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Author: tio

  • Pluralistic: Google’s new remote attestation scheme is every bit as terrible as its old remote attestation scheme (12 Jun 2026)

    Today’s links


    A pig in a sty. It is wearing badly applied lipstick. From behind one hairy ear pokes the Android droid.

    Google’s new remote attestation scheme is every bit as terrible as its old remote attestation scheme (permalink)

    Long before “agentic AI,” we had the idea that software would act as your agent on the internet. That’s why the old-fashioned technical term for a browser is a “user agent.” Your browser acts on your behalf to retrieve information and then show it to you, in the format you choose. It’s your agent:

    https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet

    This is a powerful and profound idea. It is because browsers are our “agents” that we expect them to accept our directives, say, by blocking pop-ups, or by turning off autoplay sound, or by blocking commercial surveillance trackers:

    https://privacybadger.org/

    Your browser does all that because your browser works for you. The reason your browser can work for you is that the web is an open, standardized technology. In theory, anyone who follows the standards published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) can make a browser, and that web browser can connect to any web server. Browsers and servers are interoperable. It’s the same force that means you can put anyone’s gas in your gas-tank, or anyone’s shoelaces in your shoes, or anyone’s milk on your cereal.

    But what if manufacturers could dictate those choices to you? What if your light socket refused to use a lightbulb unless it was officially blessed by the socket’s manufacturer? What if your dishwasher refused to wash your dishes unless you bought them from one of the manufacturer’s “dish partners”? What if your toaster refused to toast “unauthorized bread”?

    https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

    It’s hard to see how a company could win its market with this strategy. After all, if the dishes are really better than the competition’s, you’d buy them voluntarily, without any need for law or technology to force the matter. The only reason to make a dishwasher that refuses a rival’s dishes is if the manufacturer’s own dishes are ugly, expensive, and/or badly made.

    But once a company owns the market – once they’ve achieved dominance by buying out their rivals; by bribing potential competitors to stay out of their lane; and by engaging in deceptive conduct to trap key suppliers and customers – they could cement their dominance by blocking interoperability, keeping out rival dishes, milk, gas, lightbulbs, shoelaces and bread, capturing their whole market and squeezing it.

    That’s what Google has done, and that’s what Google wants to do more of. Google’s commercial behavior has been so unethical, deceptive and abusive that the company just lost three federal antitrust cases:

    https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/google-loses-the-adtech-monopolization

    This thrice-convicted monopolist bribed Apple – more than $20b/year – to stay out of the search market:

    https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/02/how-do-you-solve-problem-google-search-courts-must-enable-competition-while

    They cheated app vendors, ripping them off with sky-high junk fees and onerous conditions that raised prices while lowering the share of your spending that went to the companies whose products you were paying for:

    https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/boom-google-loses-antitrust-case

    They cheated advertisers, rigging the ad market to gouge businesses on ad prices and underinvesting to fight rampant ad-fraud, sucking hundreds of billions out of the productive economy for overpriced ads that no one saw:

    https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-prevails-landmark-antitrust-case-against-google

    Google wasn’t always this way. The “don’t be evil” company owes its very existence to the open web ecosystem. When the company started to index the web in 1998, it was playing on an open field, where any web server could talk to any “user agent,” even one whose user was a startup like Google, that was making a copy of every page on the server.

    For years, Google thrived on the open web, and built open technologies. Android – the mobile operating system that Google bought in 2005 – was presented as an “open” alternative to existing mobile offerings, and as the mobile market collapsed into two companies – Google and Apple – Google always presented Android as the open alternative to Apple’s “walled garden.”

    There were always ways in which Google’s “open” Android wasn’t exactly open. The company engaged in illegal “tying” arrangements that forced hardware vendors and carriers to lock out versions of Android that were created by Google’s competitors:

    https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_18_4581

    In other words, even though Google offered a mobile platform that was (mostly) technically open, they used commercial and legal strategies to choke off the market oxygen for alternative Android versions that tried to capitalize on that technical openness.

    But life finds a way. The existence of an open, modifiable, tinkerer-friendly mobile operating system meant Android hackers could create alternatives to Google’s (de facto) walled garden, which thrived in the cracks in that garden wall. Operating systems like CalyxOS, PureOS and Graphene offered a more private, more secure Android experience, one that was largely “de-Googled,” blocking Google’s relentless acquisition of your private data:

    https://grapheneos.org/

    And Google’s data-hunger is relentless. Android exfiltrates a chunk of your personal and behavioral data every five minutes. The “resting heartbeat” of Android surveillance pulses and pulses, irrespective of whether you’re using your device, and the instant you unlock your screen, that heartbeat quickens, sending even more data to the company:

    https://digitalcontentnext.org/blog/2018/08/21/google-data-collection-research/

    All that data has proved irresistible to authoritarian governments. Donald Trump’s enforcers have seized on Google data as a vital source of information about the identity of protesters and the location of migrants hunted by ICE:

    https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/google-broke-its-promise-me-now-ice-has-my-data

    So there are plenty of reasons why users would seek out these de-Googled alternatives to Android, finding them in spite of Google’s illegal commercial tactics to block access to competing technologies. The worse it got, the better those alternatives looked.

    Perhaps this explains Google’s years-long effort to increase the technical barriers to using modified versions of Android, beefing these up to match the commercial restrictions that stand in the way of a de-Googled existence.

    Back in 2023, Google floated the idea of “Web Environment Integrity” (WEI), a set of modifications to web standards that would force your computer to disclose its operating environment to the web servers it connected to, even if you objected to this disclosure:

    https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-bai-bai

    WEI was a form of “remote attestation.” That’s when your device uses a sub-processor (sometimes called a “Technical Protection Module” or “TPM”) or a walled off part of its main processor (sometimes called a “secure enclave”) to produce a cryptographically signed description of your device and its configuration: which hardware, software, plug-ins and settings you’re running.

    When you connect to a server, it demands that your device send this “attestation” before it handles your request. If your device won’t provide this data, or if the server doesn’t like (or recognize) your device and its details, it can refuse to deal with you. And because the attestation is prepared by a TPM or a secure enclave that you can’t modify or override, you don’t get to decide which facts about your device it’s allowed to see.

    Practically speaking, this means that remote attestation lets a server refuse to deal with you until you turn off your ad-blocker and your tracker-blocker. It means that the server can discriminate against users who block auto-play sound and video, who block pop-ups, who put the tab in the background when it’s playing a mandatory pre-roll ad.

    WEI was especially disturbing in light of Google’s efforts to kill ad-blockers and privacy blockers through updates to Chrome, an effort that continues to this day:

    https://protonprivacy.substack.com/p/google-is-finally-killing-ublock

    These blockers are an important part of the dynamic between web publishers and their users. In the real world, when you get an offer, you can make a counter-offer. That’s all an ad-blocker is: a way for users to respond to a server whose opening bid is, “How about you give me all your data and let me take over your computer in exchange for showing you this page?” with “How about ‘Nah?’”

    https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

    We didn’t get rid of pop-up ads by making them illegal, or by boycotting advertisers who used them. We got rid of pop-up ads when web users installed pop-up blockers, which made pop-up ads pointless. Take away our ability to block obnoxious digital content and you guarantee that we will be flooded with it.

    These kinds of modifications aren’t just used to block ads – they’re also key to accessibility. People who have photosensitive epilepsy or who (like me) suffer from low-contrast vision problems use add-ons to reformat pages so that we can safely and legibly access them.

    WEI’s creators said they were only trying to put the web on a level playing field with apps, which routinely rat you out to the companies you connect to. Apps are a source of bottomless enshittification, not least because (unlike the web), they enjoy special, dangerous legal protections that make it very legally risky to modify them:

    https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/31/unsatisfying-answers/#systemic-problems

    WEI wasn’t an effort to level the playing field between apps and the web – it was a race to the bottom, an attempt to make the web as enshittogenic as the app hellscape.

    Public outrage to WEI killed the project, but Google’s commitment to augmenting its illegal commercial lockdown efforts with technical lockdowns never ended. Now, Google has rolled out an experimental “reCAPTCHA Mobile Verification” that uses an app, your camera, and your device’s TPM or secure enclave to produce an attestation about your Android device:

    https://support.google.com/recaptcha/answer/16609652

    This will make it much easier for the apps and other services you interact with to block your device if you run an Android alternative, or if you install a mod that overrides the actions of Google’s stock Android:

    https://www.reddit.com/r/PrivacySecurityOSINT/comments/1tbdjbj/privacy_concerns_around_googles_recaptcha_mobile/

    This is a terrible idea – it’s every bit as bad as WEI was. In an age in which Big Tech is ever-more tied to authoritarian governments, redesigning our devices to tell strangers things we don’t want them to know isn’t just shortsighted, it’s inexcusable.

    Hey look at this (permalink)


    A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

    Object permanence (permalink)

    #20yrsago Images from anti-DRM protest at the San Fran Apple Store https://www.flickr.com/photos/quinn/tags/drmprotest/

    #15yrsago Reasons people were arrested at the Toronto G20 https://memex.craphound.com/2011/06/11/reasons-people-were-arrested-at-the-toronto-g20/

    #15yrsago Paul Krugman: Rule by rentiers favors billionaires, Chinese bond-holders over jobs and homeowners https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/10/opinion/10krugman.html?_r=1

    #15yrsago Ontario publicly funded Catholic school bans rainbows, appropriates student donations for LGBT cause and gives them to Catholic charity https://web.archive.org/web/20110610125236/https://www.xtra.ca/public/Toronto/Rainbows_banned_at_Mississauga_Catholic_school-10262.aspx

    #10yrsago How to be less wrong about the First Amendment https://web.archive.org/web/20160611221927/https://popehat.com/2016/06/11/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-the-first-amendment/

    #10yrsago Mounties used Stingrays to secretly surveil millions of Canadians for years https://web.archive.org/web/20160610182607/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-rcmp-surveilled-thousands-of-innocent-canadians-for-a-decade

    #5yrsago Privacy Without Monopoly, EU edition https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/11/technological-self-determination/#dma

    Upcoming appearances (permalink)

    A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


    A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

    Recent appearances (permalink)


    A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

    Latest books (permalink)


    A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

    Upcoming books (permalink)

    • “The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to AI,” a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

    • “Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It” (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

    • “The Post-American Internet,” a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

    • “Unauthorized Bread”: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

    • “The Memex Method,” Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


    Colophon (permalink)

    Today’s top sources:

    Currently writing: “The Post-American Internet,” a sequel to “Enshittification,” about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

    • “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to AI,” a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

    • “The Post-American Internet,” a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

    • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

    This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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    Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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    “When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla” -Joey “Accordion Guy” DeVilla

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  • The Fate of the Metaverse

    The human hand has 29 bones and 29 major joints. It contains over 100 ligaments, connected to 34 muscles in the palm alone, each one responsible for the minute negotiations that allow us to tie our shoes, thread a needle, lift a glass, or juggle. Thirty arteries pump blood alongside them. Forty-eight nerves — running from the spine under the clavicle, through the armpit and down the length of the arm — conduct the electrical signals that let us turn a wrist, crook a finger, or make a fist. A quarter of the brain’s motor cortex is devoted to our hands.

    On a rainy February Friday in Manhattan, a woman briskly worked a glove over my right hand and fastened a plastic ring onto my index finger. I sat on a stool in a windowless room, facing a rig studded with motion capture cameras angled inquisitively toward me. A large screen commanded my attention. When the light turns green, it read, use your wrist to control the cursor on the screen. Find the yellow circle and tap the ring on your index finger with your thumb to capture it!

    The light turned green and the game began. A yellow circle appeared on the screen and I gave chase, flexing my wrist to send the cursor scurrying after it. Once I was hovering over the circle, I gave the ring a tap with my thumb. Each time I successfully clicked a circle, it produced a satisfying ka-ching! The circles became smaller as the game went on, and I found it harder and harder to accurately control the cursor. Dripping from my arm was a messy network of wires plugged into a large computer. All the while, as I hovered and tapped, a series of devices was steadily siphoning off my biometrics.

    One bracelet around my forearm measured my skin temperature and heartbeat. Another bulkier one took more obscure readings: the movement of my thenar muscles as I brought my thumb down onto the ring, the lumbricals tensing each time I made a fist, the adductor and abductor muscles swinging from left to right as I bent my wrist. I was selling this information — unconsciously performed, useless to me — to Meta, the tech giant that owns Facebook and Instagram.

    Everyone else seemed to be like me: people with four hours to spare on a weekday afternoon.

    I’d found this gig on Craigslist, where at least three times a day a chipper listing — “Come test wearable tech in Midtown!” — advertised the opportunity. I was broke, so I signed up. That day about 40 of us showed up at the Farley Building on Ninth Avenue, the multiblock former post office where Meta leases about 700,000 square feet of office space. Inside a drab lobby, we handed over our IDs and were issued visitor passes. Attendants arranged us in groups of 10 before herding us into the elevators. On the second floor, we were led quickly through an airy common space filled with overgrown monstera plants. Everyone else seemed to be like me: people with four hours to spare on a weekday afternoon. They were mostly young, in their 20s and 30s, speaking Hindi, Spanish, Haitian Creole. Three siblings sat next to me wearing big coats and flip-flops. I asked them if they did this kind of thing often. First time, they said, and pointed out that this study only recruited first-timers. Your body’s data was only valuable once.

    We were in a small classroom. “Today is a great day to collect data!” someone had written on the whiteboard in front of us. One by one, we were called up to have our wrists measured. Measuring tape was wrapped around my forearm and a sliding gauge was delicately placed over my radius and ulna, the slender bones in the wrist. A smiling man named Calvin entered the measurements on an iPad. “Maximilien,” he said, pausing over my name. “That’s a great name. That’s a name that, like, makes me wanna go into battle.”

    Next we were shown a video introducing the project. Meta was grateful for our participation. Meta appreciated our contribution. By joining this study, we were advancing the future of wearable tech. Little was said about what that future might look like, but the video included a couple of shots of a woman sitting on a wraparound couch, serenely stroking a ring to navigate the Netflix site. Wearable tech promised total integration: sleek, friendly, unobtrusive devices that slip onto a finger or over a wrist, folding the virtual world directly into your field of vision. You put on your Ray-Ban Meta Glasses in the morning and your emails slide across the lens; you flick your wrist — encircled by a Neural Band — to open and answer them. Very soon, the video seemed to promise, you could sit at home wearing your Meta Glasses and your little bracelet, and all your content — your Instagram Reels and Threads, your Facebook feed, your endless scroll — would float before you, right up against your retinas.

    *   *   *

    Meta has been chasing this vision of total tech immersion since 2014, when it bought Oculus VR, a company that makes bulbous, face-hugging virtual reality headsets. Gamers liked Oculus’ gear, but the general public was less entranced. They were expensive — early models started at $599 each — and clunky, and the experience of 360-degree immersion in “Roblox” or “The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners” brought on motion sickness in many users. The r/oculus subreddit is dominated by discussion of nausea: how to mitigate it (“legal herbal remedies depending on what state you live in :)”), how to avoid it altogether (“small amounts of alcohol also help”), and in some cases, how to purposefully induce it (“Cooking simulator is super fun but man i be throwing up all over your sautéed mushrooms”).

    Meta executives nevertheless seemed certain that this pricey, vomitous novelty promised something much bigger. In 2020, Oculus was folded into a larger division called Facebook Reality Labs, tasked with developing what Mark Zuckerberg would soon begin calling the Metaverse. The project was long in the making: In a statement released shortly after his company purchased Oculus, Zuckerberg had hailed his latest acquisition as “a new communication platform.” “By feeling truly present,” he went on, “you can share unbounded spaces and experiences with the people in your life.”

    As of last month, Reality Labs’ losses since 2020 totaled more than $80 billion.

    “Presence” is a favorite word of Zuckerberg’s. The feeling of presence, he explained in a promotional video in 2021, would be “the defining quality of the Metaverse.” The video cuts to a scene of Zuck’s cartoonish Metaverse avatar playing poker with a giant robot in a space station. No one could mistake that for presence. Variously mocked and ignored, the Metaverse withered. As of last month, Reality Labs’ losses since 2020 totaled more than $80 billion.

    Faced with an overwhelming lack of public interest in bumbling around poorly rendered virtual worlds, Meta decided to pursue a subtler strategy: Rather than replace reality, it would attempt to augment it. In 2023, the company partnered with Ray-Ban to release Meta Glasses, chunky-framed eyeglasses equipped with tiny cameras and a voice-controlled AI chatbot. Initially the glasses seemed like a gimmick — a stocking stuffer for techie teens, something Q might slip 007 in one of the cheesier Bond films — but they became a surprise success. Seven million pairs were sold in 2025.

    The Ray-Ban Metas owe much of their success to the popularity of short-form video. When you’re wearing your glasses, the whole world — restaurants, laundromats, nightclubs, funerals — becomes grist for your content mill. Scroll through Instagram or TikTok and you’re sure to come across at least three videos pulled straight off someone’s Metas: white boys stunning restaurant workers with their fluent Mandarin; “awkward rizz” at the frat function; tours of luxury apartments. Being “truly present,” Meta realized, didn’t require abandoning the real world. It simply required filming it all the time.

    Early iterations of the Ray-Ban Metas were essentially just hidden cameras, but last September, Meta added an in-lens display to its third-generation model. The translucent screen sits slightly off-center in the lens, invisible to the people around you. Meanwhile, a Neural Band, wrapped tightly around your wrist, controls the display by reading electrical signals generated by your muscle movements; your neural system becomes the input.

    *   *   *

    At the Farley Building, video played on the projector screen in front of us. A handsome man rotated his wrist and pinched his fingers together to zoom in on a family photo, all while walking his golden lab down the block. As the video played, attendants quietly stacked prototype Neural Bands on a table nearby. We would be testing these.

    The video ended and we were called out to different testing rooms. In my room, the motion-capture cameras once again glowered. At first, the games were amusing. I felt like a dog chasing virtual balls around the screen. Ka-ching! But it quickly became boring. I stopped caring whether or not I found my target and let the cursor hang there listlessly. I imagined my data points, flowing into the wires trailing from my arm, becoming confused and erratic. Somewhere, I thought, was a researcher, or perhaps an AI agent, who would translate these infinitesimal adjustments of my muscles and ligaments into trackable, monetizable patterns. There was something unsettling about the precision of these readings. Having long since absorbed my attention span and digital habits into its global archive of human behavior, Meta was now determined to collect these last, individual, trifling details: the flick of my finger, the turn of my wrist, the places my eyes lingered on the screen. I let my hand drop. I stopped chasing the ball. I hoped they would conclude that the appeal of wearable tech declines dramatically after the first half hour of use.

    I felt like a dog, chasing virtual balls around the screen.

    More instructions. Swing your arm from side to side to move the cursor. Make a fist. Tap the ring on your index finger gently. To my right, a woman was going through the same motions. She was focused, making effortful swipes of her wrist, but the Neural Band was becoming less responsive. The cursor lagged, or refused to move at all. I’d noticed the same thing happening to me. The signals from my muscles were becoming harder for the band to read. Ideally, the band would translate these minute electrical impulses into rapid, precise movement. The ambition was frictionlessness: no mouse, no keyboard, no thumb swipe on a greasy screen. Just your hand at your side, swiveling almost imperceptibly. More than that, the system sought to close the gap between intention and action, between thinking you wanted something and doing it. Watch a reel, send a text, take a photo: As soon as you knew what you wanted, it would be happening.

    But the technology just wasn’t there yet. In the tests, the Neural Band was slow and inexact; worse, the whole idea seemed dorky. Meta’s promotional materials showcase attractive young professionals discreetly dashing off texts or asking the glasses’ built-in AI for pico de gallo recipes. Their hands remain mostly concealed, fingers tapping away at an invisible keyboard, before they return to the party. “It’s designed for short interactions that you’re always in control of,” a Meta company blog post promises. In practice, the technology creates a new kind of full-body distraction. If you watch videos of people testing out the Meta Glasses in conjunction with the Neural Bands, they appear lost in a light trance: cross-eyed, gazing slackly at a point just above the tip of their nose, twitching their wrists in cryptic movements. The effect is unnerving. In one video, a tester’s body crumples every time she summons the glasses’ in-lens display. She holds her hand out rigidly, contorting it as she manipulates the tiny screen. Her colleague looks on, bemused. “He could tell I was not fully present and looking at a display,” she tells the camera afterward. “So we’ll see what that does to society.”

    Watching my neighbor fumble with her own Neural Band, it was hard to believe that anyone was especially keen to embed Meta’s systems even deeper in their lives. So far, attempts to stuff AI chatbots into physical devices have been commercial disasters. Humane, a company founded in 2018 by two former Apple employees, began shipping its AI “pin” — a small, discreet block of metal and glass that you can affix to your shirt — to customers in 2024. The gadget was voice-controlled, and like most AI companions, it could take photos, add events to a calendar, play music and even project images onto a flat surface. Upon release, the pin failed miserably. It was slow and unhelpful, and it frequently overheated. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission deemed its charging case a fire hazard and had it recalled. In 2025, HP bought Humane for just $116 million — peanuts, in Silicon Valley terms. The purchase did not include the AI pin, which was unceremoniously dumped.

    Silicon Valley seems determined that we accept this future.

    Similar problems plagued the rollout of Friend, a small, round silver pendant with a built-in chatbot that listens to you and responds with quippy texts sent to your phone. The device’s inventor, Avi Schiffmann, spent over $1 million to plaster ads for Friend throughout the New York subway. “[Friend] noun: someone who listens, responds, and supports you,” the copy read, next to a picture of the smooth, faintly glowing orb. The campaign inadvertently demonstrated exactly how people felt about AI’s creeping intrusion into daily life. Last summer, most of the Friend ads on my train had been defaced. “AI will never be your friend,” someone had scrawled across one. “We do not have to accept this future,” read another.

    Silicon Valley seems determined that we accept this future. Later this year, OpenAI is expected to release its own AI device, produced in collaboration with Jony Ive, designer of the original iPhone. If the images leaked online are accurate, the product will take the form of a white, oblong, palm-sized speaker, like Amazon’s Alexa, that will recognize your voice and respond in the fulsome tones of ChatGPT. At first glance, it’s a far cry from the iPhone, a revolution in product design that reoriented everyday life.

    And that, ultimately, has been the problem. Silicon Valley’s dogged efforts to take AI off our phones and put it into our hands — or on our bodies, or in our eyes — have struggled to answer a simple question: Why? If we’re expected to buy such gizmos, they should at least solve a problem, satisfy a demand. As it stands, the problem they most convincingly address is Silicon Valley’s own urgent need to turn AI — currently a trillion-dollar money suck with few clear paths to profitability — into something a lot of people will pay for. So far, the pins, glasses and pendants launched at us have been unwieldy, redundant and irredeemably unsexy. Contrary to their apparent purpose, they’ve also failed to lessen our dependence on our phones. Instead, they tend to trap users in an uneasy ménage à trois: our smartphones, our new gadgets and ourselves, caught in the middle.

    *   *   *

    Still, my neighbor and I in the Farley Building were making the tech better, in our small way. The mo-cap cameras were drinking in all of our frustration and boredom, our hesitations and mistakes. All that friction would be studied, reduced and engineered away.

    When it was over, the attendant returned to strip off the glove and take my Neural Band. She sent me back into the other room, where a dozen other testers were waiting. Later I would read that some 200,000 consenting research subjects took part in the tests used to develop Neural Bands. Forty of us were here today, with scuffed shoes and hair still damp from the rain. As we waited to be dismissed, everyone was quiet, except for one older man. “So when are we getting paid?” he asked an attendant. In one to two business days she told him as she left the room.

    The man turned back to look at the rest of us, dismayed. “I thought it was a cash payment.”

    “Nah, man,” someone else spoke up. “It’s a gift card.”

    They lined us up in a hallway and sorted us again into groups of 10. We walked past the fake tree that hung from invisible wires in the office’s enormous atrium and filed into the elevators. Once out on the street, everyone scattered. I stood there on Ninth Avenue, my muscles and ligaments settling back into their private arrangements.

    A few days later, I got my $150 Visa gift card. For a little while, it helped close the gap between wanting something and having it. I bought groceries with it.

    The post The Fate of the Metaverse appeared first on Truthdig.

  • Russian Woman Convicted of Lying About Spy Ties, Stalking Agent Gets Prison Time

    A United States District Judge in Manhattan sent a Russian woman behind bars for 14 months after she pleaded guilty to lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) about her ties to Russia’s premier intelligence agency, the FSB, and to naturalization fraud linked to the interstate transport of women for prostitution.

    Case documents made public last week illustrated that prosecutors wanted the judge to impose a harsher penalty—between 18 to 24 months—on 35-year-old Nomma Zarubina, who previously insisted when entering her guilty plea that she had actually assisted the FBI and shared information with the CIA.

    “The defendant lied to the FBI in connection with a sensitive investigation into malign foreign influence,” prosecutors wrote in their sentencing memorandum. “She helped run a prostitution business over the course of several years. She intentionally omitted her participation in that criminal enterprise on her naturalization application in an effort to obtain United States citizenship. And then, after being arrested and released on bail, she repeatedly taunted, harassed, and threatened Case Agent-1.”

    Zarubina was jailed in December for cyber-stalking the investigator and a government-appointed defense attorney had asked that she be credited for her time behind bars and let go. The judge dismissed that request. 

    Judge Laura Taylor Swain revoked her bail late last year following Zarubina’s repeated refusal to stop contacting the FBI case agent who was expected to be a witness in her prosecution.

    The prosecution’s memorandum also explicitly detailed the origins of the government’s interest in Zarubina. 

    The FBI began investigating her in 2020 because they were scrutinizing her employer, Elena Branson, a U.S.-Russian dual national. Branson, who fled the United States for Russia in 2020 after the FBI searched her Manhattan apartment, was indicted in 2022 on charges of acting as an unregistered agent of the Russian government. She remains a fugitive.

    Prosecutors allege that Branson’s organization, the Russian Center New York, functioned as a propaganda arm for the Kremlin. Zarubina served as a policy advisor for the center and maintained its website.

    While many of the documents in the case remain classified, the sentencing memo provided rare detail into the broader malign-influence probe. Prosecutors noted that, at the behest of her FSB handlers—who assigned her the codename “Alyssa” – Zarubina attended the 2021 St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in Russia. Her objective, the government said, was “to help identify journalists who would be willing to provide positive coverage of the event and of Russia more generally.” The government’s memorandum included two photographs of Zarubina posing alongside individuals that prosecutors identified as intelligence targets.

  • Ukraine civilian casualty toll in May highest in four years, UN monitors say

    More civilians were killed and injured in Ukraine in May than in any other month in the past four years, UN investigators said on Friday in their latest update.

  • DR Congo: Ebola spreads as agencies brace for child victims

    The deadly Ebola outbreak in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is continuing to spread with a spike in child infections an increasingly likely scenario in the days ahead, UN agencies said on Friday.

  • WHO report shows progress in blood safety, but there are worrying gaps

    Every day, safe blood helps save the lives of women experiencing childbirth complications, accident victims, cancer patients and people living with chronic diseases. Yet despite decades of progress, access to lifesaving blood remains deeply unequal, with shortages continuing to put lives at risk in many lower-income countries, according to a new World Health Organization (WHO) report.

  • Women and girls caught up in Yemen’s ‘forgotten crisis’ bear the heaviest toll as funding falls

    Yemen remains gripped by one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, with 22 million – out of a population of 35 million – requiring assistance. Women and girls account for half of those in need, and two-thirds of them are of childbearing age, placing reproductive health at the heart of the emergency.

  • ‘Perilous moment’ threatens to reverse years of gains in HIV/AIDS response

    External funding cuts, a backlash against human rights, and chronic under-investment in HIV prevention and community services are threatening to reverse years of hard-won progress in the AIDS response, a UN report warned on Friday.

  • Lebanon Releases ‘Captagon King’ After Seven-Year Sentence

    A notorious Syrian-Lebanese trafficker widely known as the “Captagon King,” has been released from a Lebanese prison after completing a seven-year sentence for drug manufacturing and trafficking. Judicial sources confirmed the release of Hassan Daqqou to Daraj, OCCRP’s Lebanese partner. 

    A video circulated online showing family and friends celebrating his return home. 

    Daqqou was arrested in Beirut in 2021 in connection with a massive shipment of nearly 94 million Captagon pills, which was intercepted in Malaysia while en route to Saudi Arabia. In August 2022, the Beirut Criminal Court sentenced him to seven years of hard labor, a sentence that had been reduced from life imprisonment due to his alleged cooperation with a security agency, to which he provided information regarding the shipment.

    At the time of the investigation, Daqqou’s attorney said his client was a victim of a “fabricated media and political campaign” and said not a single Captagon pill was found on Daqqou or at any of his properties.

    According to 651 pages of handwritten interrogation transcripts obtained by OCCRP, Daqqou rose from poverty, selling watches on the streets of Beirut, to become a central figure in Lebanon’s Captagon trade. The documents shed light on his personal trajectory and reveal his role in a complex regional drug network involving the Syrian regime, Hezbollah, and their allies.

    In his own testimony, Daqqou described himself as having “four faces”: a businessman; an operative working with the Security Bureau of the Syrian Army’s 4th Division, led by Maher al-Assad, brother of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad; a collaborator with Hezbollah during the Syrian conflict; and a participant in anti-narcotics operations linked to Syria.

    Daqqou has faced multiple international sanctions, having been blacklisted by the U.S., the U.K., and the EU since 2023. Despite his incarceration, the kingpin allegedly continued to run his illicit trade from behind bars, with reports indicating that political pressure from Hezbollah allowed Daqqou to stay in a “comfortable” prison cell equipped with internet access throughout his sentence.

  • Hollywood Secures $9 Million Default Judgment Against IPTV Operator

    Hollywood Secures $9 Million Default Judgment Against IPTV Operator

    The Internet is littered with cheap IPTV services that offer access to a lot of content, for very little money.

    These deals often seem too good to be true, and in most cases they are, at least for those who prefer to stay on the right side of the law.

    The operators of these services often remain in the shadows, but anti-piracy groups are actively trying to pin them down. For example, members of the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) identified Mechanicsburg resident Brandon Weibley as the alleged operator of several commercial IPTV services offering pirated streams.

    IPTV Operator Ghosts Hollywood Lawsuit

    In a complaint filed in March 2025, Amazon, Netflix, Disney, Paramount, and other major studios accused Weibley of large-scale copyright infringement across a string of IPTV brands.

    His alleged activity dates back to 2017, when he registered beastmodebuilds.com and began selling subscriptions to services including Beast Mode Live, BTV, Viking Media, and GreenWing Media. After the studios confronted him in 2023, he moved to a new domain, vonwik.com, and rebranded the operation as ‘Shrugs’ and ‘Zing’.

    Weibley was personally served but never answered the complaint or appeared in court. With the defendant absent, the studios requested a default judgment, $9 million in damages, and a permanent injunction.

    The services’ public front stayed online through the Vonwik.com domain, even after Weibley was served. That left the rightsholders relying on the court to shut the operation down.

    Court Awards $9 Million + Domain Takeover

    This week, U.S. District Judge Jennifer Wilson granted the studios’ motion in full. With a sample of 60 copyrighted works at stake, multiplied by the maximum award of $150,000 per infringement, that adds up to a total of $9 million in statutory damages.

    The order

    the order

    The judge found the infringement willful on several grounds. Weibley continued to operate the services after the studios demanded he stop, and simply moved them to a new domain once the rightsholders applied pressure.

    In addition to the damages, Judge Wilson also granted a permanent injunction, which prohibits Weibley from operating the six named services or anything substantially similar.

    Importantly, the injunction also orders the registrars and registries for the associated domains, beastmodebuilds.com and vonwik.com, to transfer these to a registrar appointed by the studios. In addition, hosting providers are required to suspend the associated sites and lock their content.

    Shrugs and Zing (Vonwik.com)

    shrugs zing

    At the time of writing, the permanent injunction has yet to be applied, as Vonwik.com remains online and accessible. Whether the associated IPTV services also remain active is unknown.

    Court Applies the New Cox Standard

    In addition to the multi-million damages award, the judgment memorandum stands out for how it handles the movie companies’ secondary liability claims.

    To hold Weibley liable for contributory infringement and inducement, the court applied the Supreme Court’s recent Cox v. Sony framework. Under Cox, a provider’s mere knowledge that subscribers infringe is not enough. The provider must intend its service to be used for infringement, or the service must be tailored to it.

    Wilson navigated that standard carefully. In a footnote, she declined to rest liability on Weibley’s knowledge alone, grounding it instead in inducement, noting that he promoted the services, tried to conceal the purpose of subscriber payments, and rebranded under pressure.

    To reach those conclusions, the court leans heavily on a similar IPTV case. Judge Wilson cited the California case against ‘Outer Limits IPTV’, which resulted in a $15 million default judgment last August, throughout her analysis.

    It’s Not Over Yet

    The Motion Picture Association’s enforcement arm, the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) coordinated the legal effort and takes credit for the win.

    “We commend Judge Wilson’s ruling holding Weibley accountable for copyright infringement,” says Jesse Martin, the MPA’s Senior VP and Associate General Counsel for Global Litigation and Intermediaries.

    ACE’s press release does appear to contain a key error, however. Its headline described Weibley as the operator of “Outer Limits IPTV.” That was a different defendant in a separate lawsuit, one that resulted in a $15 million judgment last year.

    ACE’s press release

    ACE press release

    Finally, it’s worth pointing out that this is not a final conclusion of the case, because the claims against ten unnamed ‘Doe’ defendants tied to the two domain names remain pending. The studios have until June 15 to tell the court whether they intend to pursue or drop them.

    The $9 million default judgment against Shrugs and Zing operator Weibley is confirmed. Whether the defendant will pay this massive damages amount is uncertain, however, which is why the movie companies tried their best to obtain that permanent injunction, including the domain takeover power.

    —

    A copy of Judge Wilson’s memorandum is available here (pdf) and the accompanying order can be found here (pdf).

    From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.