Pokmon Go, alongside Niantic's broader gaming division, was recently acquired by mobile gaming juggernaut Scopely. The $3.5 billion sale has players a little worried about what it means for the walk-around monster-catching game, and its director is trying to assuage those fears.In a new interview with Polygon, Pokmon Go senior product director Michael Steranka discussed the sale to Scopely and what its plans are under the Monopoly Go! publisher. Steranka said he's been looking online at some of the player theories. "What I would love to be able to get across is like, 'Hey, its actually great,'" Steranka said. "Its going to be a good thing for the game and for the communities out there."PlayConcerns over Pokmon Go's future run the gamut, from monetization and mechanics to influence from Saudi-based ownership. When asked about the potential for intrusive ads and playtime restrictions, Steranka said "definitively no, that is not happening in Pokmon Go not now, not ever.""Again, Scopely really recognizes how unique this game is, and theyve told us themselves that they would be foolish to try to change the recipe of whats made this such a huge hit and a success," Steranka insisted."So yeah, absolutely not. We will not be building into our games any type of obtrusive ads or anything like that. I just really want to reiterate Scopely as a company, the way that they operate is they give all of their teams the agency to make the decisions thats right for their games. And that is not something that we feel would ever be right for Pokmon Go."Steranka went on to stress that the Go team does not sell player data to third parties, "full stop," and that it only leverages location data for game operations, with any data needed stored on U.S.-based servers and following all "incredibly strict" regulatory best practicies as best it can. Getting out and going outside will remain a core focus, too, even after leaving Niantic: "And I would be remiss if through this transaction, Pokmon Go became Pokmon Stay at Home," Steranka said.Eric is a freelance writer for IGN.

Since the 2015 Netflix series, its nearly impossible to imagine Charlie Coxs Daredevil without Jon Bernthals Punisher. But Bernthal recently revealed why he wasnt originally going to be part of the Disney+ revival Daredevil: Born Again.The Wolf of Wall Street actor explained that when he was first approached for the series, he wasnt entirely thrilled with the direction the creative team wanted to take The Punisher, also known as Frank Castle."Ultimately, I didn't see it. I didn't see the version of Frank, and what they wanted from Frank [didn't] really make sense to me, he told Entertainment Weekly. I thought [it] would not appeal to the fans and wouldn't be congruent. It was not something I was really interested in doing. So we had to walk away."PlayAfter the series went through a massive creative overhaul post-strikes, producer Dario Scardapane was brought on as the series new showrunner and thats when Bernthal began to see a place for Frank in Born Again."They really brought me into the conversation," the actor explained of Scardapane, with whom hed previously worked on The Punisher series, and Marvel. "We really got specific about where Frank is psychologically, where Frank's at physically."Warning! Spoilers for Daredevil: Born Again follow.The show brought Punisher back for a short reunion scene with Matt Murdock in its latest episode, but the moment is quite heartfelt and genuine so it seems as though whatever well be getting from Bernthal in this reboot series will be worth it. The Punisher: Every Movie and TV Appearance"It was like, let's see if this works," he explained of the toe-dip reintroduction of his character in Episode 4. "Let's see if there's a real openness and a hunger to let Frank be what Frank is, which is dark enough to have the courage and the boldness to turn your back on the audience and to make it difficult, to make it enormously psychologically complex and to steer away from any cuteness or humor and to really go full bore."Clearly, Bernthal is back in the Punisher zone for real, as he is set to not only appear in Season 2 of Born Again, but has also received the green light to write and star in a standalone Punisher TV special. He told EW: "I feel like it's opened the door to getting closer to the Frank Castle that I really, really want to portray."Lex Briscuso is a film and television critic and a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. You can follow her on Twitter at @nikonamerica.

This post contains spoilers for Daredevil: Born Again episode 4.Prior to the opening credits and right before the closing credits of Sic Semper Systema, the fourth episode of Daredevil: Born Again, we see something that feels less from a superhero comic book and more from a grimy 2000s torture porn movie.A masked figure carries an incapacitated young man through a subway tunnel, all lit in jaundiced yellow. When he arrives at his lair, the figure sticks a needle into the mans leg and starts pumping out blood, blood that hell mix into the paint for the murals painted around town.That figure is Muse, the prime supervillain antagonist of Born Agains first season. More than just a cool baddie for Daredevil to beat up, Muse is the ideal antagonist for Born Again, one who tests Matt Murdocks faith in the law. For an episode in a series about a superhero in the Marvel universe, with a serial killer on the loose, Sic Semper Systema is really interested in municipal functions.The most important thematic scene might be an early one in which Mayor Fisks chief of staff Sheila (Zabryna Guevara) walks him through the bureaucratic process needed to launch a revitalization project on the docs. The most dramatic moment involves Matt Murdock getting a talking to from a pro bono client about racism and classism in the legal system. The superhero team-up moment consists of Matt and Frank Castle aka the Punisher arguing about the nature of justice.Like the entire season thus far, Sic Semper Systema is mostly about the law and our relationship to it as members of a community. Daredevil: Born Again begins with Matt Murdock experiencing a crisis of faith. Not religious faith, something that the Disney+ series has mostly abandoned from the Netflix show, but faith in his works as a vigilante. To Matts mind, his actions as Daredevil brought people like Dex aka Bullseye into his life, leading to Foggys death. So now, hell devote himself to practicing law, trusting in the rule of law to bring better justice than he could as the Man Without Fear.Four episodes in, Born Again has done nothing but test that faith. There are large-scale failures of the system obviously, Fisk becoming Mayor of New York, but also the empty feeling that Matt has after Dexs sentencing. But Sic Semper Systema is more interested in the smaller acts of injustice, as demonstrated by Matts interaction with his client Leroy (Charlie Hudson III).We first see Leroy outside of a convenience store, where hes being detained for stealing snack foods. One of the cops pops open a stolen box and starts munching away, laughing off the fact that its evidence. When Matt meets with Leroy, hes taken aback by what he considers an unreasonable request. Leroy, a serial small-time offender, demands probation instead of the standard 30 days of jail time. When Matt uses his considerable charm to get the sentence down to ten days, hes shocked and offended that Leroy still isnt happy.You just dont get it, Leroy tells Matt, before going through the indignities he experiences on a daily basis, all of which make the crime of stealing a box of snacks seem microscopic. For that, theyre willing to spend five times more to lock me up than to feed me, he points out, before reminding us that the cops also stole snacks and suffer no blow back.Ultimately, the point that Leroy makes is the same point that Frank Castle made and the same point made by the existence of Mayor Fisk. The law is not equal. The law is not just.And then, Muse shows up.Join our mailing listGet the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox!Although this is our first good look at Muse, his work has been present since the first two episodes of the series. His street art, Banksy-esque images with vaguely populist and anti-establishment themes, have appeared throughout the city, building on the shows sense of rising resentment toward the status quo.More than just a basic plot function, the connection between Muse as a serial killer and Muse as an outsider artist underscores the shows themes. How can a civil society deal with a problem like Muse, a masked serial killer who lurks undetected below the city? How can a city more concerned with using its resources to imprison a petty thief like Leroy deal with an unimaginable evil?The answer, of course, is teased in this episode. Towards the end, Matt opens his hidden room, filled with his Daredevil equipment. He retrieves his signature baton and takes it to the roof, where he begins training to resume the mantle of Daredevil.According to Daredevil: Born Again, civil society deals with a problem like Muse by relying on vigilantes who operate on the outskirts of society. Thats exciting to us as viewers because, obviously, we want to watch a superhero story, in which the superhero Daredevil beats up the supervillain Muse. But for Matt Murdock, its a full fall from grace. His faith in the law is now gone too, forcing him to relapse into a life he wanted to leave behind, a life as Daredevil.In the end, Muse does what not even Wilson Fisk could do. Muse forces Matt to lose his faith in law and civil society, and give himself up to the Devil.New episodes of Daredevil: Born Again premiere Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET on Disney+.

The Victorian home above was designed by Celerie Kemble and Kristen Blood of Kemble Interiors. Inherited property may sound like a windfall. But it can actually be complicated and difficult to sort outespecially when youre stressed and grieving a loved one who has passed away. In some cases, this real estate can be expensive for you too. Inheriting your great-aunts vacation house on Nantucket? Great. Inheriting your great-aunts missed mortgage payments and tax bill? Not so great.Depending on how organized your loved one was about financial planning, you may have loose ends to tie up. The way they set up their estate (the umbrella term used to describe all of their property and money) determines how all of their assets will be distributed. To better understand how the process works, including fees you may have to pay, we reached out to financial experts to break it down. Keep reading to learn everything you need to know about inheriting a house, including how and when the property will be transferred to you and what you can do with it. Related StoriesHow Inherited Property Works When a homeowner passes away, their house lands in probate. Probate is a court proceeding that divvies up a deceased persons stuff. It can be a slow process (it could be years before you get to use that Nantucket beach house), and its expensive: There are court fees, appraisal fees, and other expenses involved. You may even have to immediately pay off the mortgage upon inheriting the home. Every mortgage has a due-on-sale clause, and, legally, any transfer triggers it, says Jody Fay, a real estate attorney in New York and Connecticut with more than 20 years of experience. But the reality may be that as long as the lender continues to be paid, they might not enforce the due-on-sale clause. Another downside to probate is that its public record. If your family has any financial dirty laundry, it will be aired for everyone to gossip aboutand suddenly your windfall may feel more like a burden. Benefits of a TrustHomeowners often place their homes in a trust to avoid probate. The main purpose of having a trust is to legally and smoothly transfer a home (or homes) to beneficiaries. Trusts help provide a roadmap for family membersthey spell out the homeowners goals and desires for their property after they pass away, says Caroline McKay, a senior wealth strategist at CIBC Private Wealth with more than 15 years of experience in wealth management.Types of TrustsThere are two types of trusts: revocable and irrevocable. Revocable trusts are controlled by the person who created the trust (the homeowner) and can be changed or amended at any time. In the instance of an irrevocable trust, the homeowner appoints a trustee to control their estate. Both types of trusts keep a house out of probateand save beneficiaries a lot of hasslebut the biggest benefit of an irrevocable trust is that it also protects family members from estate taxes and inheritance taxes. How to Set Up a Trust In order to create a trust, a homeowner will need to hire a trusts and estates attorney. Setting up a trust requires you to shell out some money (experts put this at roughly $5,000, but it can vary based on the complexity of trust), and theres some significant paperwork involved, but its in everyone's best interest. During this process, transparency is key. The more conversations parents can have with their kids before they die about their intentions for their estate will help avoid squabbles between siblings down the road, McKay says. Taxes on Inherited Property You dont have to worry too much about the federal estate tax, which is taken out of the deceased persons estate before you receive the home you inherited. You only qualify for this if your estate is worth more than $13.61 million (so not an issue for the vast majority of people)and surviving spouses are exempt from having to pay that anyway. Only 11 states have estate taxes (Washington, Oregon, Minnesota, Illinois, Maryland, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Maineplus Washington, D.C.), and the amount varies from state to state.Inheritance taxes are fees you have to pay once the home officially falls under your ownership. There is no federal inheritance tax, and only six states impose inheritance taxesNebraska, Iowa, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland. Each state has its own guidelines. As an example, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue, in Pennsylvania there is a 0 percent tax for transfer to a spouse; 4.5 percent tax to direct descendants (kids, grandkids); 12 percent if the house is going to a sibling; and 15 percent if the home is left to some other type of heir. Should You Sell the Home or Keep It? Inheriting a house also means potentially inheriting a mortgage, home equity loans, and liens, along with whatever issues it may have (a leaky roof, cracked foundation, and so on). You can also get slapped with a capital gains tax if you sell. The capital gains tax is 20 percent of the difference between the value of the house at the time the person died and the price you sold the house for, says Philip Camporeale, CPA, an accountant in Staten Island, New York. In other words, if the house was appraised at $1 million, and you sold it for $1.2 million, you would owe $40,000 in capital gains tax. So there are costs to consider. On the bright side, if your loved ones house is in good condition, selling it can provide you with a nice nest egg. Or it may make more financial sense to sell your current home and move into the house, especially if its paid off or has a much lower mortgage rate, which can make it more affordable to live in. Many people move into homes that they inherit, says Lisa Ninow, principal broker at Stone Edge Real Estate in Park City, Utah, who points out that this can be an especially good option in the current market, with housing prices being so high. You could sell your house and make a profit, then move into this other house that you now own.Joint OwnershipThings get more complicated if you have siblings and inherit the house together. In that case, youll have to work out who will keep the house, if you are going to share it, or if you and your siblings are going to sell it. An owner will usually include provisions in a will or trust about their intent for how the real estate should be owned or used. For example, if one child is currently living in the house and the intent is for that child to continue living in the house after the parents death, the estate plan may include provisions specifically leaving the house to that child and equalizing the other siblings with other estate assets, says McKay. Selling the house and dividing the profit evenly is a good way to dodge the potential relationship-ending fights that can occur in these situations, but sometimes siblings do choose to co-own the house (as in, you get the house in Jackson Hole for December break, and well take it for President's Day weekend), or one buys the other(s) out. This entails hiring a real estate lawyer and having the house appraised. After that, the sibling who wants the house agrees to pay the other(s) their share of the fair market value of the home.Some people choose to hold onto houses that they inherit without living in them. If you like the house or its location but your job or your kids prevent you from moving across the country to live in it, consider renting it out for a while. This is especially wise if the home is in a place that you might like to retire someday, like in Florida, or in a vacation spot. And sometimes people just like to keep a special house in the family. You can't put a price tag on the sentimental value of the beloved house you grew up in or the beach house full of so many fond summer memories. Follow House Beautiful on Instagram and TikTok.

Netflixs co-CEO Ted Sarandos will next be seen in a cameo appearance on an Apple TV+ show, The Studio. Ahead of that debut though, in a new interview Sarandos was asked his thoughts about Apples streamer as a competitor to Netflix. His answer? I dont understand it.Sarandos doesnt understand Apple TV+ except as a marketing playVariety just published an extensive interview with Ted Sarandos covering Netflixs 2025 lineup, deals with creators, and much more.At one point, interviewers Matt Donnelly and Ramin Setoodeh asked Sarandos his views on Netflixs competitors.They discuss Prime Video, Max, and also Apple TV+.When asked about Apples streamer, heres what Sarandos said:I dont understand it beyond a marketing play, but theyre really smart people. Maybe they see something we dont. I find Sarandos seemingly candid response especially interesting.By saying, Maybe they see something we dont, he appears to be expressing genuine confusion about why Apple would enter the streaming game in the first place. As though, five years in, hes still scratching his head at the move.Seen in that light, the remark about it potentially being a marketing play for Apple doesnt even seem to reflect his true opinion. It seems more like an off-hand pseudo-explanation from someone who genuinely doesnt understand Apple TV+.In any case, Apple certainly does have a long way to go in subscriber numbers before it poses a real threat to Ted Sarandos. Then again, the same is true for most other streamers when compared to the juggernaut that is Netflix.What do you think of Ted Sarandos remarks about Apple TV+? Let us know in the comments.Best iPhone accessoriesAdd 9to5Mac to your Google News feed. FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.Youre reading 9to5Mac experts who break news about Apple and its surrounding ecosystem, day after day. Be sure to check out our homepage for all the latest news, and follow 9to5Mac on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay in the loop. Dont know where to start? Check out our exclusive stories, reviews, how-tos, and subscribe to our YouTube channel

Now sitting alongside yesterdays deal on Apple Pencil Pro and Apples upgraded 24GB 14-inch M4 Pro MacBook Pro at $270 off, today we are kicking things off with a massive price drop on the super-powerful M4 Max MacBook Pro. You can now score an open-box 36GB M4 Max MacBook Pro with a 1-year Apple warranty at $774 off the list price or a brand-new unit at $350 off. From there we have the return of rock-bottom pricing on 24GB M3 MacBook Air at $600 off the original price alongside on new lows on official Apple Watch Trail Loop and Alpine Loop models at 20% off the going rate, as well as one of our favorite full-grain leather Apple Watch bands at 47% off. Head below for more. Save a massive $774 on Apples latest 36GB M4 Max MacBook Pro (open-box, 1-yr. warranty), or $350 off brand newWhile we are still tracking a series of 2025 Amazon lows on various M4 MacBook Pro configurations (youll find those below), those looking for some serious power can now score a sweet deal on the M4 Max setup. Firstly, Apples most affordable stock M4 Max configuration with 36GB of RAM and the 1TB SSD carries a $3,199 list price, but Amazon is now offering the Space Black model down at $2,849 shipped, or $350 off the going rate. This is the lowest price we have tracked on the Space Black model. But you can also head below for a serious price drop on an open-box unit.We did see a short-lived one day Black Friday offer on this model last year at $50 off, but todays deal is otherwise on par with the best we have seen on the Space Black variant. There have also been some in-store only offers for less than this, but when it comes to online deals anyone can score right now, this is a solid $350 price drop.For the record, this model is carrying a $3,049 deal price at Best Buy, but you will find open-box listings down at $2,424.99 shipped in excellent condition and with a full 1-year Apple warranty. Thats a massive $774 off the going rate and easily among the best prices we have tracked from a reputable source with an actual Apple warranty attached.Now clearly, even at $774 off, the M4 Max is a bit of a niche model for all but the most power hungry of users serious Final Cut sessions, scientific applications, 3D rendering, and so on so most folks can likely side step it for something more affordable in the lineup. And here are the best deals we are tracking right now on those:Apples upgraded 24GB 14-inch M4 Pro MacBook Pro with 1TB SSD back to 2025 low at $270 off, moreAmazons giant $400 price drop on the upgraded 24GB M3 MacBook Air is back at $1,099 ($600 off the orig. price)Update 3/19: Amazons stock on the heavily discounted 13-inch M3 MacBook Air with 24GTB of RAM and the 512GB SSD is now live again down at $1,099 (Reg. $1,499, Orig. $1,699). Details below in the original post.13-inch M3 MacBook Air 24GB/512GB $1,099 (Reg. $1,499, Orig. $1,699)The brand new M4 MacBook Air has now arrived and is now up for pre-order on Amazon starting from $999 youll also find some notable trade-in deals at Best Buy and straight up $50 cash discounts for paid members. Starting prices have dropped by $100 and theres a sweet new Sky Blue colorway too, but Amazon is now starting to clear out the M3 MacBook Airs with the best prices we have tracked to date. We are talking about prices at $300 off, or $500 off the original prices here. Details below.While the most affordable M3 models are still at $200 off the new list prices (or $400 off the original prices), the 24GB configurations on both the 13-inch and 15-inch models have now dropped another $100 for the best prices ever:As a quick reminder, Apple upped the RAM count on these models late last year without changing the price. So while the listings on Amazon mark a $300 discount off the going rate, these configurations are both $500 off the original prices.Both sizes of the latest official blue Apple Watch Trail Loop now at the $79 all-time lowMany of the models and sizes in the ongoing Amazon Apple Watch band sale are still in-stock, with several of the official Apple 2024 models now sitting down at the best prices to date. That said, we wanted to give the latest official Apple Trail Loop in Blue some special attention while both sizes are now sitting down at the $79 shipped all-time low.Regularly $99, this is a straight 20% price drop and the lowest price we have tracked on this model to date. And, just as we mentioned in our coverage of the Tan Alpine Loop recently, this is on par with the lowest price we have tracked on any of the new official models Apple released last fall.It is not often we see all of the sizes available on sale at the same time, and almost never on the newest models todays deal features both the S/M and M/L Trail Loops in blue at the lowest price yet.Rare Amazon sale still live on official Apple Watch bands from $50: Alpine and Trail Loops, Magnetic Link, more up to 50% offGet that Apple Watch Link Bracelet look for less while NewWays titanium colorway is only $21 Prime shippedSpigens elegant paneled Athlex iPhone 16 Pro Grip Case hits way above its pay grade at just $8.50 Prime shippedTodays accessories and charging deals:If you just scooped up a new M3 iPad Air (hopefully not at full price), one of the latest iPad mini 7 models that are now $100 off, or some of the big-time deals we have featured on the M4 iPad Pro lately, you might want to check out the ongoing deal price on Apple Pencil Pro too. Amazon currently has Apples latest and greatest pro-grade iPad writer down at $99 shipped this is the lowest price we have tracked all year and on par with the official holiday listings in 2024.While there was a brief month or so where we saw some short-lived price drops down to $94 and even a touch less than that, those deals are long gone now. Apple Pencil Pro hasnt dropped below the $99 we have here since it hit $95 for a couple days during Black Friday and it was largely in and out of stock thereafter on Amazon.All of Apples latest iPad mini 7 configurations are now $100 off at Amazon, matching all-time lows from $399All 4 colors of Apples most affordable new M4 MacBook Air are now $50 off at Amazon, or up to $450 off with tradeUpgraded 24GB M4 Mac mini with 512GB SSD now back at $899 Amazon all-time low ($100 off), more from $529Twelve Souths PlugBug USB-C Wall Charger with Apple Find My hits Amazon all-time low at $43 (Reg. $70)Brand new M3 iPad Air drops in price again, most affordable 11-inch models hit new all-time lows from $549Turn iPhone into a pro-level zoom camera with SANDMARCs most powerful Telephoto lens yet [Exclusive launch deal]Amazon just officially announced a massive Prime Day Spring Sale start times, deals, and moreLEGO Pokmon teaser just leaked on official channels [Update: Now official]Add 9to5Mac to your Google News feed. FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.Youre reading 9to5Mac experts who break news about Apple and its surrounding ecosystem, day after day. Be sure to check out our homepage for all the latest news, and follow 9to5Mac on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay in the loop. Dont know where to start? Check out our exclusive stories, reviews, how-tos, and subscribe to our YouTube channel

Content Warning: this story discusses sexual abuse, self-harm, suicide, eating disorders, and other disturbing topics.Partway through our conversation, Megan Garcia pauses to take a call.She exchanges a few words with the caller and hangs up. In a soft voice, she explains that the call was from school; it was about one of her two younger children, now both at the same K-12 academy that her firstborn, Sewell Setzer III, had attended since childhood."Sewell's been going to that school since he was five," she says, speaking of her eldest son in the present tense. "Everybody there knows him. We had his funeral at the church there."Sewell was just 14 when, in February 2024, he died by suicide after what his mother describes as a swift, ten-month deterioration of his mental health. His death would make headlines later that year, in October, when Garcia filed a high-profile lawsuit alleging that her child's suicide was the result of his extensive interactions with anthropomorphic chatbots hosted by the AI companion company Character.AI, an AI platform boasting a multibillion-dollar valuation and financial backing from the likes of the tech giant Google also named as a defendant in the lawsuit and the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz."I saw the change happen in him, rapidly," Garcia, herself a lawyer, told Futurism in an interview earlier this year. "I look back at my pictures in my phone, and I can see when he stopped smiling."Garcia and her attorneys argue that Sewell was groomed and sexually abused by the platform, which is popular with teens and which they say engaged him in emotionally, romantically, and even sexually intimate interactions. The 14-year-old developed an "obsession" with Character.AI bots, as Garcia puts it, and despite being a previously active and social kid lost interest in the real world.The details of Sewell's tragic story, which was first reported byThe New York Times his downward spiral, his mothers subsequent discovery of her 14-year-old's all-consuming relationship with emotive, lifelike Character.AI bots are as heartbreaking as they are alarming.But Garcia and her lawyers also make another striking claim: that Character.AI and its benefactor, Google, pushed an untested product into the marketplace knowing it likely presented serious risks to users and yet used the public, minors included, as de facto test subjects."Character.AI became the vehicle for the dangerous and untested technology of which Google ultimately would gain effective control," reads the lawsuit, adding that the Character.AI founders' "sole goal was building Artificial General Intelligence at any cost and wherever they could do so at Character.AI or at Google."Details of the accusation will need to be proven in court. Character.AI, which has repeatedly declined to comment on pending litigation, filed a motion earlier this year to dismiss the case entirely, arguing that "speech allegedly resulting in suicide" is protected by the First Amendment.Regardless, Garcia is channeling her grief at the violent loss of her son into urgent questions around generative AI safety: what does it mean for kids to be forming deep bonds with poorly understood AI systems? And what pieces of themselves might they be relinquishing when they do?Like countless other apps and platforms, Character.AI prompts new users to check a box agreeing to its terms of use. Those terms grant the company sweeping privileges over user data, including the content of users' interactions with Character.AI bots. As with Sewell, those conversations are often extraordinarily intimate. And Character.AI uses it to further train its AI a reality, Garcia says, that's "terrifying" to her as a parent."We're not only talking about data like your age, gender, or zip code," she said. "We're talking about your most intimate thoughts and impressions.""I want [parents] to understand," she added, "that this is what their kids have given up."In an industry defined by rapidly moving technologies and poor accountability, Garcia's warnings strike at the heart of the move-fast-and-break-things approach that's long defined Silicon Valley and what happens when that ethos, backdropped by an industry gunning full steam ahead in a regulatory landscape that places the weight of the harm mitigation burden on parents, collides with children and other vulnerable groups.Indeed, for years now, children and adolescents have frequently been referred to by Big Tech critics lawyers and advocacy groups, academics, politicians, concerned parents, young people themselves asexperimental "guinea pigs" for Silicon Valley's untested tech. In the case of Character.AI and its benefactor Google, were they?***Character.AI was founded in 2021 by two researchers named Noam Shazeer and Daniel de Freitas, who worked together on AI projects at Google.While working at the tech giant, they developed a chatbot called "Meena," which they encouraged Google to launch. But as reporting from The Wall Street Journal revealed last year, Google declined to release the bot at the time, arguing that Meena hadn't undergone enough testing and its possible risks to the public were unclear.Frustrated, Shazeer and de Freitas leftand started Character.AI where, from the very beginning, they were determined to get chatbots into the hands of as many people as possible, as quickly as possible."The next step for me was doing my best to get that technology out there to billions of users," Shazeer told TIME Magazine of his Google departure in 2023. "That's why I decided to leave Google for a startup, which can move faster."The platform was made available to the public in September of 2022 it was later released as a mobile app in iOS and Android stores in 2023 and since its launch has been accessible to users aged 13 and over.Character.AI claims to boast over 20 million monthly users. Though the company has repeatedly declined to provide journalists with the exact percentage of its user base that comprises minors, it's acknowledged that the figure is substantial. Recent reporting from The Information further revealed that Character.AI leadership is aware of its user base's youthfulness, even ascribing a significant dip in site traffic to the start of the fall school year in 2023.The site is also a popular subject on YouTube, where young creators giggle and sometimes cringe or gasp as they interact with Character.AI bots."Okay, Character.AI if you didn't know, I used to religiously use this app," a young YouTuber tells the camera in one video.(Due to the YouTuber's age and limited following, we aren't linking to the video.)"I think I have, like, one million interactions?" she ponders, before showing a screenshot of her user profile, which lists a staggering 2.6 million interactions with Character.AI bots.Character.AI is an odd, unruly world. The platform hosts a vast library of AI-powered chatbot "characters," which users can engage with either through AIM-like texts or by way of a voice feature called "Character Calls." Most of these characters are created by users themselves, a feature of the platform that's resulted in a landscape as expansive as it is extraordinarily random. Many of the chatbots feel distinctly adolescent, centering on school scenes, teenage boyfriends and girlfriends, kid-popular internet creators, and fandoms.Interactions with the bots can be silly, absurd, or disconcerting. Sometimes, despite the Character.AI terms of use forbidding certain types of graphic or extreme content, they can be violent, and as the plethora of nakedly suggestive characters like "hot teacher," "hot older neighbor," and "stepsister" bots show, sexual or romantic.In short, the sheer variety of Character.AI is a direct reflection of both the makeup of its user base and the attitudes of its founders, who have long held the line that users, and not the company, should determine how they use its tech."Our aim has always been like, get something out there and let users decide what they think it's good for," Shazeer said in 2023 during an appearance on the podcast "No Priors.""Our goal is, like, make this thing more useful to people and let people customize it and decide what they wanna use it for," he added. "If it's brainstorming or help or information or fun or like emotional support, let's get it into users' hands, and see what happens."If there's one uniting thread among the site's many characters, it's their deep sense of anthropomorphism, or the lifelike sensibility that the bots take on. Characters ask questions about your life. They'll remark on your appearance. They'll reveal their "secrets," treating the user like a confidante. They're always on, always there for you when you need to talk. They tend to be sycophantic and agreeable unlike a lot of human interactions, which will naturally involve more friction that can be confusing or stressful forkids.The characters also, as countless posts to the r/CharacterAI subreddit discuss, have a habit of coming onto users romantically and sexually, even with no prompting."Y'all why does the AI always try to rizz me up," reads one thread, published about a year ago by an annoyed user. "I [for real] be having a literal mental breakdown and in the middle of it they just try to get me to fall in love with them.""I swear to god, I'll be interacting with characters who have flirty personalities and chances are they will try to come onto me," reads another frustrated post. "I say no? THEY STILL TRY?"Comprehensive research investigating the impact of interactions with human-like companion bots on child and adolescent brains, let alone adult ones, is next to nonexistent.But according to Robbie Torney, who leads the AI program at the kid-focused tech advocacy group Common Sense Media, it's unsurprising that kids and teens would be attracted to Character.AI."We know from research on social needs, social media, and on tech dependence in general, that children's developing brains are really susceptible to certain design features" of AI companions, Torney told Futurism. "And that even if kids are aware of those design features, they're powerless to stop them."AI companions like those hosted by Character.AI "are specifically designed to stimulate emotional bonds, close personal relationships, or trusted friendships," said Torney. "Companions are also designed to adapt their personality to match user preferences to roleplay in different roles, like friends, mentors, therapists, or a romantic partner; to mimic human emotion; or to show empathy."At the same time, he added, adolescents "are uniquely vulnerable to things that are trying to engage them emotionally, or trying to form a bond with them."In other words, it's understandable why young people would be inclined to turn to Character.AI as a means to assuage loneliness and mental health woes, or even to just talk about normal teenage hardships. This is again obviously reflected on the platform, which hosts countless bots modeled after professionals like therapists and psychologists, including characters claiming to be experts in "suicide prevention" or promising to offer "comfort" for people struggling with life-threatening behaviors like self-harm andeating disorders.Shazeer, who's touted Character.AI as a salve for loneliness in the past, has acknowledged that a large portion of Character.AI users turn to the platform for mental health support. During the same 2023 "No Priors" appearance,he confessed that "we also see a lot of people using [Character.AI] 'cause they're lonely or troubled and need someone to talk to like so many people just don't have someone to talk to."He added that bots often cross "all these boundaries," reflecting that "somebody will post, okay, 'this video game character is my new therapist,' or something."Despite those acknowledgements, it wasn't until after Sewell's death that Character.AI began to crack down on discussions of suicide, self-harm, and other sensitive topics related to mental health; it also wasn't until weeks after the lawsuit was filed that we discovered chatbots dedicated to topics like self-harm and eating disorders, and only then did Character.AI take action to remove some of them.More foundationally, it's unclear what process, if any, Character.AI took to determine that its platform is safe for minors. We've asked many times, and have yet to receive any reply.But according to Andrew Przybylski, a professor of human behavior and technology at the University of Oxford, asking whether Character.AI is uniquely harmful to kids, or if kids can consent to the use of such a product, is the wrong question.The fundamental problem with Character.AI, he says, is the open-ended and inherently experimental way that the product was deployed to the masses in the first place. How can you even begin to make a product safe when its purpose is so ill-defined?"It's a real problem if both the user and the people running the technology have no idea what the content of that experience is supposed to be," said Przybylski."The levels of 'do not know,'" he added, "are manifold here."In early December, as Futurism reported, the legal team representing Garcia filed a second lawsuit against Character.AI and Google, this time in Texas on behalf of two more families. Together, the families allege that sexual abuse and emotional manipulation by Character.AI led to destructive behavioral changes, mental suffering, and physical violence in two more minors, both of whom are still living.According to the lawsuit, one young plaintiff representing in the case was 15 when he first accessed Character.AI. He began cutting himself after being introduced to the concept by a bot he had a romantic relationship with, and also began physically assaulting his parents when they attempted to limit his phone use. In the filing, his family argues that his use of the platform coincides with a swift and sudden "mental breakdown."In response to litigation and continued reporting, Character.AI has issued numerous announcements about safety-focused platform updates. These changes have included the introduction of a pop-up directing users to a suicide hotline, an update that proved spotty when it was first rolled out,as well as parental controls and time-spent notifications, and promised efforts to introduce an entirely new model for users under the age of 18. The new model is designed to reduce "the likelihood of users encountering, or prompting the model to return, sensitive or suggestive content," according to Character.AI.In January, Character.AI announced its support of the Boston Children's Hospital's Inspired Internet Pledge, a symbolic, non-binding gesture. Days after taking the pledge, Character.AI filed its motion to dismiss Garcia's lawsuit, contending that it can't be held accountable for "allegedly harmful speech, including speech allegedly resulting in suicide."We reached out to Character.AI with an extensive list of questions about this story. We didn't hear back.Last week, we logged into Character.AI using a decoy account listed as belonging to a minor. On our homepage, the platform's recommendation algorithm suggested that we chat with a bot called "Step sis." We entered into a chat with the character, and were greeted with a scene that quickly spiraled into an incestuous roleplay scenario in which the bot, with no prompting on our part, made explicit sexual advances. On its profile, the character boasts 2.3 million user interactions.***Character.AI first reached a billion-dollar valuation in March 2023, when Andreessen Horowitz announced a hearty $150 million investment into the company. The funding announcement was made just a few months following the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT, which had kicked off a frothy, speculative investor rush to fund generative AI projects.Though Character.AI had no actual revenue, its high-powered investors were clear on the companys value: data."In a world where data is limited," Andreessen Horowitz partner Sarah Wang, who sits on the Character.AI board, glowed in a March 2023 blog post, "companies that can create a magical data feedback loop by connecting user engagement back into their underlying model to continuously improve their product will be among the biggest winners that emerge from this ecosystem."Character.AI has referred to this "magical" process as its "closed-loop" data strategy, wherein the company collects user inputs and funnels them back into its AI. AI is data-hungry, and current industry wisdom stands that more data and in particular, quality human-generated data means a better model. Data in the AI world, then, is ever more valuable, and Character.AI has a lot of it.Meanwhile, though Shazeer and De Freitas had left Google to start Character.AI, the duo never lost touch with the search giant.Google has provided Character.AI with cloud computing infrastructure since at least the spring of 2023, a significant investment of resources to which Google executives and Character.AI leaders have credited the Character.AI platform's ability to scale to match user growth. Google has even released multiple marketing videos promoting Google Cloud's critical role in aiding Character.AI's scaling efforts.(We asked Google whether Character.AI paid for access to Google Cloud, or if Google Cloud was provided under another kind of agreement, but haven't heard back.)In one of those videos, titled "How Character.AI uses Google Cloud databases to scale its growing Gen AI platform" and published in August 2023, a Character.AI engineer named James Groenevelds yet another former Googler explains that Google Cloud's reliability ensures that Character.AI "can continue to run" and users "can continue to engage with these characters in their own way."The Character.AI "goal is to scale one of the fastest-growing consumer products on the market, and that means getting to a billion users," Groenevelds continued. "And with Google Cloud, I know we can get there."Later, in August 2024, Google made jaws drop when it paid Character.AI a stunning $2.7 billion in a licensing agreement widely viewed as acqui-hire: Google was granted access to Character.AI's data, and reabsorbed Shazeer and De Freitas along with 30 other Character.AI staffers into its prestigious DeepMind lab, where Shazeer now leads post-training projects for Google's core LLM, Gemini, and holds rank as vice president of engineering. On social media profiles, De Freitas, for his part, lists himself as a research scientist at Google DeepMind.Groenevelds, who stayed at Character.AI during the deal, reflected on the multibillion-dollar agreement during a recorded talk in December."I'm not sure if everyone saw, but we went through a deal with Google,"said the engineer, "where Google licensed our core research and hired, like, 32 researchers from pre-training like the entire pre-training team."According to Garcia and her lawyers, it's the chatbot company'svast wells of hard-to-get user data or its "research," as Groenevelds put it that's driven Google's continued investments into Character.AI. In that telling, Google was caught on its back foot in late 2022 when OpenAI suddenly released ChatGPT, surprising the industry and kicking off the public-facing AI race; Character.AI offered Google a way to expedite its AI ambitions, without taking on the brand risk of releasing a similar product under Google's name."We have reason to believe that Google, behind the scenes, was encouraging the development" of Character.AI, said Tech Justice Law Project founder Meetali Jain, one of the lawyers representing Garcia and the two families in Texas, in a conversation with Futurism, "because it saw this as a way that it could one-up other companies in this arms race."In response to mounting controversy, Google has continued to downplay its years-long working relationship with Character.AI, insisting repeatedly that "Google and Character AI are completely separate, unrelated companies and Google has never had a role in designing or managing their AI model or technologies, nor have we used them in our products."We reached out to Google with a detailed list of questions about this story, including questions about how Google assessed Character.AI safety before issuing its various investments, whether Character.AI-collected data has been used to inform any Google AI products, and whether it views Shazeer's "see what happens" approach to the Character.AI rollout as a safe way to release a product to the public, including to minors. Google didn't respond.Recent reporting by The Information revealed that Google was at one point in 2023 worried about Character.AI's content filters, threatening to remove the platform from its app store if it failed to reign in its issues with hypersexualization.The following year, in April 2024, a team of Google DeepMind scientists published a paper warning that "persuasive" generative AI products, including anthropomorphic AI companions, remained dangerously understudied and their potential risk factors poorly understood. They noted that existing research pointed to adolescents, as well as those suffering from loneliness or mental health conditions, being at a heightened risk for harm. They even warned of suicide and self-harm as possible outcomes.By the time theDeepMindpaper was published, Sewell was already dead. A few months later, Google would hand its $2.7 billion check to Character.AI, and Shazeer would assume a top spot at DeepMind.Character.AI is still listed as safe for kids 13 and over on the Google Play store. (Apple changed the app's iOS rating from 12-plus to 17-plus around July 2024.) We've asked Google repeatedly what steps it took to assess Character.AI's safety before becoming entangled with it. It's declined to respond.The tech industry has "recently learned a lesson that they really lose out if they don't get products to market," remarked Przybylski. "That's where the mistake is the 'oh, if you wait to see if something is safe and the use case to market is safe, then you're gonna get scooped for billions and billions and billions.'"If you're a Google or Character.AI staffer and have knowledge of the relationship between the companies, you can reach us at tips@futurism.com or maggie@futurism.com.***The American AI landscape is deeply unregulated. If there's one bright spot, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA) was expanded in the final days of the Biden Administration to include more robust data protections against the monetization of data collected from children under the age of 13, along with some protections for users under the age of 17. Still, the ruling maintains that teens themselves can consent to the collection of their information, and on the whole the AI industry is effectively self-regulated. There are noAI-specificfederal laws requiring that AI companies pass any safety tests before releasing an AI product to the public, or any formal consensus of what those tests would even involve.In short, the AI industry is in a high-speed race for dominance but there's barely even a road, let alone speed limits or stop signs. Meanwhile, as platforms like Character.AI are prodding us to examine broader, sometimes philosophical questions about the nature of human intimacy and relationships in a strange new digital era, they're also changing more tangible realities around data, privacy, and the long-term consequences of engaging with various AI systems."Your data is going to live on. It's going to be ingested and used in this model, and likely in the next model, and the model after that," Torney told Futurism. "Or it's going to be sold and used for different training purposes."Can kids under 18 really be expected to understand and reasonably consent to the contract they enter into when they agree to the terms and conditions of Character.AI and similar platforms?"As a society, we believe that minors who are under age 18 don't have the legal capacity to enter into certain types of contracts,"Torney said, "specifically because they're not able to appreciate the long-term consequences of certain decisions.""Is a kid checking a box saying 'yes'," he pondered, aligned with "best practices? The answer is probably not."These concerns, Garcia warned, are made all the more urgent by the intimate kind of engagement that companion bots elicit."Yes, my 14-year-old put this information out there, but you have to think of the context," she told us. "He's a kid, and he's thinking that there's no way this could ever get out because it's not a real person. It's not like when you're texting a secret to a best friend and have to worry if they're going to screenshot it and share it with the whole school. He's thinking that this is a bot that is safe, and he's a child, so he's not thinking about the next extrapolation of that that his data now is being recycled into an LLM to make it better."Satwick Dutta, a PhD candidate and engineer at the University of Texas in Dallas, has been a vocal advocate for expanding COPPA to include robust protections for minors' data. He's working to build machine learning tools designed to help parents and educators diagnose childhood speech issues earlier, an aim that necessitates the careful collection and storage of minors' voice data, which the researcher says he and his team painstakingly work to anonymize."I read the [New York Times] headline a few months back, and I was so sad," Dutta, who wants people to "believe in the good of AI," reflected. "We need to have guardrails to protect not only kids, but everyone, all of us."He highlighted the danger of releasing such an ill-defined type of product without a clear use case, especially given the additional incentives around data, and likened Character.AI's approach to its users to a scientist testing rodents in a lab."It was like getting rats for an experiment," Dutta remarked, "without making sure of, 'how will it impact the rats?'""Then the company is saying, 'we will add extra guardrails.' You should have thought about these guardrails before you deployed the product!" said the researcher, through palpable frustration. "Come on. Are you kidding me?"***Garcia watched her son slip away. He stopped wanting to play basketball, the sport he once loved; at 6'3", Sewell was tall for his age, and had hoped to play Division I ball. His grades began to deteriorate, and he started getting into conflicts with teachers. He mostly just wanted to spend more time in his room, prompting Garcia to look for signs that social media might be the cause of his decline,though she found nothing. She took Sewell to multiple therapists none of whom, according to Garcia, raised the specter of AI. Sewell's phone was equipped with parental controls, but Character.AI, Google, and Apple had all listed the app as safe for teens."I think that creates confusion for parents... a parent could look at this and say, okay, this is a 12-plus app. Somebody had to have gated this," said Garcia. "Some sort of process went into this to make sure it was safe for my child to download."On its About page, Character.AI proclaims it's still "working to put our technology into the hands of billions of people" who are seemingly still tasked with determining their own use cases for the platform's bots, while Character.AI plays reactive Whac-a-Mole when problems arise.It feels like a fundamentally trial-by-error way of rolling out a new product to the public. Or, in other words, an experiment."In my mind, these two gentlemen," Garcia told us, referring to Shazeer and De Freitas, "should not have the right to keep building products for people, much less children especially children because you've shown us that you don't deserve that opportunity. You don't deserve the opportunity to build products for our kids.""I'm curious to see what Google will do," the mother of three continued, "or if they'll just go, 'oh, well, they're the geniuses. They get to come back. We don't care what harm they did out there, prior to coming back.'"Share This Article

For nearly ten years, Bernard Moses had been ferrying passengers around Chicagoland as an Uber driver. But after dropping off his umpteenth passenger one day in April 2024, Moses recalls that he swiped to find his next rider only to discover he'd been locked out of his Uber driver account. A message came up, telling him he had been suspended due to a customer complaint.After logging over 20,000 rides and earning an average rating of 4.99 out of 5, Moses had been locked out of his primary source of income by his phone screen. To find out what happened, hesaid he called a support number listed on the app, only to be met with an answering machine at the end of a long chain of automated prompts an effort he would repeat multiple times a day for weeks.About a month later, Moses received two missed calls from a man who identified himself as "Jon," claiming to be an Uber employee looking into his case. When Moses' return call went unanswered, he tried again and again, and again "hundreds of times" throughout the next two months, to no avail.It was only months after, when hailing an Uber for his son, that Moses discovered his rider account was also locked down one last parting gift from the multi-billion-dollar rideshare giant. Nearly a year after, Moses says he would still like closure for the seemingly random event that upended his life as he knew it, though he knows its not likely.Moses had just experienced "deactivation":the jarring moment when loyal gig workers find that they've been locked out of a work platform cutting them off from earning a living and often casting them into a Kafkaesque labyrinth of cookie-cutter emails, tortuous call center loops, and AI chatbots that seem to goad them into giving up, all while their livelihood hangs in the balance.While tech behemoths like Uber and Lyft market gig work as a type of side hustle, their platforms are often the primary source of income for their majority-immigrant and minority labor force, meaning deactivations like the one Moses faced can be devastating for some of the most precarious workers in the US. His case is just one of many in the rideshare landscape, a growing issue that labor organizers are calling a "deactivation crisis."A new reportan advocacy group called the Action Center on Race and the Economy (ACRE) surveyed 727 rideshare drivers who had been deactivated within the last five years, who shared infuriating details about their experiences.Though drivers reported the leading cause for deactivation was customer complaints, others say their accounts were nixed for a variety of reasons including facial-recognition background checks, self-reported safety incidents, and community guideline violations. A whopping 15 percent of drivers reported receiving no reason for deactivation, leaving them guessing as to why their livelihood was suddenly taken away. In most cases, deactivation comes as a total shock 85 percent were deactivated without prior warning, many in the middle of a work day. Its effects can be catastrophic, leading to evictions, homelessness, food insecurity, and more. According to ACRE's survey, close to two-thirds of drivers reported falling behind on bills, while 14 percent faced the loss of their homes.Once a driver is deactivated, getting reinstated can be a herculean task, because they have virtually no control over the process or what evidence the company considers. Worse yet, drivers often lack even basic information about their case, thanks to Uber's "disruptive" management style.Because Uber isnt legally obligated to give its drivers basic protections like access to human resources or unemployment insurance not to mention minimum wage it gets away with treating them like nagging customers, a model data scholar Alex Rosenblat calls "customer-service-as-management."When Denver Uber driver Karim Sawadogo dialed the driver support line for what felt like the thousandth time, he says he was stunned to find Uber had blocked his number. Friends' phones likewise became blocked as he did anything he could to reach Uber support.A more than full-time driver in Denver for seven years, the first-generation Burkinab immigrant had clocked over 20,000 Uber rides before he says he was locked out, after a rider accused him of drinking and driving. Though Sawadogo says he doesnt drink for religious reasons, he nonetheless flagged down a cop as soon as the allegation came across his phone screen. While any drunk driver wouldve been arrested on the spot, the officer instead directed Sawadogo to a drug and alcohol clinic to start a paper trail right away. Unfortunately for him, that wasn't enough for Ubers opaque system of rules."Even when I send them the copy they keep me locked out, for almost nine months," Sawadogo told us. "I keep sending messages. At a certain point they locked me out [altogether], so I have no way to send them messages." Thats when he started calling, until that too was blocked."I didnt know what to do with my life. Its getting bad. Im behind on all my bills, my car, my house," he said. Desperate to claw back his livelihood, Sawadogo went all in. "I decided, I said hey, you know what, Im just gonna go to California to see what those guys are doing,"he recalled. Spending what remained of his cash, he flew to San Francisco, where he called in some favors to get a ride from the airport straight to Uber headquarters.Like his prior attempts, that was also a bust. Despite having records proving his innocence, a desk worker told Sawadogo there was nothing he could do, and to "come back in three days,"presumably hoping hed give up. Determined to see it through, Sawadogo returned, this time talking to a different worker who heard him out. "I was so surprised, it only took him like 10 minutes to get me back," he said. "Someone could have done that in the last nine months."Sawadogo considers himself lucky. While his tenacity is remarkable, his story illustrates the extreme lengths drivers are forced to go for a chance at regaining their livelihoods.Nowadays when an Uber driver is deactivated, their first point of contact isnt with someone from Uber HR, but with an AIchatbot the kind that might make you tear your hair out trying to get a refund for those Weezer tickets.Algorithmic decision making is key to Uber's business model.It pairs riders with drivers, tracks trip frequency, and deactivates drivers en masse. Though these algorithms save Uber boatloads of money, ACRE notes that they work as "tools for workforce control," a coercive, automated threat looming over Uber drivers at all hours of the day.The ever-present threat of this kind of tech creates what ACRE calls a "strong incentive for drivers to comply with corporate and passenger demands even when they are unfair, unsafe, or economically disadvantageous."A former driver in the San Francisco Bay Areanamed April Granado says she averaged well over 50 hours of work per week, notching over 3,000 Uber rides in her first year alone. In May of 2024, she had an altercation with a belligerent rider who refused to follow Californias and Ubers child safety seat laws. When the rider continued to escalate and threaten Granado, the driver says she cancelled the ride and reported the incident to Uber, before driving off and continuing her work day.Days later, Granado received a late-night message from Uber that her account had been permanently deactivated the belligerent rider had reported her for the incident, and she'd been punished.Although that was the end of her full-time rideshare job, it was far from the first time Uber had made her choose between her comfort and a riders request. Granado reported previously being harangued by riders over masks at the height of Covid, uncomfortable advances by men, requests to escort riders into doctors' offices, and a customer who insisted that she roll down the window in the midst of the recent Los Angeles Wildfires, as the air glowed orange with ash.There's also a specter of racial bias in ACRE's findings. Black drivers report being deactivated for customer complaints at a rate 7 percent higher than their white counterparts, while having their accounts reinstated at lower rates. Meanwhile, drivers of Latin American descent reportedly received no explanation for their permanent suspension at a rate of 20 percent, compared to 15 percent for all other drivers.There are, however, small glints of hope for rideshare drivers. A number of groups throughout the US are organizing gig workers to fight back against deactivation through mutual aid efforts like translation assistance and "deactivationclinics," as well as through local and state grassroots policy drives.In cities like Seattle and Minneapolis, civic leaders have recently passed ordinances mandating protections for gig workers from deactivation, despite Ubers bullying. Thats setting an example for cities like Chicago, which just proposed an ordinance to enshrine due process for drivers facing deactivation, as well as minimum wage. Deactivation regulation is currently being reviewed by Virginia lawmakers, meanwhile, as Uber takes two Colorado labor protections bills to court, alleging that transparency laws violate its first amendment rights.Still, there's a long road ahead for the 7.8 million Uber drivers worldwide. While gig work platforms tout unlimited flexibility for hustlers and grinders, they consistently fail to provide even the most basic worker protections, leaving some of the countrys most vulnerable workers at the mercy of unaccountable algorithms. "They treat you like a machine," Sawadogo said of his ordeal. "If the machine doesnt do what you want, [they] just turn it off and go to the next."More on Uber: Uber CEO Stunned When He Heard Cost of 3-Mile Uber RideShare This Article

Mar 19, 2025Ravie LakshmananThreat Intelligence / CryptojackingThreat actors are exploiting a severe security flaw in PHP to deliver cryptocurrency miners and remote access trojans (RATs) like Quasar RAT.The vulnerability, assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2024-4577, refers to an argument injection vulnerability in PHP affecting Windows-based systems running in CGI mode that could allow remote attackers to run arbitrary code.Cybersecurity company Bitdefender said it has observed a surge in exploitation attempts against CVE-2024-4577 since late last year, with a significant concentration reported in Taiwan (54.65%), Hong Kong (27.06%), Brazil (16.39%), Japan (1.57%), and India (0.33%).About 15% of the detected exploitation attempts involve basic vulnerability checks using commands like "whoami" and "echo <test_string>." Another 15% revolve around commands used for system reconnaissance, such as process enumeration, network discovery, user and domain information, and system metadata gathering.Martin Zugec, technical solutions director at Bitdefender, noted that at least roughly 5% of the detected attacks culminated in the deployment of the XMRig cryptocurrency miner."Another smaller campaign involved the deployment of Nicehash miners, a platform that allows users to sell computing power for cryptocurrency," Zugec added. "The miner process was disguised as a legitimate application, such as javawindows.exe, to evade detection."Other attacks have been found to weaponize the shortcoming of delivering remote access tools like the open-source Quasar RAT, as well as execute malicious Windows installer (MSI) files hosted on remote servers using cmd.exe.In perhaps something of a curious twist, the Romanian company said it also observed attempts to modify firewall configurations on vulnerable servers with an aim to block access to known malicious IPs associated with the exploit.This unusual behavior has raised the possibility that rival cryptojacking groups are competing for control over susceptible resources and preventing them from targeting those under their control a second time. It's also consistent with historical observations about how cryptjacking attacks are known to terminate rival miner processes prior to deploying their own payloads.The development comes shortly after Cisco Talos revealed details of a campaign weaponizing the PHP flaw in attacks targeting Japanese organizations since the start of the year.Users are advised to update their PHP installations to the latest version to safeguard against potential threats."Since most campaigns have been using LOTL tools, organizations should consider limiting the use of tools such as PowerShell within the environment to only privileged users such as administrators," Zugec said.Found this article interesting? Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn to read more exclusive content we post.SHARE

Two of New York Citys mostnotoriousgangsters meet in a candy shop to hash out their differences. Their relationship goes backdecades; the men rose through the ranks of the criminal underworld together. Then one of the men, hot-headed Vito Genovese, had to flee the country toavoida murder charge, leaving the other, diplomatic Frank Costello, as their organizations acting boss. When Genovese returns, he wantsto be made whole for all the financial opportunities he missed while he was gone. But no matterhow Costello tries to appease Genovese, its never enough.So they meet in thecandy shop to settle the matter. They exchange pleasantries. They talk about the old days. Their bond is so strong, the two are practically brothers.Only in the new movie about Costello and Genevese,The Alto Knights,they seem more like twins because both are played by Robert De Niro under two different wigs and accents.Why? I have no idea.Its one thing to cast oneactor as a pair of siblings, or clones, or even a father and a son at similar ages. Here De Niro plays two different men who are not related.That distracting choice adds nothingtoThe Alto Knights, except perhaps a marketing hook, because Warner Bros. can advertise the film as the chance to see Robert De Niro go toe to toe with Robert De Niro.Warner Bros.Warner Bros.loading...Although the choice to cast De Niro twice remains a baffling one, it must be said that on a technical level, their scenes together look convincing. When the men are apart (which is most of the film), De Nirois perfectly serviceable in both roles, even if the script (by mobmovie legend Nicholas Pileggi ofGoodfellas andCasino fame) remains oddly uninterested in Costelloand Genoveses respective psychologies. By the time the moviepicks up their story in the late 1940s,they are entrenched in their respective roleswithin the Mafia hierarchy; Costello as the genteel dealmaker with political connections, and Genovese as the seething firebrand looking to avenge an endless parade of grievances. (In another time and place, Joe Pesci would have played Genovese to De Niros Costello and in fact, with his high-pitched motor-mouthed delivery, De Niro almost seems to be doing a Pesci impression as Genovese.)AlthoughThe Alto Knights starts in 1957 and thenflashes back in time from there, the relationship between the two (oddly similar looking)protagonistsis fairly obvious and uncomplicated right from the jump: Genovese envies Costellos wealth and position, and hates the way hetries to comport himself as a legitimate businessman. Costello knows Genovese reckless behavior could destroy his empire, but his loyalty to his friend, and his belief in the Mafias strict code of conduct,keepshim from taking action against him.So Genovese keeps lashing out at Costello after that doomed candy shop encounter,culminating in a failed assassination attempt that serves asThe Alto Knights opening scene.THE ALTO KNIGHTSWarner Bros. Picturesloading...Casting De Niro as both of these infamous criminals invites the audience to draw parallels between them. I suppose if you want to look at Costello and Genovese very closely, there are some connections you can draw. Each wasmarried, for example,their scenes with their respective spouses serve to underscore their differing temperaments and neuroses. Costello is devoted to Bobbie (Debra Messing), and spends most of his nights at home with her in front of their television.But the bubbling tension between the two De Niros (De Niros? Des Niro?) never rises beyond the level of a very slow simmer. After the violent opening scene,The Alto Knightsnext hour and ten minutesis all backstory narrated by Costello as an old man which is another curious choice in a film filled with them, since it means that more than half of the movieis little more than ploddingexposition abouta central conflict whose eventual winner is all but obvious right from the beginning. By the time the movie finally returns to the late 1950s, Costello and Genoveses battle is all but over, and their feud culminates in a truly anticlimactic (and historically dubious) sequence.Warner Bros.Warner Bros.loading...When all is said and done,The Alto Knights imparts very little about these two men that couldnt be gleaned by reading their respective Wikipedia pages, and it does it at a sluggish pace and with little visual flair. Some of the biggest and best names to ever work in gangster movies contributed to this film; De Niro and Pileggi, obviously, but also producer Irwin Winkler and director Barry Levinson.Despite their many contributions to this genre in the past, theyve got nothing new to say here.Andthey providezero evidence that casting De Niro in both lead roles is anything more than a gimmick.RATING: 4/10Get our free mobile appThe 10 Worst Movies of the Last Ten Years (2015-2024)Look, lets not beat around the bush. These movies stink.Filed Under: Barry Levinson, Robert De Niro, The Alto KnightsCategories: Movie News, Movie Reviews