Security

Government disputes claims of continued access as investigators measure damage

France’s tax authority has confirmed that an intruder accessed its systems and extracted data in June after an alleged cybercriminal advertised a purported database of 2 million taxpayers.

Using the alias “ZeroBytes,” the alleged crook behind the attack on the General Directorate of Public Finances (DGFiP) advertised the stolen database on a cybercrime forum on Wednesday.

They claimed the database contained details of more than 2 million French taxpayers and that they gained access using stolen credentials and an MFA bypass technique.

ZeroBytes also claimed to retain access to DGFiP’s systems and offered to sell it alongside the database.

DGFiP did not immediately answer our questions about the attacker’s claims. However, in a statement released Thursday, it disputed the claim that ZeroBytes retained access.

“On Wednesday, August 12, 2026, a malicious actor claimed unauthorized access to the information system of the French Public Finances Directorate, which occurred at the end of June 2026 following identity theft,” it said. 

“Initial investigations confirm that this access, which had been severed at the end of June as part of an audit, nevertheless allowed the consultation and extraction of data concerning individuals and professionals.

“Following this complaint, the French Public Finances Directorate immediately implemented new restrictions to stop the unauthorized access and prevent further unauthorized use. In-depth investigations are ongoing to determine precisely which data and number of users were affected.”

DGFiP said it would report the attack to French data protection watchdog CNIL and notify affected users once it had determined who they were.

The intrusion is the latest in a string of security breaches affecting France’s public sector this year.

France’s Ministry of Finance, which oversees DGFiP, admitted in February that miscreants had accessed a database containing French citizens’ bank details.

The attackers used stolen credentials and made off with 1.2 million records, despite the ministry saying it quickly revoked their access.

A few weeks later, France’s Health Ministry confirmed a cyberattack on healthtech supplier Cegedim Santé in which around 15.8 million administrative files were stolen.

Around 165,000 of these contained doctors’ notes, which in “very limited cases” revealed medical histories.

In April, the Interior Ministry confirmed reports of an attack on France Titres, the government agency responsible for identity documents including passports and driver’s licenses.

The alleged culprit, reportedly a 15-year-old, advertised the stolen data online and claimed the breach affected between 18 million and 19 million people – more than a quarter of metropolitan France’s population.

In June, the department responsible for Tchap, France’s encrypted government messaging platform, investigated a suspected breach. The alleged attackers claimed to have accessed more than 73,000 user accounts, 643,000 messages, nearly 60,000 media files, and hundreds of chat rooms. ®

I was happy to finally get the 50th Anniversary edition of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here on a standalone Blu-ray Disc. This includes not only a new immersive Dolby Atmos multichannel mix of the classic 1975 album, but also an official release of an acclaimed fan-made bootleg concert recording from the Los Angeles Sports Arena that year. The disc also contains six previously unreleased alternate versions and demos from the period.

Now, if you are like me and already own Pink Floyd’s 2011 Wish You Were Here “Immersion” boxed set, you may be wondering whether you really need this new 50th Anniversary disc. As for the similarities, James Guthrie’s 5.1 mix and the 1976 quadraphonic mix appear to be the same, as do the promotional videos.

For me, the biggest attraction is the complete 16-song live concert recording from April 26, 1975, at the Los Angeles Sports Arena, which is totally worth the price of admission! The concert was restored and remastered by none other than acclaimed prog-rock producer and musician Steven Wilson.

It sounds excellent in its robust 96 kHz/24-bit presentation, especially considering the source—again, a very, very good fan-made audience recording. The performance is exemplary, with the concert beginning with two urgent early versions of songs that later appeared on Pink Floyd’s 1977 album Animals: “Raving and Drooling” and “You Gotta Be Crazy” (retitled “Sheep” and “Dogs,” respectively). And the concert only gets better from there.

If I have any disappointment, it is only that the new Dolby Atmos mix feels almost like an afterthought. Don’t get me wrong: it is OK, but it’s not significantly better than James Guthrie’s 2011 5.1 mix or the original 1976 quadraphonic mix.

The Dolby Atmos mix seems to feature a perhaps overly uniform, smooth blend, allowing the music to be heard effectively from almost any vantage point in the room. It does not rely as heavily on directing discrete information toward the so-called “sweet spot,” which is often the focus of 5.1 surround listening. And it is exactly that relative lack of precision from different positions in the room that I missed.

I do like the new navigation screen and screensaver on this 50th Anniversary disc, with their super-cool artwork and concert photos from the era.

Overall, for the price, the 50th Anniversary Blu-ray Disc edition of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here is a solid value for deep and casual fans alike. It is available from retailers like Amazon for just $26.98, as well as via the band’s website.

Our Ratings

★★★★★★★★★★ Music

★★★★★★★★★★ Sound

★★★★★★★★★★ Packaging

Where to Buy

Mark Smotroff is a deep music enthusiast / collector who has also worked in entertainment oriented marketing communications for decades supporting the likes of DTS, Sega and many others. He reviews vinyl for Analog Planet and has written for Audiophile Review, Sound+Vision, Mix, EQ, etc. You can learn more about him at LinkedIn.

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from the pinky-swears dept

It’s always the same routine.

Before each giant merger the companies promise that the new combined entity will deliver the sea, moon, and stars. We’re told the consolidation will result in untold synergies, massive job growth, and incredible new innovation. Yet in a country too corrupt to have functional antitrust enforcement or working regulators, what we get instead are mass layoffs, higher prices, less competition, and shittier product.

That’s been particularly true in media. And it’s been particularly true when it comes to the last quarter century of mergers related to Warner Brothers. Paramount’s latest $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers is no exception, and as a state antitrust lawsuit threatens to topple Larry and David Ellison’s ambitions, the company is making all sorts of promises that this time will somehow be different.

David has already falsely promised the merger will be a massive job creator for California, despite absolutely no meaningful indication that’s true. And this week, hoping to quiet concerns that Bari Weiss will do the same thing to CNN she’s doing to CBS (namely turning it into right wing billionaire agitprop), the company is promising regulators some sort of journalistic oversight board to protect CNN:

“The media conglomerate, whose efforts to acquire CNN parent Warner Bros. Discovery have stalled in federal court after a group of 12 attorneys general levied antitrust concerns against the proposed deal, has considered setting up an oversight committee to govern the news giant.”

Like every pre-merger promise, this is utterly meaningless. Rupert Murdoch promised such an entity in 2007 when he acquired the Wall Street Journal, but it’s nowhere to be found today. The Ellisons know they’ve helped gut what’s left of U.S. regulatory integrity via Trumpism, and with the eroded power of unions there’s really nothing requiring they follow through on any sort of promise.

David Ellison recently penned an editorial in the New York Times insisting he’s not political and he’d be a good steward of what’s left at CNN, but nobody at CNN actually believes him. They can see what Bari Weiss is already doing to CBS, and they’re very much right to be worried. Ellison may truly believe a rich nepobaby allied with Trumpism is somehow “not political,” but that belief is just as worthless as this new fake oversight board.

At the same time Ellison is promising this toothless new oversight board and that he’ll protect Hollywood movie production, he’s simultaneously threatening to pull Paramount out of California entirely if he doesn’t get everything he wants. But that’s likely even if the deal is approved, given that migrating film and TV production overseas is an ongoing trend.

Hollywood is still rocked and reeling from COVID, previous pointless consolidation, and massive migration of production overseas. You’ve got numerous high level technically skilled production folks resorting to driving Ubers amidst historic layoffs. Throwing more consolidation and another right wing billionaire into that volatile mix is going to be disastrous, regardless of any promises made.

The only valuable path forward to protect labor, journalism, and informed consensus is scrapping the deal entirely. Then focus on battling corruption, restoring regulatory integrity, embracing antitrust reform, empowering independent journalism and content creation, strengthening unions, restoring media consolidation limits, and kicking back aggressively against the self-serving right wing billionaire effort to dominate every last aspect of modern American life.

Filed Under: antitrust, consolidation, david ellison, journalism, larry ellison, media, mergers, oversight

Companies: cnn, paramount, warner bros.

With The Whole Bloody Affair, auteur Quentin Tarantino has restored his fourth film to his original, definitive vision. He wrote and directed Kill Bill with the intention of releasing it as a single four-hour epic before the decision was made to split it into two separate movies—Volume 1 in 2003 and Volume 2 in 2004—for both practical and artistic reasons at the time.

The redux wasn’t as simple as sticking an intermission in the middle, although that did happen. To entice audiences to return to the theater in the ’00s, he added a cliffhanger reveal at the end of Volume 1 and a recap monologue by The Bride (Uma Thurman) at the beginning of Volume 2, both of which are no longer necessary and are now gone. Unrelated to the dissection, he also made several edits to appease the MPAA and receive an R rating. Since the new version is his pet project, Tarantino thumbed his nose and restored all of his originally intended onscreen violence.

The other big change occurs during the wonderful anime sequence, now seamlessly extended to shed light on an episode from young orphan O-Ren’s deadly past: by no means dramatically necessary, but quite exciting nonetheless. Keen-eyed viewers might notice other subtle alterations here and there. Worth noting: The previously released deleted scene from Volume 2 featuring Michael Jai White has not been cut back into the story.

Let’s Not Forget About Uma

It’s been a while, so we might have forgotten just how marvelous Uma Thurman is as The Bride (her real name is a secret until the second half), one of the world’s top assassins who tried to ditch her squad and paid a heavy price for her disloyalty. After barely surviving a brutal attack at her wedding rehearsal, she sets about disposing of her former colleagues one by one on the way up to the big man himself, her boss and former lover, Bill (David Carradine).

Putting aside the grueling physical demands of the role, Uma embodies the electric heights of her character’s homicidal prowess as well as the soul-crushing depths of defeat across two movies’ worth of nonstop challenges, plus everything in between. Yet behind the blood-spattered spectacle is a nuanced, transcendent lead performance, one that proved her star power was undeniable and etched The Bride into the ranks of cinema’s most enduring antiheroes (“antiheroines”?).

This four-disc set presents the movies in two halves, with 4K Discs One and Two approximating Volumes 1 and 2 from 20+ years ago, but for the aforementioned modifications, and again on HD Blu-ray Discs Three and Four. A digital copy code is also included.

The sole extra is “The Lost Chapter: Yuki’s Revenge,” a roughly ten-minute short, animated with Unreal Engine. Here, Ms. Thurman reprises her role in a scene deleted from the original script, wherein the sister of one of her victims seeks revenge of her own. Stunt double Zoë Bell returned to perform motion capture, and Tarantino himself provides the voice of Bill, filling in for the late Mr. Carradine. It premiered as a virtual event inside the videogame Fortnite and was subsequently added to theatrical showings of The Whole Bloody Affair as a post-credits scene.

The thing is, there’s no setup whatsoever, and it’s parked on Disc One for some reason, so the proliferation of Fortnitecharacters and game logic surrounding Yuki and The Bride seems rather… odd. I found it more enjoyable upon second viewing, after I did my research.

Do You Really Need to Buy Kill Bill Again?

Great question, and it all boils down to how big a fan you are. If you have a passing interest, the changes and the updated experience of it all are worth checking out for sure, at least for a single watch. But if you were hoping for an improvement over the individual Kill Bill 4K releases from last year, well, this and those were all upsampled from the 2K digital intermediate and presented in Dolby Vision, so I wouldn’t expect a fresh uptick in technical quality. For the most part, the movie is bright and vibrant, with excellent flesh tones, sometimes employing black-and-white or desaturated color to shift moods between certain segments, but digital artifacting and black crush remain evident.

The DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 again employs sound effects that are exaggerated just enough to be happily conspicuous, with some nice moments of breaking glass or a buzzing fly, while the music is mixed aggressively. Bass, too, is strong: Brace yourself for that shotgun blast! However, there’s zero overlap with the two standalone 4Ks as far as bonus content, as the 2025 packages ported some admittedly meager legacy content, now absent.

If, on the other hand, you’re all in on the works of Quentin Tarantino, then absolutely yes. This is what he wanted to give us all along, with no creative compromises.

Movie Details

• STUDIO: Lionsgate Home Entertainment
• FORMAT: Ultra HD 4K Blu-ray (July 28, 2026)
• THEATRICAL RELEASE YEAR: 2026
• ASPECT RATIO: 2.40:1
• HDR FORMATS: Dolby Vision, HDR10
• AUDIO FORMAT: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
• LENGTH: 253 mins.
• MPAA RATING: Unrated
• DIRECTOR: Quentin Tarantino
• STARRING: Uma Thurman, David Carradine, Lucy Liu, Michael Madsen, Vivica A. Fox, Daryl Hannah, Julie Dreyfus, Chiaki Kuriyama, Sonny Chiba, Gordon Liu, Michael Parks

Our Ratings

★★★★★★★★★★ Movie

★★★★★★★★★★ Picture

★★★★★★★★★★ Sound

★★★★★★★★★★ Extras

Where to buy:

Related Reading:

The suit is a lot like a spring-weather wetsuit that stops at the knees and the elbows. Like with a wetsuit, putting it on can require some effort. Twenty electrodes cover the abs, pecs, glutes, thighs, pecs, biceps, and multiple parts of the back. These are dry electrodes, so you don’t have to wet Pepper’s suit down before you put it on (a common requirement for older gear), but your sweat will improve the conduction of electricity. Of course, if you’re pregnant or need a pacemaker, you shouldn’t use an EMS suit.

Pepper’s suit, available in sizes from XXXS to XXXL, is designed to be very tight so that the electrodes won’t slip into places you don’t want them. Since the suit is intended to be worn with nothing underneath it, that’s a particularly important consideration. And based on the way certain body parts are situated beneath the fabric, it is definitively not something I felt I could wear in public without a cover-up layer.

The only removable part of the suit is a small box that connects at your hip. This is the brains of the operation and its power source. Charge it with a USB-C cable and it’s good for at least 10 training sessions.

Pepper’s app divides workouts into three categories: strength, cardio, and relax, each with a different electrode firing pattern. (Oddly, I discovered that a few workouts were available only in German.) I tried workouts across all of the categories but spent nearly all of my time in strength, as my goal was to build muscle. Strength sessions all involve electricity pulsing through the suit for four seconds, then pausing for four seconds, then repeating for up to 24 minutes.

ScreenshotPhotograph: Christopher Null

The workouts—there are dozens, I rarely repeated any—are tuned to the pulses so that you’re activating muscles across your body while the pulse is on, then usually resting while it’s off. Again, Pepper’s approach is that EMS only works if you are using your muscles while they are being energized, so many of the workouts involve entire body flexes, stretches, and crunches, four seconds at a time.

Plugging In

I’ve experienced isolated EMS for a back injury once before, so I had an inkling of what Pepper might feel like, but the full-body experience is on another level entirely. Fortunately, Pepper eases you in, starting off with soft pulses you can’t even feel. Each of Pepper’s 10 workout zones can be individually controlled, with the power level ranging from 1 to 100. My first video-based trainer said she starts to feel the pulses at level 25, so I slowly ratcheted my way up, bit by bit, until I had all regions hitting around 20.

The shocks on the lower settings don’t really hurt, but you can definitely feel them; powerful, rapid vibrations that shake your insides and sometimes burn a little on the skin. No pain, no gain, right? As I continued to push the levels up, I discovered there was a fine line—really 1 or 2 points on Pepper’s 100-point scale—between tolerable and painful. Those vibrations turned into racy shocks that could be almost paralytic at times, and I spent the rest of my initial 12-minute session dialing the power level back down.

If you have broad finance-based skills, but aren’t sure how to apply them to a career, then consider one or even all of the following five career routes.

Modern education has come a long way. For the most part, gone are the days in which a role or industry required a particular education or qualification. Micro-credentials, online courses, part-time courses and even self-taught skills are now being viewed by many organisations and institutions as legitimate forms of upskilling, worthy of getting at the very least an opportunity to interview for a role. 

But when you have a wide range of skills and have participated in a non-traditional form of pre-career education, it can be difficult to know which career avenues your skillset is suited to. With that in mind, SiliconRepublic.com has curated a list of five of the finance and financial infrastructure ecosystem’s most interesting career routes, for professionals and jobseekers alike.

Risk management and compliance

Perhaps unsurprisingly, jobs in risk management and compliance requiring finance skills are becoming increasingly necessary, in a landscape that is undergoing significant global turmoil.

Typically, a degree or specialist qualification is required, and the role might involve managing exposure to risk, analysing likely risks, and devising and implementing strategies to minimise or avoid them. The compliance aspect would involve ensuring that an organisation, institution or client is compliant with local, national and international frameworks and regulations.

Analytics

Financial analysts play a major role in the wider business sector, as they are largely responsible for offering in-depth analysis of the factors dictating the financial marketplace. They also guide financial decision-making in key areas, on behalf of organisations and clients.

Areas covered by a financial analyst include: identifying patterns to evaluate a company’s profitability; liquidity and solvency; investment research; modelling techniques to forecast future financial performance; risk assessment; and communicating findings to clients, among others. 

A bachelor’s degree in a related field such as finance, accounting or economics is typically a requirement; traits to prioritise can include a strong foundation in financial literacy, a key understanding of internal and external markets, a robust ethical framework, and an array of technical skills that enable research, data collection and presentation. 

Forensic accountant

It is the job of a forensic accountant to identify and confirm fraudulent activities, via their own accountancy and research skills. Professionals in this field should have significant interpersonal skills, as they often work hand-in-hand with lawyers, insurance personnel, large-scale organisations, law enforcement and individuals impacted by fraud.

An accountancy degree is required, and additional qualifications in areas such as risk assessment, forecast modelling and compliance would likely give you an edge in a job interview. It is an exciting role for someone looking to spice up their finance career and put their detective and problem-solving skills to the test. In this role, you can’t underestimate the importance of accuracy or persistence.  

Fintech engineer

Fintech engineers are professionals who blend their skills in finance and technology in order to create practical, functional and secure platforms that support financial transactions. Typically, a recruiter or employer might expect a qualification in computer science, software engineering or finance. Must-have skills include: programming across a wide range of languages; significant financial literacy; broad cybersecurity awareness; workflow automation; systems integration; and skills that enable you to work closely with different teams. 

Academic

One of the most important roles within the finance ecosystem – and one that can often be forgotten about when discussing careers in this area – is that played by academics in preparing the fintech and financial infrastructure innovators of the future. A route towards a career in this space is more traditional than others on this list and includes the need for a PhD in a finance-related field, as well as qualifications that encourage teaching and research skills. 

Educators are responsible for mentoring the next generation of experts. As a result, strong interpersonal skills are a must, as is a deep understanding of complex financial systems. Because most academics are involved in research of some kind, professionals in this space should know how to write grant proposals, which also demands knowledge of numerous regulatory and financial frameworks. Public speaking is a must-have skill, and academics must be able to write and present their work in a manner suitable for an academic peer review and wider public consumption. A career in this field, while complicated at points, would arguably never be dull. 

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

The back-to-school laptop sales just don’t hit the same this year with price spikes and inventory shortages. You won’t typically find sales at Apple Stores, but there are some deals now for back-to-school shopping — beyond the always-available education discount.

In this week’s episode of One More Thing, embedded below, I explain all the fine print of Apple’s Back to School gift card promotion, which has been extended to Sept. 24. If you’re hoping to take advantage of it, be warned: Apple now requires validation through a portal called Unidays to prove you qualify for the student and educator discount. (Sorry, no more honor system for online shoppers.)

It’s also been hard to find any substantial sales on MacBooks outside of Apple stores. (Costco members get $10 off a MacBook Neo — a savings worth six hot dogs!) So it’s time to turn to a little-known corner of the Apple Store: Certified Refurbished Products.

Apple’s refurbished products can save you up to 15% from the list price. These are cleaned, tested and also include a one‑year warranty with accessories and cables repackaged in a brand‑new box. The MacBook Neo is sold refurbished and is listed at $599, which happens to be the same price you’d get with an education discount.

I mean it’s either that, or become president of my kid’s school PTA to get the educator discount. Buying refurbished seems like the better choice.

For more One More Thing, subscribe to our YouTube page to catch Bridget Carey breaking down the latest Apple news and issues every Friday.

Bridget Carey

Editor at Large

Bridget Carey is an award-winning consumer technology reporter and host of the weekly Apple show, “One More Thing.”

See full bio

Advertisement

GLM-5.3 scores 84.5pc on CyberGym, ahead of Anthropic’s Mythos 5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol.

Chinese AI company Z.ai has unveiled its latest open-weights model – GLM-5.3 – whose performance, it says, rivals that of OpenAI and Anthropic newest frontier launches – marking the latest in the ever-escalating battle between US and Chinese companies for AI dominance.

The new model makes a significant leap in capability compared to its predecessor GLM-5.2, which launched just months ago in June.

GLM-5.3 is “much better” at complex coding and long-horizon tasks, Z.ai said, boasting a 50pc improvement from the older version in its in-house code benchmarks.

The company plans to release GLM-5.3’s weights in two weeks’ time, after wrapping up safety evaluation and hardening.

“[GLM-5.3] delivers markedly stronger agentic coding results than GLM-5.2 at every effort level while consuming fewer output tokens,” Z.ai said.

GLM-5.3 also proves significantly more capable at exploiting vulnerabilities, scoring 84.5pc on CyberGym, above Anthropic’s Mythos 5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol.

“We expected this to make the model better at finding and reasoning about vulnerabilities. What surprised us was how quickly the capability continued to develop as training scaled,” Z.ai said.

Despite its lofty claims about the new model, the Hong Kong-listed company’s shares slid nearly 4pc at market close today (14 August).

“This firm remains on a completely unsustainable commercial footing,” intelligence analyst Robert Lea told Bloomberg. “Rising agentic AI will drive Z.ai’s inference costs and losses higher.”

Chinese-made models are increasingly offering models at par with its American counterparts at cheaper prices, in spite of the heavy constraints around chip exports into the country. Last month, Z.ai completed the construction of a data centre where has installed at least 10,000 Chinese-made chips to help develop its GLM line of models.

Other frontier models from China, including Moonshot’s latest Kimi model, DeepSeek’s V4 models and Alibaba’s Qwen series, have all ranked high in benchmarks.

The Beijing-based start-up went public in January this year, raising funds at a market capitalisation of nearly $7bn.

Shares at the company surged 2,000pc in June following the launch of GLM-5.2, taking Z.ai’s valuation to $128bn. Though that has since fallen to $75bn.

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

For 28 days, Keshav had a new item on his daily to-do list: masturbate for research purposes.

Both before and after self-pleasuring, he logged his mood, energy levels, cravings for various vices, and whether he was procrastinating.

Keshav was taking part in AI companion company Joi AI’s experiment assessing what happens if erotic self-stimulation becomes “an AI-guided wellness ritual.” Throughout July, 10 “masturbation consultants” were instructed to masturbate every day except Sundays, enlisting Joi AI’s sultry digital companions twice a week and using their own preferred methods the rest of the time. “It’s almost like you are chatting with a real person,” says Keshav, a single, 38-year-old Indonesian trader, who did not want to use his surname for professional reasons.

Joi AI invites users, for a fee, to chat and play with premade characters or to create their own companions, including with X-rated kinks such as blackmail fantasy, gangbangs, and emotional dependency, and capabilities and functions like squirting and roleplay.

During five-minute video calls with the digitized characters, Keshav explains, his female companions opened and closed their nude legs to reveal their genitals and would “do blowjobs and handjobs” while talking dirty. He often rendered the scenes in airplane bathrooms because he has a mile-high-club kink.

Some of the companions were “quite pushy and extroverted,” whereas others were more reserved and required a degree of courtship before the relationship became sexual—even soliciting gifts like handbags and lipstick, which cost up to $5 in the platform’s internal currency.

After ejaculating, Keshav’s “energy levels [were] a little bit down, but focus was a little bit up,” he says.

Keshav and his nine fellow masturbation consultants will receive $2,000 each for the qualitative, in-house research project run by Joi AI, which is promoting a daily guided “jerk off with purpose” masturbation tool combining “sound [and] ritual” as part of its professed goal to “solve male loneliness.” Of the 10, six completed the study. The website costs a minimum of $3.99 a month to access, but users are likely to spend far more on the platform, with 10,000 “Joi neuron” coins costing $99.99 and private videos from companions costing 1,000 neurons.

Joi AI surveyed 2,500 adults before launching the study, finding that 75 percent masturbate to reduce stress and anxiety and that 43 percent self-pleasure before “a big event,” like a date, exam, or difficult conversation. The company sought to discover how masturbation affects sleep, stress, craving intensity, focus, and ease of arousal—and how masturbating with AI held up versus other methods.

“You get this boost of dopamine when you ejaculate,” says Julie Levin, head of brand and communications at Joi AI. “We wanted our consultants to track whether their cravings [for vices] are worse or better and how it affects their self-discipline.”

Preliminary analysis of 134 masturbation session reports, seen by WIRED, suggests that participants’ stress levels reduced by 25 percent and focus increased by 17 percent. The pre-research survey suggested that 37 percent of respondents are open to AI-guided masturbation or are already practicing it. In the masturbation experiment, AI-guided self-pleasure produced comparable satisfaction scores to the established methods. “The study found no significant differences between the methods; so there is no one best way to masturbate,” the company said in the report.

It also indicated that the study group’s self-reported cravings for nicotine, alcohol, junk food, and doomscrolling reduced by 44 percent after they had masturbated. “Masturbation may be the most accessible tool people have for managing addictions,” the report said—a claim that is not based in science.

“The fact that their unhealthy cravings decreased feels like a genuine breakthrough to me: What if this is an unexpected way to tackle addictions?” Levin says. “Masturbation is obviously way healthier than alcohol or nicotine.”