Tech

What Exoskeleton Technology Learned From One User

Published

10 hours ago

1 April 2026

It’s easy to assume that Robert Woo was defined by the accident that took away his ability to walk.

Certainly, the day of his accident—14 December 2007—was a turning point. Woo, an architect working on the new Goldman Sachs headquarters in New York City, hadn’t attended his company’s holiday party the night before, and that morning he was the only one in the trailer that served as the construction-site office. He was bent over his laptop when, 30 floors above, a crane’s nylon sling gave way, sending about 6 tonnes of steel plummeting toward the trailer. The roof collapsed, folding Woo in half and smashing his face into his laptop, which smashed through his desk.

“I was conscious throughout the whole ordeal,” Woo remembers. “It was an out-of-body experience. I could hear myself screaming in pain. I could hear the voices of the rescue workers. I heard one firefighter say, ‘Don’t worry, we’re getting to you.’” The rescue workers hauled him out of the rubble and got him to the emergency room in 18 minutes flat; with one lung crushed and the other punctured, he wouldn’t have lasted much longer. In those frantic early moments, a doctor told him that he might be paralyzed from the neck down for the rest of his life. He remembers asking the doctors to let him die.

Woo simply couldn’t imagine how a paralyzed version of himself could continue living his life. Then 39 years old, he worked long hours and jetted around the world to supervise the construction of skyscrapers. More important, he had two young boys, ages 6 months and 2 years. “I couldn’t see having a life while being paralyzed from the neck down, not being able to teach my boys how to play ball,” he recalls. “What kind of life would that be?”

Robert Woo walks inside the Wandercraft facility in New York City using the company’s latest self-balancing exoskeleton. Nicole Millman

But in a Manhattan showroom last May, Woo showed that he’s not defined by that accident, which left him paralyzed from the chest down, but with the use of his arms. Instead, he has defined himself by how he has responded to his injury, and the new life he built after it.

In the showroom, Woo transferred himself from his wheelchair to a 80-kilogram (176-pound) exoskeleton suit. After strapping himself in, he manipulated a joystick in his left hand to rise from a chair and then proceeded to walk across the room on robotic legs. Woo’s steps were short but smooth, and he clanked as he walked.

This exoskeleton, from the French company Wandercraft, is one of the first to let the user walk without arm braces or crutches, which most other models require to stabilize the user’s upper body. The battery-powered exoskeleton took care of both propulsion and balance; Woo just had to steer. The bulky apparatus had a backplate that extended above Woo’s head, a large padded collar, armrests, motorized legs, and footplates. Walking across the room, he appeared to be half man, half machine. On the other side of the showroom’s plate-glass window, on Park Avenue, a kid walking by with his family came to a dead halt on the sidewalk, staring with awe at the cyborg inside.

Person seated wearing a full lower-body robotic exoskeleton for mobility assistance

Robert Woo prepares to walk in a Wandercraft exoskeleton; the device’s controller enables him to stand up, initiate walk mode, and choose a direction. Bryan Anselm/Redux

The amazement on the boy’s face was reminiscent of Woo’s young sons’ reaction when they saw a photo of Woo trying out an early exoskeleton, back in 2011. “Their first comment was, ‘Oh, Daddy’s in an Iron Man suit,’” he remembers. Then they asked, “When are you going to start flying?” To which Woo replied, “Well, I’ve got to learn how to walk first.”

The title of exoskeleton superhero suits Woo. He’s as soft-spoken and mild-mannered as Clark Kent, with a smile that lights up his face. Yet the strength underneath is undeniable; he has built a new life out of sheer determination.

For 15 years, he’s been a test pilot, early adopter, and clinical-study subject for the most prominent exoskeletons under development around the world. He placed the first order for an exoskeleton that was approved for home use, and he learned what it was like to be Iron Man around the house. Throughout it all, he has given the companies detailed feedback drawn from both his architectural design skills and his user experience. He has shaped the technology from inside of it.

Saikat Pal, a researcher at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, in Newark, met Woo during clinical trials for Wandercraft’s first model. Like so many others in the field, Pal quickly recognized that Woo brought a lot to the table. “He’s a super-mega user of exoskeletons: very enthusiastic, very athletic,” Pal says. “He’s the perfect subject.”

By pushing the technology forward, Woo has paved the way for thousands of people with spinal cord injuries as well as other forms of paralysis, who are now benefiting from exoskeletons in rehab clinics and in their homes. “Our bionics program at Mount Sinai started with Robert Woo,” says Angela Riccobono, the director of rehabilitation neuropsychology at Mount Sinai Hospital, in New York City, where Woo became an outpatient after his accident. “We have a plaque that dedicates our bionics program to him.”

Robert Woo walks down a sidewalk in New York City in 2015 using a ReWalk exoskeleton, one of the first exoskeletons designed for use outside the rehab clinic. Eliza Strickland

It’s a fitting tribute. Woo’s post-accident life has been marked by victories, frustrations, deep love, and one devastating loss, and yet he has continued to devote himself to bionics. And while his vision for exoskeletons hasn’t changed, experience has reshaped what he expects from them in his lifetime.

Long before Woo ever stood up in a robotic suit, he had developed the habits of mind that would later make him an unusually perceptive test pilot.

Woo has always been a builder, a tinkerer, a fixer. Growing up in the suburbs of Toronto, he put together model kits of battleships and airplanes without looking at the instructions. “I just put things together the way I thought it would work out,” he says. He trained as an architect and in 2000 joined the Toronto-based firm Adamson Associates Architects, a job that soon had him traveling to Europe and Asia to work on corporate high-rises.

Adamson specializes in taking the stunning designs of visionary architects and turning them into practical buildings with elevators and bathrooms. “Most of the design architects don’t really have a clue about how to build buildings,” Woo says. He liked solving those problems; he liked reconciling beautiful designs with the stubborn reality of construction. That talent for understanding a structure from the inside and spotting the flaws would prove essential later.

After his accident, Woo had two major surgeries to stabilize his crushed spine, which required surgeons to cut through muscles and nerves that connected to his arms. For two months, he couldn’t feel or move his arms; there was a chance he never would again. Only when sensation began creeping back into his fingertips did he allow himself to imagine a different future. If he wasn’t paralyzed from the neck down, he thought, maybe more of his body could be brought back online. “My focus was to walk again,” he says.

Woo was discharged in March 2008 and went back to his New York City apartment. He was still bedridden and required around-the-clock care. He doesn’t much like to talk about this next part: By May, his then-wife had moved back to Canada and filed for divorce, asking for full custody of their two children. Woo remembers her saying, “I can’t look after three babies, and one of them for life.”

It was a dark time. Riccobono of Mount Sinai, who met Woo shortly after he became an outpatient there in 2008, recalls the despondent look on his face the first time they talked. “I wasn’t sure that he wasn’t going to take his life, to be honest,” she says. “He felt like he had nothing to live for.”

One photo shows a smiling man in an exoskeleton with his arm around a smiling woman. The other photo shows a metal plaque saying that the Rehabilitation Bionics Program was made possible by the advocacy and dedication of Robert Woo. Angela Riccobono of Mount Sinai Hospital (left) credits Woo with jump-starting the hospital’s bionics program; a plaque in the department of rehabilitation medicine recognizes his role.

Yet Woo harbors no animosity toward his ex-wife. “If we hadn’t separated and gone through the custody hearing, I don’t think I would have gotten this far,” he says. To win partial custody of his children, Woo had to become independent. He had to get off narcotic pain medications, regain strength, and learn how to navigate life in a wheelchair. He had to show that he no longer needed constant nursing, and that he could take care of both himself and his boys.

There were milestones: learning how to get back into his wheelchair after a fall, learning to drive a car with hand controls, learning to manage his body as it was, not as it had been. The biggest change came when he reconnected with his high school sweetheart, a vivacious woman named Vivian Springer. She was then dividing her time between Toronto and New York City, and she had a son who was almost the same age as Woo’s two boys. Springer had worked in a nursing home and knew how to change the sheets without getting him out of bed; she was currently working in human resources and knew how to deal with insurance companies. “You wouldn’t believe how much stress it lifted off of me,” Woo says. Over time, they became a family.

Man using a robotic exoskeleton with support, shopping and standing with children. Robert Woo’s wife, Vivian, was trained in how to operate the device he used at home. His sons, Tristan (left) and Adrien, grew up watching their dad test exoskeletons. Left: Lifeward; Right: Robert Woo

Once Woo had that foundation in place, Riccobono witnessed a profound change. “He went from focusing on ‘what I can’t do anymore’ to ‘What’s still possible? What can I do with what I have?’” At Mount Sinai, Woo remembers asking his doctor Kristjan Ragnarsson, who was then chairman of the department of rehabilitation medicine, if he would ever walk again. “His response was, ‘Yes, you can walk again,’” Woo remembers, “‘but not the way you used to walk.’”

First Steps in an Exoskeleton

As soon as he had regained use of his hands, Woo had started googling, looking for anything that could get him back on his feet. He tried rehab equipment like the Lokomat, which used a harness suspended above a treadmill to enable users to walk. But at the time, it required three physical therapists: one to move each leg and one to control the machine. It was a far cry from the independent strides he dreamed of.

Several years in, he learned about two companies that had built something radically different: exoskeleton suits for people with spinal cord injuries. These prototypes had motors at the knees and the hips to move the legs, with the user stabilizing their upper body with arm braces. Woo desperately wanted to try one, although the technology was still experimental and far from regulatory approval. So he took the idea to Ragnarsson, asking if Mount Sinai could bring an exoskeleton into its rehab clinic for a test drive. Ragnarsson, who’s now retired, remembers the request well. “He certainly gave us the kick in the behind to get going with the technology,” he says.

Man in robotic exoskeleton walks with canes during rehab demo as clinicians observe Robert Woo tries out an early exoskeleton from Ekso Bionics at Mount Sinai Hospital, where he first began testing the technology. Mario Tama/Getty Images

Ragnarsson had seen decades of failed attempts to get paraplegics upright, including “inflatable garments made of the same material the astronauts used when they went to the moon,” he says. All those devices had proved too tiring for the user; in contrast, the battery-powered exoskeletons promised to do most of the work. And he knew one of the founders of Ekso Bionics, a Berkeley, Calif.–based company that had built exoskeletons for the military. In 2011, Ekso brought its new clinical prototype to Mount Sinai.

The day came for Woo’s first walk. “I was excited, and I was also scared, because I hadn’t stood up for almost five years,” he remembers. “Standing up for the first time was like floating, because I couldn’t feel my feet.” In that first Ekso model, Woo didn’t control when he stepped forward; instead, he shifted his weight in preparation, and then a physical therapist used a remote control to trigger the step. Woo walked slowly across the room, using a walker to stabilize his upper body, his steps a symphony of clunks and creaks and whirs. He found it mentally and physically exhausting, but the effort felt like progress.

Robert Woo stands using an exoskeleton and embraces his wife, Vivian. Woo says that exoskeleton use has both physical and psychological benefits. Mt. Sinai

Riccobono was there for those first steps, with tears running down her face. “I remembered how he looked the day I first met him, so defeated,” she says. “To see him rise from the chair, to see him rise to a standing position, to see how tall he was, to see him take those first steps—it was beautiful.” Ragnarsson saw clear benefits to the technology. “Any type of walking is good physiologically,” he says. “And it’s a tremendous boost psychologically to stand up and look someone in the eye.” Woo remembers hugging his partner, Springer, and for the first time not worrying about running over her toes with his wheelchair. I first met Woo a few days later, during his third session with the Ekso at Mount Sinai.

Two people stand outside; one uses blue exoskeleton crutches for mobility. Ann Spungen (left), a researcher at a Veterans Affairs hospital, led early clinical trials of exoskeletons. Her research focused on the medical benefits of exoskeleton use. Robert Woo

Later that same year, at a Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) hospital in the Bronx, Woo got to try a prototype of the world’s other leading exoskeleton: the ReWalk, from the Israeli company of the same name (since renamed Lifeward). VA researchers, led by Ann Spungen, were keen to determine if exoskeleton use had real medical value for veterans with spinal cord injuries. Woo was part of that clinical trial, for which he had more than 70 walking sessions, and he’s since been in many others. But he remembers the first VA trial with the most gratitude. “Dr. Spungen’s first exoskeleton clinical trial really turned things around for me,” he says.

Over the course of the trial’s nine intense months, Woo says he saw noticeable improvements to many facets of his health. “By the end of the trial, I eliminated about three-quarters of my medication intake,” he says, including narcotic pain pills and medication for muscle spasms. He grew fitter, with less body fat, more muscle mass, and lower cholesterol. His circulation improved, he says, causing scrapes and cuts to heal more quickly, and his digestion improved too. The results Woo experienced have generally been borne out in research studies at the VA and elsewhere—exoskeletons aren’t just good for the mind, they’re good for the body.

Improving Exoskeletons From the Inside

During the VA trial, Woo began to think of exoskeletons not as miraculous machines, but as works in progress.

Man wearing robotic exoskeleton and using crutches on a city sidewalk Pierre Asselin (right), a biomedical engineer, worked with Robert Woo during clinical trials of exoskeletons. He says Woo was always pushing the limits of the technology. Robert Woo

Pierre Asselin, the biomedical engineer coordinating the VA’s study, watched participants respond very differently to the equipment. “These devices are not the equivalent of walking—you’re tired after walking a mile,” he says. He notes that later models of both the Ekso and ReWalk enabled users to initiate each step through software that recognized when they shifted their weight. Asselin adds that the cognitive load is “like learning to drive a manual transmission car, where at first you’re really struggling to coordinate the clutch and the brake.” Woo picked it up immediately, he remembers.

Man in a leg exoskeleton reaches into a kitchen cabinet while another observes. Robert Woo uses an exoskeleton to reach items in a kitchen cabinet during a test of the device’s utility for everyday tasks. Eliza Strickland

Woo became an invaluable partner, Asselin says. “When we first started with the devices, there was no training manual. We developed all of that through collaboration with Robert and other participants.” Woo pushed the limits of the technology, Asselin says, whether it was seeing how many steps he could take on one battery charge or simulating a failure mode. “He’d say, ‘What happens if I was to fall? What would be the approach to getting up?’”

Woo approached the ReWalk the way he had approached buildings in his previous life: He looked inside the structure and found the weak points. An early model left some users with leg abrasions where the straps rubbed—a small injury for most people, but a serious risk for someone who can’t feel a wound forming. Woo suggested better padding and stronger abdominal supports to redistribute the load. He also hated the heavy backpack that carried the battery and computer, so one afternoon he grabbed an old pack, cut off the straps, and rebuilt it into a compact hip-mounted pouch. Then he snapped photos and sent them to the company. The next model arrived with a fanny pack.

$Hand-drawn concept sketch of a modular device labeled \u201cReWack 6.0\u201d with notes and arrows$ Robert Woo sent detailed design sketches as part of his feedback to exoskeleton engineers. Robert Woo

Sometimes his fixes were more ambitious. One Ekso unit that he used at Mount Sinai kept shutting down after 30 minutes. Woo felt the hip motors and found them hot to the touch. “I said, ‘Can I remove these? I’m going to make a really quick fix, okay? Give me a drill and I’ll put a couple of holes in it,” he recalls telling the therapists, proposing to create a DIY heat sink. He wasn’t allowed to modify the prototype, but a year later the company introduced improved cooling around the hip motors. “There is a Robert Woo design on this device,” one therapist told him.

Eythor Bender, who was then the CEO of Ekso, called Woo to thank him for his feedback and invite him to spend a week at Ekso’s headquarters. “There was no lack of engineering power in that building,” says Bender. “But sometimes when you work with engineers, they overlook important things.” Bender says Woo brought both design skills and lived experience to his weeklong residency. “He told the engineers, ‘Guys, this has to be something that people actually like to wear.’”

Patient in exoskeleton uses walker, flanked by doctor in lab coat and man in suit Ekso Bionics CEO Eythor Bender and Mount Sinai physician Kristjan Ragnarsson were both on hand for Woo’s early trials of the Ekso device. Ragnarsson says he saw physical and psychological benefits of exoskeleton use. Robert Woo

The longer Woo tested, the further ahead he started thinking. With motors only at the hips and knees, every exoskeleton still required crutches. Add powered ankles, he told the Ekso and ReWalk teams, and the suits could balance themselves, freeing the user’s hands. But Woo was ahead of his time. “They said they weren’t going to do that. They weren’t going to change their whole platform,” he remembers. Years later, though, hands-free exoskeletons like those from Wandercraft would emerge built around exactly that principle.

When the Exoskeleton Came Home

By the mid-2010s, Woo had pushed the technology as far as he could in clinics. What he wanted now was to use an exoskeleton at home.

That milestone came after ReWalk’s exoskeleton became the first to win FDA approval for home use in 2014. ReWalk engineers still remember Woo’s help on the final tests for that personal-use model. It was the end of May in 2015, recalls David Hexner, the company’s vice president of research and development. “He said, ‘Guys, this is great. I’m going to buy it.’”

Woo was the first customer to buy an exoskeleton to bring home, paying US $80,000 out of pocket. His insurance wouldn’t cover the cost, but he was able to make the purchase in part because of a legal settlement after his accident. The home-use model came with a requirement that the user have at least one companion who was fully trained in operating the device. In Woo’s case, that meant that Springer learned to suit him up, realign his balance, and help him if he fell.

On delivery day, two SUVs drove up to a hotel down the street from Woo’s condo in the Toronto area. The technicians hauled two huge boxes into a hotel room and assembled his personal exoskeleton. They took Woo’s measurements, made adjustments, checked the software. This latest version could be controlled by either weight shifting or tapping commands on a smartwatch, and Woo had the app ready. He tested out everything in the hotel room, signed off, and then the technicians drove his robot legs to his home.

That was the start of his golden period with the ReWalk—similar to the excitement many people experience with a new piece of exercise equipment. “I used it every day for a few hours, and then I started logging how many steps I’d done,” Woo says. “My last count was probably just slightly over a million steps,” he says, with half of those steps taken in his home unit and half in training programs and clinical trials.

Person using a ReWalk exoskeleton with crutches beside stacked ReWalk shipping boxes The ReWalk was the first exoskeleton available for use outside the clinic. Robert Woo’s ReWalk arrived in two large boxes. ReWalk engineers assembled it in a hotel room, and Woo tried it out in the hallway before taking it home. Robert Woo

Tristan, Woo’s eldest son, remembers doing laps with his dad in the condo’s underground parking garage while his dad was training for a 5-kilometer race in New York City. Tristan admits that he had previously been embarrassed about his dad, but training for the race shifted something for him. “I was so used to not wanting to tell people that my dad was in a wheelchair, but then I shared his passion for the training,” he says. “When people would come up to us, I’d tell them about it.”

The ReWalk could turn ordinary moments into small engineering projects. On weekends, Woo would take his boys to the golf course behind their condo and bring a baseball. He had rigged two holsters to the sides of the suit so he could stash a crutch and stand on three points (two legs and one arm) while he pitched or caught. Throw, switch crutches, catch. On the day of his accident, he never thought such a scene would be possible. But with the exoskeleton, it became just another design problem to solve. “It’s a little more work. It’s not perfect,” he says. “But in the end, you still get to do what you want to do—which is play ball with your sons.”

Tristan, now a college student, says he didn’t realize at the time how hard his dad worked to make those mundane activities possible. “Reflecting on it now,” he says, “he has shaped almost every element of my life, and he definitely is my hero.”

But even during that golden stretch, the ReWalk had a way of asserting its limits. Every so often it would freeze mid-stride and require a reboot—a small technical hiccup in theory, but a serious problem when there’s a person strapped inside. Once, when he was walking on his own in the parking garage (without his mandated companion), the suit glitched and went into “graceful collapse” mode, lowering him to a seated position on the ground. Woo had to ask security to bring his wheelchair and a dolly.

He had imagined the exoskeleton would be most useful in the kitchen. Woo loves to cook, and he had pictured himself standing at the stove, looking down into pots, and moving easily between counter and sink. The reality, he found out, was more complicated. “It’s actually very time-consuming and troublesome” to cook in an exoskeleton, he says.

Preparing a meal meant first rolling through the kitchen in his wheelchair to gather every ingredient and utensil, then transferring himself into the ReWalk and moving himself into position at the counter, stopping at just the right moment. “That’s when I fell once,” Woo says. “I collided with the counter and then lost my balance and fell backward.” If all went well, he’d lean either on one crutch or the counter to keep his balance while he worked. But if he’d forgotten to grab the vinegar from the cabinet, he’d have to go into walk mode, crutch over to it, and figure out how to carry the bottle back to his workstation.

Powered exoskeleton suit and crutches positioned in a modern clinical room Sitting unused in Robert Woo’s home, his ReWalk exoskeleton reflects both the promise and the limits of early devices. Robert Woo

Gradually, he stopped trying. The suit, which he’d once worn every day, spent more time sitting idle in the hallway; like so many abandoned treadmills and stationary bikes, it gathered dust. Part of the reason was the exoskeleton’s practical limitations, but part of it was a shocking development: In 2024, Vivian was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer. She died in November of that year, at the age of 54.

Woo was scheduled to begin a new round of clinical trials for the Wandercraft home-use exoskeleton that month. In the aftermath of Vivian’s death, he postponed his sessions and questioned whether he would ever go back. “At the time, I thought, ‘What’s the point?’” he remembers.

He did go back, though. “He just rolled up, right into my office,” says Mount Sinai’s Riccobono. “He still had Vivian’s box of ashes on his lap. That’s how fresh it was.” Woo brought the box into a meeting of spinal cord injury patients and shared the story of losing the love of his life. And he told them that he heard his wife’s voice in his head every day, telling him to get back to work. Once again, he was figuring out how to move forward with what he had.

How Close Are We to Everyday Exoskeletons?

In the Wandercraft showroom last May, Woo steered toward the door to the street, technicians flanking him like spotters. The slope down to the sidewalk was barely an inch high, but everyone tensed. He shifted his weight and took a step forward. The suit halted automatically. He tried again—step, stop; step, stop—as the suit kept detecting the slight decline and a safety feature kicked in. The Wandercraft isn’t yet rated for slopes of more than 2 percent, and even the gentle pitch of Park Avenue was enough to trigger its safeguards. When he finally reached the sidewalk, Woo broke into a grin. A man in the back seat of a stopped Uber leaned out his window, filming.

Knee brace with straps and a leg showing a fresh, red incision scar. During testing of the Wandercraft exoskeleton, straps caused an abrasion on Robert Woo’s leg, which he documented as part of his feedback to the company. Robert Woo

Woo had recently completed seven sessions with the Wandercraft at the VA hospital and had been impressed overall. But at the showroom, he rolled up his pants leg to reveal an abrasion on his shin, the result of a strap that had worn away a patch of skin during a long walking session. He would later send Wandercraft a nine-page assessment with photos and a technology wish list, asking the company to work on things like padding, variable walking speeds, and deeper squats.

Wandercraft’s engineers relish that kind of user feedback, says CEO Matthieu Masselin. Exoskeletons are a far more difficult engineering problem than humanoid robots, he explains. “You basically have two systems of equal importance. You know about the robot—it’s fully quantified and measured. But you don’t know what the person is doing, and how the person is moving within the device.”

Since Woo began testing exoskeletons 15 years ago, both the technology and the market have made strides. ReWalk and Ekso won FDA clearance for clinical use in the 2010s, and both now sell home-use versions. The companies have sold thousands of exoskeletons to rehab clinics and personal users, and they see room for growth; in the United States alone, about 300,000 people live with spinal cord injuries, and millions more have mobility impairments from stroke, multiple sclerosis, or other conditions. The VA began supplying devices to eligible veterans in 2015, and Medicare recently established a system for reimbursement, a move that private insurers are beginning to follow. What was once experimental is slowly becoming established.

Researchers who test the devices say the technology still has significant limits. Pal, of the New Jersey Institute of Technology, mentions battery life, dexterity, and reliability as ongoing challenges. But, he says with a laugh, “Our bodies have evolved over many millions of years—these machines will need a bit more time.” Pal hopes the companies will keep pushing the technological frontier. “My lifetime goal is to see the day when someone like Robert Woo can wake up in the morning, put this device on, and then live an ordinary life.”

For Woo, the real question about the self-balancing Wandercraft was: Could he cook with it? In the VA hospital’s home mockup, he tried it out in the kitchen, stepping sideways to retrieve items from cabinets and squatting to grab something from the fridge’s lower shelf. For the first time in years, he could work at a counter without leaning on crutches. “The self-standing exoskeleton changes everything,” he says. He imagines a user placing a Thanksgiving turkey on a tray attached to the suit and walking it into the dining room.

Back in the showroom, Woo finishes the demo and brings the suit to a seated position before transferring back to his wheelchair. After so many years of testing prototypes, he’s now realistic about the technology’s timeline. A truly all-day exoskeleton—the kind you live in, the kind that replaces a wheelchair—may be a decade or more away. “It may not be for me,” he says. But that’s no longer the point. He’s thinking about young people who are newly injured, who are lying in hospital beds and trying to imagine how their lives can continue. “This will give them hope.”

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Earwig is a strange movie, but when you’re a horror fan, that’s often a compliment. Set in a bleak post-war Europe, we follow a middle-aged man, Albert, as he cares for a young girl named Mia, who has no teeth.

Every day, he makes her new dentures out of ice, and one day, he’s told by a mysterious voice to prepare Mia for the outside world, where she has never been. Described as both a melodrama and a body horror, it’s a disturbing movie that may divide fans, but I can certainly say it’s stuck with me for a while.

Watch On

When: April 10
Where: Netflix (US); Paramount+ (UK); rent or buy (AU)

2022’s Scream is the fifth entry into the slasher franchise, and why it wasn’t just called Scream 5 continues to baffle me. Anyway, don’t let that deter you; it is a very strong movie and one of my favorites in the series.

Despite the name, it’s not a remake; instead, it focuses on a new core cast of characters, though original stars like Courteney Cox, David Arquette, and Neve Campbell reprise their roles.

Watch On

When: April 11
Where: Netflix (US); Paramount+ (UK); rent or buy (AU)

Ahead of A Quiet Place Part III, which is due next year, why not catch up with the second in the successful horror series? It’s arriving on Netflix for US audiences, while UK audiences can watch on Paramount+.

A Quiet Place Part II continues to focus on the Abbott family (except for John Kransinski’s Lee) as they try to survive in a post-apocalyptic world inhabited by blind aliens with an acute sense of hearing, so it’s critical that they monitor how much noise they make. Horror doesn’t get much more tense than this.

Watch On

When: April 24
Where: Shudder, AMC+ (worldwide)

Finally, at the end of April, we have Dolly. Creepy dolls are a staple in the horror genre, just look at Annabelle and Chucky, but this movie has got me creeped out by the synopsis alone.

Terror strikes when Macy and her boyfriend Chase are attacked while camping, and Macy is abducted by a tall, menacing figure who treats her as if she were a living doll. NWA wrestler Max the Impaler plays said figure, making it their movie debut.

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OldVersion Is Back, And Better Than Ever

Published

27 minutes ago

2 April 2026

NewsAdmin

You know what they say — you can’t keep a good website down. OldVersion.com, the repository of outdated software that has been serving up old versions of tools you need for the last twenty-five years, is not going away as we reported last year. Not only is it sticking around, it’s gotten a retro facelift inspired by Windows 3.1 or OS/2. Mostly Windows, given the screensaver, but we’ll let you find that for yourself.

We’re thrilled to see that OldVersion has gotten the support they need to keep going after running into financial troubles. According to founder Alex Levine, some of that support came as a result of the Hackaday article reporting on the then-upcoming closure, so kudos to you guys for stepping up.

While we absolutely love the retro redesign of the new website, that’s one thing notably lacking — an obvious donation button. Well, that and old-school HTTP support so you can get on with your retromachines, but that, at least, is in the works according to the site roadmap. It’s a little weird that in this year of the common era 2026 you have to do extra work to give up on HTTPS functionality, but it is the way it is.

In the meantime, the site is fully usable as long as you have HTTPS capability, or go through a proxy. Perhaps you could use this ESP8266 code to get started making one, if you don’t want to embarrass your old computer by using something more powerful than it as a pass-through.

Speaking of proxies, if old versions of software aren’t enough for you, how about an old version of the internet? We heard you like old versions, so you can visit an old version of OldVersion!

Note that if you’re reading this after 01/04/2026, the look-and-feel of OldVersion.com may not match what’s depicted here.

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SpaceX Files Draft for Potentially Stratospheric IPO

Published

53 minutes ago

2 April 2026

NewsAdmin

SpaceX is looking to the heavens for its upcoming initial public offering based on a $1.75 trillion valuation, according to confidential paperwork filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

As reported by Bloomberg, the draft IPO registration is the first step toward a possible June offering that could raise approximately $75 billion. The filing allows the company to get feedback from the SEC before the information is released publicly.

The IPO may be open to more people than just the wealthiest investors. According to a report by The Motley Fool, SpaceX plans to allocate around 30% of the initial shares to “retail investors,” meaning individual investors. Normal retail allocation tends to be around 10% of shares.

A SpaceX representative didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Why a SpaceX IPO is a big deal

Spaceflight is an incredibly expensive endeavor; SpaceX gets billions of dollars from the US government to launch satellites and help keep NASA’s programs running. Almost a year ago, the company set a target of launching every other day through the end of 2025 and ended up launching a record 165 orbital flights.

But SpaceX is no longer just a high-flying rocket company. Its Starlink division provides data access to homes, remote locations, airlines and direct to many mobile phones in areas where there’s no cellular coverage. It also recently acquired xAI, another of Elon Musk’s companies, and owns the social media site X (formerly Twitter).

It’s the AI angle that seems to be driving up the company’s valuation ahead of the IPO. The xAI all-stock acquisition valued the company and SpaceX at $1.25 trillion. This year, OpenAI and Anthropic PBC are also expected to go public.

Although those numbers are eye-popping, the company has plenty of challenges before it can get off the launchpad.

Starlink has announced a plan to send up new V3 third-generation satellites that should bring gigabit internet speeds to its network, but those won’t be ready until 2027. Getting them up requires SpaceX’s heavy-duty Spacecraft vehicle, which has had limited success in testing so far. In the meantime, its current Starlink satellites have been exploding in orbit as recently as this week.

And for xAI, the skies aren’t exactly clear despite the current fervor for all things AI. Musk announced in mid-March that “xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up.” And the company is being sued by three teen girls and their guardians for “devastating” harm caused by its Grok AI generating child sexual abuse images.

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WhatsApp notifies 200 users who installed fake app built by Italian spyware maker SIO

Published

1 hour ago

2 April 2026

NewsAdmin

WhatsApp has notified approximately 200 users, primarily in Italy, that they were tricked into installing a counterfeit version of the messaging app that was actually government spyware. The fake application was built by SIO, an Italian surveillance technology company that develops spyware for law enforcement and intelligence agencies through its subsidiary ASIGINT. WhatsApp said it had proactively identified the affected users, logged them out of their accounts, warned them about the privacy risks, and urged them to delete the fake client and install the official app from a trusted source. The company told TechCrunch it also plans to send a formal legal demand to SIO to halt any malicious activity linked to the campaign.

The disclosure, first reported by Italian newspaper La Repubblica and news agency ANSA, marks the second time in little more than a year that WhatsApp has publicly named a spyware vendor operating against its users in Italy. In early 2025, WhatsApp alerted around 90 users, including journalists and pro-immigration activists, that they had been targeted by Paragon Solutions, a U.S.-Israeli surveillance firm whose flagship product, Graphite, was deployed by Italy’s domestic and foreign intelligence services. That revelation triggered a political crisis in Rome. Italy’s parliamentary intelligence oversight committee, COPASIR, confirmed the use of Graphite and found that seven Italians had been targeted. Paragon subsequently cut ties with Italy’s spy agencies after the government declined to verify whether the spyware had been used against a specific journalist, Francesco Cancellato of the news site Fanpage.

SIO’s spyware operates through a different model. The malware, identified in its own code as Spyrtacus, is embedded in fake applications designed to look like legitimate software. Researchers have found 13 different samples of Spyrtacus dating back to 2019, with the most recent from late 2024. Previous versions impersonated Android apps from Italian mobile providers TIM, Vodafone, and WINDTRE, as well as earlier fake versions of WhatsApp itself. TechCrunch first exposed SIO’s Android distribution campaign in February 2025. The latest operation, targeting iPhones, represents an expansion of the tactic to Apple’s ecosystem. Once installed, Spyrtacus can steal text messages, chat histories, and call logs, as well as record audio and video directly from the device’s microphone and camera.

The delivery mechanism is as revealing as the malware itself. In Italy, authorities routinely obtain cooperation from mobile carriers, who send phishing links to their own customers on behalf of law enforcement. The target receives what appears to be a routine update notification from their provider, directing them to install what looks like a standard WhatsApp update. The Italian justice ministry has maintained a price list and catalogue showing how authorities can compel telecom companies to send such messages, a system that effectively turns the mobile network itself into a distribution channel for state surveillance tools. The cost of renting spyware in Italy is remarkably low: as of late 2022, law enforcement could access these tools for as little as €150 per day, without the large upfront acquisition costs that typically limit deployment in other countries.

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Italy’s position as a spyware hub is unusual among Western democracies. Companies including Hacking Team, Cy4Gate, RCS Lab, and Raxir have all been based in the country, drawn by a legal framework that provides a formal statutory basis for the “captatore informatico,” or computer interceptor, effectively state-sanctioned trojan software. Fabio Pietrosanti, president of the Hermes Center for Transparency and Digital Human Rights, has said that spyware is deployed more frequently in Italy than anywhere else in Europe because the low cost and permissive regulation make it accessible to a far wider range of law enforcement agencies than in neighbouring countries. The result is an ecosystem in which municipal police forces, not just national intelligence agencies, can commission surveillance operations against individuals.

WhatsApp spokesperson Margarita Franklin told TechCrunch the company could not yet confirm whether the 200 affected users included journalists or members of civil society. “Our priority has been protecting the users who may have been tricked into downloading this fake iOS app,” she said. The company did not specify whether it had referred the matter to Italian prosecutors or to any regulatory authority. Apple and SIO did not respond to requests for comment.

The legal landscape around commercial spyware has shifted substantially in the past year. In May 2025, a California jury ordered NSO Group, the Israeli maker of Pegasus, to pay WhatsApp $167 million in punitive damages after finding it had enabled hacks of approximately 1,400 users through zero-click attacks. A federal judge later reduced the award to $4 million but imposed a permanent injunction barring NSO from targeting WhatsApp’s infrastructure. NSO has appealed. WhatsApp’s parent company Meta described the verdict as a landmark, and it has since expanded its legal strategy against the broader surveillance industry. The formal legal demand WhatsApp intends to send SIO follows the same pattern: use litigation and public disclosure as deterrents against companies that profit from compromising encrypted messaging platforms.

The proliferation of spyware vendors presents a challenge that extends well beyond any single platform. Apple has sent mercenary-spyware threat notifications to users in more than 150 countries since 2021, alerting individuals it believes have been individually targeted by state-sponsored attacks. In April 2025, Apple notified the Italian journalist Ciro Pellegrino, one of the Paragon victims, that he had been targeted. The notification systems run by Apple and WhatsApp now represent the primary mechanism by which victims of government surveillance learn they have been compromised, a function that was once the exclusive domain of the cybersecurity industry’s specialist researchers.

The global lawful-interception market was valued at $4 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach $15 billion by 2032, growing at roughly 16 per cent annually. That growth is being driven not by the Pegasus-style zero-click exploits that attract headlines, but by the kind of low-cost, phishing-based tools that SIO sells. The barrier to entry for government surveillance has dropped to the point where a local police department in a midsize Italian city can commission the same class of spyware deployment that was once the preserve of national intelligence agencies. The gap between regulatory ambition and enforcement capacity in Europe means that the legal frameworks governing these tools have not kept pace with the speed at which they are being adopted.

What makes the SIO case distinct from the Paragon scandal is the method. Paragon’s Graphite used zero-click exploits that required no action from the target. SIO’s Spyrtacus requires the target to install a fake application, a social-engineering approach that relies on trust in the carrier and familiarity with routine app updates. The fact that Italian telecoms participate in the delivery chain, sending phishing messages to their own subscribers at the state’s request, turns the mobile infrastructure itself into an instrument of surveillance. It is one thing for a government to hack a phone. It is another for the phone company to help.

WhatsApp’s decision to publicly name SIO and notify the affected users follows the broader pattern of tech platforms asserting themselves as counterweights to state surveillance in ways that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. The company is not merely patching a vulnerability. It is identifying the vendor, alerting the victims, and threatening legal action, a posture that positions a messaging app owned by Meta as a more effective check on government spyware abuse than any European regulatory body has managed to date. Whether that dynamic is reassuring or alarming depends on your view of where the responsibility for protecting citizens from their own governments should ultimately rest.

For the 200 users in Italy who received WhatsApp’s notification, the immediate question is narrower: who authorised the surveillance, and on what legal basis? The answer may never become public. Italy’s lawful-intercept framework permits the use of these tools under judicial oversight, but the oversight mechanisms have repeatedly proven inadequate to prevent abuse. The Paragon scandal demonstrated that intelligence agencies could target journalists and activists under the cover of lawful authority. The SIO case suggests the problem runs deeper, extending to less prominent vendors, cheaper tools, and a distribution model that exploits the trust citizens place in their mobile carriers. The spyware industry does not need zero-click exploits to be dangerous. It just needs a convincing notification from your phone company.

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California Suspends Enforcement of Law Requiring VCs to Report Diversity Data

Published

1 hour ago

2 April 2026

NewsAdmin

Under a new state regulation, venture capital firms operating in California were supposed to submit demographic data about their portfolio companies, including the gender and race of startup founders they backed. But amid public criticism from some tech leaders, the California agency administering the new requirement suspended it just before the Wednesday deadline for firms to make their first disclosures.

“The California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation (DFPI) has announced that it plans to initiate rulemaking in response to comments by various stakeholders relating to the Fair Investment Practices by Venture Capital Companies Law,” the state agency posted on its website in mid-March. “Implementation and enforcement of the [law] will be suspended pending completion of the rulemaking and until final regulations are in place.”

California lawmakers first passed the measure in 2023, and it was signed into law shortly thereafter by Governor Gavin Newsom. For decades, women and people of color have received only a small share of overall startup funding relative to their representation in the US population. Lawmakers hoped putting more public scrutiny on investment decisions would help foster greater equity in the market, including for people who are disabled, retired military, or LGBTQ+.

The law called for venture capital and some other investment firms to file annual reports starting March 1 of last year about the overall makeup of the founding teams they had invested in and the amount of money they provided to diverse founders. Firms were meant to collect the demographic data through a voluntary survey that was then anonymized. California authorities planned to publish the filings online. Lawmakers amended the law in 2024 to delay reporting until April 1, 2026 and enable the state to levy daily fines for noncompliance.

The California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the authority it used to sidestep the deadline set by lawmakers. Newsom’s office also didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Financiers focused on funding entrepreneurs from underrepresented backgrounds had supported the law. But the National Venture Capital Association, the tech investment industry’s leading trade group, opposed it. The group argued that voluntary data collection would inflate diversity statistics and that publishing inaccurate data could lead to unfair attacks on investors genuinely trying to tackle diversity issues. Over the past year, the Trump administration has defunded and attacked diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, initiatives in both the public and private sectors, leading many businesses and organizations to pull back from them.

In February, the venture capital association wrote to Newsom asking for the reporting deadline to be pushed back again because, in its view, the state had bungled the process. California authorities didn’t publish the standardized survey founders were supposed to fill out until early this year and, at the time, they still hadn’t introduced a way for firms to register with regulators as required by the law, according to the association. “This administrative timeline creates an environment ripe for error and threatens to produce the misleading and counterproductive data we previously warned against,” association president and CEO Bobby Franklin wrote.

Last month, as the deadline for the first reports loomed, some entrepreneurs and investors began complaining on social media about the survey effort. “The latest California malarky is a requirement for venture investors to collect/report racial and gender statistics,” wrote Blake Scholl, the founder and CEO of venture-backed aviation startup Boom Supersonic. “I want to live in a world where merit matters—not skin color or what you have between your legs.”

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New CrystalRAT malware adds RAT, stealer and prankware features

Published

2 hours ago

2 April 2026

NewsAdmin

New CrystalRAT malware adds RAT, stealer and prankware features

A new malware-as-a-service called CrystalRAT is being promoted on Telegram, offering remote access, data theft, keylogging, and clipboard hijacking capabilities.

The malware emerged in January with a tiered subscription model. Apart from the Telegram channel, the MaaS was also promoted on YouTube, via a dedicated marketing channel that showcased its capabilities.

Kaspersky researchers say in a report today that the malware features strong similarities to WebRAT (Salat Stealer), including the same panel design, Go-based code, and a similar bot-based sales system.

CrystalX also includes an extensive list of prankware features designed to annoy the user or disrupt their work. Despite its “fun” side, CrystalX offers a large set of data theft capabilities.

**Telegram channel promoting CrystaX RAT**
*Source: Kaspersky*

CrystalX RAT details

Kaspersky says that the malware provides a user-friendly control panel and an automated builder tool that supports customization options, including geoblocking, executable customization, and anti-analysis features (anti-debugging, VM detection, proxy detection, etc.).

The generated payloads are zlib-compressed and encrypted with the ChaCha20 symmetric stream cipher for protection.

The malware connects to the command-and-control (C2) via WebSocket and sends info about the host for profiling and infection tracking.

CrystalX’s infostealer component, which Kaspersky found to be temporarily disabled as it is being prepared for an upgrade, targets Chromium-based browsers via the ChromeElevator tool, Yandex, and Opera. Additionally, the tool collects data from desktop apps such as Steam, Discord, and Telegram.

The remote access module can be used to execute commands via CMD, upload/download files, browse the file system, and control the machine in real time via built-in VNC.

The malware also exhibits spyware-like behavior, as it can capture video and audio from the microphone.

Finally, CrystalX features a keylogger that streams keystrokes in real time to the C2, and a clipper tool that uses regular expressions to detect wallet addresses in the clipboard and replace them with ones the attacker provides.

**Remote desktop function in CrystalX RAT panel**
*Source: Kaspersky*

Putting some “fun” in the package

What sets CrystalX apart in the crowded MaaS space is its rich set of prankware features.

According to Kaspersky, the malware can do the following on infected devices:

change desktop wallpaper

alter display orientation to various angles

force system shutdown

remap mouse buttons

disable input devices (keyboard/mouse/monitor)

show fake notifications

change cursor position on the screen

hide various components (desktop icons, taskbar, the Task Manager, and the Command Prompt executable)

Provide attacker-victim chat window

While the above features do not improve the attack’s monetization potential for cybercriminals, they certainly make the product distinctive, and could bait script kiddies and low-skilled/entry-level threat actors into getting a subscription.

Another reason for the prank features could be potential for victim manipulation, or even distraction, while the data theft modules run in the background.

To reduce the risk of malware infections, users are advised to exercise caution when interacting with online content and avoid downloading software or media from untrusted or unofficial sources.

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South Dakota GOP, Governor Get Their Voter Suppression On

Published

2 hours ago

2 April 2026

NewsAdmin

from the getting-the-fix-in dept

Because South Dakota governor Larry Rhoden is forever obligated to serve Kristi Noem and Kristi Noem is forever obligated to serve Donald Trump, he and his GOP buddies are making America MAGA again, starting with his home turf.

Non-citizens have never really disrupted voting. But they’re the convenient scapegoat for a party that’s justifiably worried it’s going to lose its majority during the mid-terms. Multiple efforts are being made all over the nation to disenfranchise anyone that’s not part of Trump’s most rabid voting base. Pretending people not allowed to legally vote are somehow flipping elections for the Democratic Party is more than merely obnoxious. It’s actually harming the democratic process.

Here in South Dakota, two laws have been passed in recent weeks with the express purpose of keeping non-white people from showing up to vote. The first, passed at the beginning of this month, allows any rando to claim a person they saw voting shouldn’t be allowed to vote.

Voters in South Dakota will soon be able to challenge other voters’ citizenship.
Republican Gov. Larry Rhoden signed legislation into law last week that authorizes challenges by individuals and election officials.
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[…]
State law already allows challenges to a voter’s registration up to the 90th day before an election, if a person is suspected of lacking South Dakota residency, voting in another state or being registered to vote in another state. The new law adds citizenship as a justification for a challenge.
Challenges may be filed by the South Dakota Secretary of State’s Office, the auditor in the county where the voter is registered, or a voter in the same county. The challenge must be in the form of a signed, sworn statement and must include what the law describes as “documented evidence.”

Now, we can all see what the law is. But we all know how it will be applied. State employees with access to voter rolls will raise challenges against anyone with a foreign-sounding last name. While it’s unlikely few citizens will actually file challenges, they’ll certainly feel comfortable accosting anyone standing in line to vote whose skin is darker than their own. Given the inevitability of these responses, it’s easy to see the law accomplishing exactly what it’s supposed to: limit the number of non-white voters at the polls during the mid-terms and beyond.

But that’s not the only suppression effort signed into law this month. There’s also this one, which raises the bar for participating in the democratic process with the obvious intention of limiting participation to the sort of voters the GOP thinks with vote for it:

New voters in South Dakota will have to prove that they are United States citizens in order to cast a ballot in state and local races under a bill signed on Thursday by Gov. Larry Rhoden.
The new law, which does not apply to South Dakotans already on the voter rolls, comes amid a national push by Republicans to tighten voting rules and root out voting by noncitizens, which is already illegal and believed to be rare.
“This bill ensures only citizens vote in state elections, keeping our elections safe and secure,” said Mr. Rhoden, who is seeking election to a full term this year and is facing a crowded Republican primary field.

It’s already illegal in South Dakota to vote if you’re not a citizen. This bill addresses a completely imaginary “problem.” And it forces voters to provide a passport, birth certificate, and other documents proving citizenship before they’re allowed to vote. While it may be easy for many people to present these documents, the simple fact is that they’ve never been asked to do this before, and anyone who’s not aware this law has been passed will be denied the opportunity to vote because the GOP decided to move the goalposts during an election year.

Non-citizens voting in South Dakota has never been an issue. The fact that 273 non-citizens were recently removed from the state’s voting rolls may seem a bit sketchy but there’s a good reason there might be a few hundred non-citizens with voter registrations:

Noncitizens can obtain a driver’s license or state ID if they are lawful permanent residents or have temporary legal status. There’s a part of the driver’s license form that allows an applicant to register to vote. That part says voters must be citizens.

The problem is that this is all on the same form. The voter registration part of the form has a signature line, which many applicants will fill out and sign even if their intention is only to get a drivers license or ID card, especially since it appears before the final signature block for the entire application.

If applicants are not asked to affirmatively state their intention to register to vote (as the Department of Public Safety employees ask now, along with asking applicants to write “vote” on the form to signal their affirmation), their applications might be processed, along with the voter registration applicants didn’t realize they enabling.

The Secretary of State’s office (the office that’s supposed to be reviewing voter registrations for eligibility) threw the Department of Public Safety under the bus:

Rachel Soulek, director of the Division of Elections in the Secretary of State’s Office, placed blame on the department in her response to South Dakota Searchlight questions about the situation.
“These non U.S. citizens had marked ‘no’ to the citizenship question on their driver’s license application but were incorrectly processed as U.S. citizens due to human error by the Department of Public Safety,” Soulek wrote.
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That’s not what happened. Their ID applications were processed and the Soulek’s department failed to catch the inadvertent errors. And it doesn’t really even matter who’s at fault because despite the errors, this is still a non-issue.

Soulek said only one of the 273 noncitizens had ever cast a ballot. That was during the 2016 general election.

A handful of clerical errors that resulted in a single illegal vote in the past decade cannot be a rational basis for a new law. And there’s a good chance the sole vote was made in error, rather than maliciously. After all, if the state told this person they could vote, who were they to question that determination?

This is nothing more than state governments stepping up to do what Trump can’t. His SAVE Act is stalled and lots of last-minute gerrymandering at the behest of the president is tied up in court. His loyalists are doing what they can to make his perverted dreams a reality in states that are most likely to lean Republican in the first place, which makes all of this as pointless as it is stupid. But the underlying threat to democracy remains, ever propelled forward by the people who claim to love America the most.

Filed Under: immigration, larry rhoden, racism, south dakota, trump administration, voter fraud, voter suppression

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Meta and YouTube lost landmark social media trials. That’s bad for free speech.

Published

2 hours ago

2 April 2026

NewsAdmin

This week, juries in California and New Mexico dealt a pair of landmark verdicts against America’s social media giants.

In Los Angeles, jurors awarded $6 million to a young woman who alleged that Instagram and YouTube had damaged her mental health. A day earlier, a jury in Santa Fe ruled that Meta had designed its social media platforms in a manner that harmed minors — and ordered the company to pay $375 million in recompense.

These decisions constituted a breakthrough for a legal movement that sees social media companies as the new “Big Tobacco” — an industry that knowingly peddles harmful and addictive products. And it was a triumph for advocates of “child online safety,” who believe that social media is corrosive to minors’ psychological well-being. With thousands of similar lawsuits pending, the California and New Mexico verdicts could prove to be transformative precedents.

Yet the decisions have also raised alarm bells for many free speech advocates. To organizations like FIRE — and civil libertarian writers like Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown — these decisions will do more to undermine free expression online than to safeguard young people’s mental well-being.

To better understand — and interrogate — this perspective, I spoke with Nolan Brown. We discussed how the recent verdicts could open the door to broader censorship, the evidence for social media’s psychological harms, and whether parents can sufficiently protect their kids from problematic internet use without the government’s help. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and concision.

You’ve written that these verdicts are “a very bad omen for the open internet and free speech.” How so?

One key protection for online speech is Section 230 of the Federal Communications Decency Act, which prevents online platforms from being held liable for speech they host but don’t create.

What we’re seeing in these cases is an attempt to get around Section 230 by recharacterizing speech issues as “product liability” issues. Instead of saying, “We’re going after platforms for hosting harmful speech,” the plaintiffs are saying, “We’re going after them for negligent product design.”

In other words, the choices that social media companies make about how to curate their feeds or encourage engagement.

Right. Some of the things they complained about were “endless scroll” (where you keep going down and the feed doesn’t stop at the end of a page), recommendation algorithms that promote content that a user is more likely to engage with, and beauty filters.

But ultimately, if you look at what they’re actually going after, it comes down to speech. When you talk about TikTok or YouTube being so engaging that it’s “addictive,” you’re talking about content: No matter how TikTok’s algorithm is designed, it wouldn’t be compelling to people if the content wasn’t compelling.

Similarly, in the California case, the plaintiff argued that Meta allowing beauty filters on images was a negligent product design, since they promote unrealistic beauty standards, which caused her to develop body image issues.

But that really just comes back to speech: The choice to use a filter is something that individual users do to express themselves. Providing those tools for users is a form of speech.

But aren’t many of these product design choices content-neutral? A defender of these verdicts might argue: Social media companies are manipulating minors into compulsively using their platforms, in a manner that’s bad for their mental health. And they’re doing this, in part, through push notifications, autoplaying videos, and endlessly scrolling feeds. So, why can’t we legally restrict their use of those features — without constraining the kinds of speech they’re allowed to platform?

Some people will say, “Why don’t we limit notifications — or kick people off after an hour — if they’re minors?” But in order to implement any set of rules or product design choices just for young people, these platforms would need to have a foolproof way of knowing who is a minor and who is an adult.

And that means age verification procedures, where they’re either checking everyone’s government-issued ID, or they’re using biometric data — or something else that requires everyone to submit identification before they can speak anywhere on the internet.

And that creates a lot of problems. It makes people’s data more vulnerable to identity theft, hackers, and scammers. It also means that your identity is tied to everything you do online. And that can be dangerous, especially for people who are talking about sensitive issues or protesting the government. The ability to speak and organize online anonymously is very important.

What if the product design restrictions applied to adults and minors alike? If we barred social media companies from issuing push notifications for everyone, that would avoid the age verification issue, right?

Many platforms give people the tools to do these things already. You can turn autoplay off. You can have a chronological feed. You can tailor your settings so that you don’t have these features.

If we’re saying, “Why can’t the government mandate these options?” I think that’s a very slippery slope. You might think, “Okay, who cares about push notifications? Why can’t the government just mandate that they not do push notifications?” But the rationale for that gets us into much broader territory.

It’s effectively saying: Since some people will have a problem with this, the government must micromanage the way that the product is made. Yet people can use all sorts of products in a problematic way: Fitness regimes, streaming services, food. And we’re not saying like, okay, the government gets to step in and tell these companies exactly how to do business in the way that would be least harmful to people. And that attitude is particularly dangerous when we’re talking about products involving speech.

A skeptic might argue that the slope here isn’t actually that slippery. After all, the government has already shown that it can enact targeted, content-neutral restrictions on speech without triggering a cascade of censorship.

For example, since 1990, there have been limits on the amount of advertising that can air during children’s programming in a given hour — and also a requirement that ads and content be clearly separated. Those measures are arguably more intrusive on speech than, say, banning autoplay of videos on a social media platform. And yet, the Children’s Television Act of 1990 didn’t lead to any really sweeping constraints on First Amendment rights.

I just think it makes a big difference if you’re talking about restricting speech for minors and restricting it for adults. And what you were just mentioning were restrictions that would apply to everybody.

Beyond the First Amendment issues, you’ve expressed some skepticism about the specific causal claims made by plaintiffs in these cases: Specifically, that social media caused their mental health difficulties. Yet many social psychologists — most prominently Jonathan Haidt — have argued that these platforms are corrosive to children’s psychological being. So, why do you think the allegations here are overstated?

In the California case specifically, this young woman is alleging that, because she was on social media since she was very young, she developed mental health issues. But there was a lot of testimony showing that there were many other things going wrong in her life. She was exposed to domestic violence. She had troubles with her parents, troubles at school.

So the idea that social media directly caused her difficulties — rather than these life stressors that are well-known to cause harm — I think that’s kind of suspect.

And I think you see this problem in the broader research on social media’s mental health impacts. There’s often a correlation between depressive symptoms and heavy social media use because people who are having a difficult time at home and at school — people who are socially isolated — tend to use social media more than people in better circumstances.

How much do your views on the regulation of social media hinge on skepticism about the actual harms of these platforms? If we acquired evidence that there really were major impacts here — that autoplay and beauty filters were dramatically worsening kids’ mental health — would you support legal restrictions on these features? Or would First Amendment considerations override public health concerns, irrespective of the evidence?

The strength of the evidence is important for guiding the decision-making of individuals, parents, families, communities, and school districts. But even if we knew that beauty filters caused a lot of harm, the government still would not be justified in banning them, since they are avenues for speech. Plenty of people are not harmed by them.

There are so many things that harm some people, but that are useful to others. And I don’t think the existence of problematic use justifies banning those things for everyone.

I think talk of social media “addiction” can be unhelpful on this front. That language suggests that this is something that’s automatically harmful for everyone. And that just isn’t the case. Plenty of people use social media in a healthy way, in the same way that countless people can drink alcohol without it harming them, or eat a bag of chips without bingeing on them.

I think it’s the same way with social media. This is a technology that can harm some people, particularly those who already have psychological issues.

But it isn’t this addictive substance or a poison where you can’t even be exposed to it, or else. I think that view imbues smartphones with an almost mystical quality.

There are many cases, though, where we choose to heavily regulate a substance or practice — not because it harms everyone who engages with it — but rather, because it imposes massive harms on a minority of problem users. Gambling and alcohol are two examples. But even with opioids, many people can pop some pills and never develop a dependency. Yet some end up addicted and dying of overdoses. And for that reason, we heavily restrict access to opioids.

So, I feel like the question here might be less about whether social media is bad for everyone than whether it has truly large harms for problem users.

I think there are people who talk about it the way you do. But others describe social media as if it’s something that people are powerless against. But yes, I don’t think we have strong evidence that this is harmful in the way that addictive substances are. In fact, I think the evidence is really mixed. Some studies suggest that moderate smartphone use is actually correlated with better mental health outcomes.

You argue that, instead of seeking government restrictions on social media, parents should exercise more responsibility over their kids’ use of smartphones and apps.

Many parents argue that their capacity to monitor their children’s social media use is really limited and that they lack the tools to protect their kids from the harmful effects of these platforms. What would you say to them?

I think this is straightforward with very young children. Like, why is a 6-year-old having unfettered alone time on a digital device? In the California case, the plaintiff was using social media as a very young child. And at that age, parents definitely have control over what their kids do and see online; you can control whether your kid has access to a smartphone. With adolescents, there are areas where tech companies are working with parents. We’ve seen more parental controls being introduced in recent years. We’ve seen Meta roll out specific accounts for minors that have some restrictions on them. We’ve seen things like the introduction of phones that allow basic texting but not certain apps. So, I think private solutions are possible here. I think we can address people’s legitimate concerns without having the government infringe on free expression.

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Tech

Apple expands iOS 18 updates to more iPhones to block DarkSword attacks

Published

2 hours ago

1 April 2026

NewsAdmin

Apple

Apple has now made it possible for more iPhones still running iOS 18 to receive security updates that protect against the actively exploited DarkSword exploit kit.

“We enabled the availability of iOS 18.7.7 for more devices on April 1, 2026, so users with Automatic Updates turned on can automatically receive important security protections from web attacks called DarkSword,” reads a note in today’s iOS 18.7.7 security update changelog.

“The fixes associated with the DarkSword exploit first shipped in 2025.”

In March, researchers at Lookout, iVerify, and Google Threat Intelligence revealed a new “DarkSword” exploit kit that targeted iPhones running iOS 18.4 through 18.7.

The six vulnerabilities used by the DarkSword exploit kit are tracked as CVE-2025-31277, CVE-2025-43529, CVE-2026-20700, CVE-2025-14174, CVE-2025-43510, and CVE-2025-43520.

While iOS exploits have typically been used in highly targeted spyware campaigns, this iOS exploit kit was used much more widely, including by Turkish commercial surveillance vendor PARS Defense, a threat actor tracked as UNC6748, and a suspected Russian espionage group tracked as UNC6353.

In these attacks, GTIG observed three separate information-stealing malware families deployed on victims’ devices: a highly aggressive JavaScript infostealer named GhostBlade, the GhostKnife backdoor, and the GhostSaber JavaScript malware, which can execute code and steal data.

Since July 2025, with the release of iOS 18.6, Apple has been steadily fixing the flaws as they are disclosed in security updates pushed out to compatible devices.

**Threat actors using the DarkSword exploit kit**
*Source: GTIG*

However, by late 2025, Apple stopped offering iOS 18 updates to newer devices capable of running the newer iOS 26.

For those who decided not to upgrade and stay on iOS 18, availability to the security updates became limited, with newer devices no longer receiving patches for DarkSword vulnerabilities released in 2026.

Since then, only a small number of devices remained able to receive iOS 18 updates, and the last 18.7.6 update was offered only to iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, and iPhone XR devices.

To make matters worse, a researcher released the DarkSword exploit kit on GitHub last month, making it accessible to other threat actors who wanted to target older iPhones.

Today, Apple has released iOS 18.7.7 to make it available to more devices that want to stay on the older operating system while remaining protected from the latest threats.

Devices eligible to receive the new update now include iPhone XR, iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, iPhone 11 (all models), iPhone SE (2nd generation), iPhone 12 (all models), iPhone 13 (all models), iPhone SE (3rd generation), iPhone 14 (all models), iPhone 15 (all models), iPhone 16 (all models), iPhone 16e, iPad mini (5th generation – A17 Pro), iPad (7th generation – A16), iPad Air (3rd – 5th generation), iPad Air 11-inch (M2 – M3), iPad Air 13-inch (M2 – M3), iPad Pro 11-inch (1st generation – M4), iPad Pro 12.9-inch (3rd – 6th generation), and iPad Pro 13-inch (M4).

iPhone users still running iOS 18 with Automatic Updates enabled will now receive the latest version and protections against the DarkSword exploit kit.

Automated pentesting proves the path exists. BAS proves whether your controls stop it. Most teams run one without the other.

This whitepaper maps six validation surfaces, shows where coverage ends, and provides practitioners with three diagnostic questions for any tool evaluation.

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