional networking sites and online job platforms to target Five Eyes government and military personnel — and anyone with access to classified or privileged information,” the agencies said in the joint bulletin.

“These actors use an aggressive online recruitment strategy whereby intelligence officers or their affiliates pose as employees of private consultancies, think tanks or human resources firms, and place online job advertisements for foreign policy and defense analysts,” they added.

The “Five Eyes” agencies pointed to military personnel, security clearance holders, academics, journalists and think tank officials as among those who are particularly at risk of being targeted.

Chinese spies often “post job ads on professional networking platforms and online hiring and freelance ‘gig work’ websites like LinkedIn, Indeed and Upwork” as they attempt to make first contact with potential assets, officials said.

“Chinese intelligence officers pose as online HR recruiters or consultants who represent fake, but often legitimate looking, ‘cover companies’ and claim to be located in countries other than China,” the bulletin added.

Asked comment, a LinkedIn spokesperson said: “Creating a fake account or misrepresenting your identity is a clear violation of our terms of service.

“We remain focused on detecting state-sponsored abuse, and will continue to enforce our policies against fake accounts,” the spokesperson added.

Upwork said it was aware of the issue and closely monitoring for any potential misuse.

“We leverage a number of cutting-edge detection tools and methodologies to enable us to prevent and respond to these sorts of threats,” Upwork said in a statement.

Representatives for Indeed did not immediately return requests for comment.

The Chinese Embassy in the UK slammed the allegations as “malicious slander.”

China beats Elon Musk to launch world’s first commercial brain chip

Hackers are excited. Surveillance advertising corporations are elated. Political thought-police are enraptured.

China has just approved the world’s first brain-computer chip.

And they’ve beaten billionaire tech-bro and MAGA evangelist Elon Musk to market.

The coin-sized device, called NEO, is the first surgical implant to pass clinical trials for commercial sale.

Version one is optimised to enhance the nervous system of patients suffering spinal cord injuries and paralysis. It’s about to enter mass production for the Chinese state-run health system.

But the Chinese Communist Party and Musk see this as just the first step on a path towards super-productive (and compliant) human-cyborgs.

Musk has not been backward in coming forward about the technology’s benefits.

“Restoring control of people who are tetraplegics and restoring sight, I think, are pretty big deals,” he told an event in Israel last month.

“They’re sort of what I might call Jesus-level technologies.”

His brain-implant start-up Neuralink promises users the ability to perform routine tasks using thought control, such as typing and moving a mouse.

Reversing paralysis, restoring sight and raising the dead remain in the realm of theology.

But that’s not incorporeal as it once was.

Brain-chip advocates, however, go even further. They envisage a future in which everyday citizens are endowed with digital telepathy and telekinesis.

Musk, a staunch pro-Trump Make America Great Again activist, has also floated the idea of brain chips ending the “Woke Mind Virus”. That’s all related to the technology’s potential to store (and rewrite) memories and treat psychological conditions.

“Brain implants may sound dystopian, but they are a promising part of neuroscience research,” argues Griffith University cybersecurity expert Dr David Tuffley.

SPACEX

Elon Musk outlines bold vision for SpaceX, goes light on details at JPMorgan event touting historic IPO

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk joined JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon to kick off the rocket company’s investor road show, painting a fantastic vision of data centers in space and vacations on the moon as the tech conglomerate eyes a historic $1.5 trillion valuation.

At a Thursday discussion at JPMorgan’s Manhattan headquarters, Dimon introduced Musk as “the Edison of our time,” according to Barron’s.

Beaming in via video chat, Musk went on to tout highlights of SpaceX’s plan to earn out-of-this world revenue. In a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said it would generate billions from AI projects, the Starlink broadband and mobile services and “space-enabled solutions.”

“We’re also doing the AI data centers in space, which is another massive capital endeavor,” Musk was quoted as saying. “But I think it will be the primary means by which AI can be expanded. It’s increasingly difficult to build power plants on the ground.”

SpaceX plans to sell about 556 million shares on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX, with the offering set to close on June 11 and trading starting the next day.

JPMorgan is one of 23 banks working on the deal, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley serving as lead underwriters.

Musk’s talk was light on details, Barron’s noted, and the tech guru largely stuck to the big-picture predictions for which he is famous.

At Thursday’s confab, targeted at wealthy retail investors, those included “hotels on the moon,” according to Business Insider.

“I think it would be pretty cool if you could vacation on the moon,” Musk was quoted as saying.

He also waxed eloquent about another major obsession, “terraforming” Mars so humans can live there, Business Insider reported.

“If you warm up Mars, you could one day make Mars like Earth, meaning with liquid oceans and life, and where you could walk outside without a space suit or anything. Mars is a fixer-upper of a planet, but it’s got a lot of potential,” Musk said.

SOFTWARE UPDATES

Americans are suspicious that software updates make their electronic devices worse: research

A majority of Americans believe software updates are making their devices worse, not better, according to new research.

The poll of 2,000 U.S. adults found a majority (54 percent) believe it’s done to push them towards premium features or device upgrades.

And just as many (55 percent) believe updates are designed to only make sense to younger people.

This was especially apparent for Gen Zers themselves, 63 percent of whom believe updates are only designed for them. Still, more than half of millennials (54 percent), Gen X (52 percent), and baby boomers (56 percent) also believe updates cater to people younger than them.

In fact, 62 percent believe OS updates disrupt the daily usage of their devices, and 53 percent believe app updates do the same.

As a result, more than three-quarters (78 percent) avoid changing anything on their devices unless absolutely necessary, revealing a growing resistance to updates altogether.

When updates become available, only 20 percent install them immediately. Others either wait a day or two (26 percent) or at least a week (30 percent) before installing the update. And 15 percent put it off until they’re forced to.

Commissioned by UserTesting and conducted by Talker Research, the survey highlighted how people have felt burned and betrayed by poor update practices in the past.

Respondents were asked when they last manually updated their devices. Nearly half said they’ve updated their phones within the past month (48 percent) — though those with iPhones did so more than their Android peers (49 percent compared to 42 percent respectively).

And a majority (54 percent) of tablets were also updated within the past month — again, iPads more so than Android tablets (56 percent, compared to 47 percent, respectively).

But devices that are more utilitarian were updated less recently. Close to half (46 percent) haven’t updated their smart TVs or their vehicle’s built-in infotainment system in half a year.

FAKE LIVESTREAM

YouTuber who faked livestream to create alibi in pregnant girlfriend’s murder learns his fate

A YouTuber who faked a video game livestream to try to create an alibi while he fatally stabbed his pregnant girlfriend was sentenced to 31-years to life in prison after investigators exposed his scheme.

Northern Ireland gamer Stephen McCullagh, 36, was hit with the sentence on June 3 for stabbing his girlfriend Natalie McNally, 32, in the neck and strangling her at her home in Lurgan, in December 2022.

In an effort to stage an alibi, McCullagh set up a pre-recorded stream playing “Grand Theft Auto: Vice City” and “Robot Wars” for six hours on YouTube, according to the BBC.

McCullagh was found guilty of murder after a five-week trial earlier this year.

McNally was 15 weeks pregnant when McCullagh murdered her, according to police.