Security researcher Bill Demirkapi found more than 15,000 hardcoded secrets and 66,000 vulnerable websites—all by searching overlooked data sources.

Allan “dwangoAC” has made it his mission to expose speedrunning phonies. At the Defcon hacker conference, he’ll challenge one record that's stood for 15 years.

The Biden administration released new priorities today for safeguarding clean energy infrastructure from possible cyberattacks. Smart grids and EVs can have big benefits when it comes to saving energy and cutting down pollution. But as more pieces of our lives become electric and digital, new cybersecurity challenges arise. That’s why the Biden administration is releasing guidance today on how to keep new parts of our energy infrastructure safe from harm. “We have a once in a generation opportunity to refresh our infrastructure — to get a bit of a mulligan on some parts of our infrastructure that were never designed for the level of digital / physical convergence that our world is hurtling towards,” Harry Krejsa, assistant national cyber director, says. In a fact sheet shared exclusively with The Verge before being released publicly, the Biden administration homes in on five technologies it deems critical to the near-term success of a clean energy transition and that deserve extra attention when it comes to cybersecurity. At the top of the list are batteries needed to store renewable energy and make sure it’s available even when sunshine fades and winds die down. Electric vehicles and charging equipment are also a priority, along with the batteries that power them. Then there are energy management systems for buildings — think smart thermostats, rooftop solar systems, and even smart lighting systems. So-called distributed control systems are another related priority. That encompasses controls for community microgrids and virtual power plants that harness the collective energy storage of fleets of EV or solar batteries. Inverters and power conversion equipment round out the list. “Digitization cuts both ways,” Krejsa says. On the one hand, it gives home and business owners and grid operators more control. It’s easier to adjust EV charging to specific times when renewable energy is more abundant or to turn up thermostats to save energy and avoid power outages during heatwaves. But those tools can become weak points to exploit without robust protections in place. President Joe Biden has already had to cope with criminal hackers targeting energy infrastructure during his term in office. A cyberattack in 2021 shut down the Colonial Pipeline, the largest pipeline system for refined oil products in the US. The ransomware attack took the pipeline offline for five days, leading to gasoline shortages, higher prices at the pump, and gridlocked traffic outside of gas stations. The Biden administration is also worried about state-backed threats. The Department of Homeland Security named cyber threats posed by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) a top priority for protecting critical infrastructure through 2025 in a guidance document it published in June. PRC-sponsored cyber group Volt Typhoon has “compromised the IT environments of multiple critical infrastructure organizations” including energy and transportation systems, according to a Department of Homeland Security advisory issued in February. Protective measures can be as simple as keeping up good digital hygiene. Hackers reportedly used a compromised password to get into Colonial’s network in 2021. But there also need to be more systemic safeguards. The way energy systems operate today dumps too much responsibility “onto individuals, small businesses, local governments, frontline users who don’t have the resources to mount an adequate defense against the world’s most well-resourced and well-trained, malicious actors,” Krejsa says. “It’s just not a sustainable way to architect that ecosystem.” The fact sheet released today points to the need for “secure by design principles” that “prioritize the security of customers as a core business requirement.” The Biden administration also emphasizes the need to bring different branches of government together, along with businesses, researchers and even hackers, to design and implement better protections. The Department of Energy launched the Energy Threat Analysis Center (ETAC) as a pilot public-private partnership in 2023, for example. And Krejsa spoke to The Verge on a call from Las Vegas, where he’s attending the Def Con hacking convention and “issuing a call to action and asking the hacker community for help to say, ‘look at these priority technologies.’” With everyone on board, the Biden administration’s cybersecurity roadmap includes crafting technical standards and implementation guidance for new energy technologies. It also places a priority on research and development and training a workforce for cybersecurity. With the nation’s aging energy infrastructure already overdue for an overhaul to accommodate growing electricity demand and new sources of renewable energy, it’s also a good time to tack on a security update. “Where should we make critical infrastructure investments? These are decisions that are happening right now,” says Nana Menya Ayensu, special assistant to the president on climate policy, finance, and innovation. “When it comes to cybersecurity [we want] to make sure that that is a pillar of a more modern, more nimble, digitalized energy system.”

Sabotage. Property destruction. For Léna Lazare and her cohort, radicalized by years of inaction on the environmental crisis, these aren’t dirty words. They’re acts of joy.

Microsoft made it clear earlier this year that it was planning to make security its top priority, following years of security issues and mounting criticisms. Starting today, the software giant is now tying its security efforts to employee performance reviews. Kathleen Hogan, Microsoft’s chief people officer, has outlined what the company expects of employees in an internal memo obtained by The Verge. “Everyone at Microsoft will have security as a Core Priority,” says Hogan. “When faced with a tradeoff, the answer is clear and simple: security above all else.” A lack of security focus for Microsoft employees could impact promotions, merit-based salary increases, and bonuses. “Delivering impact for the Security Core Priority will be a key input for managers in determining impact and recommending rewards,” Microsoft is telling employees in an internal Microsoft FAQ on its new policy. Microsoft has now placed security as one of its key priorities alongside diversity and inclusion. Both are now required to be part of performance conversations — internally called a “Connect” — for every employee, alongside priorities that are agreed upon between employees and their managers. “It goes beyond compliance, as we are asking employees to prioritize security in all the work that they do and hold themselves accountable by capturing their impact for it whenever they complete a Connect,” reads Microsoft’s FAQ. Microsoft employees will have to demonstrate how they’ve made impactful security changes. For technical employees, that means incorporating security into product design processes at the start of a project, following established security practices, and making sure products are secure by default for Microsoft’s customers. Sign up for Notepad by Tom Warren, a weekly newsletter uncovering the secrets and strategy behind Microsoft’s era-defining bets on AI, gaming, and computing. Subscribe to get the latest straight to your inbox. $7/month Get every issue of Notepad straight to your inbox. The first month is free. $70/year Get a year of Notepad at a discounted rate. The first month is free. $100/person/year Get one year of both Notepad and Command Line. The first month is free. We accept credit card, Apple Pay and Google Pay. All Microsoft employees are expected to use the company’s Connect tool for performance reviews, including executives who will also have their own security priority to deliver on. Microsoft has already been overhauling its security efforts as part of a Secure Future Initiative (SFI) to better protect Microsoft’s networks, production systems, engineering systems, and much more. A lot of Microsoft’s security changes internally haven’t been public-facing, but some have impacted products like Outlook. Microsoft is ending support for Basic Authentication for Outlook personal accounts in September, and it’s removing the light version of the Outlook web application on August 19th. Outlook.com, Hotmail, and Live.com users will need to access their email accounts through apps using Modern Authentication on September 16th, potentially impacting some third-party email apps and older versions of Outlook, Apple Mail, and Thunderbird. Here is Hogan’s full memo: At Microsoft, we deliver mission-critical infrastructure that the world depends on to achieve more. With that trust in us comes a great responsibility: to protect our customers, our company, and our world from cyber threats. As Microsoft employees, we all have a role in that responsibility. As Satya referenced in his May 3 email and again during his FY25 kick off on July 9, security is our number-one priority, and everyone at Microsoft will have security as a Core Priority. When faced with a tradeoff, the answer is clear and simple: security above all else. Our commitment to security is enduring. New and novel attacks will require us to continue to learn, innovate, and defend. Yet working together, we will make nonlinear improvements, stay alert, and meet the expectations of our customers. They are counting on us, and our future depends on their trust. Our new Security Core Priority reinforces our commitment to security and holds us accountable for building secure products and services. It is now available in the Connect tool for most employees, and we are partnering with geo HR teams to expand access to all employees globally. The Security Core Priority is not a check-the-box compliance exercise; it is a way for every employee and manager to commit to—and be accountable for—prioritizing security, and a way for us to codify your contributions and to recognize you for your impact. We all must act with a security-first mindset, speak up, and proactively look for opportunities to ensure security in everything we do. The core priority will have two parts: Core and common elements that apply to all employees An optional section for employees to further specify how they will activate the Security Core Priority based on their role, team, org, etc. All employees will set their Security Core Priority as part their first FY25 Connect, with the intent that during regular Connect conversations, you and your manager will discuss your Security Core Priority progress and impact. This process will follow the same approach as our other company-wide core priorities for Diversity & Inclusion and Managers. You can learn more about the Security Core Priority here, including FAQs and Security Core Priority activation examples for three main types of roles: technical, customer and partner-facing, and all other roles. As we kick off our 50th year as a company, I know we all feel honored and humbled that we are still here—as a relevant and consequential company—pursuing our mission together. When we empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more, we take on society’s biggest challenges and empower the world. What a big, bold, and meaningful mission we have, and yet none of us can take this for granted. We are here because our customers trust us, and we must continue to earn their trust every day. Thank you for your commitment to our Security Core Priority that will help protect Microsoft, our customers, and our partners. Kathleen

Inside the MAGA-fueled fever dream of the 2024 Bitcoin Conference. There were rumors that Elon Musk would introduce former President Donald Trump before his keynote speech at the 2024 Bitcoin Conference. Musk had pledged to donate tens of millions to a Trump super PAC; he was close with JD Vance, Trump’s vice presidential nominee; he was into crypto and memes. People tracked Musk’s jet and noticed it was reducing altitude over Tennessee. It was happening. It would be historic. The Bitcoin Conference is an annual affair, and each year, it’s bigger and flashier than the one before. The last few were in Miami, Florida; this time, the conference was moved to Nashville, Tennessee, to take place only a week after the Republican National Convention. My seatmate on the flight down told me he never misses a conference. He and his friends call it “Bitcoin prom,” a weekend that is just as much about partying as it is about networking. But things were different this year: scheduled to speak at the conference were more than a half-dozen Republican politicians, prostrating themselves before the crypto gods, chasing money and support from a community that once defined itself by its resistance to the government. And then there was Trump, the centerpiece of it all, hoping to welcome the techno-libertarians and the finance bros into his ever-expanding coalition. The Bitcoiners were ready for Trump, and Trump was ready for their votes. But this marriage of cryptocurrency and the Republican political machine was off to a rocky start as the conference struggled to handle the logistics of hosting the former president and his retinue. It was, frankly, a shitshow. On the day that Trump was set to speak, I was told the Secret Service canceled Bitcoin Yoga. I was also told that Bitcoin Yoga had happened yesterday (it had; I was too tired from a late night of Bitcoin Topgolf to make it to yoga on time) and was not on the schedule for today (it was, in a timeslot an hour and five minutes before a session on “Self-Governance: Bitcoin and Beef”). As the staffers behind the help desk tried to get to the bottom of whether Bitcoin Yoga was actually on the schedule (it was), whether Bitcoin Yoga was happening (it wasn’t), and whether the Secret Service was responsible for its cancellation or there had just been some sort of miscommunication (a Secret Service spokesperson later told me the agency “did not request any cancellation of any conference events”), a Bitcoin Magazine writer inquired about his backpack, which he’d left in the “whale VIP room” overnight and which had since disappeared. He was told the Secret Service probably took it during their security sweep; maybe he could check the lost and found? At the press desk, a crypto beat reporter was indignant to learn he wouldn’t be getting a “green pass,” the mysterious, higher-tier credential that conference organizers were giving to select reporters that allowed them to skip to the front of the Secret Service line. A different crypto beat reporter I’d met at a party had also been snubbed; he was a “small fry,” he told me. I had originally been denied one of these passes as well, a problem that could only be resolved after a frenzy of phone calls and emails from multiple editors. The press desk staffers told me the distribution of the passes had been decided by the Secret Service and said there was nothing they could do to get me on the list. A Secret Service spokesperson later told me that the “issuance of media credentials and the selective distribution of media credentials” didn’t “fall under our purview,” claiming those responsibilities were handled by the conference staff. As far as I could tell, the publications that were getting the press pass fell into two buckets: big names like The New York Times and right-wing media. It felt these outlets were being prioritized over the trade publications that had been covering Bitcoin for years. Was the Bitcoin Conference even a Bitcoin conference anymore? This was the final day of the conference, and everyone was on edge waiting for Trump’s scheduled speech that afternoon. Every crypto cause célèbre and fever dream was a possibility. Maybe he’d announce a plan to create a strategic Bitcoin reserve, a bulwark against inflation. Maybe he’d promise to fire Gary Gensler, the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, whose name had been uttered hundreds of times over the weekend, never without contempt. Maybe he’d promise to pardon Ross Ulbricht — the operator of the Silk Road, a covert marketplace that ran largely on Bitcoin — who is currently serving a life sentence in prison. Maybe he’d reveal himself to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious, reclusive creator of Bitcoin, who in these circles was regarded as a prophet or maybe a god. Maybe, probably, none of that would happen — but the man was here, with us, and that was all that mattered. A bullet had narrowly missed Trump’s skull at a rally two weeks prior, so security was extra tight. Around 8AM, eight hours before Trump was scheduled to speak, the line to get into the Music City Center spilled out the door and around the block. Everyone around me was wearing red MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN hats or red $MAGAA memecoin hats or red BITCOIN MADE IN AMERICA hats or orange MAKE MONEY GREAT AGAIN hats, the latter of which, I’d learn, were being given out for free by a crypto retirement platform called Bitcoin IRA. There were shirts that said DONALD PUMP, shirts that showed Trump in the aftermath of being shot, his fist in the air, that said FIGHT! FIGHT!, and shirts that said FREE ROSS VOTE TRUMP that, like the orange hats, had been given away for free. The guards at the door said no bags or outside food or drinks were allowed. A quartet of well-coiffed women demanded to be let in with their handbags, security rules be damned — they had Secret Service clearance, they said. They were told to find someone inside with the campaign or the conference who could vouch for them. “This is not a regular day,” one of the guards barked at another woman who asked if she could bring in a sandwich. Banal contraband piled up outside the glass building like offerings before a temple: tote bags, half-full water bottles and coffee cups, the remnants of breakfast. This was only the first step. Getting to the main stage required passing through a metal detector, ascending a staircase and an escalator, and walking past a stage upon which a rotating cast of local musicians performed for an audience that mostly ignored them. From there, you would join the very back of a line that snaked through the expo floor. After a 45-minute wait and a second security screening — this one conducted by the Secret Service and the TSA — you’d be in the room where it happens, the Nakamoto stage. Leaving for any reason short of going to the bathroom, because thankfully there were bathrooms, meant doing it all over again: the line and the pat-down, the waiting, the anticipation. The lines had been even longer on Friday, before the implementation of the no-bag rule. Unlike other events with Secret Service protection that I’d covered in the past, the Bitcoin Conference had no dedicated media entrance. There was a makeshift press room downstairs stocked with free coffee, tea, and water, but there was no expedited entry for journalists who wanted to see the show on the main stage. Vivian Cheng, the media liaison, escorted me to the front of the Secret Service line on Friday and told me not to count on her help again; after this, I was on my own. As we walked past the hundreds of people who had waited — were still waiting — for hours to get in, I asked if the rumors about the no-bag policy on Saturday were true. She wasn’t sure. And laptops? Also unsure. Trapped amid what meager audience had made it past the screenings thus far, I attempted to make the best of the situation by listening in on panels I had planned on skipping. The tenor of the conversations was more politicized than the event descriptions had led me to believe. A panel that was ostensibly about the risks and rewards of public mining companies gave way to discussions of President Joe Biden’s “whole-of-government attack” on cryptocurrency, as Jason Les, the CEO of the Bitcoin mining company Riot Platforms, put it. “President Trump, on the other hand, has been very positive.” And what about the presumptive Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris? (She had been invited to the conference but declined to attend.) “Harris hasn’t commented, but her political perspectives have historically been more to the progressive side than President Biden,” said Fred Thiel, the CEO of Marathon Digital Holdings (no known relation to the Peter). What do Bitcoiners want? “We don’t need anything,” Les said. “We just need an active campaign to not fight against us.” This attitude tracked. The previous night, at a Bitcoin Topgolf party hosted by podcaster Crypto Megan and actor / alleged sex criminal T.J. Miller, a group of crypto attorneys complained to me about SEC regulations. The problem with crypto law, they told me between rounds, was that there were no laws, so the government just makes up whatever rules it wants to go after you. The oldest among them said the fact that Trump — someone who “legitimized white nationalism” — had embraced cryptocurrency wasn’t an entirely positive development. But we weren’t here to talk politics. One of the young lawyers handed me a golf club and told me to take a swing. Yet politics seemed to be all anyone could talk about inside the convention center. “Under a Trump administration, we’re going to see Bitcoin mining flourish,” Thiel said. “Under a Harris administration, we have no idea what the energy policies are going to be.” To ensure its ongoing success, the Bitcoin community needs to have “the right pro-Bitcoin politicians in office, no matter the side of the aisle,” Les said. One side of the aisle had sent its presidential nominee and several sitting members of Congress to court Bitcoiners. The sole representative for the Democratic Party was Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), who had come to make the “progressive case for Bitcoin.” And then there was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., representing both and neither. Exhausted and hungry, I abandoned my post at the Nakamoto stage after realizing I could no longer sit in the cold, dim room without any caffeine or calories to sustain me. At a nearby coffee shop, I sipped on a cold brew and eavesdropped on a job interview; everyone involved had conference wristbands around their arms. One interviewer asked the interviewee his SAT score, and the group commiserated about the now-scrapped writing section, which was too subjective to be of any real use in college admissions. Back at the convention center, the line to get into the main stage area was the longest I had seen it yet, wrapping all the way around the expo floor. After a few minutes of waiting, I decided to try flashing my press credentials to the security guards working the door and asking if they’d let me skip the line, figuring the worst they could do was say no. (A spokesperson for the Secret Service later told me the decision to allow certain press pass holders to skip the line was not made by the agency.) I interrupted the guys behind me, who were having an impassioned conversation about the perils of DEI in the workplace, and asked them to hold my spot in case I came back. I got in without issue, somewhere near the middle of Bitcoin evangelist Michael Saylor’s diatribe about the power of holding your coin. Saylor spoke with messianic fervor: the people in this room would get rich, would stay rich, while everyone who failed to get on board would be left behind. Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) took the stage with Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) to talk about their love of country and Bitcoin and the liberatory power of cryptocurrency. (Lummis, who unveiled a draft bill that would require the Treasury secretary to establish a network of Bitcoin storage facilities across the country, was supposed to be joined by former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who was taken off the program at the last minute.) “Free at last, free at last,” Scott proclaimed, seemingly evoking Martin Luther King Jr. Edward Snowden took a more sober tone. He appeared virtually and was greeted with a standing ovation, before revealing that because of the technical setup, he could neither see nor hear the audience. (The crowd’s enthusiasm immediately deflated.) “I spoke recently at the Bitcoin Conference in Amsterdam and the things we talked about were very different. The last time, the topic was about how the game is rigged but we can’t leave,” Snowden said. The amount of political representation at this year’s conference, he said, was a “wonderful, remarkable thing,” but it was also cause for concern. “Cast a vote, but don’t join a cult,” he told the audience. “They are not our tribe, our personality — they have their own interests, their own values, their own things they’re chasing.” Snowden received far less applause when the speech ended, possibly because the crowd didn’t appreciate him killing the vibe, possibly because the audience knew he couldn’t hear them. Then it was time for RFK Jr. — introduced as “the next president of the United States” — who told the Bitcoiners that they have it all right. “Bitcoin is the currency of hope,” he declared to roaring applause. “It is the perfect currency. It is an elegant, poetic, beautiful, pure specie.” If you fix the money, he said, you fix the world. That night, I found myself at a party for Joe Allen, a tech correspondent for Steve Bannon’s War Room who had just published a book on transhumanism and the war against humanity. “What I see there,” he said of the Bitcoin Conference, “is an opportunity on the one hand, but it’s also a very dark temptation.” Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen are “every bit as perverse and Satanic” as the globalists toward whom Bannon and others on the nationalist right usually direct their ire, he said. “These guys represent an ideology that is fundamentally hostile to anything like traditional religion and anything like an organic, as we would know it, existence for human beings,” Allen told me later. However, he took a remarkably pragmatic view on the perverse and Satanic. “In the long term, I think we are fundamentally opposed. In the short term, politics is dirty business.” But not many at the convention center shared Allen’s sentiment; few questioned whether the MAGA tent was big enough to cover the tech futurists and the evangelical Christians, the cattle ranchers who just want the Department of Agriculture out of their business, and the crypto bros who want the SEC out of their wallets. The movement, it turns out, is big enough for all of them: their disagreements on certain subjects are less salient than their disdain for the regulatory state — their desire to liberate themselves from the authorities who want to tell them what to do and how to live, who want to take their money and give it to people who didn’t work for it. The bureaucrats want to implement central banking digital currencies, to track what we buy and who we buy it from, to cut dissidents off from the economy. Bitcoin isn’t just a way to get rich; Bitcoin is a way to break free. “Bitcoin is about decentralization, freedom, and getting to the source,” Grant, a 31-year-old from Arizona told me ahead of Trump’s speech. Neither side, he said, is going to stop printing money; the right is “pandering to voters” by taking a pro-Bitcoin stance, but it’s better than what the Democrats are doing. Like many of the other conference attendees, he proudly displayed his ideology on his shirt, which read STOP SUBSIDIZING VEGANS. The shirt, he explained, was merch from his company, CrowdHealth, a health insurance crowdfunding platform that describes itself as helping people “break free from corporate run sick care.” As we spoke, a woman approached us and asked how exactly we were subsidizing her vegan lifestyle. Then they, too, found common ground: both are RFK Jr. supporters and plan on voting for him in the presidential election. But most people I spoke to were not at the conference for the fringe player. They were there to see Trump, to hope the Republican presidential candidate would openly declare his allegiance to cryptocurrency. An hour before Trump was scheduled to speak, I got an email inviting me to watch the speech at the DNA House, a pop-up event space hosted by an asset management fund. “Skip the lines and yes you can bring a bag and have a drink,” the email read. Between the suffocating crowds, the harsh austerity of the Nakamoto stage, and the ominous alleged Secret Service seizures of other reporters’ backpacks, the invite was extremely tempting. I left. The convention center was full of politicians and grifters and hangers-on, as were the surrounding events. The weekend kicked off with Bitcoin Karate, which I skipped because it sounded annoying, only to learn that both RFK Jr. and the “Hawk Tuah” girl had been in attendance. By the time I got there, the expo floor had booths for Bitcoin coffee grown in El Salvador and a booth where an artist painted Pepe portraits of attendees. People working a booth operated by The Daily Wire, the conservative news website, handed out SCAMALA signs to people waiting in line to see Trump. Upon entering the main stage area, attendees were greeted by a man handing out signs that said BITCOIN 2024 on one side and IN SATOSHI WE TRUST on the other. Everyone was selling or promoting something. Milling around the conference floor, I saw Madison Cawthorn, the erstwhile Gen Z member of Congress outside the main stage, and interviewed no fewer than six people involved with different MAGA-adjacent altcoins. DNA House carried a promise of something different. I’d gone to a party there the night before after a brief interlude at a meetup for $EGIRL, a Musk-adjacent reactionary memecoin, at which I was one of approximately four women in attendance (not including a group of girls waiting to ride a mechanical bull). At DNA House, I was surprised to encounter a more or less “normie” crowd of crypto bros and finance types. The first man I met that night rattled off a list of his accomplishments: founder, chairman, cofounder, and so on. On the stairs outside, I smoked a cigarette with a compliance auditor who told me and a crypto beat reporter about his project to, if I understood him correctly, mine Bitcoin using hydrogen cells. Inside, people danced awkwardly to EDM and added each other on LinkedIn. There were very few women there, as was the case everywhere I went. In the light of day, DNA House was more intimate, though the crowd was no less male. One man told me this was where the “whales” were; another invited me to a private afterparty at “Taylor Swift’s recording studio.” There was a catered lunch — grilled salmon, broccoli, a rice pilaf situation — and an open bar, one screen set to the livestream of the conference, another displaying the live price of both Bitcoin and the $MAGAA memecoin. The people at DNA House may have been less overtly MAGA than those at the convention center, but only marginally so. I overheard a bearded man tell someone he works with Young Americans for Liberty. Before Trump’s speech, someone told me he and several others had attended a $3,000-a-person event at the Westin Hotel rooftop the night before hosted by the $MAGAA coin developers at which Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr. both spoke. Trump was late, as he always was, and everyone assumed there had to be a good reason, maybe a special guest like Elon Musk. When he finally took the stage, around an hour after he was scheduled, Musk was nowhere to be found, and most of the people around me were too absorbed in conversation to notice that the stream had stopped working. We caught the highlights: in between his usual stump speech about the border and wokeness, Trump pledged to fire Gary Gensler and then repeated himself when he realized the audience had worked itself into a frenzy. It “sent the crowd into ecstasy,” a reporter friend who stayed behind at the convention center texted me. The same was true for the spectators at DNA House, though they were far less interested in the rest of Trump’s policies and couldn’t even spare a little applause for his promise to stop taxing tipped wages. (The audience at the convention center was much more impressed.) Still, they were hooked. Everyone was waiting for the same thing: for Trump to announce a plan to create a strategic Bitcoin reserve. He got close, danced right up to the line, and said that under his presidency, the US would never, ever sell its Bitcoin holdings. The room broke out in applause. People stood up. They pulled out their phones, ready to capture the moment their wealth doubled or tripled. “He’s going to announce it,” Scott Walker, a cofounder of DNA Fund said from a small stage. The price of Bitcoin shot up briefly, for a split second, then went back down. And then it was over. Trump moved on. He promised to commute Ross Ulbricht’s sentence and the audience at the conference roared again. There was a smattering of applause from the crowd at DNA House, too, but the mood in the room had shifted. People had put their phones away. “Have a good time with your Bitcoin, and your crypto, and everything else that you’re playing with,” Trump told an enthusiastic convention center audience. “We’re going to make that one of the greatest industries on earth.” The DNA House set was pleased but not thrilled; they were trying to manage their expectations. Sure, Trump hadn’t given them what they wanted, but he had come close. He wasn’t fighting them. He was still their guy. “Trump went out there, he kind of promised, or kind of came up with a minimum of a promise, but he did not follow through,” Walker said after Trump’s speech. After a weekend of anticipation, the pomp and grandeur of the conference, all the waiting and every interminable line, the Bitcoin diehards and tryhards had been let down. “I expect the market will react neutral at best,” Walker said. Trump had a much better night than the Bitcoiners who were hoping to see their assets appreciate, rather than (briefly) decline. That night, while the DNA Fund hosted another party, Trump raked in a reported $21 million at a fundraiser where seats sold for as much as $800,000 a person. The biggest players were staying the course. The market would adjust. And maybe the Democrats would, too. After the conference, I talked to Kyle Lawrence, a partner at Falcon Rappaport & Berkman, a crypto law firm based in New York City, whom I had met on the flight to Nashville. He’d watched Trump’s speech from an overflow room at the convention center, surrounded by people in MAGA hats, and told me that he hoped that rather than turning Bitcoin into a partisan issue, Trump’s speech would show Democrats the power of the crypto constituency. “It basically opened the door for Kamala Harris to change her party’s tune on cryptocurrency,” he said. Someone I spoke to at the DNA party the night of Trump’s speech put it more bluntly: if Harris promises to fire Gary Gensler, or if Biden does it now, the Democrats can claw back some support from the Bitcoiners. The morning after, almost everyone I saw at the Nashville airport had a hat or tote bag or shirt or wristband identifying them as a Bitcoin Conference attendee. Here we were, together, returning to reality, and everything still felt surreal. As I made my way to my gate, I walked past a man wearing a FREE ROSS VOTE TRUMP shirt who looked curiously like Martin Shkreli. It was the pharma bro himself, seemingly delighted to have been recognized. When I identified myself as a reporter and asked if he wanted to talk about the conference, he laughed and walked away. At the gate, a couple, both of whom were crypto content creators, asked what I thought of the conference. “The crowd was electric,” one of them said of the reaction to Trump’s speech. But, the other said, Trump didn’t fully deliver. Her fiancé disagreed; this was huge. Behind us, a man told his friend he skipped the entire conference on Saturday because he knew it’d be “such a shitshow” with Trump. The friend told him he’d missed out. “It was historic.” Correction, August 5th: An earlier version misstated the slogan on the Bitcoin IRA hats. It is “Make Money Great Again,” not “Make Bitcoin Great Again.”

Stretchy seaweed, reverse vending machines, QR-coded take-out boxes: They’re how we can break society’s absurd addiction to single-use plastics.

Desert countries like the United Arab Emirates are searching for ways to make it rain. New technologies might make this possible, but at what price?

When Simone Biles saluted the judges and stepped onto the mat to vault at the Sportpaleis in Antwerp, Belgium, it seemed like every camera in the packed arena was trained on her. People in the audience pulled their smartphones to record. The photographers zoomed in from their media perches. One TV camera tracked her run on a high-speed dolly, all the way down the runway, as she hurdled into a roundoff onto the springboard. The spider cam, swinging above, caught the upward trajectory of her body as she turned towards the table and blocked up and off, twisting one and a half times before landing on the blue mat and raising her arms above her head. The apex of human athleticism and kinesthetic beauty had been captured. But there were other cameras that few other people watching in the arena were thinking about as they took in Biles’ prowess on the event: the four placed in each corner of the mat where the vault was situated. These cameras also caught the occasion but not with the purpose of transmitting it to the rest of the world. These were set up by the Japanese technology giant Fujitsu, which, since 2017, has been collaborating with the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) to create an AI gymnastics judging system. In its early days, the system used lidar (light detection and ranging) technology to create 3D composites of gymnasts in action. These days, it uses an even more sophisticated system, drawing from four to eight strategically placed hi-def cameras to capture the movement of the athletes, make 3D models, and identify whether the elements they are performing fall into the parameters established by the judging bodies inside the federation. But the computer system doesn’t make judgments itself. Instead, it is deployed when there is an inquiry from the gymnast or coaches or a dispute within the judging panel itself. The Judging Support System (JSS) can be consulted to calculate the difficulty score of an athlete’s exercise — a second opinion, rather than an initial prognosis. Currently, it is mostly used for edge cases. The JSS wasn’t necessary to evaluate the value of Biles’ vault in Antwerp. Her performance on that vault was too emphatic to be borderline. Still, the cameras positioned at the corners of the vault podium captured her 3D likeness as they did for all of the other athletes who competed through the 2023 World Gymnastics Championships. The technology distilled the legendary athlete and her performance down to straight lines and sharp angles; it showed the distance and height she traveled in numbers. The awe and wonder one feels when watching Biles perform could now be recognized by a computer — understood, though not exactly appreciated. Fujitsu and FIG announced JSS back in 2017 with the goal of having the system up and running by the Summer Olympics in 2021. A home Games in Tokyo would have been an ideal opportunity for the Japanese-based tech conglomerate to showcase this kind of technology, and it would’ve been a noteworthy achievement for Morinari Watanabe, the first Japanese president of the Lausanne-based FIG. But the JSS wasn’t ready; in fact, it would take another four years of work. At the 2023 world championships in Antwerp, the JSS was finally ready to go on all 10 artistic gymnastics apparatuses — six for the men and four for the women. This was all part of the “dream,” as Watanabe put it in the joint press conference hosted by FIG and Fujitsu heralding the technological breakthrough. “Today is a day of liberation in sports,” he proclaimed to the media and other gymnastics officials who showed up for the explainer that was held shortly before the start of the men’s all-around final. “The day has come when all athletes, not just gymnasts, will receive fair and transparent scoring.” This proclamation was a bit hyperbolic, especially given that this is not AI’s first foray into judging athletic competition. It has already been successfully applied in sporting contexts, often with approval from athletes and coaches themselves. Hawk-Eye Live, the electronic line-calling system, is used in lieu of line judges in tennis at two of the majors, and its calls are generally considered reliable. But in tennis, Hawk-Eye is being tasked with answering a yes / no question — is the ball in, or is it out? The JSS is being asked to perform a much more complicated task: it needs to be able to identify hundreds of skills in the Code of Points, and the ranges in which they’re done, across the whole span of gymnast body types — a complex undertaking, and one that changes regularly, as the FIG is updating its rules every four years. In a sport where the difference between first and fifth can be a mere tenth of a point, and when global rankings can mean the difference between being funded by your national federation or not, getting the score right is very important. The appeal to a technological solution to judging feels practically inevitable. Humans are fallible. That’s why deductions exist in the first place: to quantify the mistakes that the gymnasts make. But we’d never replace the human athletes with machines, regardless of how advanced Boston Dynamics’ back-flipping robot gets. The draw of gymnastics is watching mere mortals push the limits of athleticism. But the performance of the judges is a means to an end, not the end itself. For more than a century, human judgment was the only option, no matter how much this might’ve discomfited us, given the stakes. Now, there’s a potential technological solution that shows promise. But can AI judge human excellence better than a human? The JSS started, according to Watanabe and Hidenori Fujiwara, as a joke. It was late in 2015, about a year before Watanabe won his first FIG presidential election, making him the first non-European to helm the international federation since its inception in 1881. He suggested that Fujitsu should develop robots to judge gymnastics. Fujiwara, head of Fujitsu’s sports business development division, took the challenge seriously. “We developed a prototype system,” Fujiwara said, which he then showed to Watanabe, who was surprised by the progress. Watanabe clarified that what he’d said about robots had only been a joke, and yet here they were. This origin story for the JSS was emphasized during the press conference I attended in Antwerp shortly before the start of the men’s all-around final. There was, of course, a PowerPoint. An early slide in the presentation showed a comic with robots holding up score placards, as a male gymnast swings into a scissor-like movement on the pommel horse. The caption above the image read: “Joke come true!” (I didn’t get why it was funny; I guess you had to be there.) It’s a “joke” that Fujitsu has spent untold amounts of money, time, and energy on. Though the company wouldn’t disclose the cost of this whole undertaking, it’s hard to fathom, after strolling through their offices in the annals of the Sportpaleis and seeing the arena setup of the technology in the field of play — and off to the side — that it was anything short of a tremendously expensive and resource-intensive endeavor. But I couldn’t help but feel like it was a lot of effort for technology that, at least as pitched by Watanabe, would only ever amount to a slightly better version of judge-assisted video replay. Even ignoring the years of investing in R&D, the physical footprint of JSS appears expensive. During the competition, I glimpsed the backroom where there was a row of servers and another of monitors, a cluster of power packs, and tons of cable. Like so much of AI, its “magic” obscures copious amounts of energy-intensive hardware. Out on the floor, the JSS cameras were subtle, but a lot of human effort went into calibrating them. Before the start of the day’s competition and frequently in between sessions, you could watch as technicians took to the floor, placing large orange balls similar to exercise balls you’d find at the gym, mounted to tripod-like devices, at strategic spots on or near the equipment to make sure that the cameras were properly aligned. Sometimes, they waved these balls like wands around the apparatuses. And throughout the competition, several technicians monitored the event from behind six computer screens near the media box. Nothing about this can be done cheaply. The entire history of judging had created tragedies, Watanabe explained somewhat dramatically. But even if his remark to Fujiwara had been made in jest, the fact that FIG has doggedly pursued this venture with Fujitsu going on six years suggests that the joke hinted at something critical and true (as jokes often do): that he felt that there was something amiss in judging in the sport of gymnastics, and maybe technology could fix it. Watanabe didn’t specify any particular instance of judging malfeasance or error that created these personal tragedies. But he didn’t really have to. The conventional wisdom around the judged aesthetic sports, such as gymnastics and figure skating, is that there are and always have been issues with the scoring. During the Cold War, when both the US and the Soviet Union fought for the top spot in the Olympic medal rankings, there was fairly widespread cheating and collusion in gymnastics judging. Back in 1988, after former University of Utah gymnastics head coach Greg Marsden’s brief foray into international elite gymnastics, he let slip to the media that, at the previous year’s world championships, there was judging collusion between the US and Romania, with the coaches exchanging scores before their athletes took to the mat. And in the years since the Cold War ended and the old judging alliances started to break down, the issues became more mundane but no less consequential. It was mostly human error, confusing rules and processes, with a dash of bias — racial, national, or both — that created most of the problems. Elements of subjectivity can be found in most sports, and these judgment calls can end up having major consequences when it comes to competitive outcomes. In basketball, for example, a referee might make a bad call that affects the outcome of the entire game, like this year’s Women’s Final Four matchup between UConn and Iowa that featured a controversial offensive foul call in the final seconds of the game. But in general, the way of amassing points is fairly straightforward and has remained consistent over many years. The lines on the court, except in the case of the free throw, determine the point value of any given shot, and this didn’t change when Stephen Curry started nailing deep three-pointers. A shot from well behind the three-point line is objectively more difficult — and impressive — than one made closer to the basket. But the NBA hasn’t painted another line on the court to reward the higher difficulty level of shots taken from well behind the arc. Nor did the league change the rules to make Curry’s threes harder. Players simply learned to shoot from further back. This is not how gymnastics operates. As gymnasts introduce new elements, the FIG has to assess them for their difficulty value, and there is no upward limit, at least in theory, as there is with basketball shots. In gymnastics, a half-court shot isn’t worth the same as one from right behind the arc. Skill valuations can change from one Olympic cycle to the next; requirement groups can be added or removed. A bad score in one cycle might be a good one in the next. The rules are not stable as they are in other sports, and it can be baffling, without highly specialized knowledge, to understand the difference in difficulty from one skill to the next. The most significant change to the rules came in 2006 when the FIG scrapped the Perfect 10 scoring paradigm in favor of an open-ended approach that gives the gymnasts two marks that are added together — the difficulty score, which starts at zero and builds, depending on the fulfillment of requirements and the skills the athlete performs; and an execution one that starts at 10 and is reduced as the judges apply deductions for mistakes the athlete makes. The immediate catalyst for this particular change was the scoring controversies of the 2004 Olympics, particularly the miscalculated start value of Yang Tae-young. The South Korean gymnast was erroneously docked a tenth of a point, which led to him missing out on the gold medal in the men’s all-around. This mistake has meant that Yang, who is now a coach, doesn’t receive a gold medalist’s pension from the South Korean government. Watanabe was not wrong about how errors in judging can have serious ramifications for athletes, even years after the fact. Judges still make mistakes on the D-score, which is the updated name for start value. But, unlike with the execution mark (aka the “how well you did it” score), a gymnast or coach has the right to appeal the difficulty calculation. This is where JSS can help. Like in the earlier iterations of Hawk-Eye in tennis (and still at Wimbledon), players can challenge the call of a line judge, and the computer will override any human error. Fujitsu’s system enables something similar, albeit much slower and more bureaucratic. Several times over the course of the world championships in Antwerp, I heard an announcement over the PA that an inquiry had been submitted for one gymnast’s beam score or a different athlete’s bars mark. The large scoreboard to my back would show the athlete’s name and “under review” right next to it. Judges would consult video replay and the new JSS system, though it was unclear under which conditions the JSS, rather than video review, was used. Often, inquiries were only a few minutes, though, in an already long competition, it felt like a drag waiting for the eventual resolution to be announced. In most cases, the gymnast’s score remained unchanged. If AI was used in these inquiries, it functioned solely to validate the work of the human judges. When I sat down with the Fujitsu technicians in Antwerp in a room somewhere in the bowels of the Sportpaleis, I got to see just how precise the JSS can be. I was shown recordings of the switch ring leap, a skill that was also highlighted during the press conference the day before. This element is notoriously tricky to perform and to judge. The gymnast has a lot of boxes to tick: split of the legs, the position of the back leg relative to the crown of the head (they have to be at roughly the same level), the arch of the back, and the head release. The judge has to be able to register all of that in the split second the skill appears before them on the balance beam. JSS looked a lot like video replay, except that the gymnast is transformed into an unclothed mannequin performing the elements. The apparatus is there, but all of the trappings of the gymnasium are gone; the rendering is set against what looks like the holodeck set on Star Trek before the computer program fills in the details, a black space, with white lines running parallel and perpendicular. To the side, you can see key measurements, such as angles, to help determine whether the gymnast met the demands of the element — all of the color and flare stripped out down to the nuts and bolts. In the first clip, the gymnast did not fulfill the requirements. At the apex of the leap, her back foot didn’t line up with the crown of her head. The technician applied one tool, a blue horizontal plane, which made it quite clear that her back leg wasn’t high enough. “It’s minus 40 centimeters,” she said, pointing her cursor at the upper right corner of the screen. Next, she played a recording of another switch ring, at normal speed. “What do you think?” she asked. I responded that I thought it was performed within acceptable parameters. Turns out I was right. Don’t give me too much credit here, though; the reason I could see it easily is because the gymnast had performed it exceptionally well. Her split was oversplit; her back foot went so high that it was well above the crown of her head. As much fun as I had playing around with the system — and talking about the finer points of gymnastics with the experts — I wasn’t entirely convinced that the JSS, at its current stage of development, had made a compelling case for its necessity as a decision support system. It felt like a solution in search of a problem. Steve Butcher, former head of the men’s technical committee and technical coordinator for FIG, said initially he shared my same skepticism. He knows better than most people how hard judging can be, having spent 40 years doing it. But Butcher said he was won over quickly. All it took was a short demonstration showing a gymnast doing an iron cross, a static strength hold, gripping the rings with their arms extended to the sides so they’re completely parallel to the floor. Ideally, the athlete will create a perfectly straight line across, from wrist to wrist. “They showed me one arm, he has three degrees of deviation. And the other arm, he has one degree of deviation,” Butcher said, noting it was not perceptible by the human eye. Since that demo, he has worked with Fujitsu on behalf of FIG to help the company address the gymnastics needs and has remained a consultant on the project even though he left his full-time position with the gymnastics federation in 2022. But was this really an improvement over plain ol’ video review? How would seeing the angles of someone’s arms to this degree — a difference of two degrees, to be specific — actually improve the judging? In the example that Butcher cited, the knowledge that the JSS provided was interesting, but it wouldn’t have changed the valuation for the gymnast: he would’ve been credited the skill because he had performed it very close to the platonic ideal. At the top end of the performance, those minute flaws, if they rise to the deductible level, would be sorted out by the execution judges. The JSS isn’t up to that particular task yet. To provide an example where the JSS could’ve potentially outperformed the judges — and certainly video review — Butcher brings me back to 2012, to the moment when the men’s team finals in London had medals on the line. It was the final rotation, last routine, last gymnast up. Kohei Uchimura, then the three-time world all-around champion, was on the pommel horse, the event where Butcher was the apparatus supervisor. Uchimura’s routine went off as planned, clean and smooth, until the dismount. As he swung up from the pommel to the handstand, his arms seemed to buckle, legs akimbo; he spun wildly and slipped off the apparatus, somehow landing on the mat on his feet, albeit chest down. He walked off the podium, seemingly bemused and confused as to what just happened. This last mistake created a dilemma for the D judges: did Uchimura successfully reach a handstand — or get close enough to it — in order to receive credit for doing a dismount? If the judges didn’t give him credit for it, he would lose the value of the skill and miss a requirement group. The hit to his — and, by extension, Team Japan’s — overall score would be massive. Butcher did not give credit for the handstand, nor did the other two D judges. Uchimura’s mark put Japan in fourth place, behind Great Britain and Ukraine. Both teams started celebrating medals they thought they had just won. The Japanese team, however, immediately submitted an inquiry. The superior jury watched the video replay several times, in slow motion, frame by frame. The TV cameras hovered by the shoulders of the judges as they studied Uchimura’s routine. The action in the North Greenwich Arena had shifted from the athletes to a bunch of men in gray blazers, staring at a laptop. Finally, the superior jury decided Uchimura was close enough to a handstand. The reversal of the D panel’s original call added seven-tenths to Uchimura’s score. Japan shot from fourth to second. Great Britain ended up with the bronze, and Ukraine, to their utter devastation, was bumped off the podium. Butcher, however, still stands by what he and the two other D judges decided over 10 years ago. “We have to remember, they’re not looking at any exact angles. They’re looking at a foot here, a leg there, and looking in a video, freezing it, with no true measurements being applied,” Butcher pointed out. The decision to award credit or to withhold it was something of a very educated coin flip. “In that situation, I would have loved to have been able to have the Fujitsu system and be able to have that as the primary decision-maker,” he said. When I watched the video of Uchimura’s London performance, I found myself agreeing with the original call. That was not a handstand. He never even managed to straighten his arms completely. But like the judges of the superior jury, I wasn’t working with any precise measurements. I was basing this strictly off of my gut. It was an aesthetic judgment as much as a technical one. But in gymnastics, there’s long been a feedback loop between the technical and aesthetic; what is technically sound is often most aesthetically pleasing, and vice versa. Of course, none of this matters to AI. It doesn’t “know” things in the way that humans do. Facial and object recognition technology doesn’t recognize what a “labrador” is; it’s been shown millions of photos of that dog and has been told that this is, in fact, a labrador, or at least the sum average of a labrador. Apply the same logic of what an AI “knows” to a handstand in gymnastics, and it recognizes what a handstand is based on a series of rules and parameters of what a handstand is supposed to be. At the same time, it knows when the articulations of a body aren’t doing a handstand. That distinction may seem trite, but it also turns the sport into the color-negative version of itself. Which presents the weird irony of AI-assisted judging, a system that cannot understand or appreciate the beauty of the sport: Butcher and his panel could have used a system like JSS to back an aesthetic opinion with hard numbers. In many industries, AI has been used as an excuse to cut down on labor expenses. That’s not the case here with JSS since its implementation is strictly to support human judges. Besides, judging gymnastics isn’t a full-time career for anyone, not even at the very highest levels, so that particular objection to AI doesn’t play. But the fact that judging gymnastics events is a sporadic activity points to another issue with the JSS’s application: there isn’t a lot of opportunity to use this expensive system. It will judge even less frequently than humans do. The majority of gymnastics events are decidedly low-tech affairs. Not every competition venue will have the necessary infrastructure to support the JSS. And all meets, except the biggest ones, are a couple of days long, if that, hardly worth the time, energy, and costs that go into the setup. Fujitsu said that it took about a dozen people to set up and run the JSS in Antwerp. When asked about the next competition this much-ballyhooed system will be used at, Fujitsu didn’t answer. They said it would be decided jointly by them and FIG. Of course, it would be foolish to assume that it will always be this costly or difficult to set up the JSS in a competition format. The technology should improve over time and get cheaper, too. That opens up the possibility for what Butcher believes is its best use case: as a training aid. He told me that this was his first thought when Fujitsu first presented the JSS to him. “Somebody’s doing a triple back off the high bar but you can see that their body’s slightly skewed in the air and you can measure that angle, you can see that they [are] landing heavier on one side of their body than the other.” Being slightly off like this in the air doesn’t change the valuation of the skill. It will still be regarded as a triple-back. But in the hands of the athlete and the coach, this kind of information can prevent an almost imperceptible defect from blooming into an injury. In this example, the JSS is merely a sophisticated measuring tool. Butcher said that some national federations have expressed interest in aligning the JSS with their pre-existing video systems, which Fujitsu confirmed, adding that they plan to unveil a version specifically for training in July. Throughout the week in Antwerp, and in follow-up calls with experts, this was the most persuasive use case that I came across. Right after the Fujitsu press conference, I encountered Donatella Sacchi, the president of the women’s technical committee, who had been on the panel, along with her counterpart on the men’s side. She’s a compact woman, on the short side — but who isn’t in gymnastics? — with cropped hair, and speaks exuberantly, often standing to make her point and to demonstrate what she means by using her whole body. Sacchi was very excited at the potential of the JSS but raised the specific issue that AI couldn’t intuitively understand things the way a person with gymnastics experience could. A lot of work needed to be done — and continues to be done — to “parameterize” everything just so JSS could “see” things like a human, though not make errors like one. Sacchi pointed to a couple of issues that the system has not yet been able to overcome. When we spoke again about a month after the world championships, Sacchi told me that the JSS cannot determine whether two skills done consecutively on the beam are actually connected in one continuous movement. This is one of the ways that gymnasts rack up tenths, linking different skills for connection bonus or value (CV). This is one of the most challenging aspects for human judges to evaluate since not all credited connections feature the transfer of speed and momentum from one skill into the next, which would make the connection easy to perceive. This is especially true if you change direction in a series or if you’re combining dance and acrobatic skills. There’s usually some sort of pause or hesitation, however slight. It’s up to the gymnast to move briskly between elements, even if the skills don’t lend themselves to seamless connections. If you’re going to have a system like the JSS around to help determine difficulty scores, it needs to be able to handle connections, especially since on an event like beam, they are the most contested part of the D-score, and isn’t that what the JSS is there to address, after all? I asked Ayako Kawahito, a former gymnast and current judge who is working as a manager in the Human Digital Twin division of Fujitsu, about the beam connection problem. The issue, she said, is not about movement but about stillness. Kawahito pointed out that a person can appear to be completely still, according to the human eye, but if you subjected them to an MRI, their “joint coordinates are always moving around.” In order for the JSS to be able to assess connection value, Fujitsu and the FIG have to agree on the “(amount of) movement that can be considered a stop by a human judge,” she said. Movement that can be considered a stop. Sounds a bit like an oxymoron, but it’s the kind of question that must be answered if the JSS will be able to help the judges in the places they need it the most. If you were in Antwerp at the world championships and wandered into the Fujitsu booth, you’d be forgiven for temporarily forgetting you were at a gymnastics competition. There was very little inside to suggest that you were even at a sporting event of any kind. Monitors were hung on the bare white walls, but they didn’t show videos of gymnasts performing routines or even single elements, overlaid by JSS analysis. Instead, they showed how the technology behind the JSS could be used for fraud and theft prevention. Though this might come as something of a surprise, it’s not really the left turn that some might imagine it to be. There’s a long tradition of the Games being used as a showcase for new surveillance and security technology. “The Olympics are often used to be kind of a showroom,” Dennis Pauschinger, a researcher at the University of Neuchâtel, told me in 2019 when I was working on a story about the global anti-Olympic movement. The Fujitsu booth experience began with a simplified version of the JSS that you could play around with. I stood in front of a camera, which projected my movements onto a large screen and labeled them appropriately. It would say which hand you raised and what it was doing. “The judging system is based on what we call ‘pose estimation,’” Mike Fournigault, a Fujitsu AI architect, explained to me. “With cameras, we are able to reconstruct the pose of the body of people and to understand where are the hands, where are the arms, what are they doing with their hands, with their arms, with their legs?” This is the kind of technology that is used for self-driving cars, with incredibly mixed results. In 2018, Uber’s self-driving car could delineate between a person walking and a person riding a bike but could not reconcile the existence of a 49-year-old woman walking her bike in Tempe, Arizona; the vehicle struck and killed her. At least the stakes for JSS aren’t life and death — though, to the athletes, it can sometimes feel that way. I was shocked how much of Fujitsu’s booth was dedicated to crimes — not of the sports judging variety, but actual chargeable offenses. The monitors showed how this pose estimation might be applied to situations outside of sports. One showed how it could help prevent car theft; the other demonstrated how it can discern whether people were getting up to no good in the self-checkout line, such as putting an item in their bag without first scanning it. In the press conference, there was also mention of its applications in healthcare and rehab settings, which is not hard to imagine with a technology that can measure body movements and angles as precisely as the JSS can. “There has been increasingly this sense that we can’t just end with gymnastics because, you know, obviously it was a very expensive process to develop JSS,” Andrew Kane, then Fujitsu’s deputy head of international public relations, told me in Antwerp. Fujitsu’s end goal was never gymnastics. Later, I follow up with Fujitsu and receive a somewhat evasive answer. “We demonstrated different solutions related to Human Motion Analytics (HMA), which were for more than just gymnastics/sports,” Yuka Hatagaki of Fujitsu’s global PR wrote in an email about the booth’s contents. “The HMA technology that can analyze human movement with high precision cultivated through JSS can be applied to various industries, such as healthcare, ergonomics, and entertainment besides monitoring and theft prevention.” JSS was being developed as a means of capturing the body, to synthesize the great range of human motion into something that could be understood by a computer. What gymnastics offered was a massive set of training data to help train the AI. Fujitsu mentioned additional uses in follow-up correspondence, including applications for physical therapists to develop hyper-specific programs for patients and using gait analysis to detect early signs of dementia in the elderly, which sounds very promising, especially as someone with a mother in cognitive decline. All of this technology is built on the back of what I was witnessing around me in Antwerp. The heights of athleticism — and the competition as a whole — were used to feed a system that is repurposed and resold as a tool of surveillance. A solution in search of profit. On the morning of the final day of competition in Antwerp, I was allowed to sit in the beam judges seat while the JSS was being calibrated and the arena was being set up for the evening’s competition. The field of play was clean, not yet covered in a white, chalky film, as it would be later when the gymnasts arrived to warm up. Some athletes mark the beam with chalk as a cue for where to start their acrobatic series. All of them douse themselves in the white stuff to mop up sweat on their feet and hands, both of which they need to grip the apparatus. It’s even worse over at the uneven bars where the whole apparatus is covered in the stuff. At a gymnastics meet, magnesium is always in the air. In person, the beam seems smaller than it does on TV. When you’re watching on television, the camera zooms in on the apparatus and athlete. It’s practically all you see. Live, the equipment and the gymnast are set against the massive arena. You don’t get a sense of that scale on your screen. Still, the action seems more impressive in person, even if everything and everyone appears smaller. The added dimension really makes a difference. And in some cases, so does the massive arena. There are gymnasts out there, like Simone Biles, who, despite her diminutive stature, seem to be able to truly fill the space. As an exercise, I tried to imagine what it would be like to actually rigorously evaluate a routine, to look at it piece by piece, and find favor or fault with it when medals are on the line. Imagining that burden left me with a queasy anxiety. Years of watching and analyzing the sport, mostly from the comfort of my couch, qualified me to do exactly what I was in Antwerp to do — report on a gymnastics competition — and little more, my success at identifying the credited switch ring notwithstanding. “You cannot duplicate [that pressure] when you sit in your chair and in front of you are the best gymnasts, maybe trying to qualify for the Olympic Games,” Sacchi told me. She said that even after all of her years as a judge, she is still nervous before big events. At least the JSS can’t experience anxiety. I get why, with so much on the line, you’d reach for a technology that promises to overcome human limitations. What the JSS offers is not only the promise of accuracy but also consistency, across rounds of competition, across several days of competition. It will not tire after a 12-hour judging day the way that human judges are wont to do. Gymnasts and coaches don’t like competing in the earliest subdivisions for a reason: the judges are fresh, and their figurative pencils — they actually use tablets — are sharp, and as a result, the execution scores tend to be lower. (The JSS doesn’t yet address the execution score, but I imagine that this is the eventual goal for the technology and would make the system more useful in the long term.) Some of the hopes that are being pinned on the JSS, such as increased transparency, which Watanabe mentioned in his opening remarks at the conference, seem misplaced. Yes, the JSS can provide a lot of detailed information, but that is not the same thing as transparency. The FBI collects lots of information on US citizens, often through high-tech means, but no one would accuse it of being transparent. (Any journalist that has tried to get info from the FBI knows that it’s actually a black hole.) The fact that the JSS is collecting all this data doesn’t mean it will be shared with the gymnastics community. Ultimately, transparency is not a question of technology but of policy. The yearslong process that it took to create the JSS illuminated the complexity of the judging task, which simultaneously calls for technological intervention and impedes it at every turn. Some of that complexity is unavoidable, even desirable. It shows a sport that is constantly evolving, its athletes always innovating. And some of it points to opportunities to streamline and improve the rules. Later that day, when I was back in the media section where I belonged, I watched the eight women who qualified for the beam final. Biles won the gold there, her performance clean and surefooted. Her pace was brisk, moving from one element to the next with only the most minor of adjustments. She competed with the nonchalance of someone who has been there many times before. In second was Chinese gymnast Zhou Yaqin, a newcomer who showed a lot of style and precision in her world championship debut. She was rewarded with a 14.7 for her efforts, just a tenth behind Biles. Zhou’s coach immediately filed an inquiry because they had been anticipating a higher D-score, based on what she had been previously awarded. It would all come down to the question of those frustrating connections, the ones that the JSS is not yet able to adjudicate. After a few minutes, the announcer told the audience that there had been no change. Biles would remain in first, Zhou in second. From my seat, a few rows above the judges, this result seemed fair — though, if it had gone the other way and Zhou had received the additional tenth, tying Biles, I might’ve felt the same way. With so little separating gymnasts, who wins and who loses can, at times, feel more like a judgment call. Everything can be endlessly debated on social media. This can have the effect of making it feel like no results are ever truly final. One of the hopes for the JSS is to offer finality to the outcomes so that when an athlete looks back on their careers, the counterfactuals they might spin have nothing to do with the competency of the judges evaluating them that day. “When I speak to coaches, judges, administrators, [I] say the job of the judge is to separate gymnasts,” Butcher said. The judges’ job is to slice finely, to find the difference between gymnasts, and rank them accordingly. Judging and scoring in gymnastics can certainly be improved, and perhaps the JSS can help along that trajectory. But we’ll never escape human judgment altogether, no matter how discomfiting that thought might be.

A gigantic, weather-defining current system could be headed to collapse. Peter and Susanne Ditlevsen had a simple yet controversial question: How much time might we have left to save it?

States across the US are seeking to criminalize certain uses of AI-generated content. Civil rights groups are pushing back, arguing that some of these new laws conflict with the First Amendment.

Six years after Crazy Rich Asians, Jon M. Chu prepares to release his adaptation of one of Broadway’s biggest musicals. From a table at his family’s famous Chinese restaurant, he opens up about his childhood among the titans of tech—and why filmmakers shouldn’t be afraid of AI.

Back in 2005, a small firm offered a tantalizing vision of the future of computer keyboards. What if your keyboard was filled with tiny screens that showed you exactly what any given press would do, each built into a crystal-clear key? The keys would morph and shift as you needed, transforming from letters and numbers to full-color icons and app shortcuts, depending on what you were doing. Readers and tech bloggers adored the idea. “It’s about time someone shook up this stagnant keyboard market,” declared Engadget. “The concept is fantastic,” wrote Gizmodo. Slashdot lit up. The keyboard was just a concept, dreamed up by Art Lebedev, a Russian design firm, and it was an ambitious idea at that: called the Optimus Maximus, it would require over 100 built-in screens using display technology that wasn’t readily available at the time. With all the excitement, the firm decided to make it real. The journey to create the Optimus Maximus would take years and end in multiple commercial failures. But Art Lebedev’s vision and the technology created along the way would live on and ultimately find widespread success — a success that’s been hidden inside another popular product: Elgato’s Stream Deck, a small desktop accessory covered in morphing, full-color keys. By the time Elgato came to release its first Stream Deck in 2017, Art Lebedev’s Optimus keyboards had faded into history. But there’s more linking the two devices than a core idea. In fact, the Stream Deck hardware came from precisely the same company that developed the Optimus Maximus’ keys. In a very real sense, Art Lebedev’s work laid the foundations for what Elgato would go on to create. In 2010, Elgato was in “crisis mode.” For around a decade, the German video capture company had been selling its TV tuners to people who wanted to watch and record live television via a connected computer. But by 2010, it was clear that the market for such devices was disappearing fast. On one side, broadcast TV was becoming increasingly encrypted, limiting what Elgato’s devices could do. On the other, the streaming revolution, led by Netflix and YouTube, was cutting out the humble TV tuner entirely. “You’re on a sinking ship, you’ve got to figure out what you’re going to do,” recalls Elgato’s Julian Fest, whose parents originally founded the company in 1999. Elgato started to take a hard look at its business, and it noticed one number that didn’t quite make sense. Elgato knew how many TV tuners it had sold, but people had been registering far more copies of the company’s EyeTV recording software than its own customers would need. When it emailed those customers, it found out they were using a rival piece of hardware, the Hauppauge HD-PVR — and not to record broadcast TV. They were recording gameplay from their PlayStations to put up on YouTube. Right under Elgato’s nose was a new market opportunity. Armed with over a decade’s worth of video encoding knowledge from its TV tuner days, a direct connection to Hauppauge’s customers, and Hauppauge’s own quarterly earnings reports to know just how many HD-PVRs it sold, Elgato decided to release a rival capture product specifically tailored to gamers. The result was the Game Capture HD, released in 2012. Three years later, when Fest took over as Elgato’s general manager, it seemed clear that the market for online gameplay videos was poised to explode. With Amazon acquiring the live streaming service Twitch for almost $1 billion in 2014, Fest was on the lookout for ways Elgato could double down. Perhaps it could offer a way to not just capture gameplay footage but also to help Twitch streamers control their broadcasts in the moment. “If you looked at the state of Twitch and live streaming at the end of 2015, it was intriguing, but it was also kind of boring,” Fest tells The Verge. “Everybody’s stream was like, ‘Here’s my gameplay, here’s my webcam,’ and that’s it.” He figured that simplicity was because of all the different jobs a streamer has to handle during broadcasts: between playing the game, reading the chat, and entertaining an audience, it’d be difficult to also run a dynamic broadcast filled with changing layouts and eye-catching transitions. Unless, Fest thought, there was a way to offer advanced broadcast controls without distracting a streamer from other tasks. The company found its answer in a popular German TV show where the host had a so-called “nipple board” of buttons in front of him, built into a giant desk. “Every time you pressed one of these buttons, it would play a funny clip that his team had found on TV,” Fest recalls. The team wondered if Elgato could use a similar array of buttons to control a livestream. Elgato had its idea — now, it needed to find the right buttons to make it a reality. Art Lebedev had never intended to make a massive splash in the keyboard business. Timur Burbaev, who served as the keyboard’s industrial designer, tells The Verge that the initial idea came about shortly after he joined in 2003. The keyboard was just meant to be a concept, similar to its Lavatrix washing machine, to show off the studio’s design chops and drum up more business in the free time between projects. In July 2005, the company released a series of concept images of what it called the “Optimus keyboard.” It had the same basic layout as a full-size computer keyboard but with a twist: “Every key of the Optimus keyboard is a stand-alone display showing exactly what it is controlling at this very moment,” the website still reads. One image shows how the keys could change to show an array of Photoshop tools; another shows dedicated controls for Quake. (This was 2005, after all.) On the left edge of the keyboard are macro keys that can be programmed to open specific programs, illustrated with a series of delightfully 2005-era logos like Internet Explorer and QuickTime. Although the images are renders rather than real photographs, the close-ups make an effort to show individual pixels present on the screens of the keys, a small imperfection that provides a tantalizing hint of reality. Nearly two decades later, the imaginary device still looks fantastic. It was hard to ignore the amount of interest the design was getting. The team called an emergency meeting to discuss. “Back then, we just realized that if you get such a positive response, then let’s risk it and just produce it,” Burbaev says. It was “a clear indication” that the team should try and make it for real. The long and difficult journey of producing what would become the Optimus Maximus had begun. “No one imagined how much time and energy and especially investment it would take,” Burbaev says. A big early decision was working out what kind of screen technology to use. The first iPod with a color display had only just been released, and the iPhone had yet to make its debut. Candybar-style phones like the Nokia 1110 and Motorola C139 reigned supreme. Art Lebedev thought LCD screens of the era were too dim and offered terrible black levels, while E Ink screens had terrible response times and no backlighting at all. OLED seemed like the best choice. But this was long before OLED displays were routinely shipping in mainstream smartwatches, smartphones, and TVs. “The problem with OLED displays was that you could potentially find such a small OLED display in 2006 but a) it would cost you a fortune and b) it would have a massive resolution,” Burbaev says. They were meant for military users to show tactical information like maps on tiny screens, not Quake icons on a keyboard. Art Lebedev decided its “only option” was to dive headfirst into the OLED display business. Burbaev believes his was one of the first companies to ship a product with these kinds of small, low-cost, low-resolution OLED screens. Doing so involved placing what Burbaev describes as a “very strange” order with a Taiwanese manufacturer with some prior experience. He adds that two managers from Art Lebedev ended up living in Taiwan for half a year while they were being made. Not only did Art Lebedev need to find screens small enough to fit under each of its keys but it also needed to find a way for them to coexist with keys that you could actually type on. The final keyboard ended up being a bit of a fudge: the screens didn’t actually move. Instead, the company built a moving plastic keycap that moved around each screen. But even this solution had its challenges, Burbaev says. This plastic keycap needed to not only be transparent enough to show the display but also tinted enough to not reveal the ugly inner mechanism of each screen and durable enough to withstand scratches. All of this meant the development process for the Optimus Maximus was long and difficult, and Wired featured the keyboard not once but twice in its annual vaporware roundups. Art Lebedev was unusually open about the troubled development process, cataloging its progress making the keyboard on a LiveJournal blog. We’re used to receiving such updates in an era of Kickstarter and crowdfunding, but the approach felt novel at the time — and it shows just how slowly development went. It took months just to arrive on a keycap design, studying various possibilities along the way. The company’s first OLED manufacturer went bust before managing to deliver its pricy $10 keys, forcing Art Lebedev to hunt down a new Taiwanese supplier. Finally, after years of development, hundreds of preorders, and dozens upon dozens of blog posts and concept images hyping up every aspect of the idea, the Optimus Maximus began shipping in February 2008. What was this legendary keyboard actually like to use? In a word: “Terrible.” “Let’s put it this way, we sit around and type all day long and this thing wore us out in about 30 seconds to a minute,” Engadget wrote after its first few weeks of testing. “The Optimus Maximus is terrible for touch-typing,” CNET concurred in its July 2008 review, noting that “the tightly packed keys make for lots of mistaken presses, and the mushy responsiveness slows down your words per minute.” In 2018, retro keyboard YouTuber Chyrosran22 called the keys “fishy fuck nuggets with a capital F” that are “extremely terrible” to type on. These are issues that would be hard to forgive on any keyboard, but the Optimus Maximus also carried a $1,600 price tag in 2008 (north of $2,200 in today’s money). At that price, it had to be perfect, and the reality was far from it. So Art Lebedev came up with another, cheaper way to make screen-filled keys work: one big screen. In 2012, it released the Optimus Popularis, a more compact keyboard that placed one large LCD display under all its transparent keys, with no need for any individual OLED screens or mechanical switches underneath. Instead, you’d type on lenses that would activate the keyboard’s single large screen, with each lens held floating in place by an aluminum frame. This basic idea is the key to every LCD keyboard we’ve seen since, from the Elgato Stream Deck to Razer’s discontinued Switchblade UI to the Finalmouse Centerpiece. Yet fundamental problems remained. Not only was Art Lebedev’s new keyboard only slightly cheaper (it still cost north of $1,000) but also the Optimus Popularis was an absolute pig to type on. Art Lebedev was kind enough to send one to us for the purposes of this story, and we had ambitions to write this entire piece on the Popularis. But after half an hour, we gave up. It was a struggle getting the keyboard to register keypresses in the first place. Its space bar, in particular, is a nightmare that refuses to actuate unless you press it firmly enough in exactly the right spot, which is nearly impossible if you want to type at any sort of speed. Even in 2024, in an era of phones that are not just smart but that can literally fold in half, we still find ourselves wishing Art Lebedev had been able to deliver on its 2005 concept images. It’s a really beautiful idea with huge amounts of promise. But even if Art Lebedev never truly delivered, it did a lot of the vital iteration to get there. Four years after the Optimus Popularis’ failure, a strikingly similar gadget appeared on Indiegogo. The “Infinitton” contained just 15 individually customizable LCD keys, much like another old Art Lebedev concept dubbed the Optimus Aux. But this time, gadget lovers didn’t praise the idea to high heaven — the keypad missed its first crowdfunding goal of $30,000 and barely made that money a year later on Kickstarter. But for Taiwanese manufacturer iDisplay, the Infinitton was far from a disappointment — it was a decade-old idea finally paying off. That’s because iDisplay was the company that built those OLED and LCD keys for Art Lebedev all those years ago, the Russian design firm and Elgato both confirmed to The Verge. It never stopped working on them. “The success of Optimus Maximus kept me interested to continue the research and development of the built-in screen keys,” iDisplay cofounder Jen Wen Sun tells us via translated email. By 2017, he’d racked up over a dozen patents on the tech and says he sold the screens into broadcast equipment, airplanes, and cars along the way. The company was originally formed in 1998 and worked on buttons for the gambling industry, he tells us, surviving off small-scale R&D projects while he kept trying to sell casinos on his push-button screens. Casino owner Bally’s was once interested, he says, but a deal never panned out. Back in Germany, the Infinitton caught the attention of Elgato’s Julian Fest, who was researching how to turn his screen-equipped streaming controller idea into a reality. “As we’re thinking about this controller, this crowdfunding campaign comes out and we’re looking at this box and we’re like ‘Oh, this is perfect. We need to talk to these guys,’” Fest recalls. By the time Elgato started talking to iDisplay, the Taiwanese company had already solved many of the hardware challenges needed to turn a thousand dollar-plus keyboard into a relatively affordable $149 computer accessory. It could use small off-the-shelf screens similar to what you might find in a car’s infotainment system. And iDisplay had a simpler job on its hands crafting the Stream Deck’s bubble wrap-esque button feel because it didn’t have to worry about people needing to type at 50-plus words per minute. That feel had been crafted before Elgato ever touched it. Elgato essentially turned the Infinitton into the Stream Deck. That first Stream Deck, Fest says, “was really just on a hardware level an iteration of what these guys did.” Look at the original Stream Deck next to the Infinitton, and the resemblance is clear; it’s the same three-by-five grid of buttons turned on its side and with a new housing. “We tried to keep it as simple as possible,” Fest says. The way Fest describes it, the main thing Elgato brought to the table when it started working with iDisplay was focus. In its Kickstarter campaign for the Infinitton, iDisplay pitched the accessory to anyone and everyone. It was for designers, traders, and musicians. It was for architects, engineers, and programmers. It was for video designers and photographers and business professionals. In contrast, Elgato knew exactly who it wanted its Stream Deck to be for: streamers. It held a six-month private beta to collect feedback from its intended users, and it poured a lot of effort into making sure the device integrated nicely with OBS, the industry-standard streaming software. “The big new component then was building software that was tailor made for live streamers,” Fest says. “What we did is we took something existing and just repositioned it for an audience that actually understood and appreciated what this thing could do.” That’s not to say Elgato didn’t have any challenges to overcome while developing the Stream Deck with iDisplay. Fest says a big one was ensuring that the Stream Deck could not only send information to a computer but also receive it back and show it to the user. Without being able to stay in sync like this, the Stream Deck risked being the glorified macro pad that critics claimed it was. “If you fire off a hotkey, you don’t know if that action succeeded,” Fest says. “What we wanted to ensure is that if you change a scene in OBS you can clearly see on your device [that] that scene is now active and the other one is not. Or if you mute yourself, you’re muted, and we can guarantee that you’re muted because we’re talking natively to OBS.” The approach worked. iDisplay had sold just a few hundred units of its Infinitton via its crowdfunding campaigns, but the Stream Deck quickly became a staple of the Twitch streamer’s toolkit after its release in 2017. A year later, Corsair acquired Elgato for an undisclosed sum — and in 2022, it bought iDisplay, locking down its LCD keys. Other companies have taken notice. In 2022, Razer introduced the Stream Controller, and a year after that, competing PC accessory manufacturer Logitech snatched up Loupedeck, which had worked with Razer on the rival streaming accessory. Much like when it morphed its TV tuner into a game recorder, Elgato developed an audience for a technology rather than the other way around. It had been the missing piece of the puzzle since the beginning. But ironically, the audience for the Stream Deck has since expanded almost as wide as the one iDisplay hoped would embrace the Infinitton. Fest says he knows of Stream Decks being used in the hundreds by organizations ranging from call centers to police dispatcher services. The UK’s Virgin Atlantic airline uses dozens of Stream Decks to simplify communications with pilots and air traffic controllers. Even SpaceX was an early customer, Fest says. (SpaceX did not respond to The Verge’s request for comment.) The simple genius of the Stream Deck is that it made LCD keys peripheral, useful for anything where you need a button that dynamically advertises what it’s doing. Art Lebedev was right about one thing: there was indeed a market of people prepared to pay top dollar for premium-quality keyboards. But in retrospect, the Russian design studio bet that the market would go in the opposite direction of the one it actually went in. Instead of a software-based future filled with screens, keyboards embraced hardware, rediscovering mechanical key switches that had been around since the ’80s. Users began fixating on typing feel, seeking out tactile switches and clacky keycaps. The many compromises of LCD keys might have been too much to ask. But Elgato didn’t need to find a balance between typing feel and screen because its Stream Deck aimed to complement a traditional keyboard, rather than replace it. “Everybody has opinions on how Stream Deck’s keys feel. Some absolutely love it. Some say it’s way too mushy. But for everybody, it’s usable,” Fest says. You can forgive a key that feels mushy if you only need to press it to mute yourself while streaming. Which is not to say there’s no space for the kind of screen-based design that Art Lebedev and iDisplay worked to create. The gaming accessories company Finalmouse appears to be banking on exactly that with its forthcoming Centerpiece keyboard, which draws on the single-screen approach of the Popularis but combines it with a set of actual mechanical switches — translucent ones — to retain the feel of a mechanical keyboard. Like the Optimus Maximus, the Centerpiece has already blown past its first promised ship dates and is entering the vaporware realm. But if it does arrive, perhaps function and form will finally be aligned. The history of the keyboard, and the company that built it, is also more complicated than the legacy of its design alone. Fueled in part by success from their design work, the firm’s founder, Artemy Lebedev, has become a prominent figure in Russia, known for spreading propaganda for Putin and defending the country’s war on Ukraine. Lebedev was banned from Ukraine in 2017 after entering occupied Crimea. In 2023, a Ukrainian court seized two Kyiv apartments from Lebedev after he posted a photo showing that he’d visited a Ukrainian power plant in territory occupied by Russia during the war. “I like to shit on authority,” he wrote on Instagram at the time. As for the firm, it doesn’t consider the Optimus keyboard a failure. “You could argue how successful the project was in terms of return on investment,” Burbaev says, telling us how much business it drummed up for the studio even a decade later. Sometimes a new client would admit that they, too, were fixated by those concept images back when they were a kid. Update, June 17th: Added context about Artemy Lebedev and his role in Russian propaganda.

The man behind the AI gaffes at Sports Illustrated and USA Today has a yearslong history of filling the internet with garbage. In the summer of 2018, staff of the Chicago Tribune awoke to find a story they didn’t recognize on the newspaper’s website. The article, multiple sources say, had something to do with a purse carried by Meghan Markle, the royal also known as the Duchess of Sussex. Advertisements frequently masquerade as news articles at the bottom of actual journalism — this is the phenomenon some have dubbed “the chumbox.” But this article about Markle’s purse was, in terms of where it was hosted, how it was formatted, and where it was appearing, truly in the Tribune — its online edition, at least. Yet this was not what one would expect to run on the site of one of the most prominent newspapers in the country. It was more suited for a gossip rag or blog, a type of “as seen on celebrities” article pushing product. It clearly did not meet the paper’s editorial standards. (One person with knowledge of the article recalls that Markle’s name was misspelled.) The piece was pulled down quickly after leadership at the company was alerted to it. When Tribune staff inspected the article in the site’s content management system, they discovered something curious: the piece had been published by BestReviews, a consumer product reviews website whose content was syndicated on the Tribune. This incident was highly unusual. A few months before the Markle story was published, Tribune Publishing, the company that owned the Tribune, acquired a majority stake in BestReviews. The relationship between the Tribune and BestReviews was courteous. BestReviews staff published their work on a separate site and also republished work on chicagotribune.com, a fairly standard syndication deal with no issues until this point. The Markle article was in contrast with established protocol: BestReviews shouldn’t have pushed new types of content to the Tribune site without discussing it with staff at the paper. After the article was published, top executives at Tribune Publishing called up and questioned BestReviews leadership, multiple people who worked at the companies said. Tribune staff were confused by what had happened, but it was explained to them as a fluke. After the article was pulled, boundaries and standards were reiterated to Ben Faw, a cofounder of BestReviews, and staff moved on — it was an odd incident in an era of far bigger scandals at Tribune Publishing. Unbeknownst to most, though, the article was, in fact, a piece of marketing content promoting a shopping startup founded by one of Faw’s friends, according to a person familiar with the situation. Faw did not dispute this when The Verge asked about the story. Fast-forward to today, and a different media scandal has roiled the publishing industry for the last year and a half: the frenzied proliferation of web content generated by artificial intelligence tools. In October, The Verge and other outlets reported on product review articles appearing on Gannett publications like USA Today that seemed to be AI-generated. Gannett maintained that the content was produced by humans and that a third-party marketing firm was responsible. Just a month later, eerily similar review articles were published on the website of Sports Illustrated, but this time, Futurism discovered that the article authors’ headshots were for sale on an AI photo website. Shortly after, Sports Illustrated said it had cut ties with the company that produced the reviews. The apparent AI content proved embarrassing for nearly everyone involved: venerated publications that hired a third-party marketing firm to produce content were now attempting to defend the work — and themselves — after readers discovered the low-quality junk content on their sites. Workers who had nothing to do with the stories feared it could be the beginning of the end of their jobs. In January, the Sports Illustrated newsroom was gutted by mass layoffs, though much of the staff was later rehired after its parent company found a new publisher. In both cases, as reported by The Verge, the AI-generated content was produced by a mysterious company called AdVon Commerce, a marketing firm that boasts of its AI-powered products. There’s little information available about AdVon online, as its owners have worked to scrub their names from the internet. But AdVon didn’t come out of nowhere. For years, according to former colleagues, internal documents, and court records, a person behind the operation has seemingly used his connections in the media industry to enrich himself: Ben Faw, CEO and cofounder of AdVon. For Faw, AI-generated sludge was just the next tactic to do so. Faw has a stacked resume that he regularly highlights: a US Army veteran and West Point graduate, he went on to attend Harvard Business School and lists previous jobs at companies like LinkedIn and Tesla on his LinkedIn page. But to some who worked with Faw before he started AdVon, it was no surprise that the shoddy AI content was traced back to him. “I literally saw that headline about Sports Illustrated [The Verge’s story],” one person who worked with Faw says, “and I was like, ‘I bet Ben did that.’” Online marketers focused on Google search traffic live and die by “reputation” — being seen as a reliable, trustworthy publisher in the eyes of Google leads to better placement in search results, which, in turn, leads to more clicks, more sales, and more eyeballs. One of the signals Google uses to assess the reputation of a site is backlinks, or how often other trustworthy websites link to a site. The idea is that publications are legitimized by how many others cite them. The bigger the website, the more authority it bestows on links, at least in the world of SEO, where links are like currency: marketers inundate reporters with pitches, hoping to get mentions and links in stories. The shadier SEO specialists buy, sell, and trade links, a practice that Google prohibits. In mid-2019, BestReviews staff began to notice that unfamiliar backlinks had been placed in content that was already live on the outlet’s website, bestreviews.com. The hyperlinks were numerous and largely unrelated to the articles they appeared on. They led to other blogs about pets and lawn care, OB-GYN practices in Ohio, and beauty product companies, according to documents reviewed by The Verge. But the seemingly random links had something in common: Faw was somehow connected to many of the companies being promoted. A cosmetics company called Beauty Bakerie, for example, was linked to dozens of times. Faw is described as a board member of the company in a biography published online. It wasn’t just the links to Beauty Bakerie that raised the alarm. Interviews with former associates, internal documents, and court records obtained by The Verge paint a picture of a complex web of companies involved in a backlink scheme, with Faw seemingly at the center. Some of the links involve a company called Alan Morgan Group, a digital marketing firm based in Ohio that was cofounded by Eric Spurling, the cofounder and president of AdVon and a classmate of Faw’s from West Point. The firm’s services include “getting [clients’] content featured on the front page of some of the best-known digital newspapers” and search engine optimization. According to two people with insider knowledge, BestReviews had hired the firm to do SEO work for the website. In reality, Faw and others involved with Alan Morgan appear to have set up an elaborate, self-dealing system that used Faw’s connections to BestReviews to enrich themselves. According to interviews and internal documents seen by The Verge, hundreds of links placed in BestReviews stories went to clients of Alan Morgan. Though BestReviews had hired Alan Morgan to improve its SEO, in practice, it was more like Alan Morgan clients were getting SEO services in the form of plum, potentially lucrative backlinks from BestReviews. According to documents seen by The Verge, Faw was confronted in June 2019 about the thousands of links inserted into BestReviews’ content, including links that didn’t make sense in context: the phrase “trauma shears”’ linked to Beauty Bakerie; a link on “learn more here” led to a different consumer reviews site. When Faw was asked about the links, he claimed that someone at Alan Morgan Group had inserted the links, according to multiple people with knowledge of the conversations. The relationship was terminated. What wasn’t known then, even to some senior BestReviews staff, is that Faw was allegedly employed by Alan Morgan and held a one-third equity stake in the company, according to a lawsuit filed by former business associate Jonathan Smith, a copy of which was obtained by The Verge. In the suit, Smith accuses Spurling and Faw of fraud and conspiracy, claiming the two ran off with money, intellectual property, and clients of his business as they spun up a dizzying number of companies — including, eventually, AdVon. Smith did not respond to requests for comment, and the case is now closed, per the court’s website. Interviews and documents suggest that Faw was employed at both Alan Morgan and BestReviews at the same time, in what appears to be a clear conflict of interest. There are other threads in the links that, once pulled at, unravel and seem to lead back to Spurling and Faw. On one of the backlinked sites, dog-gear.com, an “About Us” page describes a “founding team” with a background that bears a striking similarity to Faw’s resume: West Point, Harvard Business School, Fortune 500 companies. An archived version of a DogGear author page indexed by Google lists “[email protected]” as a contact email. In his suit, Smith alleges that Spurling spun up a company called Pet Gear LLC, a company designed to link publisher content with Amazon affiliate links “in a way that would maximize revenue for the publisher,” according to the lawsuit. In the suit, Smith also requests financial documents related to dog-gear.com, though it’s not clear that the site is operated by Pet Gear, founded by Spurling. Another site called Better Lawns and Garden was also linked to more than a hundred times, according to documents viewed by The Verge. The site publishes articles like, “The Best Potting Soils for Proper Plant Nutrition” and “Tree Felling: How to Safely Remove a Tree Yourself.” The pieces are written by a person named Mike Dover, who, according to the LinkedIn profile listed on his author page, works for AdVon. The competing reviews sites were especially strange, implying that Faw, while working at BestReviews, possibly spun up competing review sites and linked out to them hoping to take advantage of BestReviews’ prominence and Google standing. Some of the outside reviews sites mirrored BestReviews’ own content: an archived version of the FAQ page on dog-gear.com from April, for example, is nearly identical to an archived version of BestReviews’ FAQ page from May. At least once, this linking practice spilled over to the Tribune site as well. According to a person familiar with the incident, some time after the Meghan Markle purse story appeared and was removed, a Tribune web editor noticed a weird link inserted into a BestReviews article that was syndicated on the Tribune’s website. “It was just a normal hyperlink to, I think, a dentist or some sort of private business in the South,” the person told The Verge. “It made absolutely no sense in the content.” Like the Markle article, the addition of the link was traced back to BestReviews. Tribune staff quickly removed the hyperlink, and an executive called BestReviews to discuss the rogue link. After that, the source says, safeguards were put in place to prevent it from happening again, including limiting BestReviews’ CMS access. “In both those situations we noted it quickly — we had somebody minding the store,” a former Tribune staffer says. “We saw that something wasn’t right, we took care of it immediately [and] wiped it out.” Hedge fund Alden Global Capital acquired Tribune Publishing in 2021, after BestReviews was sold to Nexstar. Reached for comment via email, spokesperson Davidson Goldin didn’t answer questions related to the piece, saying that the events in this story predate Alden’s acquisition. But at BestReviews, no one noticed the links until months after they were inserted, according to a person who worked at the company. The idea that Faw allegedly had created competing reviews sites — some of which directly ripped off the work of BestReviews — while still working at the company he helped build was shocking. “No matter how you feel about a company, who does this?” they said. “Who cheats like this?” Faw was prominently featured in a recent Futurism report about AdVon’s numerous publisher deals. The outlet reported that AdVon’s product review content had appeared on sites ranging from the Los Angeles Times to Hollywood Life and Us Weekly, attributed to writers that don’t exist. The articles, with titles like “Best Yoga Mats” and “Develop Your Core Using the Best Ab Roller,” contain paragraphs of stilted, unnatural-sounding language, with links leading to Amazon product pages, earning a small commission every time a reader purchases an item. They are essentially sales pitches dressed up to look like news articles or product reviews. After both the USA Today / Gannett and Sports Illustrated debacles, AdVon denied claims that the product reviews were AI-generated. But when pressed by Futurism about documents that showed AdVon staff using AI, the company backtracked, saying automated tools were in use at least for some publishing partners. Still, many of the outlets cut ties with AdVon due to the quality of the work, Futurism reported. But a former AdVon employee told The Verge that the content that AdVon says is created by humans is nearly identical to the AI-generated content they created while working there. Freelancers who were initially hired as writers were reassigned to roles of editors and tasked with making AI-generated writing sound human. The tool AdVon used — called MEL internally — generated hundreds of words on products using bare-bones prompts like “best televisions,” spitting out links to product pages on Amazon. “I looked at [MEL’s output] the first time and I just fell apart,” the former AdVon worker says. “Everything we were working towards — all that education, all of the writing experience … it was gone. There was none of the human journalistic writing. It was just, generate a bunch of words that we hope will look like a good article.” Faw and Spurling did not directly respond to The Verge’s questions about the details of this piece. Instead, Faw sent a statement saying AdVon is helpful to newsrooms and “generate[s] affiliate revenue which publishers use to fund newsroom operations and salaries.” “AdVon offers human-only, AI-enhanced, and hybrid solutions to help our customers with this problem,” the statement continues. “We’re committed to working closely with our publishing partners to ensure that their optional use of our AI solutions meets their content standards in this quickly evolving space.” Since the widespread availability of AI tools, news outlets have been at the center of conversations about artificial intelligence: Is there an ethical way to use them? How should outlets signal to readers when AI is involved? How can workers and human labor be protected? Product reviews and commerce content specifically have felt the effects of AI: across many outlets, it’s been this type of service journalism that corporations have unleashed AI “experiments” on first. At CNET, AI tools were secretly used on content meant to sell credit cards, insurance, and other products and services before readers and media caught on. At The Inventory, a site owned by G/O Media, a bot has published dozens of stories a week highlighting Amazon products that are on sale since company leadership announced its plans to use AI. At both Sports Illustrated and USA Today / Gannett, third-party articles with all the hallmarks of being AI-generated were published alongside the work of human journalists. The degradation of product reviews and recommendations is ironic given it’s often some of the most profitable work for media companies: each time a reader makes a purchase through a link in a story, the outlet gets a small kickback through affiliate revenue. Established review sites like The New York Times’ Wirecutter or niche interest blogs might not uncover corruption or break news, but readers care about that work — at their best, reviews are trustworthy, rigorously researched stories that help people make decisions about their lives. They also bring in money for news outlets. By all accounts, the work of BestReviews while under Tribune ownership struck that balance. BestReviews was cofounded by Denis Grosz and Momchil Filev in 2014 and quickly built an archive of lucrative product reviews that earned the outlet money each time a reader made a purchase from an article. Grosz and Filev declined to comment for this story. Nexstar, the media company that acquired BestReviews in 2020, also declined to comment. Multiple former BestReviews staff tell The Verge that they produced quality work, made by real people who cared about journalism. Articles were written by subject matter experts, or at least people who had an interest in the topic and were willing to do research about products and actually test them. There was a test lab, in-house photo and video teams, and editorial standards. To this day, BestReviews promises that it doesn’t accept payment or free products “in exchange for positive reviews,” therefore remaining unbiased. “It’s not like Pulitzer Prize-winning content that we were doing,” a former BestReviews employee says. “But truly the mission was: save people money by giving them an honest review, pros and cons, and give them a few options based on different budgets.” “We didn’t put out just a fluff piece or advertising for the [manufacturers],” another former staffer says. “We didn’t really take a bias towards a certain company. We kept our standards.” But the work produced at AdVon was different. A former staffer told The Verge that when they wrote articles, they were simply creating marketing materials for brands that had hired AdVon to promote their products. There was no testing of gear or even selecting different models to compare; writers simply got a list of products and were tasked with rewriting Amazon product listings into articles. Another person who worked at AdVon described a similar experience using the AI system, in which MEL selected the products featured in the articles for them. “[It was] promotional listicle content articles. It would be like, ‘10 best backpacks,’ and then they would have a list of backpacks promoted by companies that they were trying to support,” a former AdVon staffer says. “Most of this was to try to break through [search algorithms] so that that content could be promoted through SEO.” While reputable outlets review and recommend products without fear or favor, an army of lower-quality blogs, content farms, and influencers push similar content that’s designed only to generate sales. “Best of” lists can be a cash cow for publishers looking for evergreen content that drives traffic from Google, and manufacturers stand to benefit from the press mentioning and linking to their products. As publishers stare down the barrel of Google search traffic drying up to zero, outlets big and small, trustworthy and less so, are leaning into product review content, hoping it will buoy a sinking ship. But the ecosystem of online reviews is essentially the Wild West. One of the countless companies promising to help brands get publicity via product reviews is called SellerRocket. The company markets to Amazon sellers who want their products mentioned in recommendation lists or reviews. SellerRocket says it has “helped more than 4,000 brands get coverage.” In one webinar posted to YouTube, a SellerRocket employee explains to prospective clients how the company can get their products featured in news articles and reviews. They pull up a Sports Illustrated review of ab rollers — authored by “Damon Ward,” one of the fake AI authors created by AdVon — saying the magazine is a “publisher we work with.” They then show that the best ab roller article is ranking highly on Google Search. Clicking on the story, the employee says, “They always lay out how they went about their grading process, why they chose what [products] they did.” There’s no mention of AdVon, but the article includes a familiar disclaimer: “Sports Illustrated and its partners may earn a commission if you purchase a product through one of our links.” It’s not clear who selected the items appearing in AdVon’s product recommendations or why SellerRocket boasted of its success using an AdVon article. But according to Utah public records, the registered agent for a company called Seller Rocket shares a name with an operations specialist working at AdVon. SellerRocket didn’t respond to questions about its relationship with AdVon. If any of the Sports Illustrated or Gannett content featured clients that paid for placement in reviews, that financial relationship wasn’t clearly disclosed to readers — which, if true, would be a violation of Section 5 of the FTC Act, which prohibits “unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce.” The SellerRocket website previously listed the logos of BuzzFeed, Forbes, Wirecutter, and BestReviews, implying they were SellerRocket clients. Faw and Spurling did not respond to questions surrounding the use of these logos. “Wirecutter has never done business with SellerRocket. The use of our logo was misleading and factually incorrect and we had them take it down via a cease and desist order,” Jordan Cohen, spokesperson for The New York Times said in an email. Forbes spokesperson Jocelyn Swift and BuzzFeed spokesperson Juliana Clifton also told The Verge that the outlets have never worked with SellerRocket. SellerRocket has since removed mention of those publications from its site. By drawing on his deep network in media and product reviews, Faw was able to land deals with premier publishers like Sports Illustrated, USA Today, and McClatchy newspapers like the Miami Herald. The seemingly AI-generated content that was described as human-made lost AdVon business, and the publications running the work issued naive-sounding statements. Sports Illustrated, for example, said at the time that AdVon content was not AI-generated but that the listed author names were fake, leading the publisher to drop AdVon. After revelations that Sports Illustrated had been publishing content attributed to fake writers, the outlet’s then publisher ousted CEO Ross Levinsohn, a serial media executive who worked at Tribune Publishing around the time Faw was at BestReviews. (Levinsohn left the company after NPR reported he had been sued twice for sexual harassment, with both cases ending in settlements.) In the time since the controversy erupted, Faw and Spurling have removed their names from the AdVon website. But for the writers hired by AdVon to actually write, the company’s business practices have had lingering effects. One former AdVon worker told The Verge of having work dry up as they were instructed to use AI tools, so much so that eventually they couldn’t continue to do work for the firm. Another former AdVon writer — who maintains they didn’t use AI while working at the company — says that because AdVon has deleted so much of its work, they’re unable to find their human-written clips to show potential clients as work samples. Some time after they left AdVon, an AdVon employee reached out to them, offering an AI editing position. AdVon and the companies that have hired the firm are doubling down on all the same tactics that digital publishers have wrung dry: flooding Google with clickable, thin content; accelerating output at the cost of quality work; and trying to replace knowledgeable humans with cheaper machines. For AdVon and other companies, the shift to AI is marketed as exciting, new, and forward-thinking. The name “AdVon” stands for advanced echelon, a military term describing a group that’s the first on the ground ahead of everyone else: elite, cutting-edge, leaders. Instead, Faw and his team flooded the internet with duplicitous, cheap words, nakedly designed for quick profits at the expense of human workers. It’s not visionary, but it’s the oldest trick in the book, a regurgitation of old ideas dressed up as new. The only question is how much longer it can last.

As Sonos continues chipping away at fixing bugs and improving the performance of its poorly received mobile app redesign, the company also remains focused on several new hardware products. Among them is an ultrapremium soundbar that will serve as a successor to the current Sonos Arc — and likely at a higher price. Codenamed Lasso, the device is currently in limited beta testing, and today, I can share the first images of it. The exterior of the Lasso soundbar bears a strong resemblance to the Arc, which Sonos introduced over four years ago. But inside, the components and speaker drivers have been completely overhauled and redesigned, and that’s expected to result in a cost upwards of $1,200. Sonos aims to ship Lasso later this year, though the timeframe could change. Whenever it does arrive, Lasso (hardware model S45) will be the first Sonos product to integrate technology from Mayht, a Netherlands-based startup that the company acquired in 2022 for $100 million in cash. At the time, Sonos credited Mayht for having “invented a new, revolutionary approach to audio transducers.” CEO Patrick Spence said the deal would give Sonos “more incredible people, technology, and intellectual property that will further distinguish the Sonos experience, enhance our competitive advantage, and accelerate our future roadmap.” But it’s taken quite some time to get Mayht’s ideas into a shipping product. Sonos has released several small speakers over the last couple years — the Era 100, Move 2, and Roam 2 among them — that could’ve benefitted from Mayht’s innovative transducers, which are said to “enable smaller and lighter form factors without compromising on quality.” But it’s the soundbar that will offer the first taste of what the acquisition has yielded. Sources tell me that it’s been a challenge to make Mayht’s transducer system more cost efficient, as it partly makes use of “expensive” neodymium magnets. Bloomberg previously reported the Lasso codename, its rumored price, and the inclusion of Mayht’s technology. The product’s final consumer branding isn’t yet known, but for now, Sonos is playfully including the Ted Lasso typeface on beta units. The Arc is already a very impressive Dolby Atmos soundbar, and you can expect even greater immersion from Lasso and its revamped internals. Additionally, according to sources, the upcoming soundbar should deliver substantially better bass performance than its predecessor. With the Arc, you really need to add a Sub or Sub Mini to get the most out of it. Sonos could maybe get away with that with a $899 product, but if it’s going to charge well over $1,000 for Lasso, the device needs to deliver top-tier home theater audio without any added help. The images also reveal a dedicated Bluetooth button, suggesting that Lasso could support Bluetooth audio playback. That feature has been absent from all previous Sonos soundbars. And similar to the company’s other recent products, there’ll be a physical switch for disabling the built-in microphones. Just like the Arc, Lasso is designed to work with the recently released Sonos Ace headphones for private listening with spatial audio. The company has pledged to extend Ace compatibility to its more affordable Beam and Ray soundbars by late summer or early fall. As for the more immediate future, Sonos continues to release updates to its mobile app at a frequent pace as it tries to address customer frustrations and lift the negative sentiment that has embroiled the company’s community since May. It’s clear to me that Sonos is listening and moving quickly, but a lot of damage has already been done: the Android version of the Sonos app currently has a brutal 1.2-star average review rating. The rating on Apple’s App Store isn’t nearly as bad since older reviews are still balancing out the spate of complaints that came with the redesign.

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Microsoft is losing another key Xbox executive at the end of the month. Xbox chief marketing officer Jerret West is leaving Microsoft to join Roblox as its new CMO and head of market expansion. Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer confirmed the move in an internal memo to Xbox employees today, which was obtained by The Verge. West previously spent eight years at Microsoft on the Xbox marketing side, before departing in 2011 and then eventually spending seven years at Netflix as the head of marketing. West returned to Microsoft in late 2019, leading the marketing for the launch of the Xbox Series S / X consoles. West’s team is responsible for developing marketing plans for games, hardware, and Xbox Game Pass. Microsoft is now shuffling around some of its marketing teams in the wake of West’s departure, and there will be a new expanded central gaming marketing team under Kirsten Ward, VP of Xbox integrated marketing. Spencer says the Microsoft Gaming leadership team has “decided to place marketing closer to the businesses they support” as a result of West’s departure. Games marketing will now sit inside the game content and studios division that’s led by Matt Booty. Xbox marketing, led by Chris Lee, will move to the Xbox org and report up to Xbox president Sarah Bond. This is the second key Xbox executive resignation this year, after former head of Xbox emerging tech, Kareem Choudhry, left Microsoft in early April. Choudhry’s departure triggered a similar shake-up, with his former team moving to the Xbox hardware side. A new Xbox experiences and platforms team was created after Choudhry departed, with a push to improve the Xbox experience across Windows and Xbox consoles. This latest marketing shake-up also comes around eight months after a big shake-up of Xbox leadership and amid continued changes to Microsoft’s gaming strategy. Microsoft promoted Bond to Xbox president in October, leading all Xbox platform and hardware work. Booty also got promoted to the president of game content and studios, including overseeing Bethesda and ZeniMax studios. Here’s Spencer’s marketing memo in full: I have some news to share with all of you: Jerret West, who has served as the Chief Marketing Officer of Xbox for four and a half years, will be leaving Microsoft to join Roblox as their new CMO and Head of Market Expansion. His last day will be June 30th. On behalf of Team Xbox, I’d like to thank Jerret for everything he accomplished. During his time here, Jerret was instrumental in launching and growing communities like our Xbox social universe to 120M followers strong, and product expansion like Game Pass which is now available in more than 80 countries worldwide. He oversaw the creation and delivery of global marketing campaigns for numerous games, platforms (console, PC, cloud) and brand moments such as this year’s momentous Xbox Games Showcase. Roblox is an important partner for Xbox, and we look forward to working with Jerret and the Roblox team to connect more people around the world through the power of play. As a team we are committed to growing the strong marketing capability in Gaming. Going forward, the Gaming Leadership Team and I have decided to place marketing closer to the businesses they support. Games marketing will sit inside of Studios, Xbox marketing will sit inside the Xbox team, international marketing will sit inside of the Consumer Sales Org, and our centralized marketing team will report to me. The following organizational changes will be effective on July 1st: The Integrated Marketing team led by Kirsten Ward and the Programming and Events team led by Tina Summerford will come together as an expanded Central Gaming Marketing team under Kirsten, who will report to me as a member of the Gaming Executive Leadership Team. Chief of staff Pav Bhardwaj and executive assistant Kim Nold will report to Kirsten. The Bethesda Publishing Marketing team, led by Erin Losi, will move to Game Content and Studios, reporting to Matt Booty. The 1P Games Marketing Team including Xbox Game Studios and Mojang, led by Aaron Greenberg, will also move to Game Content and Studios, reporting to Matt. The Xbox Marketing team, led by Chris Lee, will move to the Xbox Org, reporting to Sarah Bond. The International Marketing team, led by Jim McMullin and Florian Liewer, will move to the Consumer Sales Org, reporting to Ami Silverman. The Bethesda International Marketing team, led by Adam Carter, will also move to the Consumer Sales Org. Adam will be taking on a new role leading Business Operations at Bethesda, reporting to Jill Braff. The Consumer Sales Org will work on backfilling his role and share more at a later date. We’re fortunate to have a deep bench of talent and experience, and I’m excited to see how our marketing will evolve under their leadership. Phil

Microsoft is planning to launch its new Copilot Plus PCs next week without its controversial Recall feature that screenshots everything you do on these new laptops. The software maker is holding back Recall so it can test it with the Windows Insider program, after originally promising to ship Recall as an opt-in feature with additional security improvements. “We are adjusting the release model for Recall to leverage the expertise of the Windows Insider community to ensure the experience meets our high standards for quality and security,” says Microsoft in an updated blog post. “When Recall (preview) becomes available in the Windows Insider Program, we will publish a blog post with details on how to get the preview.” This means that Recall won’t even be available initially to Windows Insiders or anyone who buys a Copilot Plus PC. I wrote in Notepad earlier today that Windows engineers were scrambling to get the security improvements tested and implemented in time for the June 18th launch date of Copilot Plus PCs. Now, Microsoft is essentially admitting here that it needs more time to test Recall’s security improvements. Microsoft first unveiled the Recall feature as part of its upcoming Copilot Plus PCs last month, but since then, privacy advocates and security experts have been warning that Recall could be a “disaster” for cybersecurity without changes. Microsoft committed to three major updates to Recall last week, including making the AI-powered feature an opt-in experience instead of on by default, encrypting the database, and authenticating through Windows Hello. Recall uses local AI models built into Windows 11 to screenshot mostly everything you see or do on your computer and then give you the ability to search and retrieve items you’ve seen. An explorable timeline lets you scroll through these snapshots to look back on what you did on a particular day on your PC. Everything in Recall is designed to remain local and private on-device, so no data is used to train Microsoft’s AI models. Microsoft’s decision to delay Recall comes just after vice chair and president Brad Smith testified before the House Homeland Security Committee today. Smith said that Microsoft is putting security above everything, as part of its Secure Future Initiative (SFI). “It is more important even than the company’s work on artificial intelligence,” says Smith. Smith also revealed that Microsoft will make security a mandatory part of its bi-annual reviews process for all employees. “With this change, cybersecurity will be considered in every employee’s annual bonus and compensation,” Smith said. I reported earlier today in Notepad that Recall was originally created before Microsoft’s big SFI overhaul begun. Recall was developed in secret at Microsoft, and it wasn’t even tested publicly with Windows Insiders. Microsoft subsequently identified some of the security issues with Recall and started to develop and test changes to the experience in recent months. It clearly now needs more time to make sure these changes stand up to its promise of putting security above AI and everything else.

In The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge With AI, the spiritual sequel to his (in)famous first book, Ray Kurzweil doubles down on the promise of immortality.