Essex Police has not properly considered the potentially discriminatory impacts of its live facial recognition (LFR) use, according to documents obtained by Big Brother Watch and shared with Computer Weekly. While the force claims in an equality impact assessment (EIA) that “Essex Police has carefully considered issues regarding bias and algorithmic injustice”, privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch said the document – obtained under Freedom of Information (FoI) rules – shows it has likely failed to fulfil its public sector equality duty (PSED) to consider how its policies and practices could be discriminatory. The campaigners highlighted how the force is relying on false comparisons to other algorithms and “parroting misleading claims” from the supplier about the LFR system’s lack of bias. For example, Essex Police said that when deploying LFR, it will set the system threshold “at 0.6 or above, as this is the level whereby equitability of the rate of false positive identification across all demographics is achieved”. However, this figure is based on the National Physical Laboratory’s (NPL) testing of NEC’s Neoface V4 LFR algorithm deployed by the Metropolitan Police and South Wales Police, which Essex Police does not use. Instead, Essex Police has opted to use an algorithm developed by Israeli biometrics firm Corsight, whose chief privacy officer, Tony Porter, was formerly the UK’s surveillance camera commissioner until January 2021. Highlighting testing of the Corsight_003 algorithm conducted in June 2022 by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the EIA also claims it has “a bias differential FMR [False Match Rate] of 0.0006 overall, the lowest of any tested within NIST at the time of writing, according to the supplier”. However, looking at the NIST website, where all of the testing data is publicly shared, there is no information to support the figure cited by Corsight, or its claim to essentially have the least biased algorithm available. A separate FoI response to Big Brother Watch confirmed that, as of 16 January 2025, Essex Police had not conducted any “formal or detailed” testing of the system itself, or otherwise commissioned a third party to do so. Essex Police's lax approach to assessing the dangers of a controversial and dangerous new form of surveillance has put the rights of thousands at risk Jake Hurfurt, Big Brother Watch “Looking at Essex Police’s EIA, we are concerned about the force’s compliance with its duties under equality law, as the reliance on shaky evidence seriously undermines the force’s claims about how the public will be protected against algorithmic bias,” said Jake Hurfurt, head of research and investigations at Big Brother Watch. “Essex Police’s lax approach to assessing the dangers of a controversial and dangerous new form of surveillance has put the rights of thousands at risk. This slapdash scrutiny of their intrusive facial recognition system sets a worrying precedent. “Facial recognition is notorious for misidentifying women and people of colour, and Essex Police’s willingness to deploy the technology without testing it themselves raises serious questions about the force’s compliance with equalities law. Essex Police should immediately stop their use of facial recognition surveillance.” The need for UK police forces deploying facial recognition to consider how their use of the technology could be discriminatory was highlighted by a legal challenge brought against South Wales Police by Cardiff resident Ed Bridges. In August 2020, the UK Court of Appeal ruled that the use of LFR by the force was unlawful because the privacy violations it entailed were “not in accordance” with legally permissible restrictions on Bridges’ Article 8 privacy rights; it did not conduct an appropriate data protection impact assessment (DPIA); and it did not comply with its PSED to consider how its policies and practices could be discriminatory. The judgment specifically found that the PSED is a “duty of process and not outcome”, and requires public bodies to take reasonable steps “to make enquiries about what may not yet be known to a public authority about the potential impact of a proposed decision or policy on people with the relevant characteristics, in particular for present purposes race and sex”. Big Brother Watch said equality assessments must rely on “sufficient quality evidence” to back up the claims being made and ultimately satisfy the PSED, but that the documents obtained do not demonstrate the force has had “due regard” for equalities. Academic Karen Yeung, an interdisciplinary professor at Birmingham Law School and School of Computer Science, told Computer Weekly that, in her view, the EIA is “clearly inadequate”. She also criticised the document for being “incoherent”, failing to look at the systemic equalities impacts of the technology, and relying exclusively on testing of entirely different software algorithms used by other police forces trained on different populations: “This does not, in my view, fulfil the requirements of the public sector equality duty. It is a document produced from a cut-and-paste exercise from the largely irrelevant material produced by others.” Computer Weekly contacted Essex Police about every aspect of the story. “We take our responsibility to meet our public sector equality duty very seriously, and there is a contractual requirement on our LFR partner to ensure sufficient testing has taken place to ensure the software meets the specification and performance outlined in the tender process,” said a spokesperson. “There have been more than 50 deployments of our LFR vans, scanning 1.7 million faces, which have led to more than 200 positive alerts, and nearly 70 arrests. “To date, there has been one false positive, which, when reviewed, was established to be as a result of a low-quality photo uploaded onto the watchlist and not the result of bias issues with the technology. This did not lead to an arrest or any other unlawful action because of the procedures in place to verify all alerts. This issue has been resolved to ensure it does not occur again.” The spokesperson added that the force is also committed to carrying out further assessment of the software and algorithms, with the evaluation of deployments and results being subject to an independent academic review. “As part of this, we have carried out, and continue to do so, testing and evaluation activity in conjunction with the University of Cambridge. The NPL have recently agreed to carry out further independent testing, which will take place over the summer. The company have also achieved an ISO 42001 certification,” said the spokesperson. “We are also liaising with other technical specialists regarding further testing and evaluation activity.” However, the force did not comment on why it was relying on the testing of a completely different algorithm in its EIA, or why it had not conducted or otherwise commissioned its own testing before operationally deploying the technology in the field. Computer Weekly followed up Essex Police for clarification on when the testing with Cambridge began, as this is not mentioned in the EIA, but received no response by time of publication. Although Essex Police and Corsight claim the facial recognition algorithm in use has “a bias differential FMR of 0.0006 overall, the lowest of any tested within NIST at the time of writing”, there is no publicly available data on NIST’s website to support this claim. Drilling down into the demographic split of false positive rates shows, for example, that there is a factor of 100 more false positives in West African women than for Eastern European men. While this is an improvement on the previous two algorithms submitted for testing by Corsight, other publicly available data held by NIST undermines Essex Police’s claim in the EIA that the “algorithm is identified by NIST as having the lowest bias variance between demographics”. Looking at another metric held by NIST – FMR Max/Min, which refers to the ratio between demographic groups that give the most and least false positives – it essentially represents how inequitable the error rates are across different age groups, sexes and ethnicities. In this instance, smaller values represent better performance, with the ratio being an estimate of how many times more false positives can be expected in one group over another. According to the NIST webpage for “demographic effects” in facial recognition algorithms, the Corsight algorithm has an FMR Max/Min of 113(22), meaning there are at least 21 algorithms that display less bias. For comparison, the least biased algorithm according to NIST results belongs to a firm called Idemia, which has an FMR Max/Min of 5(1). However, like Corsight, the highest false match rate for Idemia’s algorithm was for older West African women. Computer Weekly understands this is a common problem with many of the facial recognition algorithms NIST tests because this group is not typically well-represented in the underlying training data of most firms. Computer Weekly also confirmed with NIST that the FMR metric cited by Corsight relates to one-to-one verification, rather than the one-to-many situation police forces would be using it in. This is a key distinction, because if 1,000 people are enrolled in a facial recognition system that was built on one-to-one verification, then the false positive rate will be 1,000 times larger than the metrics held by NIST for FMR testing. “If a developer implements 1:N (one-to-many) search as N 1:1 comparisons, then the likelihood of a false positive from a search is expected to be proportional to the false match for the 1:1 comparison algorithm,” said NIST scientist Patrick Grother. “Some developers do not implement 1:N search that way.” Commenting on the contrast between this testing methodology and the practical scenarios the tech will be deployed in, Birmingham Law School’s Yeung said one-to-one is for use in stable environments to provide admission to spaces with limited access, such as airport passport gates, where only one person’s biometric data is scrutinised at a time. “One-to-many is entirely different – it’s an entirely different process, an entirely different technical challenge, and therefore cannot typically achieve equivalent levels of accuracy,” she said. Computer Weekly contacted Corsight about every aspect of the story related to its algorithmic testing, including where the “0.0006” figure is drawn from and its various claims to have the “least biased” algorithm. “The facts presented in your article are partial, manipulated and misleading,” said a company spokesperson. “Corsight AI’s algorithms have been tested by numerous entities, including NIST, and have been proven to be the least biased in the industry in terms of gender and ethnicity. This is a major factor for our commercial and government clients.” However, Corsight was either unable or unwilling to specify which facts are “partial, manipulated or misleading” in response to Computer Weekly’s request for clarification. Computer Weekly also contacted Corsight about whether it has done any further testing by running N one-to-one comparisons, and whether it has changed the system’s threshold settings for detecting a match to suppress the false positive rate, but received no response on these points. While most facial recognition developers submit their algorithms to NIST for testing on an annual or bi-annual basis, Corsight last submitted an algorithm in mid-2022. Computer Weekly contacted Corsight about why this was the case, given that most algorithms in NIST testing show continuous improvement with each submission, but again received no response on this point. The Essex Police EIA also highlights testing of the Corsight algorithm conducted in 2022 by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), claiming it demonstrated “Corsight’s capability to perform equally across all demographics”. However, Big Brother Watch’s Hurfurt highlighted that the DHS study focused on bias in the context of true positives, and did not assess the algorithm for inequality in false positives. This is a key distinction for the testing of LFR systems, as false negatives where the system fails to recognise someone will likely not lead to incorrect stops or other adverse effects, whereas a false positive where the system confuses two people could have more severe consequences for an individual. The DHS itself also publicly came out against Corsight’s representation of the test results, after the firm claimed in subsequent marketing materials that “no matter how you look at it, Corsight is ranked #1. #1 in overall recognition, #1 in dark skin, #1 in Asian, #1 in female”. Speaking with IVPM in August 2023, DHS said: “We do not know what this claim, being ‘#1’ is referring to.” The department added that the rules of the testing required companies to get their claims cleared through DHS to ensure they do not misrepresent their performance. In its breakdown of the test results, IVPM noted that systems of multiple other manufacturers achieved similar results to Corsight. The company did not respond to a request for comment about the DHS testing. Computer Weekly contacted Essex Police about all the issues raised around Corsight testing, but received no direct response to these points from the force. While Essex Police claimed in its EIA that it “also sought advice from their own independent Data and Digital Ethics Committee in relation to their use of LFR generally”, meeting minutes obtained via FoI rules show that key impacts had not been considered. For example, when one panel member questioned how LFR deployments could affect community events or protests, and how the force could avoid the technology having a “chilling presence”, the officer present (whose name has been redacted from the document) said “that’s a pretty good point, actually”, adding that he had “made a note” to consider this going forward. The EIA itself also makes no mention of community events or protests, and does not specify how different groups could be affected by these different deployment scenarios. Elsewhere in the EIA, Essex Police claims that the system is likely to have minimal impact across age, gender and race, citing the 0.6 threshold setting, as well as NIST and DHS testing, as ways of achieving “equitability” across different demographics. Again, this threshold setting relates to a completely different system used by the Met and South Wales Police. For each protected characteristic, the EIA has a section on “mitigating” actions that can be taken to reduce adverse impacts. While the “ethnicity” section again highlights the National Physical Laboratory’s testing of a completely different algorithm, most other sections note that “any watchlist created will be done so as close to the deployment as possible, therefore hoping to ensure the most accurate and up-to-date images of persons being added are uploaded”. However, Yeung noted that the EIA makes no mention of the specific watchlist creation criteria beyond high-level “categories of images” that can be included, and the claimed equality impacts of that process. For example, it does not consider how people from certain ethnic minority or religious backgrounds could be disproportionally impacted as a result of their over-representation in police databases, or the issue of unlawful custody image retention whereby the Home Office is continuing to hold millions of custody images illegally in the Police National Database (PND). While the ethics panel meeting minutes offer greater insight into how Essex Police is approaching watchlist creation, the custody image retention issue was also not mentioned. Responding to Computer Weekly’s questions about the meeting minutes and the lack of scrutiny of key issues related to UK police LFR deployments, an Essex Police spokesperson said: “Our polices and processes around the use of live facial recognition have been carefully scrutinised through a thorough ethics panel.” Instead, the officer present explained how watchlists and deployments are decided based on the “intelligence case”, which then has to be justified as both proportionate and necessary. On the “Southend intelligence case”, the officer said deploying in the town centre would be permissible because “that’s where the most footfall is, the most opportunity to locate outstanding suspects”. They added: “The watchlist [then] has to be justified by the key elements, the policing purpose. Everything has to be proportionate and strictly necessary to be able to deploy… If the commander in Southend said, ‘I want to put everyone that’s wanted for shoplifting across Essex on the watchlist for Southend’, the answer would be no, because is it necessary? Probably not. Is it proportionate? I don’t think it is. Would it be proportionate to have individuals who are outstanding for shoplifting from the Southend area? Yes, because it’s local.” However, the officer also said that, on most occasions, the systems would be deployed to catch “our most serious offenders”, as this would be easier to justify from a public perception point of view. They added that, during the summer, it would be easier to justify deployments because of the seasonal population increase in Southend. “We know that there is a general increase in violence during those months. So, we don’t need to go down to the weeds to specifically look at grievous bodily harm [GBH] or murder or rape, because they’re not necessarily fuelled by a spike in terms of seasonality, for example,” they said. “However, we know that because the general population increases significantly, the level of violence increases significantly, which would justify that I could put those serious crimes on that watchlist.” Commenting on the responses given to the ethics panel, Yeung said they “failed entirely to provide me with confidence that their proposed deployments will have the required legal safeguards in place”. According to the Court of Appeal judgment against South Wales Police in the Bridges case, the force’s facial recognition policy contained “fundamental deficiencies” in relation to the “who” and “where” question of LFR. “In relation to both of those questions, too much discretion is currently left to individual police officers,” it said. “It is not clear who can be placed on the watchlist, nor is it clear that there are any criteria for determining where AFR [automated facial recognition] can be deployed.” Yeung added: “The same applies to these responses of Essex Police force, failing to adequately answer the ‘who’ and ‘where’ questions concerning their proposed facial recognition deployments. “Worse still, the court stated that a police force’s local policies can only satisfy the requirements that the privacy interventions arising from use of LFR are ‘prescribed by law’ if they are published. The documents were obtained by Big Brother Watch through freedom of information requests, strongly suggesting that these even these basic legal safeguards are not being met.” Yeung added that South Wales Police’s use of the technology was found to be unlawful in the Bridges case because there was excessive discretion left in the hands of individual police officers, allowing undue opportunities for arbitrary decision-making and abuses of power. Every decision ... must be specified in advance, documented and justified in accordance with the tests of proportionality and necessity. I don’t see any of that happening Karen Yeung, Birmingham Law School “Every decision – where you will deploy, whose face is placed on the watchlist and why, and the duration of deployment – must be specified in advance, documented and justified in accordance with the tests of proportionality and necessity,” she said. “I don’t see any of that happening. There are simply vague claims that ‘we’ll make sure we apply the legal test’, but how? They just offer unsubstantiated promises that ‘we will abide by the law’ without specifying how they will do so by meeting specific legal requirements.” Yeung further added these documents indicate that the police force is not looking for specific people wanted for serious crimes, but setting up dragnets for a wide variety of ‘wanted’ individuals, including those wanted for non-serious crimes such as shoplifting. “There are many platitudes about being ethical, but there’s nothing concrete indicating how they propose to meet the legal tests of necessity and proportionality,” she said. “In liberal democratic societies, every single decision about an individual by the police made without their consent must be justified in accordance with law. That means that the police must be able to justify and defend the reasons why every single person whose face is uploaded to the facial recognition watchlist meets the legal test, based on their specific operational purpose.” Yeung concluded that, assuming they can do this, police must also consider the equality impacts of their actions, and how different groups are likely to be affected by their practical deployments: “I don’t see any of that.” In response to the concerns raised around watchlist creation, proportionality and necessity, an Essex Police spokesperson said: “The watchlists for each deployment are created to identify specific people wanted for specific crimes and to enforce orders. To date, we have focused on the types of offences which cause the most harm to our communities, including our hardworking businesses. “This includes violent crime, drugs, sexual offences and thefts from shops. As a result of our deployments, we have arrested people wanted in connection with attempted murder investigations, high-risk domestic abuse cases, GBH, sexual assault, drug supply and aggravated burglary offences. We have also been able to progress investigations and move closer to securing justice for victims.” Read more about police data and technology Metropolitan Police to deploy permanent facial recognition tech in Croydon: The Met is set to deploy permanent live facial recognition cameras on street furniture in Croydon from summer 2025, but local councillors say the decision – which has taken place with no community input – will further contribute the over-policing of Black communities. UK MoJ crime prediction algorithms raise serious concerns: The Ministry of Justice is using one algorithm to predict people’s risk of reoffending and another to predict who will commit murder, but critics say the profiling in these systems raises ‘serious concerns’ over racism, classism and data inaccuracies. UK law enforcement data adequacy at risk: The UK government says reforms to police data protection rules will help to simplify law enforcement data processing, but critics argue the changes will lower protection to the point where the UK risks losing its European data adequacy.

On Tuesday, the Senate unanimously passed the No Tax on Tips Act, pushing one of President Donald Trump’s campaign promises one step closer to becoming law. The pledge to eliminate federal taxes on service and hospitality workers’ tips rallied voters in the 2024 election, so much so that even former Vice President Kamala Harris endorsed the idea in her campaign against Trump. Now, both Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill seem to want to make it a reality. It’s easy to see why “no tax on tips” has broad bipartisan support: It looks like a populist policy that gives lower-wage workers much-needed relief, and opposing it might make you seem out of touch with the working class. But as I wrote last year, “no tax on tips” would actually be more of a tax break for businesses that would cost the federal government an estimated $10 billion to $15 billion a year in tax revenue. In short, the policy incentivizes businesses to lower workers’ wages and make them rely more on tips. But that’s exactly the opposite of what workers — and tipped workers in particular — need. Tipped workers are underpaid. Some of them would certainly see their take-home pay increase if the federal government stops taxing them on tips, assuming that their wages stay the same. But tips can be volatile, and often vary by season, and a “no tax on tips” policy would make offseasons worse for tipped workers, who will likely be stuck with lower base pay. The reality is that the problem for tipped workers isn’t that their taxes are too high — it’s that their wages are far too low. Plus, not having their taxes tipped means workers might end up accruing less credit toward their Social Security. In fact, many underpaid workers won’t even see a difference from the policy. Some tipped workers — by some estimates more than a third of them — earn so little that they are already exempt from income taxes, which means that a “no tax on tips” law would do nothing to boost their take-home pay. More than that, “no tax on tips” doesn’t help out most low-wage workers: More than 95 percent of low- and moderate-wage workers don’t receive tips on a regular basis. So while Congress busies itself with flashy tax cuts that won’t go too far in helping low-wage workers, it might be better to focus on the root cause of tipped workers’ problem: the subminimum wage.What is the subminimum wage and why is it so low? The last federal minimum wage increase was in 2009, and it’s been the same since: $7.25 per hour. Many states have minimum wages that are higher than the federal level — but most also have a subminimum wage for tipped workers. That’s a carveout that allows employers to pay their workers less so long as they make up the difference in tips, and that wage is just $2.13 per hour. If a subminimum wage worker doesn’t make enough tips to reach the full minimum wage, the employer is required to pay the difference. These tiered minimum wages date back to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), passed in 1938. The legislation created a subminimum wage with the intention of encouraging employers to hire people “whose earning capacity is impaired by age or physical or mental deficiency or injury.” The idea was to ensure that job opportunities and work training programs would still be available for people with disabilities. But in 1966, Congress amended the FLSA to include a subminimum wage for workers who regularly receive tips, hoping this would lower payroll costs for service-sector businesses. This change fundamentally changed the culture around tipping: While customers used to give workers tips as a show of gratitude, tips became a necessity for workers in order to make ends meet. Since then, workers in the service and hospitality sectors in most places have been subject to a subminimum wage that has not increased since 1991. While tipped wages are often sold to workers as a benefit — in theory, there’s no limit to how much they can make if customers are generous — the reality is that their overall take-home pay, even including tips, is often not enough. For example, the median wage for waiters in 2024 was $33,760, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the bottom 10 percent of waiters earned about $18,000. For context, the standard deduction — that is, the portion of your income that is untaxed — is $29,200 for a married couple and $14,600 for an individual. “No tax on tips” might give waiters a small tax break, but it’s hardly enough to work as a meaningful solution to low wages.The movement to abolish the subminimum wageMany workers have grown frustrated with the tiered minimum wage system, leading to the creation of organizations like One Fair Wage, which advocates for getting rid of the subminimum wage — a measure that would likely help alleviate poverty. (At least eight states have eliminated the subminimum wage for tipped workers.) And because a handful of states have already abolished the subminimum wage in favor of one equal minimum wage for tipped and non-tipped workers alike, we can see how the former holds workers back.According to an analysis by the Center for American Progress, tipped workers have a higher poverty rate in states with a subminimum wage compared to states that have abolished it. In states with the subminimum wage, 14.8 percent of tipped workers live in poverty. By contrast, those same workers have a poverty rate of 11 percent in states that have gotten rid of the subminimum wage. The biggest problem with the “no tax on tips” idea is that it will likely only suppress wages, which will ultimately hurt workers in the long run. There are better ways Congress can help low-wage workers than eliminating taxes on tips, including by expanding the standard deduction — giving a meaningful tax cut to all low-wage workers, not just those who receive tips — or by finally getting rid of the subminimum wage. And they might consider increasing the minimum wage while they’re at it. After all, a raise is long overdue. This story is written for the Within Our Means newsletter. Sign up here.See More:

Targeting the immune system to fight cancer has been in the works for over a decade, and thanks to its precise, personalized approach, it's poised to shape the future of oncology. As our understanding of how immunotherapy can be used against cancer grows, scientists are now reconsidering existing drugs, particularly those that affect the immune system, for their potential role in cancer treatment.Alongside well-established medications like aspirin, showing potential to help the immune system combat cancer, researchers are now turning their attention to antidepressants — and the results are looking promising.A team from UCLA recently published a study in Cell showing how SSRIs, a widely prescribed class of antidepressants, can help the immune system suppress tumor growth across various cancer types. So instead of developing entirely new drugs, could the key lie in repurposing ones we already have?“These drugs have been widely and safely used to treat depression for decades, so repurposing them for cancer would be a lot easier than developing an entirely new therapy,” said senior study author Lili Yang, a member of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA, in a press statement.The Role of AntidepressantsSSRIs, or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, work by increasing levels of serotonin, a neurotransmitter associated with mood and focus, and by blocking the serotonin transporter (SERT), which typically regulates how much serotonin is available outside our cells. In people with depression, serotonin levels in the brain drop significantly — a problem that SSRIs like fluoxetine (Prozac), citalopram (Celexa), and sertraline (Zoloft) help to address.But serotonin isn’t just about mood. Only about 5 percent of the body’s serotonin is made in the brain. The rest acts as a signaling molecule in many essential bodily functions, including digestion — and, as recent research suggests, immune system regulation.While earlier lab studies hinted that serotonin might help stimulate T-cells, the immune system’s front-line soldiers, its precise role and potential in immunoregulation remained unclear. That is, until now.Antidepressants and Anti-Tumor PotentialBefore studying SSRIs, the UCLA team had explored another class of antidepressants called MAO inhibitors (MAOIs), which also increased serotonin levels by blocking an enzyme known as MAO-A. These drugs showed anti-tumor potential, but due to their higher risk of side effects, researchers shifted their focus to SSRIs.“SERT made for an especially attractive target because the drugs that act on it — SSRIs — are widely used with minimal side effects,” said Bo Li, the study’s first author, in the news release. By using SSRIs to boost serotonin availability, researchers aimed to outmaneuver one of cancer’s suggested strategies: depriving immune cells of the serotonin they need to function effectively.The results were encouraging. In both mouse and human tumor models of melanoma, breast, prostate, colon, and bladder cancers, SSRI treatment shrank tumors by over 50 precent. The key, according to Yang, was “increasing their access to serotonin,” which in turn enhanced the T-cells' ability to attack.Combining with Existing Cancer TreatmentsThe team also tested whether combining SSRIs with existing cancer treatments could offer even better results. The answer was yes. In follow-up experiments, all mice with melanoma or colon cancer that received both an SSRI and immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) therapy, a treatment designed to overcome the immune-suppressing nature of tumors, experienced significantly reduced tumor sizes.“Immune checkpoint blockades are effective in fewer than 25 percent of patients,” said study co-author James Elsten-Brown in the press release. “If a safe, widely available drug like an SSRI could make these therapies more effective, it would be hugely impactful.”Using therapies already deemed safe means fewer regulatory hurdles and faster clinical use.“Studies estimate the bench-to-bedside pipeline for new cancer therapies costs an average of $1.5 billion,” Yang said. “When you compare this to the estimated $300 million cost to repurpose FDA-approved drugs, it’s clear why this approach has so much potential.”This article is not offering medical advice and should be used for informational purposes only.Article SourcesOur writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:UCLA Broad Stem Cell Research Center: Drug commonly used as antidepressant helps fight cancer in miceHaving worked as a biomedical research assistant in labs across three countries, Jenny excels at translating complex scientific concepts – ranging from medical breakthroughs and pharmacological discoveries to the latest in nutrition – into engaging, accessible content. Her interests extend to topics such as human evolution, psychology, and quirky animal stories. When she’s not immersed in a popular science book, you’ll find her catching waves or cruising around Vancouver Island on her longboard.

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As our newest Operator, your role is to use your detective skills to assist our field agents and investigate mysterious crimes. Use cutting-edge FDI software to dig for clues, solve puzzles, and uncover the truth. The Town of Nie Iromusubi (HuneX, 22nd May, $39.19) - "The Town of Nie Iromusubi", a fan-disc of the strange and eerie otherworldly BL fantasy "The Town of Nie. "Weaving together extraordinary colors. Trident’s Tale (3DClouds, 22nd May, $24.99) - Set sail for an epic action-packed adventure in Trident’s Tale, where you’ll become Ocean, a bold young captain on a quest to reclaim the legendary Storm Trident—a mythical artifact that grants power over the seas. But beware the ocean is vast, treacherous, and crawling with danger at every turn! Weirdo (CASCHA GAMES, 22nd May, $10.99) - Parallel-Weirdo is a Japanese manga-style visual novel set in DYL High School. It follows Wang Zhe, an ordinary and frail boy, who tries to win the hearts of girls and complete What will you be downloading this week? (63 votes) A Bibelot: Tiret sur Will  0%ADVANCED V.G. Saturn Tribute2%Arcade Archives NebulasRay5%Casual Sport Series: Badminton  0%Cats Visiting Fairy Tales  0%Cattle Country3%Cipheur  0%Cookie Clicker8%Cozy Winter  0%Digger Simulator: Gold Rush  0%Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping8%Eggconsole Hydlide Ii Msx2%Extreme! 2-Choice Flag Quiz  0%Food Truck Business Simulator  0%Genopanic  0%Ghost Room Deep  0%Knight's Night!  0%Legends Aligned: Minis in Conflict  0%Merge Numbers  0%Mobile Suit Gundam SEED: Battle Destiny Remastered3%Monster Train 28%Mudness Offroad Car Simulator Runner  0%Not Not 2 - A Brain Challenge2%Onimusha 2: Samurai's Destiny6%Pancho's Mission  0%Pick Race 3D  0%Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo19%Planeta 55  0%Please, Touch The Artwork 25%Power Sink3%Project Zombie  0%Sauna of the DEAD  0%Soccer Golf!  0%Starlight Legacy3%STEAM-HEART'S Saturn Tribute2%Super Waifu Ball2%Tavern Owner Simulator  0%The Operator  0%The Town of Nie Iromusubi  0%Trident's Tale  0%Weirdo  0%Nothing for me this week21% So that's your lot for this week's North American Nintendo Download. Go on, be a sport and drop a vote in the poll above, and comment below with your hot picks! Related Games See Also

Halo is ostensibly a series about using guns to shoot aliens and defeat organized religion. But the coolest weapon in the series isn’t a gun. It’s a sword — specifically, it’s the energy sword.You may have encountered an energy sword for the first time in 2001’s Halo: Combat Evolved. Certain classes of Elites would wield what looked, at the time, like a cyan lightsaber drawn in Microsoft Paint. You’d quickly discover that these iridescent color splotches in fact killed you in one hit, tearing through the Master Chief’s super future space armor like paper. Those feelings of frustration were likely followed by feelings of “Gimme that,” but sadly, developer Bungie did not allow players to use the energy sword in Halo: Combat Evolved.Bungie came to its senses in 2004’s Halo 2, allowing you to actually use the thing — at which point the energy sword instantly became the coolest weapon in Halo, an honor it’s held onto for more than 20 years.Energy sword confirmed for Halo….whatever the next Halo game is called Image: Halo Studios/Microsoft Game StudiosSince then, while many Halo weapons have undergone notable cosmetic and functional changes, the energy sword has largely remained the same. (Why change perfection?) It has a horizontal hilt; two streams of blueish plasma pour out of each end, forming mirror scythe shapes that coalesce into a sharp pointy end. When you attack an enemy, you lunge toward them, and will usually kill them in one hit. To balance this out, you can use the energy sword about ten times before it runs out of battery — enough to give you an edge but not so much to make you invincible.In the multiplayer mode for Halo Infinite, the most recent Halo game, the energy sword is known as a “power weapon,” or one that respawns on long intervals and is considered the type of weapon that can turn the tide of a match. There are plenty of uses for the energy sword in Infinite’s multiplayer — none of which are inherently evil, by the way, no matter what people might tell you. They are as follows:You can camp around a corner and kill an unsuspecting opponent as they walk by youYou can camp behind a box and kill an unsuspecting opponent as they walk by youYou can camp next to a doorframe and kill an unsuspecting opponent as they walk by youYou can camp near a ramp or stairwell and kill an unsuspecting opponent as they walk by youOf course, the best players have found even more creative ways to use the energy sword. Top Halo pro Tommy “Lucid” Wilson notably pairs the energy sword with a long-range rifle to bait opponents into headshots. In the original multiplayer trailer for Halo Infinite, you can see one player using the explosion from a plasma grenade to launch an energy sword off an isolated platform before grabbing it midair and killing an opponent. (If you somehow pull this off in an actual match, you’ll get the Combat Evolved medal. Hearing longtime Halo announcer Jeff Steitzer say “combat evolved” never gets old.) The energy sword became so overbearing in Halo Infinite that, in December 2022, a year after the game’s release, developer 343 Industries nerfed it.But that hasn’t done anything to suppress its cool factor, as the energy sword is now no longer relegated to the Halo games (or covers of tie-in novels). Etsy is rife with hundreds of energy sword trinkets. Check out your local renaissance faire; you’ll likely see a wall of wood-carved energy swords at the “blacksmith.” Anecdotally, a solid half of all Halo tattoos feature the energy sword. It has fully broken containment. Can the battle rifle say that? Can the gravity hammer?Screw the gravity hammer.See More:

Amadou Sow woke to the shrieking of smoke detectors. It was a little after 2:30 am on August 5, 2020, and his house in the suburbs of Denver, Colorado, was ablaze. The 46-year-old rushed to his bedroom door, but a column of smoke and heat forced him back. Panicked, Sow ran to the rear window, broke the screen with his hand, and jumped. The two-story drop fractured his left foot.Sow’s wife Hawa Ka woke their daughter Adama, who shared their room. She dragged the terrified 10-year-old to the window and pushed her out. Sow tried to catch her but missed. Miraculously, the girl landed on her hands and feet, uninjured. Then it was Ka’s turn. When she leaped, she fell on her back, shattering her spine in two places. Sow barely heard her howls of pain. He was thinking about their 22-year-old son, Oumar.He couldn’t see any movement inside Oumar’s room. He hurled a rock at the window, but the glass held steady. Despair filled him. Then he noticed Oumar’s car wasn’t in the driveway. He must be working his night shift at 7-Eleven. Thank God! Sow’s family was safe. But what about the others in the house? All told, nine people called 5312 Truckee Street home.Sow had bought the four-bedroom property in the northeastern suburb of Green Valley Ranch in 2018. The neighborhood was newly built and sparsely populated, cut off from the bulk of the city by miles of prairie grass, giving it an isolated, ghost-town feel. But for Sow, a Senegalese immigrant who usually worked nights at Walmart, the home was a refuge. Not long after his family moved in, his old friend Djibril Diol’s family joined them. Diol—Djiby to his friends—was 29 and a towering 6'8", a civil engineer who hoped to one day take his skills back to Senegal.The first fire truck arrived at 2:47 am. By then, the inferno had shattered the windows and plumed the air with smoke. The stench of burning wood filled the neighborhood. When firefighters subdued the blaze enough to get in the front door, they found the small body of a child. Djiby’s daughter Khadija had been two months shy of her second birthday. Farther in sprawled Djiby himself and his 23-year-old wife, Adja.Next to Adja lay Djiby’s 25-year-old sister, Hassan. She’d only been living in the house for three months. Like Adja, she had dreamed of going back to school to study nursing. She died with her arms still wrapped around her 7-month-old daughter, Hawa Beye. Medical examiners would later conclude that all five died of smoke inhalation, airways coated in black soot, internal organs and muscles burnished “cherry-red” from the heat.At the same time firefighters were entering the house on Truckee Street, Neil Baker, a homicide detective for the Denver Police Department (DPD), was awoken by a call from his sergeant. Baker—in his fifties with reading glasses, thinning hair, and a rosy complexion—threw on a suit, muttered a hurried goodbye to his wife, and jumped in his car.Neil Baker and his police colleagues used Google to help solve the case.Photography: Jimena PeckAfter nearly 30 years as a Denver-area cop, Baker knew his way around town. He also knew that Green Valley Ranch was a confusing rabbit’s warren of nearly identical roads. So before he set off, he did something innocuous, something anyone might have done: He Googled the address. And like anyone who Googles something, he was thinking about the search result he wanted—not the packets of data flitting between his device and Google’s servers, not the automated logs of what he was searching for and where he was searching from. But this unseen infrastructure would be key to figuring out what happened at Truckee Street—and it may soon extend the reach of law enforcement into the private lives of millions.Three weeks before the fire, 16-year-old Kevin Bui went into central Denver to buy a gun. Bui had led a charmed life. His family emigrated from Vietnam before he was born, and though they struggled financially at first—Bui describes his childhood homes as “the projects”—by the time he started high school, his dad’s accounting business had taken off. The family moved to a palatial house in Lakewood, on Denver’s western outskirts, complete with views of the mountains. Bui took to wearing Gucci belts and Air Jordans.Rogue NationWIRED profiles the people who make trouble—scams, drug deals, even murder—and also, occasionally, save the day.“I disliked school, but I was always really good at it,” Bui tells me. He was athletic too—a swimmer, and an inside linebacker on his school football team, the Green Mountain Rams. He was close with his older sister, Tanya, despite their seven-year age difference. Tanya filled Kevin’s girlfriend’s lashes and bitched to him about her boyfriends. The siblings discussed adopting a dog together.But there was a darker side to their life: Kevin and Tanya dealt fentanyl and marijuana, often finding customers on Snapchat. Kevin planned to start “carding,” stealing people’s credit card information on the dark web. And he took to amassing weapons.The guys Bui had arranged to meet in central Denver on that day in July had promised to sell him a gun. Instead, they robbed him of his cash, iPhone, and shoes.Afterward, Bui bubbled with humiliation. A few weeks earlier, football practice had shut down because of the pandemic. Classes had already been virtual for months. He felt he was “just doing bullshit”: waking up, logging on to Zoom, and returning to bed. The robbery tipped him over the edge. That night, at home in Lakewood, Bui resolved to get even. He pulled up the Find My device feature on his iPad and watched as it pinged his phone. The map zoomed east, past downtown, finally halting at Green Valley Ranch. A pin dropped at 5312 Truckee Street.The next afternoon, Bui sent a Snapchat message to his friend Gavin Seymour. “I deserved that shit cuz I knew it would happen and still went,” he wrote, according to later court records. “They goin get theirs like I got mine.”Bui and Seymour ran track together and lived just a four-minute drive apart. But in many ways they were opposites. Where Bui oozed confidence, Seymour was plagued by insecurity. Where Bui excelled academically, Seymour struggled with multiple learning disabilities. In contrast to Bui’s apparently cookie-cutter-perfect family life, Seymour’s parents split when he was young, and his father was largely absent.In response to Bui’s message, Seymour wrote: “idk why I would let you go alone I’m sorry for that.”Bui wrote back: “I cant even be mad cuz we used to do the same shit to random niggas.”But he was mad. More to the point, he was disgraced, his self-image—as a winner, a champ, top dog—shattered. A week later, Bui searched the Truckee Street address 13 times, including on sites like Zillow that detailed its interior layout. And he persuaded Seymour, who was just about to turn 16, and another friend, 14-year-old Dillon Siebert, to help him exact revenge. In late July, Seymour and Siebert also searched the address multiple times.Bui would later insist they’d planned to simply vandalize the house: hurl rocks at the windows, maybe, or egg the exterior. But sometime in those last hot days of July, things took a darker turn. On August 1, Bui messaged Seymour: “#possiblyruinourfuturesandburnhishousedown.”Three evenings later, Siebert and Bui went to Party City to buy black theater masks, then grabbed dinner at Wendy’s. They met up with Seymour, and at around 1 am on August 5 the three piled into Bui’s Toyota Camry. They stopped at a gas station, where they filled a red fuel canister to the brim. Then they set off for Green Valley Ranch, cruising past downtown and the Broncos stadium and through an industrial area dotted with smokestacks and semitrailers. The drive took at least 30 minutes, long and boring enough for any one of the teens to express doubt, postpone, chicken out. But it seemed none of them did, not even when they got to 5312 Truckee and saw a minivan—a family vehicle—parked out front.Green Valley Ranch, in the eastern suburbs of Denver, was a new and sparsely populated neighborhood with a confusing road layout and rows of cookie-cutter family homes. Even longtime city residents found it confusing to navigate.Photography: Jimena PeckThey found the house’s back door unlocked. It’s not clear who doused the gas on the living room walls and floors or who set the flame. When it caught, all three stumbled out to Bui’s car and took off.When Detective Baker arrived at 5312 Truckee Street two hours later, neighbors swarmed the street, their faces lit by the glow of the flames. The air tasted like ash. He spotted Ernest Sandoval, his partner on the case. Sandoval, nearly 15 years younger than Baker, had moved to homicide from the nonfatal shootings unit only a few weeks earlier.The officers on the scene told the pair that there could be as many as five fatalities. They suspected faulty wiring had sparked the blaze. It was terrible, tragic—but at least homicide’s job would be straightforward. “We’ll have some reports to write,” Baker remembers thinking. “We’ll have to probably go to the autopsies.” Then a man with melancholy eyes and a faint soul patch approached him. “I have something you should see,” he said. Noe Reza Jr. lived next door. He took out his phone, which held footage from his security cameras.The video clips started at 2:26 am. They showed three figures in hoodies and masks stealing through the side yard of 5312 Truckee. One points toward the rear of the house. Then they move out of the camera’s sight. Twelve minutes later, the trio sprint back toward the street. At 2:40, flames erupt from the home’s lower floor. Someone screams. The fire consumes the entire house within two minutes.“Oh, are you kidding me,” Baker thought. Five people had been murdered and their only lead was a few seconds of video that revealed nothing of the criminals’ identity.That morning, Kevin Bui slept in. Around 10 am, he searched online for news of the fire. There was an abundance. The tragedy had sparked headlines and Twitter threads across the world. The Council on American Islamic Relations issued a statement urging police to consider religious hate as a potential motive. Leaders of Colorado’s African community expressed fear, wondering which of their members might be targeted next. Even Senegal’s president tweeted he’d be watching the case closely.That’s when the truth began to dawn on Bui. Like many people, he had assumed that Apple’s Find My device software offers exact location tracking. But such programs rely on an unreliable combination of signals from GPS satellites, cell towers, Wi-Fi networks, and other connected devices nearby, and their accuracy can vary from a few feet to hundreds of miles. In the past, this ambiguity has led to threats, holdups, and even SWAT raids at the wrong addresses. (Apple did not respond to a request for comment.)As he read the news that morning, Bui realized that he had made a terrible mistake. These innocent faces didn’t belong to the guys who had robbed him. He’d killed a family.That August, Denver’s usually crystalline skies were choked with wildfire smoke. Baker and Sandoval barely noticed. They spent their waking hours in DPD’s 1970s-era HQ, with its fluorescent lighting and gumball machines in the lobby.The pair had begun their investigation with the usual stuff: interviewing the victims’ friends and family, combing through text messages and financial records. The more they dug, the clearer it became that the families of 5312 Truckee lived quiet, pious lives: work, mosque, home.The detectives returned to video footage. On clips pieced together from nearby Ring cameras, they saw the car the suspects were in taking a series of wrong turns as it entered the neighborhood, and wildly swerving and mounting curbs on the way out. But the videos weren’t clear enough to identify the exact make or model of the dark four-door sedan. The detectives quickly obtained what are known as tower dump warrants, which required the major phone networks to provide the numbers of all cellular devices in the vicinity of 5312 Truckee during the arson. And they slung a series of so-called geofence warrants at Google, asking the company to identify all devices within a defined area just before the fire. (At the time, Google collected and retained location data if someone had an Android device or any Google applications on their cell phone.)The warrants returned thousands of phone numbers, which the detectives dumped on Mark Sonnendecker, an agent at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) who specialized in digital forensics. Sonnendecker, slim and soft-spoken with a face resembling Bill Nye’s, focused on T-Mobile subscribers. He had noticed that a “high percentage” of suspects in previous cases subscribed to the network.There were 1,471 devices registered to T-Mobile within a mile of the house when it ignited. Using software that visualizes how long it takes a signal to bounce from a cell tower to a phone and back again, Sonnendecker narrowed the list down to the 100 devices nearest to the house. One evening toward the end of August, detectives roamed the area around 5312 Truckee with a cell-phone-tower simulator that captured the IDs of all devices within range. That night, there were 723. Sonnendecker cross-referenced these with the 100 from earlier, eliminating the 67 that showed up on both lists and likely belonged to neighborhood residents who could be ruled out. That left 33 T-Mobile subscribers whose presence in Green Valley Ranch in the early hours of August 5 couldn’t easily be explained.Investigators considered bringing them in for questioning but decided against it; without any evidence to detain them, they feared spooking the arsonists into fleeing the country. Nothing pointed to any obvious suspects. Still, Sonnendecker remained confident that something would pop up to give police the breakthrough they needed.But as summer turned to fall, progress on the case began to falter. Hundreds of Crime Stoppers tips were still pouring in, including some from psychics. Baker and Sandoval crisscrossed the state to interrogate a trio found with drugs, guns, and masks in Gypsum and to interview the Senegalese community in the mountain town of Silverthorne. (For decades, West Africans had found work in the ski hub’s many resorts, hotels, and grocery stores.) They even chased a lead to Iowa. “We got pretty hopeful here and there, but it just kind of fizzled out,” recalls Baker.The detectives were feeling the pressure. In the wake of nationwide Black Lives Matter protests that summer, a petition demanding police stop “undervaluing the lives of BIPOC individuals” and prioritize the investigation into the deaths of the Diol family collected nearly 25,000 signatures. Baker and Sandoval were told not to take on any new cases so they could work this one full time.At a department meeting in September, Baker and Sandoval pleaded with colleagues for ideas. Was there anything they hadn’t tried—anything at all? That’s when another detective wondered if the perpetrators had Googled the address before heading there. Perhaps Google had a record of that search?It was like a door they’d never noticed suddenly flung open. They called Sonnendecker and the district attorney, Cathee Hansen. Neither had heard of Google turning over a list of people who had searched for a specific term. In fact, it had been done: in a 2017 fraud investigation in Minnesota, after a series of bombings in Austin in 2018, in a 2019 trafficking case in Wisconsin, and a theft case in North Carolina the following year. Federal investigators also used a reverse keyword search warrant to investigate an associate of R. Kelly who attempted to intimidate a witness in the musician’s racketeering and sexual exploitation trial. But those records had largely been sealed. So, unaware of these precedents, Hansen and Sandoval drafted their warrant from scratch, requesting names, birth dates, and physical addresses for all users who’d searched variations of 5312 Truckee Street in the 15 days before the fire.Google denied the request. According to court documents, the company uses a staged process when responding to reverse keyword warrants to protect user privacy: First, it provides an anonymized list of matching searches, and if law enforcement concludes that any of those results are relevant, Google will identify the users’ IP addresses if prompted by the warrant to do so. DPD’s warrant had gone too far in asking for protected user information right away, and it took another failed warrant 20 days later and two calls with Google’s outside legal counsel before the detectives came up with language the search giant would accept.Finally, the day before Thanksgiving 2020, Sonnendecker received a list of 61 devices and associated IP addresses that had searched for the house in the weeks before the fire. Five of those IP addresses were in Colorado, and three of them had searched for the Truckee Street house multiple times, including for details of its interior. “It was like the heavens opened up,” says Baker.In early December, DPD served another warrant to Google for those five users’ subscriber information, including their names and email addresses. One turned out to be a relative of the Diols; another belonged to a delivery service. But there was one surname they recognized—a name that also appeared on the list of 33 T-Mobile subscribers they’d identified earlier in the investigation as being in the vicinity of the fire. Bui.The phone was registered to Kevin’s sister Tanya—he may have borrowed it after his was stolen. But a quick scan of the social media accounts of the remaining subscribers on the list yielded three suspects: Kevin Bui, Gavin Seymour, and Dillon Siebert. They were teens, they were friends, and they didn’t live anywhere near Green Valley Ranch. They lived in the Lakewood area, 20 miles away. There was no reason for them to be Googling a residential address so far across town.“There was a lot of high-fiving,” recalls Sandoval. But it was too soon to fully celebrate. They now had to build a case strong enough to prosecute minors in a high-profile homicide. “We knew this was going to be a big, big, big fight,” Baker says.On New Year’s Day of 2021, Baker drove by the Bui family’s home and snapped a photo of the 2019 Toyota Camry sitting in the driveway. Another warrant to Google yielded the three teens’ search histories since early July. In the days before the fire, Siebert searched for retailer “Party City.” On Party City’s website, Baker spotted masks similar to those worn by the three perpetrators. The company confirmed that their Lakewood location had sold three such masks hours before the fire. Baker then contacted the shopping complex to get footage from the exterior security cameras that night. He saw that around 6 pm, a 2019 Toyota Camry pulled into the parking lot. “It just snowballed,” says Baker, shaking his head in remembered wonder. “I cannot believe the amount of evidence that we were able to come up with.”Photography: Jimena PeckFrom the teens’ texts and social media, detectives were able to see that the morning after the arson, with the house on Truckee Street still smoldering, Bui and Seymour embarked on a camping trip. A week later, Bui went golfing. A few months after that, Seymour joined the Bui family on vacation in Cancun, where more smiling photos of the two emerged, this time on beaches and boats. The posts enraged the detectives. “Where’s the remorse?” Baker said.Shortly after 7 am on January 27, police arrested Bui, Seymour, and Siebert. Seymour and Siebert refused to talk, but Bui agreed to an interview and promptly confessed. “He’d had six months of just keeping this inside,” said Baker. “He knew that his time had come.”For the next 18 months, the case dragged through the court system. It took a year for a judge to rule that Siebert, 14 at the time of the crime, would be charged as a juvenile, while 16-year-olds Bui and Seymour would be tried as adults. If convicted, they faced life in prison.In June 2022, just when it seemed like the prosecution could finally proceed, Seymour’s lawyers dropped a bombshell. They filed a motion to suppress all evidence arising from the reverse keyword search warrant that DPD had served to Google—the key piece of information that had led detectives to Bui and his friends.Nearly two years had passed since the Diols were killed in their own home. Many of the victims’ family and friends still moved through their days fearfully and lay awake nights, reliving the nightmare. Now, the detectives had to tell them that the case might be thrown out altogether, potentially allowing the three teens to walk free.Seymour’s defense argued that, in asking Google to comb through billions of users’ private search history, investigators had cast an unconstitutional “digital dragnet.” It was, they said, the equivalent of police ransacking every home in America. The Fourth Amendment required police to show probable cause for suspecting an individual before getting a warrant to search their information. In this case, police had no reason to suspect Seymour before seeing the warrant’s results. But the judge sided with law enforcement. He likened the search to looking for a needle in a haystack: “The fact that the haystack may be big, the fact that the haystack may have a lot of misinformation in it doesn’t mean that a targeted search in that haystack somehow implicates overbreadth,” he said.The teens’ fate looked sealed. Then, in January 2023, Seymour’s lawyers announced that the Colorado Supreme Court had agreed to hear their appeal. It would be the first state supreme court in America to address the constitutionality of a keyword warrant. Though the verdict would apply only in Colorado, it would influence law enforcement’s behavior in other states, and potentially the US Department of Justice’s stance on such warrants too.Baker and Sandoval’s investigation had now been dragged into a legal process that could reshape Americans’ right to search and learn online without fear of retribution. “Even a single query can reveal deeply private facts about a person, things they might not share with friends, family, or clergy,” wrote Seymour’s legal team. “‘Psychiatrists in Denver;’ ‘abortion providers near me;’ ‘is my husband gay;’ ‘does God exist;’ ‘bankruptcy;’ ‘herpes treatment’ … Search history is a window into what people wonder about—and it is some of the most private data that exists.”The Colorado Supreme Court heard arguments for the case in May 2023. Seymour’s attorney argued that reverse keyword searches were alarmingly similar to geofence warrants, which courts across the country had begun to question. (In August 2024, a federal circuit court of appeals—considered the most influential courts in the United States after the Supreme Court—ruled geofence warrants “unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment” for never specifying a particular user.)Denver’s DA, Cathee Hansen—who’d helped detectives craft the warrant in question nearly three years earlier—compared it to querying a bank for suspicious transactions. “You don’t go into each person’s account and scroll through their transaction history to see if it applies to that account,” she said. “You just tap into a database.” Neither search violated any individual’s privacy, she argued.The judges pushed Hansen on the warrant’s applicability to abortion, outlawed in a growing number of states. “I could see warrants coming in from one of those states to Colorado: Who searched for abortion clinics in Colorado?” said Justice Richard Gabriel. “Under your view, there’d be probable cause for that. That’s a big concern.”After a five-month wait that Sandoval remembers as “gut-wrenching,” the court finally ruled in October 2023. In a majority verdict, four judges decided the reverse keyword search warrant was legal—potentially opening the door to wider use in Colorado and beyond. The judges argued that the narrow search parameters and the performance of the search by a computer rather than a human minimized any invasion of privacy. But they also agreed the warrant lacked individualized probable cause—the police had no reason to suspect Seymour before they accessed his search history—rendering it “constitutionally defective.”Because of the ruling’s ambiguity, some agencies remain leery. The ATF’s Denver office says it would only consider using a keyword warrant again if the search terms could be sufficiently narrowed, like in this case: to an address that few would have reason to search and a highly delimited time period. The crime would also have to be serious enough to justify the level of scrutiny that would follow, the ATF says.Not everyone is so cautious. Baker and Sandoval regularly field calls from police across the country asking for a copy of their warrant. Baker himself is considering using it in another case. And a cottage industry of consultants that, until recently, helped police craft tower-dump warrants now trains them to requisition Google. No systemic data is being collected on how often reverse keyword warrants are being used, but Andrew Crocker, surveillance litigation director of digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation says it’s possible that there have been hundreds of examples to date.Meanwhile, another case—in which a keyword-search warrant was used to identify a serial rapist—is now before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. If the warrant is upheld, as it was in Colorado, their use could accelerate nationwide. “Keyword warrants are dangerous tools tailor-made for political repression,” says Crocker. It’s easy to envision Immigrations and Customs Enforcement requesting a list of everyone who searched “immigration lawyer” in a given area, for instance.By the summer of 2024, all three teens had accepted plea deals: Siebert got 10 years in juvenile detention; Seymour got 40, and Kevin Bui 60, both in adult prison. Bui received the harshest sentence because he’d masterminded the arson. (He was also caught with 92 pills of fentanyl and a couple grams of methamphetamine in his sock while in detention.)To the victims, none of it was enough. Amadou Beye, the husband of Hassan Diol and father of seven-month-old Hawa, addressed Bui directly at his sentencing. “I will never forget or forgive you for what you did to me,” he said. “You took me away from my wife, the most beautiful thing I had. You took me away from my baby that I will never have a chance to see.” A shudder ran through his tall body. Beye had been in Senegal awaiting a visa when his family was killed. His daughter was born in America, and he never got to meet her.Bui remained expressionless throughout the victim impact testimonies, save for a furiously bobbing Adam’s apple. Peach fuzz darkened his now 20-year-old jaw. He wore a green jumpsuit, clear-framed glasses, and white shoes. At the end, he read from a crumpled sheet of yellow ruled paper. “I was an ignorant knucklehead blinded by rage. I’m a failure who threw his life away,” he said. “I have no excuses and nobody to blame but myself.”But when I talked to Bui three months later, he sounded upbeat. “When you go to prison there’s a lifeline,” he told me. Monday through Friday, he took classes on personal growth and emotional intelligence. Aside from that, “I just work out, I chill with some of the guys. We eat together, watch TV, watch sports,” he said. He tried to catch every Denver Broncos and Baltimore Ravens game. Lately, he’d also gotten into Sex and the City.Not once did Bui complain about the lack of privacy in prison or his exile from the outside world, both physical and digital. Prisoners had little internet access, which, for someone of his generation, who’d grown up online, must have been hard. Did he know who he was without his iPhone, his Snapchat and Instagram? Who were any of us really, without our online personas, our memes and TikToks and the access to the entirety of human knowledge afforded by our devices? As Seymour’s lawyers had argued, didn’t our deepest, truest selves reside online, in our searches and browsers?All Bui would say was that he was in a good place now. Then he had to go: He was getting a haircut. Online or not, he still had an image to maintain.Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.

May 21, 202510 min readSleep Better with New Drugs, Select Cannabinoids and Wearable DevicesDrugs that target wakefulness, molecules in cannabis and wearable devices that modulate brain activity could help people with insomniaBy Rachel Nuwer carlofranco/Getty ImagesThis Nature Outlook is editorially independent, produced with financial support from Avadel.Miranda cannot remember a time in her life when she did not have insomnia. The 23 year old, who asked for her last name to be withheld, started struggling with sleep when she was a child. As she’s grown older, it’s only become worse. She takes “a myriad of medications” each night, she says, but usually still cannot fall asleep until the early hours of the morning. “I can’t get up and be functional until halfway through the day,” she says. She had to drop out of university because she couldn’t attend classes, and she can’t hold down a job. Her insomnia exacerbates other medical conditions as well, including migraines and the pain condition fibromyalgia. “It’s hugely debilitating,” she says. “It affects everything.”In the United States, about 12% of adults have been diagnosed with chronic insomnia — when a person struggles to sleep for more than three nights each week for at least three months, and experiences daytime distress as a result. Research suggests that the worldwide figure is 10–30%. It also often co-occurs with and creates a vicious cycle with other conditions, including chronic pain, depression and anxiety.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Fortunately for Miranda and millions of others with chronic insomnia, new treatments are arriving. The emergence of a class of pharmaceuticals that induces sleep through a different brain pathway from existing drugs is a welcome development, and molecules in cannabis and specialized medical devices to promote sleep are also showing potential as sleep aids. Soon, those struggling with sleep could have a range of new options available to help.Imperfect solutionsCognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) is usually the recommended first treatment. This specialized talking therapy focuses on establishing healthy sleep behaviours and addressing thoughts that can interfere with sleep. But CBT-I is not covered by all health-care insurance plans in the United States. In the United Kingdom and parts of Europe, public health-care systems usually provide it, but waiting times can be long. This is because, around the world, there is a limited availability of therapists, says Andrew Krystal, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco. “We keep hiring new people, but almost immediately their schedules are completely filled and the wait list is a year.”CBT-I also doesn’t work for everyone. Miranda has tried it and has received conventional talking therapy for over a decade, with limited success. “It only helps so much,” she says.Pharmacological interventions are the next line of defence, Krystal says. Benzodiazepines and a class of medicines called Z-drugs, which include zolpidem (Ambien), are among the most prescribed insomnia medications. These sedative hypnotics enhance the effects of the neurotransmitter GABA, thereby dampening brain activity. They also reduce anxiety. But they can create a hangover effect and increase the risk of falls in older people. These drugs also have the potential for misuse and can cause dependence. Some studies have even found an association between long-term use of Z-drugs and benzodiazepines and an increased risk of death.Miranda tried Ambien, but says that she quickly became chemically dependent. She eventually weaned herself off it and switched to benzodiazepines, but she began developing a tolerance to them, too — she once wound up in hospital with withdrawal symptoms after she tried to cut back on her dosage. “They’re horrible drugs to be on,” she says. But she cannot fall asleep without them. Each night, she now takes two benzodiazepines, as well as gabapentin, an anticonvulsant medication that is sometimes given off-label for insomnia.Physicians frequently provide other off-label prescriptions for insomnia, including trazodone, which is approved for depression. Over-the-counter products such as antihistamines are also used for sleeplessness. None are ideal, however, because they have not been evaluated as sleep aids, says Emmanuel Mignot, a sleep-medicine researcher at Stanford University in California.Miranda has experience with many of these products. When she first developed chronic insomnia as a child, her paediatrician recommended melatonin, which is available without a prescription in the United States. It helped her fall asleep, but it did not keep her asleep. During her teenage years, different neurologists prescribed off-label antidepressants and other mood medications, including trazodone and mirtazapine. But they came with what she calls “torturous” side effects: she felt constantly anxious and exhausted during the day, and her memory became “incredibly foggy”.Blocking wakefulnessMignot was studying narcolepsy, a chronic disorder that affects sleep–wake cycles and causes people to fall asleep suddenly, when he inadvertently helped to pave the way towards the latest means of treating insomnia. He discovered that dogs with narcolepsy have a genetic mutation that affects one of two receptors used by the neurotransmitter orexin, the primary role of which was initially thought to be the regulation of appetite. Mignot then found that people with narcolepsy lack orexin, confirming the chemical’s main job: promoting wakefulness. If drugs could be developed to prevent orexin from binding to its receptors, Mignot thought, then people with insomnia would become “narcoleptic for one night”.In 2007, researchers at the pharmaceutical firm Actelion (part of which is now Idorsia Pharmaceuticals in Switzerland) showed that blocking orexin’s two receptors induced sleep in rats, dogs and people. In 2014, the biopharmaceutical company Merck, received US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for the first dual orexin receptor antagonist (DORA) drug, suvorexant (Belsomra). In 2019, another DORA drug — lemborexant (Dayvigo) — was approved, followed, in 2022, by daridorexant (Quviviq).Compared with benzodiazepines and Z-drugs, which inhibit activity all over the brain, DORA drugs affect only the neurons activated by orexins (see ‘Blocking wakefulness’). “The beauty of it is it does nothing but block the stimulation of wakefulness,” says neurologist Joe Herring, who heads neuroscience clinical research at Merck in Rahway, New Jersey. “It’s a physiologically better way to promote sleep.”Alisdair Macdonald/NatureDaridorexant is the only DORA drug for which data are available about daytime functioning, says Antonio Olivieri, chief medical officer at Idorsia, which produces daridorexant. In clinical trials, Idorsia showed that, compared with those given a placebo, people who received daridorexant experienced significant improvements in daytime insomnia symptoms the following day. Data reported in the approvals database of the FDA also indicate that daridorexant has the lowest fatigue and drowsiness scores of the three DORA drugs, possibly because it leaves the body the quickest.So far, there have been no one-to-one comparisons of DORA drugs. “Ideally, you’d have direct evidence of how those drugs compare to each other,” says Daniel Buysse, a sleep scientist at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in Pennsylvania. “But we rarely have such evidence, so instead, we have to rely on statistical techniques that allow you to make indirect comparisons.” It’s also difficult to say definitively how DORA drugs compare with older treatments for insomnia, but Buysse says that drug registration trials suggest that DORA drugs have fewer adverse cognitive or hangover effects compared with benzodiazepines and Z-drugs, as well as less potential for dependence and misuse. The European Insomnia Guideline 2023 placed daridorexant as the next recommended insomnia treatment after CBT-I.The main drawback to DORA drugs, Buysse says, is not medical but financial: their high cost keeps them out of reach of many people who could benefit from them. “There are many patients I would like to prescribe these drugs for, but I know in order for them to get one of these medications we’ll have to go through trials of several other drugs before the request will be considered,” Buysse says. DORA drugs are also available only in a few countries, so far.Given her long history of insomnia, Miranda was given a prescription for suvorexant. Her psychiatrist recommended the drug to her about a year ago. “I was really sceptical that an anti-wakefulness drug would be any different to a pro-sleep drug,” she says. But she quickly felt the difference, and has now come to see the drug as “a saviour”. Without the drug, she says, “I’d probably be on a much higher benzodiazepine dose than I am.” She hopes her suvorexant dose can continue to increase, so that some of her other medications can be reduced.Expanding availabilityOther drugs that target the orexin system are in the clinical pipeline. Seltorexant, for example, is being developed by the US pharmaceutical firm Johnson & Johnson for people with both major depressive disorder and insomnia. Around 70% of people with depression have insomnia, so having a medication that treats both of those disorders “has the potential to fill an important gap”, says Krystal, who has consulted for Johnson & Johnson on the drug. In a phase III trial, participants who took the drug experienced meaningful improvement in both sleep and depressive symptoms, with an antidepressant effect that seemed to be independent of the participants getting better sleep. Seltorexant might have an antidepressant effect because it is designed to block only one of the two types of orexin receptor, Krystal adds, whereas other DORA drugs block both receptor types.Investigations of already-approved DORA drugs are also expanding into other populations. Merck has sponsored investigator-led studies of suvorexant in people with insomnia as well as depression or substance-use disorders, and Idorsia is sponsoring studies of daridorexant’s safety and efficacy in sub-groups of people who have insomnia and other conditions.In 2020, suvorexant became the first medication to be approved for treating sleep disorders in people with Alzheimer’s disease. Insomnia is often a precursor to and co-morbid with Alzheimer’s, and the disease seems to manifest differently in people with the condition. In one study comparing older people with insomnia with those with both insomnia and Alzheimer’s, people with both conditions had a number of extra changes to their sleep patterns, including less time spent in deep sleep — sometimes called slow-wave sleep because that describes the pattern of the brain’s electrical activity during these intervals. Sleep problems in people with Alzheimer’s also seem to have a causal role in increasing levels of toxic substances in the brains of those individuals. Preliminary data suggest that suvorexant could also help to reduce toxic brain proteins. The results of a follow-up study testing that finding are expected in 2026.In the weedsSleeplessness is already among the most common conditions for the medicinal use of the drug cannabis. Miranda, for example, supplements her nightly pharmaceutical regimen with a cannabis tincture that contains a few of the plant’s 100-plus cannabinoids (she lives in a state where cannabis use is legal). “It’s definitely a key player in my sleep-medication arsenal,” she says.Yet, scientifically, little is known about which cannabinoids — if any — promote sleep, and what a safe and effective dose is. “Tens of millions of people around the world are probably using cannabinoids for insomnia, but we have very little good-quality evidence to support that,” says Iain McGregor, director of the Lambert Initiative for Cannabinoid Therapeutics at the University of Sydney in Australia.McGregor is investigating cannabinol (CBN), a molecule that develops in cannabis as the psychoactive component tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) oxidizes. His group reported that CBN increased sleep in rats to a similar degree as zolpidem, but without the drug’s known negative side effect of suppressing rapid-eye-movement sleep. Unpublished data of a single-night trial with 20 people with insomnia disorder show that people fell asleep 7 minutes faster after taking 300 milligrams of CBN compared with those taking a placebo; participants also reported subjective improvements in sleep and mood. Although 7 minutes “doesn’t sound like a lot”, it is on a par with what benzodiazepines and Z-drugs typically accomplish, says Camilla Hoyos, a sleep researcher at the Woolcock Institute of Medical Research in Sydney, who led the work. McGregor, Hoyos and their colleagues are aiming to follow up the work with a large, community-based trial in which people with insomnia take either CBN or a placebo for six weeks at home.As for cannabidiol (CBD) and THC — the most well-known cannabinoids — the prospects for efficacy against insomnia are doubtful, at least for the doses used in trials so far. Several small studies have failed to find a sleep benefit from taking CBD. In one experiment, researchers observed that participants in a study who received 10 milligrams of THC and 200 milligrams of CBD actually slept for 25 minutes less compared with when they received a placebo. Several other company-sponsored trials of low-dose CBD for insomnia were not published, McGregor adds, because they found no significant improvement. “It’s been one failure after the next,” he says.Insomnia’s new frontiersThe search for more effective insomnia treatments continues in other realms, as well. Some research groups are experimenting with different receptors that they hope could lead to new classes of drugs. Gabriella Gobbi, a clinical psychiatrist and research neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, for example, has homed in on one of the brain’s two melatonin receptors, MT2. “We want to find an alternative mechanism without any addiction liability and with fewer side effects, especially for use in children and elderly people,” she says. A molecule that the team developed that binds to MT2 increased the time that rats spent in deep sleep by 30%. Gobbi aims to launch clinical trials in the next two to three years.A few companies and health systems, including the US Department of Veterans Affairs and the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, have also created or are developing digital platforms for delivering CBT-I. These apps take users through regimens that are tailored to their symptoms. SleepioRx, for example, is a 90-day digital programme that has been evaluated in more than two dozen clinical trials and has showed efficacy as high as 76%. This includes helping people to fall asleep faster, sleep better throughout the night and feel better the next day. In August 2024, the programme, developed by Big Health in San Francisco, California, received FDA clearance. A 2024 meta-analysis of 15 studies that compare in-person and electronically delivered CBT-I concluded that the two approaches were equally effective.Uptake among physicians has been slow so far, Krystal says. But once practitioners catch on, he adds, “I can imagine a world where you have digital care as your first stop, and if that’s not successful, you see a therapist.”Some studies suggest that insomnia can stem from a high level of underlying brain activity during sleep. This raises the question of whether reducing this activity could treat insomnia, says Ruth Benca, a psychiatrist at Wake Forest School of Medicine in North Carolina. Companies and academic research groups are beginning to test this proposition with wearable devices that use auditory tones or mild electrical stimulation to increase slow-wave activity in the brain. Some devices are already on the market, and evidence suggests that they can increase the duration of deep sleep. Last June, for example, researchers at Elemind Technologies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, confirmed that auditory stimuli delivered in sync with specific brain-wave rhythms generated in a headband allowed people who usually struggle for more than 30 minutes to fall asleep to shave an average of 10.5 minutes off that time.In the coming years, according to Benca, researchers hope to learn enough about insomnia’s causes and treatments to be able to recommend personalized therapies based on an individual’s specific demographics, genetics and co-morbidities. These are the frontiers people are working at, she says.Even after a lifetime of struggling to find safe and effective help, Miranda says that she still holds out hope that better treatments for insomnia are on the horizon. “I can’t be on these medications forever,” she says. “They’re going to take years off my life.”

Published May 21, 2025 10:00am EDT close 'There's no sense of privacy involved': 'CyberGuy' warns AI users' privacy could be at risk Tech expert Kurt Knutsson discusses tips on how to protect your data amid AI privacy concerns and Ford filing a patent to bring the stick shift to electric vehicles.  Removing your personal information from people-search sites can feel pretty overwhelming. There are hundreds of these sites in the U.S. alone. In fact, the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse says there are over 500 companies that collect and sell personal information. At first, it might seem impossible to get your details removed from all of them. But here's the good news: You don't need to tackle every single site. Your information isn't on all 500-plus sites. With a bit of time and persistence, you can remove your info from the major ones, and every removal really counts. Let me show you exactly how to do it yourself.JOIN THE FREE "CYBERGUY REPORT": GET MY EXPERT TECH TIPS, CRITICAL SECURITY ALERTS AND EXCLUSIVE DEALS, PLUS INSTANT ACCESS TO MY FREE "ULTIMATE SCAM SURVIVAL GUIDE" WHEN YOU SIGN UP! A woman scrolling on her laptop (Kurt "CyberGuy" Knutsson)First, find which people-search sites have your infoThe process will be easier if you have a list of people-search sites that have your personal information. Not only can you check them off as you go, but you'll also need a list for the last step. The easiest place to start is with a free scan that some data removal services provide. These scans automatically check a ton of people-search sites for your personal information and send you a report. You can also search for your full name on Google. This will probably bring up a mix of results, including your social media profiles. THINK YOU CAN DELETE YOUR DATA YOURSELF? HERE'S WHY YOU'RE PROBABLY WRONGThe bigger your online presence, the more search results you'll likely have to sift through to find the people-search sites. I recommend searching for your name together with other personal details, like your email, phone number or home address. For some reason, this is more likely to bring up people-search sites, different ones depending on the combination of personal details you try. You may not be able to find all the people-search sites that have your info like this, though. You should also check any state-specific people-search sites, like StateofFlorida.com, and search all of the most popular people-search sites like:WhitepagesSpokeoBeenVerifiedInteliusMyLifePeopleFindersRadarisTruthFinderFastPeopleSearchInstant CheckmateKeep in mind that many smaller or niche sites exist, especially those that are state or region-specific. These sites can be harder to find but may still have your information. Using scanning tools or data removal services can help uncover these less obvious listings.Follow the opt-out process for each siteEvery people-search site has its own opt-out process, but most of them will require you to do something like this:Find your listing: You'll usually need to search for your name, phone number, address or email on the site.Submit a removal request: Most sites have an online form where you can request removal. Look for links that say "Opt-Out," "Do Not Sell My Info" or "Privacy Rights," which are usually found in the website footer.Verify your request: Most sites will send you a confirmation email with a link you'll need to click. Some ask for a phone call verification. A few people-search sites request documents, like a photo ID (I recommend avoiding sending sensitive documents unless absolutely necessary). If a site insists on ID verification, try contacting their support to ask about alternative methods or consider skipping that site if you're uncomfortable.TOP 20 APPS TRACKING YOU EVERY DAYPro tip: Use a separate email address for opt-out requestsMany sites require email verification. Using your regular email can expose it to spam or further data collection. Creating a dedicated or alias email address just for these requests helps protect your primary inbox and keeps things organized. Also, using various email aliases makes it so you don't have to worry about all your info getting taken in a data breach. An email alias address is a great way for you to stop receiving constant spam mail by simply deleting the email alias address. See my review of the best secure and private email services here. A woman working on her laptop (Kurt "CyberGuy" Knutsson)Phone verification and a secondary number If a site requires phone verification, consider using a secondary number to avoid exposing your personal phone number. Services like Google Voice can provide you with a secondary number that you can use for online activities, keeping your primary number private. The process should take between five and 20 minutes for each site on your list, depending on how difficult they make it for you. But once you submit the request, removal is usually pretty quick. Your information should be off the site within 24 hours to a week, though it can sometimes take up to 30 days.Don't forget about Google search resultsPeople-search sites aren't the only places your info can pop up. Sometimes your personal info appears directly in Google search results, pulled from public records or other sites. If you find sensitive info in Google results, you can request removal through Google's own removal tools, especially if the info includes things like your Social Security number, bank account info or images you don't want to be public. This is a separate process, but it is worth doing alongside removing info from people-search sites. Google Search image (Kurt "CyberGuy" Knutsson)Keep in mind, this isn't a one-and-done dealEven after you remove your info, there's a good chance it'll show up again. People-search sites constantly scrape public records and other databases to refresh their listings. Some sites offer "suppression lists" you can add your name to, but it's not a perfect system. Small changes, like a slightly different address, a new phone number or a missing middle name, can slip past their filters and pop up as a "new" profile.The best way to stay on top of it is to set a reminder to recheck the main people-search sites every few months and repeat the opt-out process when needed. Maintaining a detailed tracker or spreadsheet with the sites you've contacted, dates and confirmation info can make this easier and help you avoid missing any sites. A woman working on her laptop and scrolling on her phone (Kurt "CyberGuy" Knutsson)​​A quick note on your rights (updated for 2025)There is still no federal data privacy law in the U.S. that grants everyone the automatic right to opt out of people-search sites. However, the landscape is changing quickly at the state level. As of 2025, at least thirteen states have passed comprehensive privacy laws that give residents stronger opt-out rights, including:California (California Consumer Privacy Act/California Privacy Rights Act - CCPA/CPRA)Virginia (Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act - VCDPA)Colorado (Colorado Privacy Act - CPA)Connecticut (Connecticut Data Privacy Act - CTDPA)Utah (Utah Consumer Privacy Act - UCPA)Delaware (Delaware Personal Data Privacy Act - DPDPA)Iowa (Iowa Consumer Data Protection Act - ICDPA)Nebraska (Nebraska Data Privacy Act - NDPA)New Hampshire (New Hampshire Data Privacy Act - NHDPA)New Jersey (New Jersey Data Privacy Act - NJDPA)Tennessee (Tennessee Information Protection Act - TIPA)Minnesota (Minnesota Consumer Data Privacy Act - MCDPA)Maryland (Maryland Online Data Privacy Act - MODPA)If you live in one of these states, you now have a much stronger legal footing to demand that people-search sites remove your information. Many of these laws require companies to honor requests to opt out of the sale or sharing of your personal data, and some even require businesses to respect browser-based global opt-out signals. But even if you don't live in one of these states, you should still submit removal requests. Most people-search sites do not filter opt-out requests by state; they generally process any request they receive to avoid potential legal issues, regardless of your location.If this sounds like too much work, there's helpRemoving your data manually takes real time and commitment, especially since you have to keep doing it to stay off these sites. That's why many people turn to personal data removal services. Instead of going site by site yourself, a service can automatically send removal requests on your behalf, track the responses and re-request removals if your data reappears later.While no service promises to remove all your data from the internet, having a removal service is great if you want to constantly monitor and automate the process of removing your information from hundreds of sites continuously over a longer period of time. Check out my top picks for data removal services here.Kurt's key takeawaysManual removal is free and gives you full control, but it takes time and requires ongoing effort. Automated services cost money but save you time, handle rechecks and can catch new listings faster. Choose what best fits your budget and privacy needs. If you follow these steps and stay consistent, you can take back control of your personal information online. It might take some work, but every removal counts toward protecting your privacy.CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APPDo you think it should be your job to constantly remove your info from people-search sites or should companies and lawmakers be doing more to protect your privacy? Let us know by writing us at Cyberguy.com/Contact.For more of my tech tips and security alerts, subscribe to my free CyberGuy Report Newsletter by heading to Cyberguy.com/Newsletter.Ask Kurt a question or let us know what stories you'd like us to cover.Follow Kurt on his social channels:Answers to the most-asked CyberGuy questions:New from Kurt:Copyright 2025 CyberGuy.com. All rights reserved. Kurt "CyberGuy" Knutsson is an award-winning tech journalist who has a deep love of technology, gear and gadgets that make life better with his contributions for Fox News & FOX Business beginning mornings on "FOX & Friends." Got a tech question? Get Kurt’s free CyberGuy Newsletter, share your voice, a story idea or comment at CyberGuy.com.

Halo is ostensibly a series about using guns to shoot aliens and defeat organized religion. But the coolest weapon in the series isn’t a gun. It’s a sword — specifically, it’s the energy sword. You may have encountered an energy sword for the first time in 2001’s Halo: Combat Evolved. Certain classes of Elites would wield what looked, at the time, like a cyan lightsaber drawn in Microsoft Paint. You’d quickly discover that these iridescent color splotches in fact killed you in one hit, tearing through the Master Chief’s super future space armor like paper. Those feelings of frustration were likely followed by feelings of “Gimme that,” but sadly, developer Bungie did not allow players to use the energy sword in Halo: Combat Evolved. Bungie came to its senses in 2004’s Halo 2, allowing you to actually use the thing — at which point the energy sword instantly became the coolest weapon in Halo, an honor it’s held onto for more than 20 years. Since then, while many Halo weapons have undergone notable cosmetic and functional changes, the energy sword has largely remained the same. (Why change perfection?) It has a horizontal hilt; two streams of blueish plasma pour out of each end, forming mirror scythe shapes that coalesce into a sharp pointy end. When you attack an enemy, you lunge toward them, and will usually kill them in one hit. To balance this out, you can use the energy sword about ten times before it runs out of battery — enough to give you an edge but not so much to make you invincible. In the multiplayer mode for Halo Infinite, the most recent Halo game, the energy sword is known as a “power weapon,” or one that respawns on long intervals and is considered the type of weapon that can turn the tide of a match. There are plenty of uses for the energy sword in Infinite’s multiplayer — none of which are inherently evil, by the way, no matter what people might tell you. They are as follows: You can camp around a corner and kill an unsuspecting opponent as they walk by you You can camp behind a box and kill an unsuspecting opponent as they walk by you You can camp next to a doorframe and kill an unsuspecting opponent as they walk by you You can camp near a ramp or stairwell and kill an unsuspecting opponent as they walk by you Of course, the best players have found even more creative ways to use the energy sword. Top Halo pro Tommy “Lucid” Wilson notably pairs the energy sword with a long-range rifle to bait opponents into headshots. In the original multiplayer trailer for Halo Infinite, you can see one player using the explosion from a plasma grenade to launch an energy sword off an isolated platform before grabbing it midair and killing an opponent. (If you somehow pull this off in an actual match, you’ll get the Combat Evolved medal. Hearing longtime Halo announcer Jeff Steitzer say “combat evolved” never gets old.) The energy sword became so overbearing in Halo Infinite that, in December 2022, a year after the game’s release, developer 343 Industries nerfed it. But that hasn’t done anything to suppress its cool factor, as the energy sword is now no longer relegated to the Halo games (or covers of tie-in novels). Etsy is rife with hundreds of energy sword trinkets. Check out your local renaissance faire; you’ll likely see a wall of wood-carved energy swords at the “blacksmith.” Anecdotally, a solid half of all Halo tattoos feature the energy sword. It has fully broken containment. Can the battle rifle say that? Can the gravity hammer? Screw the gravity hammer.