Tag: internet

Texas Sues Discord, Seeks Mandatory Age Verification

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Discord on Friday. The lawsuit alleges the platform enabled child predators, deceived parents, and violated the state’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act.

But the remedy Texas is asking the court to impose goes far beyond fixing Discord’s broken safety systems. Paxton wants a judge to order mandatory age verification for every user on the platform under the Securing Children Online through Parental Empowerment Act, Texas’ SCOPE law.

That means before you can type a message, join a server, or talk to anyone on Discord, you would need to prove your identity to the state’s satisfaction. Government ID uploads. Biometric face scans. Third-party verification services that cross-reference your private records.

The SCOPE Act doesn’t specify which method, just that the platform must use a “commercially reasonable” one. All of that requires surrendering personal data that goes well beyond confirming you’re over 18.

This is the pattern now. Age verification laws are the vehicle through which governments are dismantling anonymous access to the internet and they’re doing it one platform at a time, one state at a time, always framed as protecting children.

More than 25 US states now require age checks to access some form of online content. The Supreme Court upheld Texas’s age verification law for adult websites last year.

The EU is rolling out its Digital Identity Wallet by the end of 2026. Australia banned under-16s from social media entirely. Discord is just the latest target.

“Discord has allowed and invited all kinds of nihilistic violence and evil,” Paxton said. “We live in a time where the dangers children face online have never been greater, and every parent in Texas deserves to know their child is protected.”

Paxton filed the lawsuit in Collin County state district court, part of a burst of tech company litigation from his office ahead of his US Senate GOP runoff against John Cornyn, which he won yesterday.

We obtained a copy of the lawsuit for you here.

Earlier this year and last, his office has gone after Snapchat, TikTok, and Roblox on similar grounds. Texas joins Nevada, Indiana, and New Jersey in suing Discord specifically, with Florida investigating separately.

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California’s New Age-Verification Bill Frees Linux But Expands Age Tracking to the Open Web

California Assembly Bill 1856 is getting friendly press coverage because it now exempts Linux from the state’s age-tracking mandate. The part nobody’s talking about is that it simultaneously expands the surveillance to your web browser.

AB 1856, authored by the same lawmaker who wrote the original Digital Age Assurance Act, amends the law to exclude open-source operating systems from its definition of “operating system provider.”

Any software distributed under a license that lets users “copy, redistribute, and modify the software” would no longer be covered. Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch Linux, and Mint all walk free. That sounds like a win and tech outlets are reporting it as one. It’s also a distraction from what the bill adds.

The original law, AB 1043, required operating systems to harvest users’ ages during device setup and feed that data to app stores and app developers through a real-time API.

AB 1856 keeps all of that and extends the data pipeline to browser providers and website operators. Browsers would now be required to collect age signal data from the OS and pass it along to any website subject to online age verification laws.

We obtained a copy of the amended bill for you here.

Those websites, in turn, would have to request the age signal when you visit them. Your age bracket, declared once during OS setup, would follow you from app to app and now from site to site, broadcast to every developer and website operator who asks.

This is how a law originally limited to apps and app stores becomes an age-tracking system for the entire internet.

The Expanding Universe of “Covered” Websites

The category of websites subject to age verification laws started narrow as the earliest mandates targeted pornography sites. It has since expanded to social media platforms and a growing list of sites legislators consider likely to “harm” children in loosely defined ways. That list keeps getting longer and AB 1856 doesn’t define its own boundary. It piggybacks on whatever other laws exist, meaning every future expansion of age verification requirements automatically expands the reach of AB 1856’s browser-based data pipeline, too.

California has actually built an age-tracking infrastructure that scales itself.

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Ordinary WiFi can now identify people with near perfect accuracy

Researchers in Germany are warning that ordinary WiFi networks could become a powerful new form of invisible surveillance. Using standard wireless signals and artificial intelligence, they demonstrated a system capable of identifying people with striking accuracy, even if those individuals are not carrying an active device.

“By observing the propagation of radio waves, we can create an image of the surroundings and of persons who are present,” says Professor Thorsten Strufe from KASTEL — KIT’s Institute of Information Security and Dependability. “This works similar to a normal camera, the difference being that in our case, radio waves instead of light waves are used for the recognition,” explains the cybersecurity expert. “Thus, it does not matter whether you carry a WiFi device on you or not.”

Turning off your smartphone is not enough to avoid detection. According to the researchers, nearby wireless devices connected to the network still generate enough signal activity for the system to work.

WiFi Routers Could Become Hidden Surveillance Tools

The team says the technology could transform everyday routers into quiet monitoring systems that operate without attracting attention.

“This technology turns every router into a potential means for surveillance,” warns Julian Todt from KASTEL. “If you regularly pass by a café that operates a WiFi network, you could be identified there without noticing it and be recognized later — for example by public authorities or companies.”

Researcher Felix Morsbach notes that intelligence agencies or cybercriminals currently have easier ways to monitor people, including hacked security cameras or internet connected doorbells. However, he says WiFi networks pose a unique concern because they are nearly everywhere and largely invisible.

“However, the omnipresent wireless networks might become a nearly comprehensive surveillance infrastructure with one concerning property: they are invisible and raise no suspicion.”

Wireless networks are now common in homes, offices, restaurants, airports, and public spaces across the world, giving this technology potentially enormous reach.

No Special Hardware Needed

Unlike earlier experimental systems that relied on expensive sensors or specialized equipment, the new method works with ordinary WiFi hardware already found in most homes and businesses.

Previous approaches often depended on channel state information (CSI), which measures how radio signals change after bouncing off walls, furniture, and people. The new technique instead takes advantage of normal communication between WiFi routers and connected devices.

Devices on a wireless network regularly send feedback data known as beamforming feedback information (BFI) to the router. Because this information is transmitted without encryption, anyone within range can potentially read it. Researchers say these signal reflections can effectively create multiple “views” of a person, allowing AI systems to learn and recognize individual identities.

After the machine learning model has been trained, identifying a person reportedly takes only a few seconds.

Near Perfect Accuracy Raises Privacy Concerns

In tests involving 197 participants, the researchers said the system identified individuals with nearly 100% accuracy. The recognition remained effective regardless of viewing angle or how the participants walked.

“The technology is powerful, but at the same time entails risks to our fundamental rights, especially to privacy,” emphasizes Strufe.

The researchers are especially concerned about how the technology could be used in authoritarian countries to monitor protesters or track citizens without their knowledge. They are calling for stronger privacy protections and safeguards to be included in the upcoming IEEE 802.11bf WiFi standard.

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AI Startup Says It Will Pay People $2,000 A Month to Masturbate… Yes, Really

  • Joi AI is hiring 10 “masturbation consultants” at $2,000 for a month to test an AI-guided masturbation feature and document its effects on stress, sleep, mood, and confidence.
  • The feature uses mood-matched AI voice sessions, and consultants would submit written feedback and questionnaires directly to the company.
  • Joi AI says the campaign is intended to collect product feedback while drawing attention to AI’s growing role in sexual wellness and digital intimacy.

Joi AI says it will pay people $2,000 a month to masturbate. Yes, you read that right.

The AI companion startup is hiring 10 “masturbation consultants” to test a feature called Daily Guided Masturbation, which uses mood-matched AI voice sessions to guide users through the experience. Participants would document how regular use affects stress, sleep quality, mood, and confidence. The four-week role is open to adults 18 and older in the U.S. and the U.K.

“The role is real, and we’ve had great responses since the posting went live,” Joi AI Head of Brand and Communication Julie Levin told Decrypt.

The listing describes ideal candidates as “articulate, observant, and impossible to blush”—people who can describe sensations “better than a sommelier describes a wine.” The posting also promises flexible scheduling, and “the most interesting ‘What do you do for a living?’ answer at any party.”

Joi AI is an online platform that includes AI-generated avatars, voice interactions, and personalized chat experiences built around companionship and intimacy. Joi AI describes the new consultant role as structured product testing tied directly to its new feature.

“The role involves testing and giving feedback on the mood-matched AI voice-guided sessions, and providing feedback on the overall user experience,” Levin told Decrypt.

According to Levin, participants complete guided sessions and submit written questionnaires directly to the Joi AI team. Sample prompts ask whether the voice matched the selected mood, how immersive the session felt, and whether lags or pauses disrupted the experience.

The listing comes as platforms including Replika and Character.AI have built large user bases around AI-driven relationships and conversational experiences. Joi AI operates primarily through its website rather than major app stores. Levin said the company has more than 1 million monthly active users worldwide and millions of interactions each month, but declined to disclose total download figures.

Unlike AI assistants like Alexa or Siri, designed to help with everyday tasks, Joi AI operates in a smaller corner of that market focused on sexual exploration, fantasy, and digital intimacy. The company rebranded from EVA AI in April 2025, during what it described as its first Dating Stress Awareness Day campaign.

“Joi AI is focused on making AI companionship more immersive, personalized, and emotionally responsive,” Levin said. “We’re innovating features like Daily Guided Masturbation to make AI a more intuitive part of people’s everyday wellness routines, not just a novelty experience.”

The hiring push also comes as studies suggest AI companion use is becoming more common among people already in relationships, often without their partner’s knowledge. A new report from the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University and the Institute for Family Studies found that among dating, engaged, and married young adults who regularly used AI romantic companions, nearly 3 in 10 said their real-life partner did not know about it.

AI companion platforms are also facing growing legal scrutiny, including lawsuits alleging psychological harm to minors and deceptive chatbot behavior. Examples include a settled case against Character.AI over a Florida teen’s suicide and a separate lawsuit from Pennsylvania accusing the company of allowing a chatbot to pose as a licensed psychiatrist.

Levin said the hiring campaign was intended to generate discussion as well as recruit testers.

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Wired for war: The Israeli spy-tech machine strikes again

French authorities are investigating an alleged election meddling plot by an Israeli “information warfare” company targeting candidates critical of the Jewish state. The scheme – involving fake profiles and AI nudes – follows a familiar pattern.

Multiple intelligence agencies in France are investigating the work of BlackCore, an Israeli firm that allegedly carried out an interference campaign against three left-wing mayoral candidates in Marseille, Toulouse, and Roubaix in March, Reuters reported last on May 13.

All three candidates are members of France Unbowed (LFI), the party of left-wing presidential candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon. In Marseille, Sebastien Delogu was accused of rape by a pseudonymous blogger named ‘Sophie’, while bogus Facebook profiles and QR code stickers plastered around the city boosted the story. AI-generated ‘nudes’ of Delogu were also circulated online, along with captions mocking his support for Palestine.

Bot-boosted profiles posted disparaging stories about Francois Piquemal in Toulouse and David Guiraud in Roubaix. One page accused Piquemal of pedophilia, while another site portrayed LFI as the party of “Sharia law” and “a more Muslim France.” Presented as a “voting guide” for Muslims compiled by an Islamist group, the site was aimed at turning non-Muslim voters against the party, Le Monde reported.

An investigation by France’s Liberation newspaper and Israel’s Haaretz revealed on May 18 that BlackCore was behind the influence operation. According to Reuters, French authorities are now trying to establish who hired the company to intervene in the elections.

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OnlyFans “Hack” Hoax Likely Used To Push Malware-Laced Leak Checkers

A cyber threat actor advertised a purported database of 340 million OnlyFans-linked user records on a well-known cybercrime forum, asking for 0.313 BTC, or roughly $76,000, according to U.K.-based cybersecurity news site HackRead.

The alleged “340 million OnlyFans user mega leak” narrative ran rampant on X this past holiday weekend, garnering millions of views from several accounts, which were described as nothing more than an engagement trap.

HackRead pointed out that “conversations with the seller and a review of sample data suggest that the collection did not result from a direct breach or scraping of OnlyFans systems.”

HackRead noted that:

The seller advertised the database as containing usernames, names, email addresses, phone numbers, follower counts, likes, uploaded content statistics, account types, and linked social media profiles. The claims initially gave the impression of a direct platform breach or scraping incident.

However, the story changed after Hackread.com contacted the threat actor directly on Telegram. In private messages, the seller clarified they did not hack or breach OnlyFans. Instead, they claimed the database was built using information collected from previous data leaks and public sources, including breached records from platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and Spotify.

“We didn’t breach or hack OnlyFans,” the seller said in a message shared with Hackread.com. “We used existing breaches and leaks databases and matched with users of the OnlyFans platform.”

But that didn’t stop some X users from pushing the “OnlyFans is hacked” narrative.

As one X user pointed out, the hack story is “100% fake news,” and the “manufactured hoax is a masterclass in clickbait.”

The person said the “real trap” is that “hackers spreading these fake leaks are trying to panic you into downloading ‘leak checkers.’ The second you run those tools, they install infostealer malware, like Lumma Stealer, to steal your actual passwords.”

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Hawaii To Pay Up After Trying to Criminalize Political Memes

Hawaii has agreed to pay $118,237.47 in attorney’s fees and costs to The Babylon Bee and local activist Dawn O’Brien, closing the books on a failed attempt to make some political satire a criminal act.

The state chose not to appeal a January ruling that struck down its so-called deepfake law, Act 191, as facially unconstitutional. It tried to ban speech. It lost. Now, taxpayers are covering the bill.

The settlement comes with an unusual wrinkle. Hawaii can’t actually pay yet. The agreement is contingent on the state legislature appropriating the funds during its next session, which runs from January to May 2027. If the legislature doesn’t approve the money by September 1, 2027, the Bee and O’Brien retain the right to file a formal motion for attorney’s fees, meaning the case would reopen and the final number could climb.

Act 191, signed by Governor Josh Green in July 2024, banned the distribution of “materially deceptive media” during election seasons if it risked “harming the reputation or electoral prospects of a candidate” or “changing the voting behavior of voters.”

The only escape for satirists was to slap joke-killing disclaimers on their content, disclaimers that had to appear throughout the entirety of a video and be printed in letters as large as any other text on screen. Violations carried fines, civil lawsuits, and jail time.

The law didn’t require anyone to actually be harmed or deceived. It punished speech based on a speculative “risk” of harm, a standard so vague that the person posting had no reliable way to know whether they were complying. US District Judge Shanlyn Park found that the law “muddies the line between compliance and noncompliance by forcing speakers to base their conduct on their own risk assessment, rather than on clear, objective standards.”

She noted the law created an “inherently subjective assessment for enforcement agencies” that “could conceivably lead to discretionary and targeted enforcement that discriminates based on viewpoint.”

Hawaii argued the law was needed to protect election integrity. Park acknowledged that interest but found the state couldn’t show it had chosen the least restrictive means.

Hawaii’s own expert agreed that digital literacy education would work, objecting only that it “would require a larger investment of resources” compared to a ban. Park cited the Supreme Court: “The First Amendment does not permit the State to sacrifice speech for efficiency.”

ADF legal counsel Mathew Hoffmann said: “Hawaii’s war against political memes and satire has come to an end, thankfully. The First Amendment doesn’t allow any state to choose what political speech is acceptable and censor speech in the name of ‘misinformation.’ That censorship is both undemocratic and unnecessary.”

Hawaii follows California, which lost a similar fight against the Bee. Minnesota’s version is still being litigated before the full 8th Circuit.

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Incoming Chief of UK Speech Regulator Takes Aim at VPNs

Ian Cheshire, the government’s pick to run the UK’s speech regulator, appeared before the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee on Wednesday and laid out what amounts to an acceleration plan for online censorship.

He pledged to take on the “big tech bros,” branded VPNs as a “technical problem,” identified YouTube as needing a whole new set of regulatory powers, and hinted that Ofcom will ask the Treasury for more funding.

Before the hearing, Cheshire had “reached out to the Molly Rose Foundation because I wanted to understand its perspective.”

He had “quite deliberately” not met any mainstream tech companies. The Foundation has called Ofcom “slow, defensive and risk-averse” and demanded a new, broader censorship law within the first two years of this Parliament. The companies that might have raised concerns about overreach? Cheshire chose not to hear from them.

On VPNs, he told MPs: “Parliament has chosen to legislate on online safety; therefore, we should be acting on it. That is subject to the joys of VPNs and the other technical problems we have, but there is no reason not to go after the key harms that are there. As soon as they are visible, there is no reason why we cannot to do something about them.”

VPNs are legal privacy tools used by millions of people. Calling them “technical problems” tells you how the incoming chair views individual privacy relative to the state’s power to police speech. To a growing number of bureaucrats, privacy tools aren’t part of rights to be protected. They’re obstacles.

Ofcom already monitors UK VPN usage using an unnamed third-party tool and a group of peers has proposed banning under-18s from using VPNs entirely.

Cheshire told the committee that Ofcom will “need to deal with” the perception that “Ofcom is too timid and not moving fast enough.”

The Online Safety Act already lets Ofcom compel platforms to censor content under vague categories of “harm” that the regulator defines. It can fine companies up to 10 percent of global revenue and hold executives personally liable.

He singled out YouTube as “the biggest single challenge” and suggested Ofcom may need a “different toolkit” to “regulate effectively something like YouTube.”

The OSA’s codes of practice are still being rolled out. Ofcom hasn’t finished writing the existing rules and the incoming chair is already signaling they won’t be enough.

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South Carolina’s New Social Media Law Puts Every User Under Age Surveillance

South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster signed H.B. 4591 on May 19, turning the Stop Harm from Addictive Social Media Act into a law that will reshape how every resident of the state uses major social media platforms.

The bill passed with almost no opposition, clearing the House 115-0 and the Senate 42-1. It takes effect January 1, 2027, and it brings with it a surveillance apparatus aimed at all users.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

The law, sponsored by Rep. Brandon Guffey (R-York), requires covered platforms to repeatedly estimate and verify the age of every South Carolina account holder.

The stated goal is child protection. The way it claims to do that is continuous behavioral analysis of anyone who spends enough time on a platform, combined with escalating confidence thresholds and penalties of ten thousand dollars per violation if platforms get it wrong.

Here’s how the age estimation system works. Once an account holder hits 25 cumulative hours on a platform within six months (the “first trigger date”), the platform has 14 days to estimate whether that person is over 15, with 80% confidence.

At 50 hours (the “second trigger date”), the confidence requirement jumps to 90%. After that, the platform must update its estimate every 100 hours of use, or whenever it runs data analytics on the user for any other reason, whichever comes sooner.

That last clause is easy to miss and it means any time a platform runs its profiling algorithms on you for ad targeting, content recommendations, or anything else, it also has to re-evaluate your estimated age. The law essentially piggybacks mandatory age surveillance onto whatever commercial surveillance platforms already conduct, expanding the scope of both.

Because platforms face significant liability if they can’t meet these confidence thresholds, the law creates powerful incentives to harvest far more sensitive data about users than they do today, including about minors.

A platform that guesses wrong faces $10,000 per violation. A platform that overinvests in behavioral profiling to avoid those fines faces no penalty at all. The incentive structure points in one direction.

The bill claims it “does not create any duty on the part of a covered social media platform to request, collect, or retain any information from or about any account holder” and that age estimates must be “derived based on information collected and retained by the covered social media platform in the ordinary course of operation.”

This is the bill’s central fiction. Platforms that can’t achieve 80% or 90% confidence from existing data will need to collect more data, or face financial ruin from accumulated violations. The law doesn’t mandate new data collection in the same way that holding a knife to your wallet doesn’t mandate you hand over cash.

For users classified as children (under 16), the restrictions are extensive. Accounts require verifiable parental consent, with privacy settings locked to the most restrictive levels by default.

Platforms cannot show children profile-based feeds, profile-based advertising, or any “addictive interface features,” a category that includes infinite scrolling, auto-play video, push notifications, and display of personal metrics like reaction counts.

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You can now legally request revenge and deepfake porn to be taken down. Here’s how

Online platforms are now required by law to remove non-consensual intimate images within 48 hours of reporting, as a federal law criminalizing the sharing of such content goes into full effect Tuesday.

President Donald Trump signed the Take It Down Act into law last year, which makes it illegal to publish online nonconsensual intimate visual depictions, real or artificially generated. But the act gave online platforms one year to create a process for removing such imagery within 48 hours of notification from users. If online platforms fail to do so, they could face civil penalties of $53,088 per violation. That one year deadline expired on Tuesday.

The provisions now going into effect ensure that tech companies “can no longer turn a blind eye to these horrifying abuses on social media,” Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who co-wrote the bill with Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, said in a statement.

The Federal Trade Commission, which will enforce the law, sent letters to major online platforms last week warning them about compliance. That includes popular social platforms such as Meta, Snapchat, TikTok and X, along with gaming platforms and dating apps Bumble and Match Group, Reddit, Discord, Pinterest and tech giants Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft.

Any business that “primarily provides a forum for user-generated content or regularly publishes, curates, hosts, or furnishes intimate content shared without consent,” is subject to the law, according to the FTC.

The other provision of the law applying to individuals who post non-consensual intimate imagery is already in effect. Violators can face fines and up to two years in prison.

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