While IO Interactive may be heavily focused on its inaugural James Bond game, 2026’s 007 First Light, it’s still providing ambitious new levels and updates for Hitman: World of Assassination and its new science fiction action game MindsEye. To continue to build hype for First Light and IOI’s growing partnership with the James Bond brand, the latest World of Assassination level is a Bond crossover, as Hitman protagonist Agent 47 targets Le Chiffre, the main villain of the 2006 movie Casino Royale. Available through July 6, 2025, the Le Chiffre event in World of Assassination features actor Mads Mikkelsen reprising his fan-favorite Bond villain role, not only providing his likeness but voicing the character as he confronts the contract killer in France. Den of Geek attended the first-ever in-person IO Interactive Showcase, a partner event with Summer Game Fest held at The Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood. Mikkelsen and the developers shared insight on the surprise new World of Assassination level, with the level itself playable in its entirety to attendees on the Nintendo Switch 2 and PlayStation Portal. The developers also included an extended gameplay preview for MindsEye, ahead of its June 10 launch, while sharing some details about the techno-thriller. Matching his background from Casino Royale, Le Chiffre is a terrorist financier who manipulates the stock market by any means necessary to benefit himself and his clients. After an investment deal goes wrong, Le Chiffre tries to recoup a brutal client’s losses through a high-stakes poker game in France, with Agent 47 hired to assassinate the criminal mastermind on behalf of an unidentified backer. The level opens with 47 infiltrating a high society gala linked to the poker game, with the contract killer entering under his oft-used assumed name of Tobias Rieper, a facade that Le Chiffre immediately sees through. At the IO Interactive Showcase panel, Mikkelsen observed that the character of Le Chiffre is always one that he enjoyed and held a special place for him and his career. Reprising his villainous role also gave Mikkelsen the chance to reunite with longtime Agent 47 voice actor David Bateson since their ‘90s short film Tom Merritt, though both actors recorded their respective lines separately. Mikkelsen enjoyed that Le Chiffre’s appearance in World of Assassination gave him a more physical role than he had in Casino Royale, rather than largely placing him at a poker table. Of course, like most Hitman levels, there are multiple different ways that players can accomplish their main objective of killing Le Chiffre and escaping the premises. The game certainly gives players multiple avenues to confront the evil financier over a game of poker before closing in for the kill, but it’s by no means the only way to successfully assassinate him. We won’t give away how we ultimately pulled off the assassination, but rest assured that it took multiple tries, careful plotting, and with all the usual trial-and-error that comes from playing one of Hitman’s more difficult and immersively involved levels. Moving away from its more grounded action titles, IO Interactive also provided a deeper look at its new sci-fi game MindsEye, developed by Build a Rocket Boy. Set in the fictional Redrock City, the extended gameplay sneak peek at the showcase featured protagonist Adam Diaz fighting shadowy enemies in the futuristic city’s largely abandoned streets. While there were no hands-on demos at the showcase itself, the preview demonstrated Diaz using his abilities and equipment, including an accompanying drone, to navigate the city from a third-person perspective and use an array of weapons to dispatch those trying to hunt him down. MindsEye marks the first game published through IOI Partners, an initiative that has IOI publish games from smaller, external developers. The game did not have a hands-on demo at the showcase and, given its bug-heavy and poorly-received launch, this distinction is not particularly surprising. Build a Robot Boy has since pledged to support the game through June to fix its technical issues but, given the game’s hands-on access at the IOI Showcase, there were already red flags surrounding the game’s performance. With that in mind, most of the buzz at the showcase was unsurprisingly centered around 007 First Light and updates to Hitman: World of Assassination, and IO Interactive did not disappoint in that regard. Even with Hitman: World of Assassination over four years old now, the game continues to receive impressive post-release support from IO Interactive, both in bringing the title to the Nintendo Switch 2 and with additional DLC. At the showcase, IOI hinted at additional special levels for World of Assassintation with high-profile guest targets like Le Chiffre, without identifying who or if they’re also explicitly tied to the James Bond franchise. But with 007 First Light slated for its eagerly anticipated launch next year, it’s a safe bet that IOI has further plans to hype its own role in building out the James Bond legacy for the foreseeable future. The Hitman: World of Assassination special Le Chiffre level is available now through July 6, 2025 on all the game’s major platforms, including the Nintendo Switch 2. MindsEye is now on sale for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.

A dangerous strain of bird flu is spreading in US livestockMediaMedium/Alamy Since Donald Trump assumed office in January, the leading US public health agency has pulled back preparations for a potential bird flu pandemic. But as it steps back, another government agency is stepping up. While the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) previously held regular briefings on its efforts to prevent a wider outbreak of a deadly bird flu virus called H5N1 in people, it largely stopped once Trump took office. It has also cancelled funding for a vaccine that would have targeted the virus. In contrast, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has escalated its fight against H5N1’s spread in poultry flocks and dairy herds, including by funding the development of livestock vaccines. This particular virus – a strain of avian influenza called H5N1 – poses a significant threat to humans, having killed about half of the roughly 1000 people worldwide who tested positive for it since 2003. While the pathogen spreads rapidly in birds, it is poorly adapted to infecting humans and isn’t known to transmit between people. But that could change if it acquires mutations that allow it to spread more easily among mammals – a risk that increases with each mammalian infection. The possibility of H5N1 evolving to become more dangerous to people has grown significantly since March 2024, when the virus jumped from migratory birds to dairy cows in Texas. More than 1,070 herds across 17 states have been affected since then. H5N1 also infects poultry, placing the virus in closer proximity to people. Since 2022, nearly 175 million domestic birds have been culled in the US due to H5N1, and almost all of the 71 people who have tested positive for it had direct contact with livestock. Get the most essential health and fitness news in your inbox every Saturday. Sign up to newsletter “We need to take this seriously because when [H5N1] constantly is spreading, it’s constantly spilling over into humans,” says Seema Lakdawala at Emory University in Georgia. The virus has already killed a person in the US and a child in Mexico this year. Still, cases have declined under Trump. The last recorded human case was in February, and the number of affected poultry flocks fell 95 per cent between then and June. Outbreaks in dairy herds have also stabilised. It isn’t clear what is behind the decline. Lakdawala believes it is partly due to a lull in bird migration, which reduces opportunities for the virus to spread from wild birds to livestock. It may also reflect efforts by the USDA to contain outbreaks on farms. In February, the USDA unveiled a $1 billion plan for tackling H5N1, including strengthening farmers’ defences against the virus, such as through free biosecurity assessments. Of the 150 facilities that have undergone assessment, only one has experienced an H5N1 outbreak. Under Trump, the USDA also continued its National Milk Testing Strategy, which mandates farms provide raw milk samples for influenza testing. If a farm is positive for H5N1, it must allow the USDA to monitor livestock and implement measures to contain the virus. The USDA launched the programme in December and has since ramped up participation to 45 states. “The National Milk Testing Strategy is a fantastic system,” says Erin Sorrell at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. Along with the USDA’s efforts to improve biosecurity measures on farms, milk testing is crucial for containing the outbreak, says Sorrell. But while the USDA has bolstered its efforts against H5N1, the HHS doesn’t appear to have followed suit. In fact, the recent drop in human cases may reflect decreased surveillance due to workforce cuts, says Sorrell. In April, the HHS laid off about 10,000 employees, including 90 per cent of staff at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, an office that helps investigate H5N1 outbreaks in farm workers. “There is an old saying that if you don’t test for something, you can’t find it,” says Sorrell. Yet a spokesperson for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says its guidance and surveillance efforts have not changed. “State and local health departments continue to monitor for illness in persons exposed to sick animals,” they told New Scientist. “CDC remains committed to rapidly communicating information as needed about H5N1.” The USDA and HHS also diverge on vaccination. While the USDA has allocated $100 million toward developing vaccines and other solutions for preventing H5N1’s spread in livestock, the HHS cancelled $776 million in contracts for influenza vaccine development. The contracts – terminated on 28 May – were with the pharmaceutical company Moderna to develop vaccines targeting flu subtypes, including H5N1, that could cause future pandemics. The news came the same day Moderna reported nearly 98 per cent of the roughly 300 participants who received two doses of the H5 vaccine in a clinical trial had antibody levels believed to be protective against the virus. The US has about five million H5N1 vaccine doses stockpiled, but these are made using eggs and cultured cells, which take longer to produce than mRNA-based vaccines like Moderna’s. The Moderna vaccine would have modernised the stockpile and enabled the government to rapidly produce vaccines in the event of a pandemic, says Sorrell. “It seems like a very effective platform and would have positioned the US and others to be on good footing if and when we needed a vaccine for our general public,” she says. The HHS cancelled the contracts due to concerns about mRNA vaccines, which Robert F Kennedy Jr – the country’s highest-ranking public health official – has previously cast doubt on. “The reality is that mRNA technology remains under-tested, and we are not going to spend taxpayer dollars repeating the mistakes of the last administration,” said HHS communications director Andrew Nixon in a statement to New Scientist. However, mRNA technology isn’t new. It has been in development for more than half a century and numerous clinical trials have shown mRNA vaccines are safe. While they do carry the risk of side effects – the majority of which are mild – this is true of almost every medical treatment. In a press release, Moderna said it would explore alternative funding paths for the programme. “My stance is that we should not be looking to take anything off the table, and that includes any type of vaccine regimen,” says Lakdawala. “Vaccines are the most effective way to counter an infectious disease,” says Sorrell. “And so having that in your arsenal and ready to go just give you more options.” Topics:

Mario Kart World comes at you fast (Nintendo) After a dozen hours with the biggest game on Nintendo Switch 2, GameCentral tries to evaluate the surprisingly controversial new Mario Kart game. It’s very obvious why Mario Kart World is the main launch title for the Nintendo Switch 2: it’s been over a decade since the last one and Mario Kart 8 is one of the best-selling video games of all-time. Much of that success is due to the innate simplicity of the concept and the easy accessibility of its controls, so it’s surprising that Mario Kart World has been so difficult for people to get their heads around. We’ve played it three times now, for increasingly long lengths of time, the previous time being at a press event with a host of other journos. But now that we have a Nintendo Switch 2 of our own, we’ve been able to spend even longer exploring the game at our leisure and we’ve come to the conclusion that Nintendo’s marketing for the game is doing it a disservice. It emphasises the fact that the game has a massive open world but as soon as you start playing, it becomes obvious that the designers must consider that to be a relatively minor part of the game. Or at least the idea that you can roam around at will, looking for secrets. You can do that, but despite what we and many others assumed it’s very much a side activity. This is made obvious by the fact that the option to free roam is not part of the main menu for the game, instead there’s an easily missed prompt to press the ‘+’ button and explore the open world at will. This is a lot of fun, because the open world is phenomenally well designed – full of secret pathways and tempting scenery to jump off and grind on – but what’s putting people off is there’s very little structured gameplay for it. There are a variety of objects to look out for – such as P-switches, ? panels, and special medallions – but all they do is unlock small stickers you can customise your vehicle with. The P-switches activate missions, which are the most complex activity, but most of the time they involve simply collecting blue coins or competing in a mini-race. There are a few more unusual examples but most barely last 60 seconds, when you beat them, and that’s as complicated as the open world gameplay ever gets. It is enjoyable, and we’ve spent many happy hours already searching for secrets, but there’s no question that the open world feels underutilised – an afterthought almost. Expert, exclusive gaming analysis Sign up to the GameCentral newsletter for a unique take on the week in gaming, alongside the latest reviews and more. Delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning. Although other AI racers can occasionally be seen driving around you can’t interact with them, there’s no story or dialogue, and no complex mission scenarios. What’s more, you can’t meet random online players in the open world and even if you invite friends all you can do is take photos with them. You can choose to start one of the other modes from within the open world but we’re very surprised that you can’t set up your own point-to-point races (which would surely have been perfect for the mouse controls of the new Joy-Cons). Instead, all you can do is create a custom Grand Prix by choosing which track to go to once each one ends. We point all this out because these details weren’t clear beforehand and because it’s almost certainly going to be the main complaint against the game. But while it is certainly a missed opportunity, it doesn’t negatively affect the actual focus of the game. It seems that the ability to free roam is intended as essentially a bonus. The real changes to the game are in terms of the nature of the tracks, which rather than being a succession of completely unconnected circuits all flow from one to another. Often they’re not circuits at all, but linear races from one point to another, as you work your way across the world map. Since they’re all in the same corner of the world, a Grand Prix often has a consistent theme, such as snowy or desert levels, and specific elements, like dinosaurs or boos, can appear at the beginning and end of adjoining tracks, reinforcing the impression that it’s all one giant race (these sections are removed for Time Trials). The graphics are very impressive (Nintendo) That concept seems to have come first and the open world followed, even though technically it’s not needed – or at least not to the level of detail that Nintendo has gone with. But either way, the courses in Mario Kart World are excellent, with wildly different designs even for returning tracks. The new ones are especially good though, with Boo Cinema, where you travel through the screen and into the film itself, being our current favourite. Although the ones with Wave Race 64 style water physics are also all uniformly excellent. The action may seem similar in video clips but it’s really quite different to Mario Kart 8. And not just because of the wider roads, new enemies, and the fact that there’s now 24 racers on every track. There’s now far more shortcuts and alternate routes, which seems like it should end up making races feel disjointed and unbalanced but it doesn’t, thanks to the levelling effect of items and the fact that sooner or later everyone is still being funnelled down the same path. The abundance of point-to-point races is a significant change to the Mario Kart norm and not only does it spice up Grand Prix mode but it allows for the superb Knockout Tour. This is a far more significant addition than free roam, even though it’s a simple sudden death mode, where you have to reach a certain position by the end of a track or you’re out of the game. In Grand Prix you can try and make up for a bad performance in the next race but with Knockout the tension is sky high throughout, and it works brilliantly, especially online. When we started playing the game, on Wednesday afternoon, there were only a handful online, but over the course of Thursday morning the matches became full and everything came alive. Playing against 23 other humans also helps to emphasise the fact that while Mario Kart World does make certain things easier – like automatically holding items behind you as a shield or allowing for a little more leeway when escaping shells – this is absolutely still a game of skill. Playing online, we could see the same names consistently doing well and ourselves… enjoying the mid-table mediocrity that we usually do, when faced with talented opposition. Not that that ever put us off. On the contrary, we spent almost every match grinning inanely at the sheer Mario Kart-ness of it all. We will still need to play more to do a full review though – we haven’t played a lot on 150cc yet and we only got an hour or two with the online. However, at this point we do feel we’ve seen the basics of what the game is. More Trending It’s a strange one to be sure, in what is usually one of Nintendo’s most straightforward franchises, but while anyone can look at the open world and think of a dozen other things that could’ve been done with it, the actual racing is top notch. Mechanically it’s not significantly different from Mario Kart 8 but then the series is not a very malleable one, and this does as much as it can to mix things up – and all without resorting to gimmicks. In terms of a score, we’re not looking at a 10/10. Mario Kart World is many things but it’s not perfect, not like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. We’ll have to spend more time with it to determine if it suits an 8 or 9/10 but longevity has never been a problem for the series, so we imagine it’ll be the higher of the two. Given how late Nintendo was in sending out consoles that’s all we can say for now but while this is not quite the game many will have been expecting, and it does leave a lot on the table (possibly to be picked up by DLC, but naturally Nintendo isn’t saying), it’s still an excellent game and a great introduction to the Switch 2. Formats: Nintendo Switch 2Price: £74.99 (physical) or £66.99 (digital)Publisher: NintendoDeveloper: Nintendo EPDRelease Date: 5th June 2025Age Rating: 3 There’s unlockable costumes for all the named characters (Nintendo) Email gamecentral@metro.co.uk, leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter. To submit Inbox letters and Reader’s Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here. For more stories like this, check our Gaming page. GameCentral Sign up for exclusive analysis, latest releases, and bonus community content. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. 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Launch week is finally here, and though I would love to be bringing you a proper review of the Nintendo Switch 2 right now, I still don’t have one at the time of writing. In its wisdom, Nintendo has decided not to send review units out until the day before release, so as you read this I will be standing impatiently by the door like a dog anxiously awaiting its owner.I have played the console, though, for a whole day at Nintendo’s offices, so I can give you some first impressions. Hardware-wise, it is the upgrade of my dreams: sturdier JoyCons, a beautiful screen, the graphical muscle to make games look as good as I want them to in 2025 (though still not comparable to the high-end PlayStation 5 Pro or a modern gaming PC). I like the understated pops of colour on the controllers, the refined menu with its soothing chimes and blips. Game sharing, online functionality and other basic stuff is frictionless now. I love that Nintendo Switch Online is so reasonably priced, at £18 a year, as opposed to about the same per month for comparable gaming services, and it gives me access to a treasure trove of Nintendo games from decades past.But here’s the key word in that paragraph: it’s an upgrade. After eight years, an upgrade feels rather belated. I was hoping for something actually new, and aside from the fact that you can now use those controllers as mice by turning them sideways and moving them around on a desk or on your lap, there isn’t much new in the Switch 2. Absorbed in Mario Kart World, the main launch title, it was easy to forget I was even playing a new console. I do wonder – as I did in January – whether many less gaming-literate families who own a Switch will see a reason to upgrade, given the £400 asking price.Brilliant … Mario Kart World. Photograph: NintendoSpeaking of Mario Kart World, though: it’s brilliant. Totally splendid. It will deservedly sell squillions. Alongside the classic competitive grand prix and time trial races, the headline feature is an open, driveable world that you can explore all you like, as any character, picking up characters and costumes and collectibles, and getting into elimination-style races that span the full continent. All the courses are part of one huge map, and they flow right into one another.Your kart transforms helpfully into a boat when you hit water, and I found an island with a really tricky challenge where I had to ride seaplanes up towards a skyscraper in the city, driving over their wings from one to the other. Anyone could lose hours driving aimlessly around the colourful collection of mountains, jungles and winding motorways here. There’s even a space-station themed course that cleverly echoes the original Donkey Kong arcade game, delivering a nostalgia hit as delightful as Super Mario Odyssey’s climactic New Donk City festival.Pushing Buttons correspondent Keith Stuart also had a great time with another launch game, Konami’s Survival Kids, which is a bit like Overcooked except all the players are working together to survive on a desert island. (Be reassured, if you generally find survival games hard work: it’s very much fun over peril.)However: I would steer clear of the Nintendo Switch Welcome Tour, an almost belligerently un-fun interactive tour of the console’s new features … that costs £7.99. Your tiny avatar walks around a gigantic recreation of a Switch 2 console, looking for invisible plaques that point out its different components. There are displays with uninteresting technical information about, say, the quality of the console’s HD rumble. One of the interactive museum displays shows a ball bounding across the screen and asks you to guess how many frames per second it is travelling at. As someone who aggressively does not care about fine technical detail, I was terrible at this. It’s like being on the least interesting school trip of your life.And it felt felt remarkably un-Nintendo, so dry and devoid of personality that it made me a little worried. Nintendo Labo, by contrast, was a super-fun and accessible way of showing off the original Switch’s technical features. I had assumed that Welcome Tour would be made by the same team, but evidently not.I couldn’t wait to get back to Mario Kart World, which, once again, is fantastic. I’m excited to spend the rest of the week playing it for a proper review. And if you’ve pre-ordered a Switch 2, you’ll have it in your hands in the next 24 hours. For those holding off: we’ll have plenty more Switch 2 info and opinions in the next few weeks to help you make a decision.What to playArms akimbo … to a T is funny and weird. Illustration: Annapurna interactive/SteamLast week I played through to a T, the beautifully strange, unexpectedly thoughtful new game from Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi. It is about a young teenager who is forever stuck in a T-pose, arms akimbo. As you might imagine, this makes life rather difficult for them, and they must rely on their fluffy little dog to help them through life. It’s a kid-friendly game about accepting who you are – I played it with my sons – but it is also extremely funny and weird, and features a song about a giraffe who loves to make sandwiches. I love a game where you don’t know what to expect, and I bet that if I asked every single reader of this newsletter to guess how it ends, not one of you would be anywhere close.Available on: PS5, Xbox, PC Estimated playtime: What to readTake chances … Remy Siu (left) and Nhi Do accept the Peabody award for 1000xRESIST. Photograph: Charley Gallay/Getty images 1000xRESIST, last year’s critical darling sci-fi game about the immigrant experience and the cost of political resistance, won a Peabody award this week. From the creators’ acceptance speech: “I want to say to the games industry, resource those on the margins and seek difference. Take chances again and again. This art form is barely unearthed. It’s too early to define it. Fund the indescribable.” Keith Stuart wrote about the largely lost age of midnight launch parties – for the Switch 2 launch, only Smyths Toys is hosting midnight releases. Did you ever go to one of these events? Write in and tell me if so – I remember feeling intensely embarrassed queuing for a Wii on Edinburgh’s Princes Street as a teenager. The developers of OpenAI are very proud that their latest artificial “intelligence” model can play Pokémon Red. It’s terrible at it, and has so far taken more than 80 hours to obtain three gym badges. I’m trying not to think about the environmental cost of proving AI is terrible at video games. When Imran Khan had a stroke last year, he lost the ability to play games. I found this essay about the role that Kaizo Mario (super-difficult hacked Mario levels) played in his recovery extremely moving. skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionWhat to clickQuestion BlockSoothing … Unpacking. Illustration: Humble Games/SteamReader Gemma asks:“At this moment I am cuddling my three-month-old as he naps on the sofa while I’m playing Blue Prince. It might be the best postnatal game: it has very little background sound or music; can be paused any time; is very chill with zero jeopardy; but also has a fascinating storyline and incredible puzzles. I also find myself narrating the letters and talking out loud for the maths puzzles. (Do three-month-olds understand algebra?) Your article [about Nintendo at naptime] made me feel less guilty, so thank you. Any other updated tips for similar games that you’ve discovered in the last eight years for postnatal gaming?”In the small-baby years I played two types of games: five-hour ones that I could complete in a couple of evenings, or endless Stardew Valley/Animal Crossing-type games where you could just drop in and zone out for as long as you needed, and it didn’t matter whether you were “achieving” anything. I couldn’t play anything with a linear plot because my brain was often mush and I’d simply forget what had happened an hour ago. It’s different for everyone, though – my friend Sarah was obsessed with Grand Theft Auto when her baby was wee.I became hooked on a couple of exploitative phone games that I won’t recommend – don’t go near those in a vulnerable brain-state, you’ll end up spending hours and £££ on virtual gems to buy dopamine with. Something like Unpacking or A Little to the Left might be soothing for a puzzle-brain like yours (and they’re short). I’ll throw this out there to other gamer mums: what did you play in the early months of parenthood?If you’ve got a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – email us on pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.

Daft Punk were a French electronic music duo formed in 1993 in Paris by Thomas Bangalter (left) and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo. They achieved popularity in the late 1990s as part of the French house movement, combining house music, funk, disco, techno, rock and synth-pop. They are regarded as one of the most influential acts in dance music. From 1999, Daft Punk assumed robot personas for public appearances, with helmets, outfits and gloves to disguise their identities, and made few media appearances. In 2013, the band released their fourth and final album, Random Access Memories, to acclaim. The lead single, "Get Lucky", reached the top 10 in the charts of 27 countries. The album won five Grammy Awards in 2014, including Album of the Year and Record of the Year for "Get Lucky". This promotional photograph shows Daft Punk in 2013 after the release of Random Access Memories. Photograph credit: Sony Music; edited by W.carter Recently featured: Eastern quoll Battle of Diamond Rock Drosera capensis Archive More featured pictures

Payphones "were the only things that were built to last for decades and be out in the elements," says electrical engineer Patrick Schlott. He should know; as a hobby, he buys secondhand payphones, rewires them, then asks local businesses in rural Vermont if they'd let him install them. His goal is to offer, for free, public telephone service. (Schlott foots the bill himself.) "It's assumed most folks own cell phones," writes Schlott. "Well, not everyone does, sometimes they don't work out on dirt roads, sometimes you forget your charger, and sometimes you just really need to make a phone call. We aim to provide a valuable public service to the community while teaching people about the US telephone system that has over a century of history behind it." Schlott's company, RandTel, currently operates three phones in his neck of Vermont: One at the North Tunbridge General Store in Tunbridge, one at the Latham Library and a third—a rotary model from the 1950s--at the town of Randolph's information booth. He's particularly proud of that last one, as "This installation is 100% solar-powered, provided graciously by Catamount Solar," he writes. "Many thanks to the White River Valley Chamber of Commerce for hosting!" Here's a look at what Schlott does:

Satellite view of coral reefs in New CaledoniaShutterstock/BEST-BACKGR​OUNDS There might be an upside to the loss of coral reefs. Their decline would mean oceans can absorb up to 5 per cent more carbon dioxide by 2100, researchers estimate, slowing the build up of this greenhouse gas in Earth’s atmosphere. “It is a beneficial effect if you only care about the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere,” says Lester Kwiatkowski at Sorbonne University in Paris, France. But the decline of corals will also reduce biodiversity, harm fisheries and leave many coasts more exposed to rising seas, he says. Advertisement How much the world will warm depends mainly on the level of CO2 in the atmosphere. So far the land and oceans have been soaking up around half of the extra CO2 we have emitted. Any factors that increase or decrease these so-called land or ocean carbon sinks could therefore have a significant impact on future warming. It is often assumed that corals remove CO2 from seawater as they grow their calcium carbonate skeletons. In fact, the process, also known as calcification, is a net source of CO2. “You’re taking inorganic carbon in the ocean, generally in the form of carbonate and bicarbonate ions, turning it into calcium carbonate and that process releases CO2 into the seawater, some of which will be lost to the atmosphere,” says Kwiatkowski. Unmissable news about our planet delivered straight to your inbox every month. Sign up to newsletter This means that if reef formation around the world slows or even reverses, less CO2 will be released by reefs and the oceans will be able to absorb more of this greenhouse gas from the atmosphere – a factor not currently included in climate models. Observations suggest coral reef calcification is already declining as rising seawater temperatures cause mass coral bleaching and die-offs. The higher level of CO2 is also making oceans more acidic, which can make it harder to build carbonate skeletons and even lead to their dissolution. Kwiatkowski and his team took published estimates of how corals will be affected by warming and ocean acidification and used a computer model to work out how this might change the ocean sink in various emission scenarios. They conclude that the oceans could take up between 1 and 5 per cent more carbon by 2100, and up to 13 per cent more by 2300. This doesn’t take account of other factors that can cause reef decline such as overfishing and the spread of coral diseases, says Kwiatkowski, so might even be an underestimate. On the other hand, the work assumes that corals aren’t able to adapt or acclimatise, says Chris Jury at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, who wasn’t involved in the study. “If the worst-case or even medium-case scenario in this study comes to pass, it means the near-total destruction of coral reefs globally,” says Jury. “I think that with consideration of realistic levels of adaptation and acclimatisation by corals and other reef organisms, the authors might come to different conclusions under a low to moderate level of climate change.” If Kwiatkowski’s team is correct, it means that the amount of emitted CO2 that will lead to a given level of warming – the so-called carbon budget – is a little larger than currently thought. “I think we would like our budgets to be as accurate as possible, even if we’re blowing through them,” says Kwiatkowski. Journal reference:PNAS DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2501562122 Topics:

During most of the introduction to the Wake Up Dead Man portion of Saturday night’s Netflix Tudum event, writer-director Rian Johnson and his starry cast, led by a folksy Daniel Craig, had fun hiding what the third Knives Out mystery is about. In fact we really don’t know. But as judged by the first teaser trailer for the movie, it is going for a darker and more oblique tone than the general playfulness viewers remember from Knives Out and Glass Onion, marketing included. In the teaser, a church bell ominously sounds in the distance as images suffused in shadow and nocturnal rains cascade down around Craig’s unexpectedly stoic Benoit Blanc. Without a charming witticism or visual gag in sight, Blanc tersely intones during the trailer, “The impossible crime. For a man of reason this is the Holy Grail.” Through it all, a haunting hymn plays as an elegiac and Southern voice cries, “O Death, O Death, Won’t you spare me over til another year.” While we still know relatively little about the plot of Wake Up Dead Man beyond its terrific ensemble—which includes Glenn Close, Kerry Washington, Jeremy Renner, Josh Brolin, Andrew Scott, and Cailee Spaeny—the song choice might tell us a lot about the film’s setting, and possibly the dark places it intends to go. Initially speculation regarding the third Knives Out picture assumed that it would be set in England where most of the film’s production occurred. And while that might still be the case, we suspect the English countryside might be used to substitute for something a little closer to home for American viewers—and distinctly Southern. Indeed, many fans of the Coen Brothers likely recognize the song “O, Death” used in the trailer, for it is the exact version sung by the late bluegrass artist Ralph Stanley in Joel and Ethan Coen’s O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000). Stanley, it should be stressed, is a legend in the bluegrass and folk sound of music who won a Grammy for this version of “O Death.” However, his vocals were used in O Brother (and now Wake Up Dead Man) to send a chill up the spine when sung a cappella style in the third act of the Coens’ Mississippi-set Depression fable. After all, on screen the song is being sung not by a simple musician, but by the grand wizard of a Ku Klux Klan chapter which has gathered to lynch and murder a young Black man on a trumped up accusation based in superstition. The Coens’ choice of this song to be sung by the KKK in the 1930s is probably not accidental either. The standard version of the song’s origin is that it’s a traditional Appalachian folk song written by Baptist preacher Lloyd Chandler. Chandler certainly performed the song in the 1920s in North Carolina, allegedly after receiving a vision from God of the song in 1916. However, further research has proven that Chandler’s composition bears an uncanny similarity to a 1913 printed version of a folk song (that is therefore likely much older) in Journal of American Folklore. The journal asserted the song was sung by “Eastern North Carolina Negroes.” Which is all to say, the song’s ambiguous origin is rooted in the cultural milieu and tensions of the American South during the days and decades of Jim Crow and after the Civil War. It was used by the Coens as a disturbingly beautiful song of annihilation put in the mouths of mass murdering racists, and it is now used to signal what appears to be the first Benoit Blanc mystery to return to the region of Benoit’s home: the American South. (This setting is seemingly further verified by the fact that one of the film’s law enforcement figures is dressed like someone from an American sheriff’s office as opposed to an English village.) This is all of course speculation, but to use this song and Stanley’s Grammy-winning version of it specifically is likely a deliberate choice on Johnson’s part. And given how Johnson is unafraid to use what on the surface appear to be cozy murder mysteries to interrogate larger issues of social rot and inequality in the modern world via both Knives Out and Glass Onion, we are left to wonder just how deeply Southern the roots of his third murder mystery will run. Wake Up Dead Man premieres on Dec. 12 on Netflix.

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 85, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, sorry in advance that this week is a tiny bit politics-y, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I’ve been reading about Sean Evans and music fraud and ayahuasca, playing with the new Obsidian Bases feature, obsessing over every Cliche” more times than I’m proud of, installing some Elgato Key Lights to improve my WFH camera look, digging the latest beta of Artifacts, and downloading every podcast I can find because I have 20 hours of driving to do this weekend.I also have for you a very funny new movie about tech CEOs, a new place to WhatsApp, a great new accessory for your phone, a helpful crypto politics explainer, and much more. Short week this week, but still lots going on. Let’s do it.(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you reading / playing / watching / listening to / shopping for / doing with a Raspberry Pi this week? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, tell them to subscribe here. And if you haven’t subscribed, you should! You’ll get every issue for free, a day early, in your inbox.)The DropMountainhead. I mean, is there a more me-coded pitch than “Succession vibes, but about tech bros?” It’s about a bunch of (pretty recognizable) billionaires who more or less run the world and are also more or less ruining it. You’ll either find this hilarious, way too close to home, or both. WhatsApp for iPad. I will never, ever understand why Meta hates building iPad apps. But it finally launched the most important one! The app itself is extremely fine and exactly what you’d think it would be, but whatever. It exists! DO INSTAGRAM NEXT.Post Games.Polygon, all about video games. It’s only a couple episodes deep, but so far I love the format: it’s really smart and extremely thoughtful, but it’s also very silly in spots. Big fan.The Popsockets Kick-Out Grip. I am a longtime, die-hard Popsockets user and evangelist, and the new model fixes my one gripe with the thing by working as both a landscape and portrait kickstand. $40 is highway robbery for a phone holder, but this is exactly the thing I wanted.“Dance with Sabrina.” A new, real-time competitive rhythm game inside of Fortnite, in which you try to do well enough to earn the right to actually help create the show itself. Super fun concept, though all these games are better with pads, guitars, or really anything but a normal controller.Lazy 2.0. Lazy is a stealthy but fascinating note-taking tool, and it does an unusually good job of integrating with files and apps. The new version is very AI-forward, basically bringing a personalized chatbot and all your notes to your whole computer. Neat!Elden Ring Nightreign. A multiplayer-heavy spinoff of the game that I cannot get my gamer friends to shut up about, even years after it came out. I’ve seen a few people call the game a bit small and repetitive, but next to Elden Ring I suppose most things are.The Tapo DL100 Smart Deadbolt Door Lock. A $70 door lock with, as far as I can tell, every feature I want in a smart lock: a keypad, physical keys, super long battery life, and lots of assistant integrations. It does look… huge? But it’s pretty bland-looking, which is a good thing.Implosion: The Titanic Sub Disaster. One of a few Titan-related documentaries coming this summer, meant to try and explain what led to the awful events of a couple years ago. I haven’t seen this one yet, but the reviews are solid — and the story seems even sadder and more infuriating than we thought.“The growing scandal of $TRUMP.” I love a good Zeke Faux take on crypto, whether it’s a book or a Search Engine episode. This interview with Ezra Klein is a great explainer of how the Trump family got so into crypto and how it’s being used to move money in deeply confusing and clearly corrupt ways. Cameron Faulkner isn’t technically new to The Verge, he’s just newly back at The Verge. In addition to being a commerce editor on our team, he also wrote one of the deepest dives into webcams you’ll ever find, plays a lot of games, has more thoughts about monitors than any reasonable person should, and is extremely my kind of person. Since he’s now so very back, I asked Cam to share his homescreen with us, as I always try to do with new people here. Here it is, plus some info on the apps he uses and why:The phone: Pixel 9 Pro.The wallpaper: It’s an “Emoji Workshop” creation, which is a feature that’s built into Android 14 and more recent updates. It mashes together emoji into the patterns and colors of your choosing. I picked this one because I like sushi, and I love melon / coral color tones.The apps: Google Keep, Settings, Clock, Phone, Chrome, Pocket Casts, Messages, Spotify.I haven’t downloaded a new app in ages. What’s shown on my homescreen has been there, unmoved, for longer than I can remember. I have digital light switches, a to-do list with the great (but paid) Stuff widget, a simple Google Fit widget to show me how much I moved today, and a couple Google Photos widgets of my lovely wife and son. I could probably function just fine if every app shuffled its location on my homescreen, except for the bottom row. That’s set in stone, never to be fiddled with.I also asked Cameron to share a few things he’s into right now. Here’s what he sent back:Righteous Gemstones on HBO Max. It’s a much smarter comedy than I had assumed (but it’s still dumb in the best ways), and I’m delighted to have four seasons to catch up on. I’m really digging Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which achieves the feat of breakneck pacing (the game equivalent of a page-turner) and a style that rivals Persona 5, which is high praise. I have accrued well over a dozen Switch 2 accessories, and I’m excited to put them to the test once I get a console on launch day.CrowdsourcedHere’s what the Installer community is into this week. I want to know what you’re into right now, as well! Email installer@theverge.com or message me on Signal — @davidpierce.11 — with your recommendations for anything and everything, and we’ll feature some of our favorites here every week. For even more great recommendations, check out the replies to this post on Threads and this post on Bluesky.“The Devil’s Plan. This Netflix original South Korean reality show locks 14 contestants in a windowless living space that’s part mansion, part prison, part room escape, and challenges them to eliminate each other in a series of complicated tabletop games. (If this sounds familiar, it’s a spiritual successor to the beloved series The Genius from the mid-2010s.)” — Travis“If you’re a fan of Drive to Survive, I’m happy to report that the latest season of Netflix’s series on NASCAR is finally good, and a reasonable substitute for that show once you’ve finished it.” — Christopher“I switched to a Pixel 9 Pro XL and Pixel Watch 3 from an iPhone and Apple Watch about 6 months ago and found Open Bubbles, an open source alternative to BlueBubbles that does need a Mac but doesn’t need that Mac to remain on, You just need a one-time hardware identifier from it, then it gives you full iMessage, Find My, FaceTime, and iCloud shared albums on Android and Windows using an email address. So long as you can get your contacts to iMessage your email instead of your number, it works great.” — Tim“Playing Mario Kart 8 Deluxe for the last time before Mario Kart World arrives next week and takes over my life!” — Ravi“With Pocket being killed off I’ve started using my RSS reader — which is Inoreader — instead as a suitable replacement. I only switched over to Pocket after Omnivore shut down.” — James“I just got a Boox Go 10.3 for my birthday and love it. The lack of front lighting is the biggest downfall. It is also only on Android 12 so I cannot load a corporate profile. It feels good to write on just, almost as good as my cheaper fountain pen and paper. It is helping me organize multiple notebooks and scraps of paper.” — Sean“Giving Tweek a bit of a go, and for a lightweight weekly planner it’s beautiful. I also currently use Motion for project management of personal tasks and when I was doing my Master’s. I really like the Gantt view to map out long term personal and study projects. (I also got a student discount for Motion, but it’s still expensive.)” — Astrid“Might I suggest Elle Griffin’s work at The Elysian? How she’s thinking through speculative futures and a cooperative media system is fascinating.” — Zach“GeForce Now on Steam Deck!” — SteveSigning offOne of the reasons I like making this newsletter with all of you is that it’s a weekly reminder that, hey, actually, there’s a lot of awesome people doing awesome stuff out there on the internet. I spend a lot of my time talking to people who say AI is going to change everything, and we’re all going to just AI ourselves into oblivion and be thrilled about it — a theory I increasingly think is both wrong and horrifying.And then this week I read a blog post from the great Dan Sinker, who called this moment “the Who Cares Era, where completely disposable things are shoddily produced for people to mostly ignore.” You should read the whole thing, but here’s a bit I really loved:“Using extraordinary amounts of resources, it has the ability to create something good enough, a squint-and-it-looks-right simulacrum of normality. If you don’t care, it’s miraculous. If you do, the illusion falls apart pretty quickly. The fact that the userbase for AI chatbots has exploded exponentially demonstrates that good enough is, in fact, good enough for most people. Because most people don’t care.”I don’t think this describes everything and everyone, and neither does Sinker, but I do think it’s more true than it should be. And I increasingly think our job, maybe our method of rebellion, is to be people who care, who have taste, who like and share and look for good things, who read and watch and look at those things on purpose instead of just staring slackjawed at whatever slop is placed between the ads they hope we won’t really notice. I think there are a lot of fascinating ways that AI can be useful, but we can’t let it train us to accept slop just because it’s there. Sorry, this got more existential than I anticipated. But I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and I’m going to try and point Installer even more at the stuff that matters, made by people who care. I hope you’ll hold me to that.See you next week!See More:

How far would you go to keep yourself private online? There’s little doubt that advances in technology over the past three decades have eroded traditional concepts around privacy and security: It was once unthinkable to voluntarily invite big companies to track your every move and decision—now, we happily let them in exchange for the digital goods and services we rely on (or are hopelessly addicted to). Most people these days either tolerate these privacy intrusions or outright don’t care about them. But there’s a growing movement that believes it’s time to claim our privacy back. Some are working piecemeal, blocking trackers and reducing permissions where they can, while not totally ditching modern digital society as a whole. Others, however, are as hardcore as can be—a modern equivalent of "going off the grid."  We put out a call looking for the latter—people who are going to great lengths to protect their privacy in today’s mass surveillance world. We received a number of insightful, fascinating, and unique situations, but for this piece, I want to highlight four specific perspectives: "Ed," "Jane," "Mark," and "Jay."Ed is "ruthless" with app choices and permissionsThe first respondent, I’ll call Ed, since their privacy journey began with the Edward Snowden leaks: “I'd known something was likely up…as early as 2006[.] I remember headlines about AT&T possibly spying, but high school me didn't take it too seriously at the time. The Snowden leaks, when I was in college, really opened my eyes. Ever since, I've taken steps to protect my privacy.”Ed says the biggest step they’ve taken towards a digitally private life has been their Proton account. If you’re not aware, Proton is a company that offers apps designed for privacy. Their email service, Proton Mail, is the most famous of the company’s products, but Proton makes other apps as well. Ed uses many of them, including Proton VPN, Proton Calendar, and Proton Drive. Ed pays for Proton Ultimate, which costs them nearly $200 every two years (a new account is now billed yearly at $119.88). You don’t have to pay for Proton, but your experience is much more limited. That’s not totally dissimilar to Google’s offers, which gives you more features if you pay, but most people can definitely get by with a free Google Account. I'm not so sure the reverse is true. Speaking of Google, Ed does have a Google Account, but rarely logs into it. They don’t keep anything attached to it, however—Ed stores all files, for example, in Proton Drive or Tresoirt (another end-to-end encrypted service).Ed uses SimpleLogin for throwaway email addresses. That’s not just for the times Ed wants to avoid giving their email address to someone. According to them, they use an alias anytime an organization asks for their email, and frequently delete it when it’s no longer useful. Each online purchase gets its own alias, and that alias is deleted once the purchase is complete. Whenever Ed travels, they use an alias for any flights, hotels, and rental cars they use. Once the trip is up, they delete the alias. If one of those aliases receives a spam message, they delete it as well.Ed’s smartphone of choice is iPhone, and although Apple arguably has the best reputation for privacy in big tech, Ed is no fan: “Apple is no bastion of privacy of course, but they seem to be the least-worst of the big tech companies.” Ed doesn’t use iCloud for any backups: Any iPhone files are kept in Tresorit. That iPhone, of course, contains apps. But each app is there for a reason, and no app gets access to permissions unless it requires it: “I'm ruthless about apps and app permissions. If I'm not going to use the app regularly, I uninstall it. I grant only those permissions I think the app reasonably needs.” Ed protects his mobile internet traffic with Proton VPN, and only accesses the web via Firefox Focus, a special version of Firefox designed for privacy. Location services are always off on Ed’s iPhone, unless they’re using Apple Maps for navigation. Once they arrive at their destination, Ed disables location services again. They also have an interesting trick for getting back home without revealing their actual address:  “Additionally, when I'm navigating home, I don't enter my home address. I enter the address down the street just as an extra layer so I'm not entering my actual home address…I'll end navigation and turn off location while still driving…if I know the rest of the way home myself."Most of us deal regularly (if not daily) with spam calls. Not Ed: They use the “Silence Unknown Callers” setting on iOS to send all numbers not in the Contacts app to voicemail. They then review all voicemails, and if they didn’t leave a message, they block the number. Our initial call out for this piece referenced how using a VPN can sometimes block incoming phone calls, but Ed isn’t bothered by that: “Since most calls these days are scams or telemarketing, and most people I do want to talk to aren't going to call me anyway, I see this as more of a feature than a bug.” For their desktop computing needs, Ed uses Windows. They admit they aren’t privacy experts when it comes to Microsoft’s OS, but they do what they can, including changing all privacy settings and uninstalling all programs they don’t use. (That includes OneDrive and Edge.) They also run a clean version of Windows 11 after following Lifehacker’s guide. Firefox is their go-to PC browser, and they use a variety of extensions, including:ClearURLs: removes trackers from links.Decentraleyes: blocks data requests from third-party networks. Disconnect: blocks trackers from "thousands" of third-party sites.Firefox Multi-Account Containers: separates your browsing into siloed "containers" to isolate each session from one another.PopUpOFF: blocks pop-ups, overlays, and cookie alerts.Privacy Badger: blocks invisible trackers.Proton VPN: Proton's Firefox add-on for its VPN.uBlock Origin: popular content blocker.Ed didn’t say how much of an impact this array of extensions and settings has on their browsing, save for YouTube, which they admit does sometimes give them trouble. However, Ed has workarounds: “When YouTube wants me to 'sign in to confirm you're not a bot,' changing VPN servers usually does the trick.” Ed also uses the audible clues for ReCAPTCHA prompts, rather than the pictures, since they don’t want to help train Google’s “braindead AI.”Ed deleted all their social media accounts, including Facebook, X, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Though they’ve never had TikTok installed on their phone, they will watch it in Firefox when a friend sends them a video. Jane uses an open-source smartphone OS designed for privacyWhile Edward Snowden may have kicked off Ed’s interest in personal privacy, "Jane" has many strong beliefs motivating their desire for privacy. They are concerned about data brokers and Meta’s practices of tracking internet activity, and how these companies build profiles based on that data to sell to third-parties; they’re concerned about the possibility of telecommunication companies tracking our locations via cellular towers; they worry about US law enforcement and agencies reviewing citizens’ social media accounts accounts and tracking people. Their focus on privacy is fueled by true concern for their own well-being, not only the value of privacy as a concept.      Jane uses a VPN on all of their devices. Instead of Proton, however, Jane opts for Mullvad. They enable ad and tracker blocking, as well as a kill switch, which blocks your internet if you lose connection with the VPN—thus protecting your connection from being leaked out of the secure network.I’m a big advocate for strong and unique passwords and proper password management, but Jane definitely beats me when it comes to secure credentials. Jane uses six to eight-word passphrases generated by diceware, a tactic that chooses words based on dice rolls. Something like this diceware generator will roll a die five times, then find a word in a bank based on that five-digit number. You can repeat this as many times as you want to come up with a passphrase built up with random words. Jane saves all of their passphrases to a password manager, except for the ones for important accounts, like their bank. They commit those to memory, just in case someone breaches their password manager.     Like Ed, Jane uses Mullvad, but instead of just using their VPN, they opt for the web browser, which has those protections built in. Mullvad’s strict privacy settings break persistent logins on websites, so any sites Jane wants to stay logged in on are kept in Brave browser. For both Mullvad and Brave, Jane uses uBlock Origin.“From time-to-time I do run into sites that will block access due to being on a VPN or blocking ads and trackers. Instead of disabling [my] VPN completely, switching my connection to one of Mullvad's rented servers instead of ones they own usually helps. Barring that, I occasionally go into [uBlock Origin] and temporarily whitelist a needed [URL] ([ReCAPTCHA] etc). This works for me to get around site blocks most of the time.”  Jane uses a Mac, and configured macOS based on various privacy guides. But instead of an iPhone, Jane opts for a Google Pixel. That might surprise readers who assumed hardcore privacy enthusiasts would break away from Google entirely. But X doesn’t run Android: Instead, they installed GrapheneOS on their Pixel, an open-source OS designed for privacy. Following a restart, Jane configured the Pixel to only unlock with a seven-word dice passphrase—for general use, they use a fingerprint scan and a six-digit PIN. If the don’t unlock their Pixel for a while, their phone automatically reboots to put it back into this “First Unlock” state. They also keep airplane mode on at all times to disable the phone’s radio communications, but maintain a wifi connection with timed automatic Bluetooth and wireless disabling. Jane also deleted all their social media accounts after downloading all data associated with those platforms.Mark uses phone and credit card masks“Mark” is perhaps the least hardcore of the respondents in this story, but that makes their experience both interesting and relatable. Unlike most of the people we spoke to, Mark is still on Facebook and Instagram. That’s due to their job, which requires them to be on the platform, but they’ve been “systematically” deleting everything they can over their 19-year Facebook history and saving the data to an external hard drive. Mark doesn’t follow anything that isn’t relevant to their job, and only uses Facebook and Instagram inside the DuckDuckGo browser. They don’t react to posts they see, and following their privacy tactics, Facebook doesn’t show them relevant ads anymore. “If there is an ad I'm actually interested in I'll search it up in a different browser rather than click it.”Mark has had four Google Accounts in their time online, and has deleted two so far. Like Facebook, they have to use Google for their job, but they delegate all their work to Chrome. All other browsing runs through Firefox, DuckDuckGo, or Tor. The latter is perhaps best known for being the browser of choice for browsing the dark web, but what makes it great for that is also what makes it a great choice for private browsing.Unlike others in this story, Mark hasn’t de-Googled themselves completely. In addition to using Chrome for work, Mark has a phone mask through Google, and has their contacts, calendar, and maps tied to the company—though they are moving away from Google as much as they can. They've been running through their old emails to find and delete outdated accounts they no longer use. Any accounts they do need now use an email mask that forwards to a Mailfence account, an encrypted email service.   Mark was the only respondent to talk about entertainment in relation to privacy: “I've also been switching to physical media over streaming, so buying CDs and DVDs, locally as much as possible. I'm lucky to have a local music store and a local bookstore...one of the owners of our bookstore wrote a book on how to resist Amazon and why. Any book I want, I can either order through them or on Alibris. For music, I use our local record store and Discogs.”When shopping online, Mark uses a credit card mask, but still uses the card itself when shopping in person. They want to start using a credit card mask in retail locations like Janet Vertesi, an associate professor of sociology at Princeton University, but they haven’t quite gotten there yet.   What really piqued my interest most about Mark, however, wasn’t their perspective on their own privacy concerns, but the concerns around the privacy of their kids: “They each have a Gmail, two of them have Snapchat. Their schools use Gaggle and Google to spy on them. I don't even know how to start disconnecting them from all this...I was a kid during the wild west of the internet and this feels like getting back to my roots. My kids are end users who understand apps and touchscreens, not torrenting their music or coding a basic website. (Is this my version of "I drank out of the garden hose"?) I feel like Big Data has its grip on the kids already and I don't have a guidebook on navigating that as a parent.”  Mark’s current focus on their kids’ privacy includes deleting their health data from their local health system. That’s in part due to a data breach impacting the health system, but also the language about autism from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the current Secretary of Health and Human Services.Jay de-googled their life and uses a VoIP phone number"Jay's" origin story with personal privacy dates back to 2017. That year, Equifax suffered a major hack, where nearly 148 million Americans had sensitive data stolen and weren’t notified about the breach for months. Jay was frustrated: You don’t choose to give your data to Equifax, or any credit bureau, and yet so many people lost their data. They also felt that companies were not properly held responsible for these events, and lawmakers were simply too out of touch to do what was necessary to protect citizens’ privacy, so they took it upon themselves to protect their own data. Ever since this incident, Jay freezes their credit: “It was frustratingly difficult back then, but nowadays, it is very easy (it just requires an account, which I use a burner email for)...The freeze will not allow anyone to pull credit for large purchases in your name, even if they have your social security number (and because of the data breach, someone probably does). I decided I wanted to pursue some privacy for the things I do have a choice over.”  From here, Jay de-googled their life, including both Google Search as well as YouTube. They’ve found no issue with using alternative search engines, and, in fact, sees Google getting worse, as it tries to show you results based on what it thinks it knows about you, not what is most relevant to your actual query: “The internet was supposed to be a place you went to find information, not where you became the information that companies take instead."Jay uses tools to prevent fingerprinting, where companies identify you and track you across the internet, but worries that going too far with things like ad blockers puts a target on your back as well. Jay chooses to pick “a couple of effective tools,” and runs with those.For their smartphone needs, Jay goes with Apple. Like Ed, Jay doesn’t believe Apple is perfect, and even considers their privacy policies a bit of a gimmick, but sees them as the better alternative to Android. Jay likes the security of the App Store, and the array of privacy features in both Safari and Apple Accounts as a whole. They highlight Safari’s “Advanced Tracking and Fingerprinting Protection” feature, which helps block trackers as you browse the web; iCloud’s Private Relay, which hides your IP address; and “Hide My Email,” which generates email aliases you can share with others without giving your true email address away.Most of us are plagued with spam calls, but following the Robinhood data breach in 2021, Jay started receiving a flood of them. They decided to change their phone number and made a point of never sharing it with businesses. For the times they need to give out their number to parties they don’t trust, they use a number generated by My Sudo, which, for $20 per year, gives them a VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) phone number. It works with most services that rely on SMS, but it won’t function for two-factor authentication. (Which is fine, seeing as SMS-based 2FA is the weakest form of secondary authentication.) My Sudo lets you change your number for an additional $1, so if Jay’s number ever was compromised or started receiving too much spam, they could swap it.        Jay, like many respondents, deleted all social media services: “It has its place in society for a lot of people, and is no doubt a great way to connect. However, I found that the fear of deleting it was a lot worse than actually deleting it. The people you care about won’t forget you exist.” That said, Jay doesn't mind any of the obstacles this lifestyle does throw their way: “It is a challenging topic, as most people consider you a little bit 'out there' if you take steps to make your life a little less convenient, but more private. The modern world sells you convenience, while pretending it is free, and harvesting your data for so much more than you actually get out of your relationship to them.”      What it takes to be private on the modern internetThere's no one way to tackle personal privacy. Every one of the respondents to our query had something unique about their approach, and many had different motivations behind why they were so concerned about their privacy.There are plenty of common through lines, of course. Most privacy people love Proton, which makes sense. Proton seems to be the only company that offers a suite of apps most closely resembling Google's while also prioritizing privacy. If you want your email, calendar, word processor, and even your VPN all tied up nicely under one privacy-focused umbrella, that's Proton. But not everyone wants an ecosystem, either. That's why you see respondents using other VPNs, like Mullvad, or other private storage options, like Tresorit. These apps and services exist—they might just not be owned by one company, like Apple or Google (or Proton).Google and Meta are more commonalities, in that most privacy enthusiasts ditch them entirely. Some, like Mark, haven't been able to fully shake off these data-hungry companies. In Mark's case, that's because they need these platforms for work. But while most hardcore privacy people delete their Google and Meta accounts, most of us have trouble de-Googling and de-Metaing our digital lives. In general, though, the keys to privacy success include the following: Use a VPN to protect your internet traffic; prioritize privacy in your web browser, both through the browser itself, as well as extensions that block ads and protect your traffic; shield your sensitive information whenever possible, by using email aliases, alternate phone numbers, or credit card masks; use strong and unique passwords for all accounts, and store those passwords in a secure password manager; use two-factor authentication whenever possible (perhaps passkeys, when available); and stick to end-to-end encrypted chat apps to communicate with others. While there's always more you can do, that's the perfect storm to keep your digital life as private as reasonably possible. Some might read through the examples here and see steps that are too much effort to be worth it. It might seem out of reach to ditch Gmail and Instagram, break certain websites, and force your friends and family to learn new numbers and email addresses to protect your privacy, especially if you don't feel your privacy has that much of an impact on your life. But even if you aren't sold on the concept of privacy itself, there are real-world results from sticking with these methods. Jay no longer receives spam calls and texts; Mark no longer sees ads that are freakishly relevant to their likes. It's a lifestyle change, to be sure, but it's not just to serve some concept of privacy. You can see results by changing the way you interact with the internet, all without having to actually disconnect from the internet, and, by extension, the world at large.