from the but-maybe-this-time-it-will! dept

Back in 2011 and 2012, one of the central technical objections that helped kill SOPA and PIPA was about DNS blocking. Engineers, internet architects, and cybersecurity experts all lined up to explain, in painstaking detail, why blocking at the DNS layer was a terrible idea. It would break the fundamental architecture of how the internet works. It would have massive collateral damage. It would undermine security protocols designed to protect users from exactly the kind of DNS manipulation that the bill proposed. And it wouldn’t even stop piracy, because anyone who actually wanted to get around DNS blocking could do so easily.

Congress, to its rare credit, actually listened to the technical experts (and widespread protests) and shelved the legislation. But the entertainment industry never gave up on the idea. They just went jurisdiction-shopping. And France, which has never met a maximalist copyright enforcement scheme it didn’t love, has been more than happy to oblige.

As recently reported by TorrentFreak, a Paris Court of Appeal validated DNS blocking orders requiring Google, Cloudflare, and Cisco to block access to pirate sites through their own DNS resolvers. This goes beyond traditional ISP resolvers, which France has been ordering blocked for years — this targets third-party resolvers — the ones that millions of people specifically choose to use because they offer better privacy, better security, and better reliability than their ISP’s default DNS.

But, of course, in France (and to the usual crew of Hollywood lobbyists), “better privacy, security, and reliability” can only mean one thing: used for piracy.

The court rejected all five appeals, and in doing so, articulated a legal principle so sweeping that it has no natural stopping point.

In this case, French pay-TV provider Canal+ went to court under Article L. 333-10 of the “French Sport Code,” which lets rightsholders request “all proportionate measures” against “any online entity in a position to help” block access to pirate sites. Canal+ argued that because users were simply switching to third-party DNS resolvers to circumvent ISP-level blocking, those resolvers should be conscripted into the blocking regime too.

Cloudflare and Cisco pushed back, arguing that their DNS resolvers serve a “neutral and passive function” — they translate domain names into IP addresses and that’s it. They compared their role to a phone book. The court’s response boiled down to: we don’t care.

The DNS resolution service allows its users, via the translation of a domain name into an IP address, to access websites on which sports competitions are broadcast in violation of rights-holders’ rights, and in particular to circumvent the blocking of those sites by ISPs.

The court found that the “neutral and passive” nature of DNS resolvers is “simply irrelevant to Article L. 333-10.” The law isn’t about liability at all — it only cares whether a service can help block access to pirate sites, which DNS resolvers clearly can. If you are technically capable of blocking access, you must.

Google, meanwhile, tried a different argument: that DNS blocking through third-party resolvers isn’t effective because users can just switch to a VPN or yet another resolver. The court wasn’t moved by that either:

Any filtering measure can be circumvented, and this possibility does not render the measures in question ineffective.

As long as DNS blocking stops some subset of users from reaching pirate sites, the court ruled, it’s “proportionate.” Under that line of thinking, any measure that inconveniences even a fraction of would-be pirates is legally justified, no matter how much collateral damage it causes for everyone else.

And if you think that principle has any limit, Canal+ has made it quite clear that they don’t think it does:

Canal+ said in a statement that the rulings are “more than a victory,” forming part of “a global approach that will be reinforced by the progressive deployment of complementary measures, including IP blocking.”

Canal+ has already been getting courts to order VPN providers to block as well. So now we have ISP DNS blocking mandated, third-party DNS resolver blocking mandated, VPN blocking mandated — and, per the TorrentFreak article, direct automated IP address blocking is coming too. They will not stop until the entire internet is broken.

Each step reaches further down the internet stack, breaks more of the internet for more people, and stops fewer actual pirates, because the people who are determined to pirate content are always one technical maneuver ahead. The people who get caught in the collateral damage are ordinary users who happen to use Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 or Google’s 8.8.8.8 for perfectly legitimate reasons like speed, reliability, and privacy.

Cisco, rather than comply with the original order, simply pulled its OpenDNS service out of France entirely. That’s the kind of collateral damage we’re talking about. French users who relied on OpenDNS for entirely lawful purposes completely lost access to the service. Because a copyright holder decided that the DNS layer was the right place to play whack-a-mole with pirate sites.

When Cisco argued on appeal that implementing geo-targeted DNS blocking would require 64 person-weeks of engineering work, the court waved it off, saying the estimate was “not supported by any objective evidence” and pointing out that Cisco already offers DNS filtering to enterprise customers. The fact that enterprise DNS filtering for corporate networks is a fundamentally different thing than mass geo-targeted blocking of domains at the resolver level for an entire country’s users apparently did not register as a meaningful distinction.

The court’s core reasoning — that any entity technically capable of blocking must do so, that circumvention doesn’t make blocking disproportionate, and that the “neutral and passive” function of an intermediary is irrelevant — creates a legal framework that can reach basically anything. If a DNS resolver can be conscripted because it’s “in a position to help,” what about browsers? What about operating systems? What about CDNs, or cloud hosting providers, or certificate authorities? The logic has no brake pedal. Every layer of the internet stack is, in some sense, “in a position to help” block access to content. The question the court’s reasoning cannot answer is: where does it end?

Under this reasoning, what’s to stop a rightsholder from arguing that browsers should block pirate URLs directly? Or that operating systems should refuse to resolve them at all?

That seems bad!

Of course, this kind of maximalist copyright enforcement is something of a French specialty. This is the same country that brought us HADOPI, the graduated response agency that cost French taxpayers €82 million over a decade while imposing a grand total of roughly €87,000 in fines. A staggering return on investment — if the goal was to light money on fire while accomplishing nothing. France has also been at the forefront of copyright exceptionalism that risks undermining the EU legal system more broadly, pushing interpretations of copyright law so aggressive that they threaten to distort the legal frameworks of neighboring countries.

France keeps doing the same thing over and over again: spend enormous sums, conscript more and more intermediaries, break more and more of the internet’s infrastructure, accomplish almost nothing in terms of actually reducing piracy, and then conclude that what’s really needed is… more of the same, but harder. The entertainment industry’s refusal to learn from twenty years of evidence that enforcement-maximalism doesn’t work is genuinely remarkable. Every study and every natural experiment shows the same thing: the most effective anti-piracy tool ever invented is convenient, reasonably priced legal access to content. But that requires adapting your business model, and it’s apparently much more satisfying to get courts to break the internet for you instead.

The ruling’s real danger is the template it sets. Other countries with similar legal frameworks will look at this appeals court validation and think: we can do that too. The “any entity in a position to help” standard, combined with the “doesn’t have to be perfectly effective” standard, combined with the “we don’t care about your neutral role in the architecture” standard, adds up to a legal toolkit for conscripting nearly any internet infrastructure provider into a copyright enforcement apparatus. And the costs get externalized onto those providers (and their users), while the rightsholders collect the benefits.

The engineers who fought SOPA warned about exactly this: DNS blocking breaks things, creates collateral damage, pushes enforcement into layers of the stack never designed for it — and doesn’t actually stop piracy, because the actual pirates just route around it while everyone else suffers. France apparently decided all of those concerns are, to quote the court, “simply irrelevant.” And now they’ve moving on to IP blocking.

At some point, you run out of layers of the internet to break. But apparently we’re going to have to find out where that point is the hard way.

Filed Under: copyright, dns blocking, france, sopa

Companies: canal plus, cisco, cloudflare, google

• Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced will feature PSSR 2 on PS5 Pro
• Ubisoft confirms the game will have several modes on PS5 and PS5 Pro
• The game will also use the latest version of the studio’s Anvil engine

Ubisoft has confirmed Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced will feature Sony‘s upgraded PSSR (PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution) AI upscaling technology.

The remake of the 2013 Assassin’s Creed pirate adventure has finally been revealed, and a new PlayStation Blog post following the world premiere trailer has outlined what players can expect from the PS5 and PS5 Pro versions.

Back in the early 1980s, Radio Shack sold a variety of gadgets that caught the eye of both curious children and tech enthusiasts. Among those goods was Gobble Man, a small handheld game that placed maze chases directly into your palms years before the larger portable consoles that came later. Bandai first released this in Japan during 1981 as a game known as Packri Monster. Tandy then scooped it up, licensing the design for its US stores before selling it as Gobble Man in 1983. To add to the confusion, Tandy sold the exact same units under the titles Hungry Monster and Ogre Eater.

Four AA batteries powered everything from start to finish. A vacuum fluorescent display, which was basically a tiny little screen, made the game feel extremely bright; even in a dark room or on a vehicle journey, you could see every wall and dot in the maze clearly. Inside the handheld was a Hitachi HD38800 chip, a specialized microcontroller designed specifically to operate this game and nothing else.

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Players took a rectangular plastic case about the size of a large paperback book to play with. A four-way joystick on the front let you to direct the yellow monster through the curving courses; the stick itself employed a dual pivot mechanism that required a forceful push to register every turn. The monster continued to move in the same direction until the player altered course or it collided with a wall. The controls included a start button and a power switch, as well as a small orange indicator that signaled when the gadget was turned on.

The music came from a very small built-in speaker that played the tunes and effects at the same constant volume, such as beeps and rudimentary melodies, and alerted you when something happened in the game. There was no volume control, so the cacophony was part of the experience, whether you liked it or not. The gameplay took place on a single fixed maze, with green food pellets to chew on. The goal was simple: move the monster so that it ate every pellet before the bogey caught up, and if it did, game over. Red power food would sometimes materialize in specific locations. Eating one of those would transform the monster into a coward who would back direction and flash briefly. For a certain period of time, you might pursue them and get some bonus points.

However, the difficulty level increased with each subsequent round. More enemies joined the chase, and speeds rose, giving the maze the sensation of closing in around you when the strain was on. Your score would skyrocket if you timed your power snacks perfectly and wiped the board clear without making a single error. Round after round, the whole thing just kept going until the batteries died or your thumbs gave out in frustration. Anyone who picked up Gobble Man in 1983 would immediately feel as if they understood the game because the rules were so familiar.

Gobble Man was never really trying to compete with the big boys, such as Pac-Man, home consoles, and coin-op machines. It was simply a nice little distraction to keep you engaged while on the run, regardless of where you were. Six years later, Nintendo released the Game Boy, which very well defined what portable gaming was all about. But first, Tandy created Gobble Man, which proved that the concept worked and left many people wanting more.

More than half of the outlets listed on its website are reportedly closed

Homegrown supermarket and minimart chain Hao Mart has closed a large share of its outlets as losses deepen, The Straits Times reported.

As of publication, Hao Mart’s website lists 20 outlets across Singapore. However, a check by The Straits Times found that only seven remain in operation after visiting all listed locations over a two-week period in the second half of Mar.

The remaining seven include six regular Hao Mart stores, located in Bedok South Avenue 3, Canberra Link, Potong Pasir Ave 1, Petir Road, Whampoa Drive and Pasir Ris Street 21; and one premium Eccellente outlet in the Marina Square shopping mall.

According to Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority (ACRA) records obtained by the publication, the company has been in the red since 2023, and its losses have worsened over the years.

For FY2025, Hao Mart reported a S$49.6 million loss. The amount is up from S$32.8 million in FY2024 and S$23.2 million in FY2023, following two years of profitability. The company also posted a S$2.2 million loss for FY2019, its first year of filings.

FY2025’s figures were filed with ACRA belatedly in Jan. ACRA told The Straits Times in Mar that it has taken enforcement action against Hao Mart for failing to file annual returns within six months of its financial year-end.

While the regulator did not disclose the specific penalty imposed, its website states that late filings can incur fines of S$300 or S$600, depending on the length of the delay.

Separately, Hao Mart is also facing four High Court lawsuits, including a dispute with landlord OG over the termination of its lease for its flagship five-storey Taste Orchard mall on Orchard Road.

Vulcan Post has reached out to Hao Mart about the scaling down of its operations and financial situation.

Some closed stores taken over by rivals

Hao Mart was founded by Dr Tan Kim Yong in 2016, with its first store at Block 74 Whampoa Drive. The chain expanded rapidly over the years, peaking at 51 stores in Dec 2021.

But by Dec 2024, Hao Mart stores had dwindled to just 20, according to its website. Among the outlets that The Straits Times found to be closed, four had been replaced by Hao Mart’s rivals.

Sheng Siong now occupies Hao Mart’s former Punggol East and KINEX Mall spaces, while ValueMart runs the Punggol Walk site near Waterway Point.

Newcomer ACE Signature took one of three Geylang shophouses. Of the remaining two Geylang units, one became a coffeeshop, and the other was demolished in Sep 2024 for a five-storey rebuild. The Redhill Road minimart is now a tuition centre.

Elsewhere, Indian supermarket chain Sri Murugan Supermarket now runs Hao Mart’s former Bayshore Park condo minimart. Its Parksuites condo-facing outlet has been converted into an after-school care centre. The Far East Plaza outlet is now a food court, the Esplanade Xchange space has become a travel agency, and the East Village supermarket has been replaced by a gym.

• Read other articles we’ve written on Singaporean businesses here.

The era of enterprises stitching together prompt chains and shadow agents is nearing its end as more options for orchestrating complex multi-agent systems emerge. As organizations move AI agents into production, the question remains: “how will we manage them?”

Google and Amazon Web Services offer fundamentally different answers, illustrating a split in the AI stack. Google’s approach is to run agentic management on the system layer, while AWS’s harness method sets up in the execution layer. 

The debate on how to manage and control gained new energy this past month as competing companies released or updated their agent builder platforms—Anthropic with the new Claude Managed Agents and OpenAI with enhancements to the Agents SDK—giving developer teams options for managing agents. 

AWS with new capabilities added to Bedrock AgentCore is optimizing for velocity—relying on harnesses to bring agents to product faster—while still offering identity and tool management.

Meanwhile, Google’s Gemini Enterprise adopts a governance-focused approach using a Kubernetes-style control plane. Each method offers a glimpse into how agents move from short-burst task helpers to longer-running entities within a workflow. 

Upgrades and umbrellas

To understand where each company stands, here’s what’s actually new. 

Google released a new version of Gemini Enterprise, bringing its enterprise AI agent offerings—Gemini Enterprise Platform and Gemini Enterprise Application—under one umbrella. 

The company has rebranded Vertex AI as Gemini Enterprise Platform, though it insists that, aside from the name change and new features, it’s still fundamentally the same interface. 

“We want to provide a platform and a front door for companies to have access to all the AI systems and tools that Google provides,” Maryam Gholami, senior director, product management for Gemini Enterprise, told VentureBeat in an interview. “The way you can think about it is that the Gemini Enterprise Application is built on top of the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, and the security and governance tools are all provided for free as part of Gemini Enterprise Application subscription.”

On the other hand, AWS added a new managed agent harness to Bedrock Agentcore. The company said in a press release shared with VentureBeat that the harness “replaces upfront build with a config-based starting point powered by Strands Agents, AWS’s open source agent framework.” 

Users define what the agent does, the model it uses and the tools it calls, and AgentCore does the work to stitch all of that together to run the agent. 

Agents are now becoming systems

The shift toward stateful, long-running autonomous agents has forced a rethink of how AI systems behave. As agents move from short-lived tasks to long-running workflows, a new class of failure is emerging: state drift.

As agents continue operating, they accumulate state—memory, too, responses and evolving context. Over time, that state becomes outdated. Data sources change, or tools can return conflicting responses. But the agent becomes more vulnerable to inconsistencies and becomes less truthful. 

Agent reliability becomes a systems problem, and managing that drift may need more than faster execution; it may require visibility and control. 

It’s this failure point that platforms like Gemini Enterprise and AgentCore try to prevent. 

Though this shift is already happening, Gholami admitted that customers will dictate how they want to run and control any long-running agent. 

“We are going to learn a lot from customers where they would be using long-running agents, where they just assign a task to these autonomous agents to just go ahead and do,” Gholami said. “Of course, there are tricks and balances to get right and the agent may come back and ask for more input.”

The new AI stack

What’s becoming increasingly clear is that the AI stack is separating into distinct layers, solving different problems.  

AWS and, to a certain extent, Anthropic and OpenAI, optimize for faster deployment. Claude Managed Agents abstracts much of the backend work for standing up an agent, while the Agents SDK now includes support for sandboxes and a ready-made harness. These approaches aim to lower the barrier to getting agents up and running.

Google offers a centralized control panel to manage identity, enforce policies and monitor long-running behaviors. 

Enterprises likely need both. 

As some practitioners see it, their businesses have to have a serious conversation on how much risk they are willing to take. 

“The main takeaway for enterprise technology leaders considering these technologies at the moment may be formulated this way: while the agent harness vs. runtime question is often perceived as build vs. buy, this is primarily a matter of risk management. If you can afford to run your agents through a third-party runtime because they do not affect your revenue streams, that is okay. On the contrary, in the context of more critical processes, the latter option will be the only one to consider from a business perspective,” Rafael Sarim Oezdemir, head of growth at EZContacts, told VentureBeat in an email.

Iterating quickly lets teams experiment and discover what agents can do, while centralized control adds a layer of trust. What enterprises need is to ensure they are not locked into systems designed purely for a single way of executing agents. 

Run by two students, Project6 hosts 48-hour mansion hacker houses in S’pore & beyond

Singapore’s startup scene has a problem.

It’s organised, well-funded, and growing, but it’s missing something essential: a “scrappy culture,” a sense of urgency, and spaces where builders can just… build, at least according to Canaan Poh, 23, and Xander Minzenmay, 21, the founders behind Project6.

So they did something unconventional: they rented a mansion and filled it with founders.

For 48 hours, participants are expected to do one thing—build. Sleep is optional. Shipping (turning an idea into a working product, for those not in the startup world) is not.

They’ve not only hosted their mansion hacker houses in the region, but also in Montreal, with plans to expand to more international locations, drawing hundreds of founders from across the globe. And it all started because Canaan and Xander got frustrated with how Singapore’s startup ecosystem actually worked.

Bringing the Silicon Valley spirit to Singapore

Canaan and Xander are currently both students, but deeply interested in the startup system.

Canaan studies at NTU and also runs lythe, an AI infrastructure startup. Meanwhile, Xander studies at the University of Queensland in Australia and has directed one of the largest university-focused startup conferences in the country.

The two met at a student networking event hosted by Canaan’s startup in Singapore while Xander was on exchange at SMU—and that’s where things began to take shape.

After the event, Xander left with the sense that the conversations weren’t going far enough. Much of the room was focused on introductions, LinkedIn exchanges, and conversations around fundraising and investor updates. While connections were being made, it felt like there was less emphasis on what people were actually building day to day.

He vented to Canaan afterwards. And Canaan got it immediately—he’d been feeling the same thing.

Compared to Silicon Valley in San Francisco, the culture felt different. There, high school dropouts raise millions and college students build billion-dollar companies. Credentials mattered less, and execution mattered more.

The question was obvious: Why couldn’t Singapore be like that?

They started by hosting founder dinners

The duo started small.

They began by hosting dinners at Canaan’s apartment, inviting founders they knew from hackathons and their network.

Each gathering brought together around 10 people, with no pitches or structured networking—just a deliberate effort to get the right people in a room and let conversations develop naturally.

They later expanded beyond Canaan’s home, holding dinners at cafés and restaurants. As interest grew, larger organisers began to take notice. Organisations such as SCAPE, along with other community spaces, eventually came on board to co-host these gatherings.

But dinners only went so far. They created space for conversation, but not necessarily for building. Ideas were discussed, connections were made, but most people still left and returned to their day-to-day work unchanged.

If the goal was to shift founders from talking to building, the format itself needed to change. So they started thinking bigger.

Inspired by hacker houses in Silicon Valley, they began experimenting with a new model: bringing founders together under one roof for short, high-intensity residencies.

In Jan 2026, they tested the idea for the first time. The pair rented a mansion in Johor Bahru and invited 10 founders from Singapore’s ecosystem for a 48-hour sprint.

Once the founders arrived, the structure was simple. After a short introduction phase, they quickly moved into building. Teams formed based on shared ideas and complementary skills, then spent the weekend developing products, coding, and iterating.

By the end of the 48 hours, each group presented what they had managed to build, ranging from early prototypes to functional demos.

Operating the hacker houses have not been straightforward

That first mansion went viral on LinkedIn. VCs and tech giants wanted in. More founders were keen on attending.

By Apr 2026, they had run a total of four 48-hour residencies. Applications for each cohort numbered in the hundreds.

But operating these hacker houses has not been straightforward, particularly in Singapore.

“The main challenge has been designing something that is sustainable and properly aligned with the local housing environment,” said Canaan.

As a result, their first founders’ meet-up took place in Johor Bahru, where short-term rentals were more feasible, followed by a second in Kuala Lumpur.

They eventually managed to organise a third residency in Singapore, in collaboration with AI.SEA, a builder-first initiative focused on Southeast Asia, with support from engineers at OpenAI.

Even so, the duo said they are still working closely with government stakeholders to explore how such residencies can be run more effectively within local constraints. They are currently planning to launch a dedicated house in Singapore, though details remain under wraps.

The mansion hacker house in Singapore ran concurrently with the Montreal edition. While founders were based in Singapore for the local residency, the Montreal house was operated in partnership with two individuals embedded in Canada’s startup scene.

15 projects shipped & over S$500K raised

Outcomes from Project6’s 48-hour residencies have been tangible.

“We have had multiple startups launched, with some already raising angel rounds of over S$500,000,” said Xander.

According to its website, 15 projects have been shipped across all houses.

This includes automotion, a tool that takes a static design, like a screenshot of an app or a UI layout, and automatically turns it into animation instructions and developer-ready code. Another one is TACK,

Another project is TACK, a real-time AI meeting moderator designed to keep discussions on track. It helps teams stay focused, captures key points as they emerge, and ensures conversations move forward productively rather than drifting off-topic.

For Canaan and Xander, the shipped products and capital raised serve as validation for their approach, evidence that short, intensive residencies can consistently translate into real startup outcomes.

They describe the initiative as a “third space for founders”—a setting outside of home and traditional offices where builders can live, work, and collaborate in a more immersive, high-intensity environment.

Looking ahead, Project6 is focused on scaling that model.

“Over the next one to two years, we see Project6 evolving to be active in more than 50 countries,” said Canaan, adding that cities such as Shenzhen, Hong Kong, and California are among the potential locations under consideration.

The long-term goal, he explained, is to establish flagship hacker houses in Singapore and San Francisco, effectively creating a bridge between the two ecosystems—giving Singapore-based founders greater access to global capital and networks, while also providing a landing point for international founders looking to build in Singapore.

We are bullish that hacker houses will become the new sourcing layer instead of the traditional accelerator model for the next wave of talent founders and builders, and ultimately, we will grow to support these founders on their journey.

• Find out more about Project6 here.
• Read other articles we’ve written on Singaporean businesses here.

Featured Image Credit: Canaan Poh/ Xander Minzenmay