Xbox and Nintendo have also been pushing consumers towards digital games.

from the you-got-boondoggle-in-my-boondoggle dept

Last fall, Ezra Klein was getting a lot of attention for his book Abundance, which basically argued that American had become bureaucracy-obsessed and fallen out of love with building things. I thought it was mostly simplistic cack, downplaying or ignoring the fact that the U.S. government has become so blisteringly corrupt, it clearly no longer functions in the public interest.

As a longtime telecom beat reporter I was particularly struck by Klein’s chapter on broadband, which mostly seemed to amplify Republican attacks. One of Klein’s biggest targets was the infrastructure bill and Broadband, Equity, Deployment, and Access (BEAD) program, which was part of the 2021 infrastructure bill, and set aside $42.5 billion for improved internet access.

BEAD was never going to be a poster child for government efficiency. But as I noted at the time, Klein’s criticism of the program was bizarre and simplistic, downplayed why the program was taking so long (we had to remap the entirety of U.S. internet access, for one), and ignored how other legislation that same year (like ARPA) was delivering much of the abundance Klein claimed to be looking for.

I could tell from reading Klein’s Abundance chapter on broadband that he didn’t spend much time talking to telecom policy experts. After Klein’s attacks made inroads on the podcast circuit (including on Jon Stewart’s) they were then picked up again by right wing media, further perpetuating the idea that BEAD was a completely useless boondoggle:

I bring it up because a little more than a year later and this BEAD program really is now a boondoggle under Trumpism, as Sean Gonsalves and I explored in a new feature over at The Verge.

Republicans, it should be noted, voted against the infrastructure bill and ARPA, but can still routinely be found taking credit for the improvements they opposed.

Last election season, Republicans ran on the idea that they’d reshape BEAD and trim the fat. Instead they’ve stripped away all oversight, eliminated any requirements that taxpayer-funded broadband be affordable or equitably deployed, and gone out of their way to redirect money away from future-proof fiber toward Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos low-Earth-orbit satellite broadband networks.

Republicans — and the Joe Rogan infotainment universe — are positively convinced that Starlink is akin to magic. So they’ve decided to throw billions of taxpayer money at Bezos and Musk in exchange for slower, more expensive, congested low-Earth orbit satellite connectivity that chips away at the ozone layer. It’s worth noting they’re being given billions for service that already exists and was already set to be deployed.

In our Verge piece, we talked to minority communities in Louisiana who were slated to get fiber upgrades, but are now being shoveled toward Starlink service (that already existed) thanks to Republican BEAD changes. They are very aware they’re now getting the short-end of the stick:

“The most frustrating part is that it was a zero dollar investment in infrastructure,” Wills told The Verge. “Nothing fundamentally changed. People with Starlink are going to just get mailed a box and many won’t be able to install it. And we still won’t have anybody really served,” leaving the community with “no growth in our economic potential.”

“No money will stay here,” he said. “No jobs will be created from this — no installation jobs, zero construction jobs, or even any small stimulus.”

Republicans are then claiming they “saved taxpayers money” by throwing money at billionaires for satellite broadband they already planned to deploy. States and the Trump administration are now bickering over these $20 billion in “non deployment funds.” Congress said this money had to be used for broadband access; but the law under Trumpism is very clearly optional. It’s a giant mess.

All of this corrupt retooling has caused endless new delays, pushing real-world deployments out by another year or two. As of this writing, the $42.5 billion program has only provided new (fixed wireless) connections to a handful of homes in Louisiana and Nebraska (the Trump administration tried to use this as a press op highlighting how amazingly successful their revamp has been).

Due to the higher costs of deployment created by stupid tariffs and pointless wars, many additional fiber deployment bids originally supposed to be funded by BEAD are likely to go into default and be cancelled, opening up the possibility of Musk and Bezos getting billions more in taxpayer subsidies. It’s expected that this whole mess will get significantly uglier later this year.

Curiously, Ezra Klein hasn’t made a peep. All the press coverage last election season about how BEAD was a boondoggle is nowhere to be found now that the program is a bigger boondoggle than ever. And it’s a bigger boondoggle than ever because the U.S. is too corrupt to function, something that needs to be addressed (and candidly acknowledged by our press) before we can even begin to sniff “abundance.”

I’ve always felt that the abundance movement was an influence campaign by affluent centrists to pre-empt genuine populist progressive reform as the response to authoritarianism. The abundance movement always struck me as Clinton-era vibes-based deregulatory corporatism with a new coat of paint; something seemingly supported by its proponents’ curiously limited attention span.

Filed Under: abundance, bead, broadband, donald trump, elon musk, ezra klein, high speed internet, internet access, jeff bezos, ntia, taxpayers, telecom

Companies: spacex, starlink

Cyber threat intelligence becomes more valuable when indicators are enriched with context that supports investigation, correlation, and decision-making. Through the Criminal IP integration with OpenCTI, security teams can transform IP addresses, domains, and URLs from isolated indicators into structured intelligence within the OpenCTI knowledge graph.

The integration automatically enriches indicators with Criminal IP’s reputation scoring, infrastructure intelligence, vulnerability data, behavioral signals, and phishing analysis.

The resulting information is structured as OpenCTI entities and relationships, allowing analysts to investigate connected infrastructure, identify potential attack surfaces, and prioritize high-risk indicators.

Integration Highlights

Contextual Risk Scoring Beyond Simple Reputation

Criminal IP provides dual-perspective risk scoring (inbound and outbound), reflecting both how an IP is targeted and how it behaves externally. This gives analysts a more nuanced signal than traditional single-score reputation models and improves prioritization of high-risk infrastructure.

Deep Infrastructure Intelligence Embedded in the Graph

Enrichment goes beyond tagging indicators, Criminal IP creates structured OpenCTI entities and relationships, including vulnerabilities (CVEs), Autonomous Systems (ISPs), and geolocation. This enables analysts to pivot across infrastructure, uncover shared components, and identify related infrastructure within the graph.

Service Exposure & Vulnerability Correlation

By linking observed services to known CVEs, the integration provides immediate insight into potential attack surfaces. Analysts can quickly assess whether an IP is not only malicious, but also exploitable or actively leveraged in attacks.

High-Fidelity Threat Labeling & Behavioral Signals

Automatically generated labels incorporate multiple data points such as anonymization technologies (VPN, proxy, TOR), hosting characteristics, and malicious classifications. This layered labeling approach provides richer context than binary “malicious/benign” tagging.

Advanced Domain & Phishing Intelligence

For domains, Criminal IP performs full URL analysis to detect phishing activity, credential harvesting, suspicious files, and impersonation techniques. Confidence scores are directly tied to phishing probability, giving analysts a quantifiable measure of risk.

Infrastructure Mapping & Analysis support

The integration links indicators to network ownership (Autonomous Systems), physical locations, and resolved IP infrastructure. This allows teams to identify hosting patterns, regional clustering, and and infrastructure patterns across indicators.

How Integration Works

Indicators such as IP addresses, domains, and URLs are first ingested into OpenCTI.

The Criminal IP connector then automatically enriches each indicator with reputation scoring, infrastructure intelligence, vulnerability information, behavioral signals, and phishing analysis.

The enriched data is structured into entities and relationships within the OpenCTI knowledge graph. Analysts can then use the resulting intelligence for investigation, correlation, infrastructure pivoting, and threat analysis.

The process can be summarized as follows:

1. Indicators (IP addresses, domains, URLs) are ingested into OpenCTI
2. The Criminal IP connector automatically enriches each indicator with reputation scoring, infrastructure intelligence, and phishing analysis
3. Enriched data is structured into entities and relationships, enabling investigation, correlation, and analysis within the OpenCTI knowledge graph

Key Use Cases

SOC Triage and Alert Validation

Rapidly validate suspicious IPs and domains using dual risk scoring, infrastructure context, and phishing intelligence, enabling analysts to prioritize high-risk indicators and support prioritization of high-risk indicators.

Threat Hunting and Infrastructure Pivoting

Leverage enriched relationships such as CVEs, Autonomous Systems, and geolocation to pivot across connected infrastructure and uncover related assets used in attacker operations.

Phishing and Campaign Analysis

Identify and analyze malicious domains, credential harvesting pages, and supporting infrastructure to track phishing activity and understand broader campaign patterns.

OpenCTI Platform

OpenCTI is an open-source cyber threat intelligence platform designed to structure, store, and analyze threat data using a graph-based model. It enables organizations to connect indicators, vulnerabilities, threat actors, and campaigns into a unified knowledge base for investigation, collaboration, and intelligence sharing.

Criminal IP

Criminal IP delivers decision-ready cyber threat intelligence by analyzing IP addresses, domains, and URLs across the global internet. Powered by AI and OSINT, it provides reputation scoring, infrastructure visibility, and real-time detection of malicious activity, including phishing, exposed services, and anonymization technologies such as VPNs and proxies. Its API-first architecture enables seamless integration into security platforms to enhance visibility, automation, and response.

Sponsored and written by Criminal IP.

A vulnerability was discovered in Apple’s “Hide My Email” that allows an attacker to work out your real email address. It’s not been fixed for over a year.

Hide My Email has been a great help for Apple users who need to communicate with services and companies, but don’t want to provide their real email address. Spam, as ever, continues to be a problem requiring solutions like this.

However, while it is capable of thwarting your typical spammer or marketing-happy small business, it’s not foolproof. As a report from 404Media reveals, it’s a feature that can be beaten.

The exact nature of the vulnerability hasn’t been detailed, due to the lack of action by Apple to fix it. Testing on Monday by the report verified that it is still a problem.

EasyOptOuts co-founder Tyler Murphy discovered an issue with Hide My Email in June 2025, and responsibly reported it to Apple as well as the publication. Twelve months later, and the problem still exists.

Murphy explains that the issue was reported and instructions to replicate it where provided to Apple. He doesn’t know why it hasn’t been fixed, but also didn’t feel comfortable waiting to discuss the problem any longer.

“Hide My Email users deserve to know that it may be possible for attackers to discover their hidden email addresses,” he declared.

There are free websites accessible to the public that link email addresses to other personal details, he adds. Anyone relying on Hide My Email may find themselves at risk of being identified on them.

Under Investigation

While Apple hasn’t yet fixed the hole in Hide My Email, it is certainly aware of the problem. One month after Murphy contacted Apple, it confirmed it was looking into the issue.

In March 2026, Apple said it had “addressed the reported issue in a recent system change.” However, Murphy discovered the hole hadn’t been plugged.

Again, more information was provided to Apple, which replied a month later saying it was doing more checks.

Apple updated Murphy in May, insisting it was “still investigating” the problem. It also wished for Murphy to hold off disclosing the problem until after the investigation concluded.

Murphy wrote back, proposing that Apple could stop selling access to Hide My Email until a fix was available, as a means to limit the number of users at risk.

By the end of May, Apple said that it would be addressed in a security update “expected in the coming weeks.”

After being alerted by Murphy, the publication contacted Apple multiple times, but did not get a response.

Questionable changes

While it is unknown exactly when and how the vulnerability will be fixed, it may end up accompanying other changes to the service. These are changes that have questionable value to its users.

A June 15 developer notice warned that the email domains used for Sign In with Apple and Hide My Email will be updated in the future. The intention is for email providers and developers to update their systems in advance of the changeover.

The changes basically mean that newly-generated relay email addresses for Hide My Email will change from the domain iCloud.com to private.icloud.com. Sign In With Apple currently creates relay addresses ending with privaterelay.appleid.com, and will change to the private.icloud.com version.

The problem here is that there’s nothing stopping a website or newsletters from blocking email addresses using private.icloud.com, forcing them to sign up with another legitimate account.

For Hide My Email at least, the change removes the source ambiguity protecting the service and its users.

Oppo has unveiled the Enco Air5s, the brand’s first semi-in-ear earbuds with Active Noise Cancellation, placing them in direct competition with Apple’s AirPods 4 with ANC.

The open design that gives semi-in-ear earbuds their comfortable fit has traditionally been a poor fit for effective noise cancellation, since it leaves more room for ambient sound to leak through.

Oppo’s Real-time Adaptive Noise Cancellation addresses that limitation by adjusting noise reduction based on fit, ear canal shape and surrounding sound, all processed through an 800kHz sampling rate for faster response to changing conditions.

Alongside that adaptive system, the Enco Air 5s also include a Tailored Voice-Canceling System built to suppress vocal frequencies and reduce nearby conversations, a feature aimed at noisy environments such as crowded cafés.

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Each earbud weighs just 3.9 grams, a figure Oppo credits to its Excimer Craftsmanship finishing process, which combines a shimmering surface with a smooth touch while keeping the overall build ultra-lightweight. Complementing this is the Ergonomic Semi-in-Ear Fit, intended to conform more closely to natural ear contours and reduce friction during extended wear.

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Sound comes from a newly customised 12mm dynamic driver built around a Copper-Clad Aluminum Wire coil, paired with an Acoustic Cavity Design that Oppo says delivers crisp highs, impactful bass and clear vocals. An upgraded 10-band Custom EQ allows listeners to fine-tune low, mid and high frequencies, while Adaptive Sound Enhancement compensates for sound leakage in real time.

Connectivity is Bluetooth 6.0 alongside Oppo’s own Smart Bluetooth system, with Dual Connection Across Systems letting users switch between paired devices without manually reconnecting.

Beyond standard pairing, the earbuds introduce AI Translate, supporting face-to-face translation for situations such as ordering food or attending meetings abroad, alongside Slide Volume Control for hands-free adjustment without touching a connected phone.

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Battery life reaches up to 48 hours with the charging case, with Oppo stating the cells retain over 80 percent capacity after 1,000 charge cycles, a claim backed by TÜV Rheinland certification.

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The Enco Air 5s will launch in Lunar White, Midnight Black and Starlight Purple finishes, though Oppo has not confirmed pricing or release dates beyond noting that details will follow through official local market announcements.

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The competitive edge in enterprise AI is shifting to context: which platform can give an agent the right memory, the right retrieval and the right data at the moment of decision.

Couchbase on Tuesday announced its AI Data Plane, combining persistent agent memory, real-time context retrieval and an enterprise-managed MCP server in a single operational platform. 

Couchbase’s roots are in caching and high-transaction databases — an architecture the company argues makes it better suited for agent memory than vendors that came to the problem from search or analytics. The AI Data Plane runs identically across cloud, on-premises and disconnected edge environments, extending agent memory and local vector search to devices with no network connection.

“How do you make sure that the intelligence that you get out of these models are the ones that databases specialize in?” Gopi Duddi, CTO at Couchbase, told VentureBeat. “How can you get that value out of storage systems, which are still going to be databases?”

What the AI Data Plane delivers

The AI Data Plane packages three components designed to replace the fragmented stacks most enterprises are currently running.

Agent memory: A unified persistence layer for conversational context, structured operational data and vector embeddings. Couchbase says the guardrails are what distinguish it from standalone memory services: token constraints per session, time-to-live limits on stored memories and metering controls that cap compute consumption per agent session.

Enterprise MCP server: An enterprise-supported self-managed server for standardized model-context protocol integration, shipping as part of the platform rather than requiring a separate service.

Agent catalog: A function-level catalog of discoverable agent tooling built by Couchbase. Duddi distinguished it from metadata catalogs like Databricks Unity or AWS Glue — describing it, in his words, as closer to a glorified MCP that surfaces agent functions as callable tools within the platform.

Memory-first architecture takes agent context to the disconnected edge

The lineage of Couchbase and its core architectural foundation is what Duddi says gives it an edge when it comes to context.

“We were a cache before we became a database,” Duddi said.

Writing to memory is 10x faster than writing to disk, Duddi said — a speed advantage he argues separates Couchbase from NoSQL databases that layer memory workloads on top of disk-based storage.

Couchbase isn’t the only data technology that has its roots in a caching layer. Redis similarly is rooted in cache and also recently announced an agentic AI context layer. Duddi argued that Couchbase is different in that it maintains an ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability) compliant database which matters for transactional workloads. Couchbase also has a long history across multiple deployment modalities.

That architecture extends to the edge through Couchbase Lite, the platform’s on-device runtime. It runs SQL, full-text search and vector search locally without a network connection, using a proprietary sync mechanism to replicate bidirectionally back to cloud or between edge nodes when connectivity returns. The target environments are retail floor operations, field service, industrial deployments and regulated settings where agent data cannot leave the device.

Duddi cited hotel reservations as an early example: multiple agents serving customers concurrently, each pulling local context and running vector search on-device, with shared session memory synchronizing centrally. The practical benefit is token efficiency. Rather than every agent independently retrieving and processing the same data, the platform caches shared context so concurrent sessions draw on it without burning tokens repeatedly.

Agora’s view from production

Agora, a platform that helps developers embed real-time voice, video and conversational AI into enterprise applications, has run Couchbase in production since February 2024.

The initial use case was its Signaling product, managing channel setup and state synchronization for live calls. Expanding into conversational AI agents brought stricter requirements: memory-first architecture, full JSON support for storage and query, cross-datacenter replication for high availability and enterprise-grade vendor support.

“Couchbase was the best fit based on these criteria,” Patrick Ferriter, SVP of Product at Agora, told VentureBeat.

Agora is now extending that relationship to support context retrieval for conversational AI agents.

“This will simplify the architecture and deliver enterprise grade RAG with predictable lower latency required for conversational AI use cases,” Ferriter said.

For data professionals trying to figure out the best approach to context, there is no one answer. On platform selection, Ferriter was direct.

“It depends on the preference and goals of the organization, including timing,” Ferriter  said. “If they want something enterprise grade and optimal for immediate production and scale vs. having to optimize and maintain an open-source solution with community support. We wanted the former and that is why we looked at an expanded partnership with Couchbase.”

Competitive context: following the right trend

The context layer has become a crowded space in 2025.

Oracle put a memory core in its database back in March providing a context layer. Redis added a context layer in May as did vector-native database vendor Pinecone.  

“Couchbase is following this trend, not setting it, but it’s the right one to follow,” Devin Pratt, Research Director for AI, Automation, Data and Analytics at IDC, told VentureBeat. “Its real edge is reach, running the same platform from cloud to edge to mobile, which is how enterprises actually operate. The test now is to scale against bigger names.”

For teams navigating the vendor landscape, Pratt’s framing is direct. “Match the tool to the workload. Consolidate where it makes sense, use a specialized engine like a graph database where relationship-heavy reasoning earns it, and let governance drive the call rather than treating memory as plumbing,” Pratt said.