An OpenAI engineer and Saudi national faces criminal charges after plugging an audio recorder into an executive conference room's TV set. Crudely wrapped in toilet paper, the device was soon found, and after security footage was reviewed, so was the culprit. — Read the rest
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Skincare products promising youthful glows and wrinkle-free smiles regularly lead to unexpected charges for the customers pressured or tricked into buying them, reports NPR. It seems there's not much anyone can do to stop the scammers, who often work out of mall kiosks and suburban salons, beyond filing lawsuits and complaining to disinterested authorities. — Read the rest
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A man who broke into a tech company in Tempe, Arizona, made off with what he "likely" thought were Apple computers. But the Mac Mini boxes were empty, and he left the computers on the desks there.
"I come in, the window was smashed to pieces," employee Curran Rose told Fox 10 news in Phoenix. — Read the rest
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The French government is closely watching a cybersecurity crisis at supermarkets after they were forced to throw out food due to an attack that knocked out refrigerators.
The office of Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu told POLITICO that he is “personally monitoring the situation” after cyberattacks targeted the refrigeration systems of several major supermarket chains. Lecornu has asked the country’s cybersecurity agency ANSSI to look into it, his office added.
News reports on Monday said that hundreds of supermarkets were affected. Intermarche and Cooperative U, two French supermarket chains, told AFP that they had been affected. Intermarche told AFP that affected stores will have to throw away affected fresh and frozen food.
Dominique Schelcher, the CEO of Cooperative U, confirmed on X that a cyberattack hit “the cold production facilities of several stores in our network” since Sunday night.
EU agriculture and food commissioner Christophe Hansen condemned the attack, also mentioning Leclerc, France’s largest supermarket chain, which has not yet publicly confirmed that it is affected.
French news reports state that the attack hit refrigerators manufactured by Danish company Danfoss. Prime Minister Lecornu’s office said ANSSI has found a flaw in software provided by “a Danish company” and has contacted it. The agency is coordinating with European counterparts as other countries may be affected, the office said.
Danfoss did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
EU cybersecurity agency ENISA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Several outlets have reported that thieves stole 30,000 bottles of wine, worth about 5 million euros, from a cellar near Cortona.
The operation, carried out on October 2, targeted winemaker Marchesi Antinori—a now 26th-generation family business founded in 1385. The masked bandits, who numbered at least seven, apparently had great taste, or curatorial skills, as they nabbed a selection of coveted offerings, all from the 2023 vintage, from the remarkably beautiful winery.
Corriere della Sera confirms that the thieves deactivated the alarm system and disabled cameras. They filled the two large trucks, which they drove over to the Tuscan premises, using the company’s own forklifts. The job took three hours. The gang was clearly incredibly well-prepared—one wonders how they could have the skills to be so methodical yet not realize that, with the attention this story has received, attempts to sell the illegally obtained goods should prove challenging, to say the least.
As relayed by Corriere della Sera, Renzo Cotarella, Marchesi Antinori’s longtime CEO, suggests that the culprits behind the egregious crime might have been “the same one that has affected other wineries in Italy in recent months. Certainly, a theft of such magnitude and value has never occurred in Italy.” This indeed appears to be the country’s biggest-ever wine heist.
Speaking to The New York Times, Lorenzo Vivoli, who works in communications for Marchesi Antinori, commented on the thieves’ impeccable timing — the bottles were resting in the warehouse on a Friday, waiting to be exported on Monday. Such shipments only happen twice a year. It certainly seems possible that the revered company itself had fallen victim to infiltration by a rodent of an employee.
Vivoli revealed to the paper, “We do have insurance, but unfortunately it will only pay us one-tenth of the price.” Thus, it’s especially important to support efforts to solve this case for the sake of the fine individuals at Marchesi Antinori. Of course, the police are currently on the job, and it seems hopeful that justice will be served.
The post Italy May Have Just Seen Its Biggest Wine Heist Ever (And the Details Are Wild) appeared first on VICE.
The Pentagon's first military execution since World War II is scheduled for December 3, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says it will be livestreamed for the public. Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan, who killed 13 fellow service members and injured 32 more in 2009, will be put to death by a firing squad. — Read the rest
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BRUSSELS — The European Union’s cybersecurity agency and in-house research center have each begun experimenting with open artificial intelligence models from China, three EU officials have told POLITICO.
The Joint Research Centre (JRC) — the EU’s in-house scientific research center — is evaluating “publicly available open-weight models” originating from China, European Commission spokesperson Maciej Berestecki confirmed. The head of ENISA, the bloc’s agency responsible for cybersecurity, also said in an interview that his team was now testing Chinese AI.
The experiments with Chinese models at the JRC are part of a broader research project to evaluate artificial intelligence that also includes leading models from the United States and Europe, Berestecki said. “Models from different origins are included in a comparative scientific evaluation of their capabilities, performance, limitations and risks,” he said, adding that the JRC is also looking into their potential scientific applications.
AI safety and security — topics currently under intense scrutiny following a series of incidents in which advanced AI models hacked real-world networks during testing activities — are not the core focus of the JRC’s testing activities, according to a different Commission official, who was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive material.
Open-weight models are those whose core components are publicly released, allowing anyone to run the model and study how it works. China’s approach to AI has leaned more towards open models than the United States. Some major U.S. tech and AI companies, including chips giant NVIDIA, are investing in open-weight models.
The U.S. and China are locked in a race to dominate in the technology, with Europe largely sitting on the sidelines. Without a viable European frontier model, European private and public organizations may be left to choose between American and Chinese providers for advanced AI applications.
In a recent speech, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen suggested Europe should not try to win the frontier AI race. A top German tech company told POLITICO this week it was dropping Europe’s leading AI lab Mistral in favor of open-source Chinese models.
The JRC has not entered into any “bespoke access” or licensing negotiations with the relevant Chinese developers, Berestecki said. The models are run on the center’s “secure, on-premises scientific infrastructure” and the Commission is not intending to use Chinese models for its own purposes, he added.
EU cyber agency ENISA — which has gained access to advanced models from top U.S. AI firms Anthropic, OpenAI and Google — is also experimenting with “a couple” of open-weight Chinese models, its executive director Juhan Lepassaar confirmed in an interview on Wednesday.
JRC and ENISA have been tasked with working together to set up an AI testing platform under a recent EU action plan on AI and cyber, the European Commission’s attempt to respond to the growing concerns after a series of incidents involving AI systems breaking out of testing environments and breaking into other organizations’ digital systems.
The FBI National Stolen Art File lists more than 8,000 paintings, sculptures and other "culturally-significant property" that has found its way out of galleries, museums and private collections and into swag bags. The sprawling online gallery provides a description, dimensions, artist, and, if available, a photograph. — Read the rest
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Netflix’s film “Unabomber” arrived last Friday, and by the weekend it was the most-watched movie on the platform — despite reviews calling it “dangerously simplistic” (IndieWire) and “another box checked on Netflix’s long, long list of true crime content” (Decider). Mixed is putting it kindly.
I watched this streaming content through a unique lens because I have a vantage point on this story almost no one else does: I grew up next door to Ted Kaczynski. For 16 years, the Unabomber was my neighbor in Lincoln, Montana. Which is why you’ll notice I don’t call this a “true-crime thriller.”
The violence I uncovered in our shared backyard was harrowing: the strychnine fed to my beloved jet-black dog, Wiley, a threat against my little sister’s life when she was still a toddler, and evidence that Ted had built and tested bombs in the very woods where I’d ridden horseback and built childhood forts.
Ted wasn’t always the wild-eyed figure the FBI dragged out of a 10×12 cabin in the woods. He was a son, a brother, a student, a professor — the perpetrator of one of the longest domestic terrorism campaigns in American history was once a baby in his mother’s arms, a boy idolized by his younger brother, David. When Ted and David bought 1.4 acres from my grandfather in 1971, Ted still looked like the buttoned-up Berkeley professor, not a disheveled hermit with a taste for murder.
“Teddy,” as our family called him in those early years, didn’t just live alongside us. In the ’80s — before a text message counted as a greeting — he shared meals and dinner conversation with our family. He held me in his arms when I was a baby, brought me gifts as a child, played cards with my parents, and even worked for my family. Ted didn’t present as a monster. He presented as an eccentric neighbor who’d chosen a peaceful, off-grid lifestyle.
(Illustration by Salon / Images courtesy of Jamie Gehring) A young Jamie Gehring, left, in the early 1980s in the cabin where her family shared meals with Ted Kaczynski. Right, her sister, Tessa, with the family dog, which Gehring says Kaczynski poisoned.
I only began to grasp the full extent of his violence while writing my book, “Madman in the Woods: Life Next Door to the Unabomber.” For five years, my evenings were spent trying to crawl inside not only a killer’s mind, but the mind of the man next door who spoke to me in the gentle voice in which people reserve for children. I interviewed people who knew him and people who hunted him, reading thousands of pages of his journals, and corresponding with Ted himself at ADX Florence — the federal supermax known as the Alcatraz of the Rockies.
The violence I uncovered in our shared backyard was harrowing: the strychnine fed to my beloved jet-black dog, Wiley, a threat against my little sister’s life when she was still a toddler, and evidence that Ted had built and tested bombs in the very woods where I’d ridden horseback and built childhood forts, under the ponderosa pines.
But here’s what complicates the monster story, and what Hollywood has failed to illustrate in this movie: I also found a young man failed by nearly every system around him. A baby separated from his mother during a critical window of his development. A child so advanced in school he couldn’t relate to his peers. A teenager shipped off to Harvard at 16.
It’s that Harvard chapter where the Netflix film plants its flag. And look — the Murray experiments make for good cinema. Jacob Tremblay’s young Ted sits under bright lights, electrodes on his chest, while Russell Crowe’s Henry Murray takes him apart. The film wants this to be the moment. The scene where the monster gets made. A monster that discovers he cannot be “broken.”
Here’s what complicates the monster story, and what Hollywood has failed to illustrate in this movie: I also found a young man failed by nearly every system around him.
Some of it is true. His code name was Lawful, and Ted did want to prove that he couldn’t be defeated. There was a camera rolling, electrodes measuring heart and respiratory rates. The experiments were designed to break down a subject’s ideals and measure the stress response. They were unethical and cruel — especially for a 16-year-old who placed such importance on identity and intellect.
But the film mistakes a chapter for the whole story, and a dramatization for the record. If this is your first encounter with Kaczynski, the movie hands you a clean origin story and calls it a day. The experiments were not the single catalyst that turned a teenager into a man who would kill three people and injure 23 others. Were they part of the imperfect storm? In my opinion, yes. But an origin story is what Hollywood needs. The story is deeper, more complicated, and far from clean-cut black and white. There are so many interesting facets of this story, and I wish that the film would have taken the time and the care to tell them.
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Ted isn’t here to give his take on the reenactment, but I can tell you what he said about the experiments themselves. In a letter Ted wrote in response to a pen pal who was concerned about what the man went through with the Harvard study, he said: “The truth is that in the course of the Murray study there was one and only one unpleasant experience. It lasted about half an hour and could not have been described as ‘torture’ even in the loosest sense of the word. Mostly the Murray study consisted of interviews and the filling out of pencil-and-paper personality tests. The CIA was not involved. . .”
(Illustration by Salon / Images courtesy of Jamie Gehring) A young Ted Kaczynski stands outside his cabin near Lincoln, Montana, left. Interior photos taken after his 1996 arrest.
I believe I know which half hour he meant. Buried in a transcript of one session, I found the interrogator attacking the young man’s philosophy, then pivoting — with a cruelty so casual it’s almost worse — to his appearance: “. . .don’t interrupt me, please. On this avoiding of society or of society is a bad thing, is that why you’re trying to grow that beard?” Ted: “. . .I mean, really, this isn’t really a beard yet.” The interrogator: “. . .you’re darn right it’s not.”
It was cold. It was damaging. But was it the singular experience that set a man on a decades-long mission to dismantle technological society? Simply put: no.
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And as far as the additional timeline in this movie — the hunt, just read my book. The agent is fictional, the heroes were erased, and just about the only thing I found factual was the re-creation of Kaczynski’s mailbox. But I will admit that Russel Crowe, Jacob Tremblay, and Shailene Woodley all deliver riveting performances. Jacob Tremblay embodies a young Kaczynski almost exactly as I have imagined him, minus the smiling and the forging of his mother’s signature. But there were moments of his performance in which I recognized a young version of my own childhood monster.
Hollywood keeps asking what made the monster, because a monster with a making is a monster we can understand — and contain. The harder truth, the one I lived next door to for 16 years, is that there was no single breaking point. There was a baby, a boy, a brilliant teenager, an eccentric neighbor — and, somewhere in the shadows, a killer. No one scene explains him.
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Christopher Paul is running unopposed to become the chief of police in Elizabeth, Louisiana, a village of 417 people. Paul, however, was recently charged with raping two 13-year-old girls twenty years ago, creating a dilemma for locals who might not want someone suspected of serious crimes to be their only full-time police officer. — Read the rest
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A young rabbit was having a terrible time attempting a flyout at the local skatepark. Stuck in the bowl and unable to escape, the cottontail made a new friend.
This kind, patient skater pulled off an amazing tailgrab and eventually helped his new bunny buddy escape. — Read the rest
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Cocaine worth more than $10m was stored as evidence at a courthouse in Fiji, but at some point in the long-running drug trial was replaced by flour. Authorities admit that about 87 pounds of cocaine is "effectively missing;" ABC News in Australia describes it as "yet another apparent example of internal corruption that has plagued Fiji's authorities." — Read the rest
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Matthew Ammel, the former bodyguard and former boyfriend of former Arizona U.S. Senator Kyrsten Sinema, was arrested after allegedly breaking into her home while she was out of town and causing $200k worth of damage. Ammel, police say, demanded that Sinema post a video to social media and threatened to throw one of her paintings into her swimming pool every ten minutes until she complied. — Read the rest
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President Donald Trump loves a good pardon. His generosity is so well known, in fact, that an industry of lobbyists, lawyers and other insiders has reportedly sprung up to facilitate clemency for wealthy criminals. Clemency, meaning mercy or leniency, lets the president reduce the punishment for, or even forgive, federal crimes.
For defendants hoping to avoid jail and walk away from millions of dollars in financial sanctions, paying, say, US$600,000 to a lobbying firm to influence the president may seem like a good investment.
House Democrats recently reported that Trump’s second-term clemency – which includes both pardons, which wipe away every part of a conviction, and commutations, which typically leave convictions intact but shorten a person’s sentence – has saved convicted defendants nearly $1.7 billion in forgiven financial obligations.
Some of that amount – about $700 million – had not yet been officially imposed by courts because the clemency came through so quickly. Much of the remaining $1 billion had been ordered as restitution, meant to repay victims’ losses.
As a legal scholar researching the evolution of modern presidential clemency, I have reviewed every individual pardon and commutation granted by U.S. presidents since 1989, spanning seven administrations, from George H.W. Bush to Trump’s second term. I have found that while other presidents have canceled tens of millions of dollars’ worth of restitution and fines, none of them have come anywhere near the billion-dollar mark – until now.
The main financial penalties faced by federal defendants are fines, forfeiture – where a defendant has to give up, say, the Ferrari they bought with the profits from their drug business – and restitution.
Restitution is an order to pay back the criminal’s gains to the victims of the crime. For example, if the CEO of a company tricks people into investing $600 million into a hydrogen-powered truck that was never operational, the court may order that, if convicted, he pay back the people he defrauded.
Restitution is rarely able to return all of someone’s lost money, but it is supposed to prevent the fraudster from enjoying the fruits of their crime.
Since January 2025, Trump has granted clemency to a lengthy list of big-ticket fraudsters, including a cryptocurrency billionaire whose exchange pleaded guilty to anti–money laundering violations and CEOs convicted of payroll tax fraud.
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Many of these pardons and commutations have coincided with the use of lobbying firms or generous donations to causes close to Trump’s heart: his inaugural committee, his reelection campaign or MAGA Inc. One successful pardon-seeker’s mother attended a $1 million fundraising dinner.
Clemency seekers use a variety of ways to catch the president’s attention. The end result is that victims of crime – and taxpayers, who have to pay for these huge white-collar investigations and trials – are often left with nothing.
The U.S. Constitution grants the president nearly unbounded power to pardon whomever he likes, whenever he likes and for whatever reason he likes. This is why, since 1894, the Office of the Pardon Attorney has tried to impose some guidelines on the process and decide which cases should be eligible for clemency at all.
These guidelines generally require that a clemency seeker have been released from prison for five years before they are eligible to request a pardon. If they never went to prison, the five years is calculated from the date of sentencing. Many presidents adhere to this norm: My study shows that between 94% and 100% of people pardoned by George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and Barack Obama met this criteria. Because he gave so many preemptive pardons, Joe Biden’s percentage was lower, at around 68%, but still well over half.
In contrast, out of the 216 individual pardons granted by Trump in his second term so far, only 34 – about 15% – have gone to people who waited that long.
A look back at recent past administrations shows an erratic but increasing amount of financial obligations canceled. While some presidents have been frugal with their financial forgiveness – George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush remained under the million-dollar mark, while Joe Biden was just over it – others have been less so.
Bill Clinton erased nearly $10 million in fines and restitution through pardons, most notoriously pardoning Marc Rich, a fugitive financier whose ex-wife contributed more than a million dollars to various Democratic causes and the Clinton Presidential Library.
Obama more than doubled Clinton’s record, forgiving $23 million in financial sanctions.
But Trump surpassed them both in his first term, canceling nearly $195 million in financial obligations. The amount of money saved by convicted defendants during his second term is exponentially higher. One could even say that, as Trump likes to put it, “We’ve never seen anything like it.”
Since the main function of commutations is to let people out of prison sooner, commutations usually leave financial obligations in place. During his first term, Trump primarily granted commutations that left “intact and in effect” all conditions of a person’s sentence except for imprisonment. This let numerous defendants out of jail but kept them on the hook for nearly $3 billion in fines and restitution.
That has changed during Trump’s second term. Today, his commutations routinely cancel a recipient’s prison sentence “with no further fines, restitution, probation or other conditions.”
This is how, through commutations alone, Trump has canceled more than $300 million in penalties and restitution since he returned to office.
One figure that is unavailable in public records is whether any given defendant has started to pay, or has fully paid off, their financial obligations. So these figures for every administration represent a ceiling: the full amount of fines, restitution or forfeiture that a judge imposed on a convicted defendant. How much was actually paid down can usually only be estimated, though there are exceptions.
For example, Jason Galanis, who pled guilty to defrauding the Oglala Sioux Nation, had paid just over $2 million of his $80 million restitution before his sentence was commuted and the restitution erased in 2025. But we only know that because he unsuccessfully asked the court to return the money.
One useful indicator of how much someone may have already paid is the speed at which they got clemency. The faster they receive clemency, the less time they have to pay off their penalties. The median delay between sentencing and receiving a pardon during Biden, Obama and George H.W. Bush’s administrations was over 20 years.
During Trump’s second term, in contrast, things are moving faster. Trump has pardoned or given commutations to at least 44 recipients within a year of their sentences who together account for over $270 million in financial obligations.
This includes a nursing home executive who pled guilty to withholding his employees’ payroll taxes – which prosecutors said he spent on a yacht – and was pardoned 12 days after being sentenced, ensuring that he could avoid some $4 million in restitution. A crypto company was pardoned hours before it was due to pay a $100 million fine for violating anti–money laundering laws. A digital media founder was ordered to repay defrauded investors $36 million. His sentence was commuted, and his restitution canceled within four months of sentencing.
In these cases, clemency was issued before most of the money was able to reach the government or the victims it was owed to. The faster clemency is granted, the more likely it is that fraudsters get to walk away without paying their victims anything.
Caren Morrison, Professor of Law, Georgia State University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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After 30 years, Pokémon remains among the most desirable collectible franchises in fandom and auctions regularly prove the cards' growing value. But one scalper went too far in his efforts to acquire the latest Squirter or PewPew or whatever, attaching a GPS tranceiver on a delivery driver's vehicle and using it to track her movements. — Read the rest
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Elizabeth Holmes, the Theranos founder and convicted felon, will move to a halfway house next year. ABC News was first to report her forthcoming transfer from federal prison, where she was imprisoned after being sentenced to 10 years and 3 months on wire fraud charges. — Read the rest
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Hollywood film producer Harvey Weinstein was today sentenced to 15 years in prison on his most recent sexual assault conviction in New York.
His victim, production assistant Miriam Haley, told the Manhattan court in an impact statement that Weinstein abused his position and power and that "It is a life sentence for me." — Read the rest
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Clavicular, who rose to fame promoting the weird grooming methods termed "looxmaxxing," has worse problems than being mogged by a chad judge. The influencer, legally named Braden Peters, faces felony charges in Massachussets, where he is accused with drugging someone for sex, with procuring liquor for someone under 21 years old, and with rape. — Read the rest
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President Donald Trump painted a terrifying picture during his rally in North Carolina on Wednesday night. Standing on stage at Gastonia Municipal Airport, Trump offered a dramatic retelling of a brutal murder that took place in the state last August. Iryna Zarutska’s death made headlines around the country, but the killing that Trump weaved into the Republican Party’s midterm pitch has also emerged as a persistent fixation and rallying cry for racist extremists on the far right.
As he told Zarutska’s story, Trump spared no gory or dramatic details.
From the earliest days of technopolitics, the role of technology in resisting authoritarianism was unclear. On the one hand, there's the indisputable fact that modern cryptography, properly implemented, can deliver a degree of privacy that is proof against all technological attacks.
That is to say, if you pull out your distraction rectangle, fire up the camera, and tap the shutter button, in the ensuing eyeblink instant the image you've captured will be scrambled so thoroughly that it could never be unscrambled without the secret key unlocked by your passphrase or biometrics. Even if every hydrogen atom in the universe were converted into a computer, and even if all those computers spent all the time between now and the end of the universe trying to guess what the key was, we would run out of universe and time long before we ran out of possible keys.
What's more, this extremely robust form of scrambling and descrambling can be combined with other techniques to block tampering with the encrypted data, and to allow parties to reliably identify who scrambled the data and also to restrict who may unscramble it. These remarkable technological facts have inspired many excited debates about what they mean for our politics, most notably among a group of people who called themselves "cypherpunks":
https://web.archive.org/web/20151102012232/https://www.wired.com/1993/02/crypto-rebels/
One cypherpunk faction believed that modern cryptography could enable a kind of technological secession: by allowing ordinary people to communicate, transact and collaborate without the possibility of state interception or control, crypto could make states themselves obsolete.
But another faction pointed out that no amount of mathematics could help you if an agent of the state – or a criminal the state failed to protect you from – tortured you until you revealed the secret passphrase needed to unlock your secrets. This was (ironically) called "rubber hose cryptanalysis" (as in "Tell me your passphrase or I'll hit you with this rubber hose again"). Later, this became known as a "wrench attack" after a famous XKCD comic about $1m worth of security technology being defeated by hitting someone with a $5 wrench until they divulged the password:
Once you stipulate to the problem of wrench attacks and rubber-hose cryptanalysis, it becomes apparent that your cryptography is only as good as your physical defenses. What's more, the most effective physical defenses we have come from a strong rule of law, because even the thickest safe door benefits from the threat of prison for anyone who breaks into the safe, and the most effective tool for preventing a cop from hitting you with a rubber hose is the existence of a judge who can send that cop to prison for abusing your civil rights.
But what do you do if you already live under tyranny? The rule of law is a great defense, but cryptography alone can't bring about the rule of law. What is the role of technology in this foundational struggle?
My technopolitics faction – the faction associated with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where I've worked for a quarter-century – has an answer: the role of encryption is to provide a measure of privacy and security that is best used to organize political struggles to demand the rule of law and respect for human rights. Encryption isn't proof against rubber hoses, but it is effective against many other forms of state repression, and it can provide a technical edge for those engaged in a political struggle.
Another faction – the faction most associated with bitcoin and subsequent cryptocurrency projects – rejects the role of the state altogether, and seeks to replace states (and state-regulated institutions like courts and banks) with mathematics. Rather than asking courts to interpret contracts, we can put our trust in self-executing "smart contracts," and rather than asking banks to safeguard our financial integrity, we can use cryptographic software to ensure that money only moves when the person it belongs to tells it to.
This has many problems. Smart contracts are slow, expensive, and unreliable. The number of people who understand contracts is small, the number of people who understand the software that embodies smart contracts is likewise small, and the Venn intersection of the two is more of a sphincter. What's more, there is irreducible ambiguity in all but the simplest of contracts, which means that even a "self-executing" contract ends up relying on a human adjudicator (an "oracle") who can be bribed or intimidated into cheating:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/14/externalities/#dshr
And when it comes to transactions, crypto proves to be unwieldy, expensive and complex, so that nearly all crypto users end up directing an intermediary (like Coinbase) to hold and move their cryptographic assets for them. The upshot is that cryptocurrency mostly replaces banks – imperfect, but heavily regulated and insured – with unregulated tech platforms with murky ownership and often defective security procedures, who may or may not be insured (or even locatable) in the event of a collapse or a breach. Consequently, cryptocurrency has become a scam magnet of unprecedented and unstoppable power, and hardly a day goes by without people being ripped off in the most ghastly ways imaginable:
https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/
For bitcoin maxis and other anti-state cypherpunks, this is just a skill issue. Anyone who doesn't understand how to manage their own keys and turns to a platform to hold and move their crypto is getting what they deserve. As the maxim goes, "Not your keys, not your wallet," which is cypherpunkspeak for "caveat emptor."
That's where the wrench attacks come in. Because if you are in possession of keys that can be used to irreversibly and instantaneously steal large sums of money and move it to jurisdictions where the perpetrators are beyond any legal or physical recourse (e.g. North Korea), then there is a massive incentive for your adversaries to kidnap you and hit you with a wrench or a rubber hose.
That's precisely what's going on. People with substantial cryptocurrency holdings face grave personal danger, and the physical attacks on their person grow bolder, more violent, and more sadistic by the day:
https://github.com/jlopp/physical-bitcoin-attacks/blob/master/README.md
As crypto critic David Rosenthal writes, this problem is even worse than it seems at first blush:
https://blog.dshr.org/2026/05/wrench-attacks.html
For one thing, cryptocurrencies depend on "public ledgers" that indelibly, publicly record every transaction in the network. Cryptocurrency is nothing without these ledgers, and they have to be immutable and public to work. This is very bad news for anyone who relies on anonymity as their defense against physical attacks.
That's because "reidentification attacks" (where an anonymous person in a dataset is positively identified) get easier to perform over time. You might be represented in a database of hospital prescribing activities by a random number, and that number might be hard to associate with your real identity…at first. But with every subsequent release of data – whether in the form of an anonymized data-set or a breach – it gets easier to cross-reference the facts associated with your record with other facts from other records, such that a detailed, identifying picture of you emerges one fact at a time.
For example, if the taxi company you use suffers a breach that reveals journeys associated with every doctor's appointment at the hospital, now an attacker can pick out the home or work address of the single person who visited the hospital just before you received your prescription. The longer an "anonymized" data-set sits around in public view, the easier it gets to de-anonymize it:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10933-3
Combine the fact that permanent ledgers make it progressively easier to identify people whom you can torture into revealing their crypto keys with the irreversible, instantaneous nature of crypto transfers and you get some very juicy targets indeed. "Not your keys, not your wallet" means it's "not anyone else's problem" when you get robbed. You can't ask the bank to interdict or reverse the transaction.
Rosenthal provides a litany of the escalating security measures crypto holders are turning to as this problem goes progressively more dangerous and terrifying. There's the guy who splits his keys up in four physical vaults at four separate locations, whose management is instructed to make him wait a minimum of seven days when he asks to retrieve them. Despite all this, he keeps his identity secret:
Rosenthal quotes Nicholas Weaver, who asks what kind of "internet of money" bitcoin can be if it can't be safely stored on a computer connected to the actual internet:
https://doi.org/10.1145/3208095
But an equally valid question is, what kind of escape from tyranny is it that requires you to hide your identity at all times lest you be snatched off the street and brutally tortured? What kind of "liberty" requires you to spend $860,000 armoring your two top execs' personal vehicles to protect them from gunfire and light artillery?
https://www.ft.com/content/71d7486d-89b5-48ac-8f94-857578c0a03b
It costs $6.2m/year to protect Coinbase's CEO – "more than the combined amount that JPMorgan Chase & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Nvidia Corp. spent on their respective CEOs":
Crypto true believers exhort one another to "HODL" (hold on for dear life). Selling your crypto during downturns is considered a moral failing. But now, crypto holders – especially those who manage their own keys – are literally holding on for dear life, as they are hunted by crime syndicates and state actors alike.
It's a good reminder of how badly crypto has failed on its own terms, delivering its biggest users into an existence of fear and physical peril that rivals the plight of even the most hunted dissidents in the most repressive societies. Worse: as cryptocurrency lobbyists have fused crypto with the world's largest and most corrupt governments (especially the Trump regime), crypto now has all the exposure to state coercion that made banks so unsuitable, but without the (inconstant, insufficient) protections offered by traditional banking.
And that's before we talk about the energy consumption problems, the scams enabled by crypto, and the rampant human trafficking that those scams necessitate:
People in my technopolitical faction have a saying of our own: "'Crypto' means cryptography." Cryptography plays a hugely important role in protecting people from crime and state repression. It is no substitute for the rule of law and democracy, but it remains a key tool for securing and defending both:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/27/the-best-defense-against-rubber-hose-cryptanalysis/
Cryptocurrency, on the other hand? That's the worst of all worlds.
Best sketches from SNL season 51 https://a.wholelottanothing.org/best-sketches-from-snl-season-51/
Revenge of The Business Idiot https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-revenge-of-the-business-idiot/
Uber, Lyft drivers in Massachusetts form first US ride-share union https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/uber-lyft-drivers-massachusetts-form-first-us-ride-share-union-2026-05-26/
Star Trek Title Card Generator https://trek.epicrandomness.com/
#20yrsago Can anyone own “Web 2.0?” https://memex.craphound.com/2006/05/26/can-anyone-own-web-2-0/
#20yrsago iRiver gives customers the choice of switching off DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20060619150812/http://www.iriver.com/mtp/
#20yrsago EFF scores win against Apple: bloggers’ sources are protected https://web.archive.org/web/20060602020337/http://blog.wired.com/27BStroke6/index.blog?entry_id=1489151
#15yrsago Anonymous pre-paid credit-cards and money-laundering https://web.archive.org/web/20110529001021/https://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2011/05/23/technology-lt-fea-plastic-money-laundering_8481416.html
#15yrsago More incompetence revealed on the part of France’s “three-strikes” copyright enforcer https://web.archive.org/web/20120520073256/https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/05/french-three-strikes-anti-piracy-software-riddled-with-flaws/
#15yrsago Montage: Non-pornographic scenes from pornographic movies https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVBhVDXLpaI
#15yrsago Improper court record redaction: a study https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2011/05/25/studying-frequency-redaction-failures-pacer/
#15yrsago Texas anti-TSA-grope bill killed by threat to shut down all Texas airports https://www.texastribune.org/2011/05/24/fed-threat-shuts-down-tsa-groping-bill-in-texas/?r
#15yrsago Canadian Tories refuse to send soldiers to help flood victims because they’d compete with the private sector https://web.archive.org/web/20110527053822/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/quebec/ottawa-initially-refuses-request-for-more-troops-to-aid-quebec-flood-victims/article2033562/
#15yrsago Gold-farming in a Chinese forced-labor camp https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/may/25/china-prisoners-internet-gaming-scam
#10yrsago Edward Snowden performs radical surgery on a phone to make it “go black” https://web.archive.org/web/20160527125043/https://www.wired.com/2016/05/snowden-vice-cell-phone-hack/
#10yrsago FBI is investigating copyright trolls Prenda Law for fraud https://web.archive.org/web/20160526005012/https://popehat.com/2016/05/25/fbi-actively-investigating-prenda-law-team-for-fraud/
#10yrsago How a pharma company made billions off mass murder by faking the science on Oxycontin https://web.archive.org/web/20160524112437/http://static.latimes.com/oxycontin-part1/
#10yrsago GOP officials won’t let the FEC stop bosses from forcing employees to give to PACs https://web.archive.org/web/20160526114245/https://prospect.org/blog/checks/fec-deadlocks-over-employer-political-coercion
#10yrsago Undetectable proof-of-concept chip poisoning uses analog circuits to escalate privilege https://www.ieee-security.org/TC/SP2016/papers/0824a018.pdf
#10yrsago “Pickup artist” douche uses copyright to sue Youtube critics, fans raise $100K defense fund https://www.gofundme.com/f/h3h3defensefund
#10yrsago The best thing you will read about the revelation that Captain America was a Nazi spy https://web.archive.org/web/20160623131614/https://storify.com/rahaeli/captain-america
#10yrsago Revealed: the amazing cover for Walkaway, my first adult novel since 2009 https://reactormag.com/cover-reveal-walkaway-cory-doctorow//
#10yrsago Tor Project is working on a web-wide random number generator https://blog.torproject.org/mission-montreal-building-next-generation-onion-services/
#10yrsago Jury hands Oracle its ass, says Google doesn’t owe it a penny for Java https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/05/eff-applauds-jury-verdict-favor-fair-use-oracle-v-google
#10yrsago Arcade cabinet enthusiasts discover trove of 50+ games in ship, derelict for 30 years https://arcadeblogger.com/2016/05/06/arcade-raid-the-duke-of-lancaster-ship/
#5yrsago Monopolists are winning the repair wars https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/26/nixing-the-fix/#r2r
#1yrago Who Broke the Internet, Part IV https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/26/babyish-radical-extremists/#cancon
Kansas City: Facing the Future (Woodneath Library Center), Jun 10
https://www.mymcpl.org/events/119655/facing-future-cory-doctorow
LA: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Brian Merchant (Skylight Books), Jun 19
https://www.skylightbooks.com/event/skylight-cory-doctorow-presents-reverse-centaurs-guide-life-after-ai-w-brian-merchant
Menlo Park: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Angie Coiro (Kepler's), Jun 21
https://www.keplers.org/upcoming-events-internal/cory-doctorow-2026
Toronto: TBA, Jun 23
NYC: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Jonathan Coulton (The Strand), Jun 24
https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html
Philadelphia: TBA, Jun 25
Chicago: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Rick Perlstein (Exile in Bookville), Jun 26
https://exileinbookville.com/events/50628
Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales
EFFecting Change: How to Disenshittify the Internet (EFF, with Wendy Liu)
https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-enshittification
The “Enshittification” of Everything (Bioneers)
https://bioneers.org/cory-doctorow-enshittification-of-everything-zstf2605/
Enshittification (99% Invisible)
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/666-enshittification/
Artificial Intelligence: The Ultimate Disruptor, with Astra Taylor and Yoshua Bengio (CBC Ideas)
https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-23-ideas/clip/16210039-artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disruptor
"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
"Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
"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
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 Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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