RightsCon, the world’s largest digital rights conference, was canceled this year due to pressure from the Chinese government, according to the nonprofit organization that organizes the annual event.

In a statement, Access Now says it was “told that diplomats from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) were putting pressure on the Government of Zambia because Taiwanese civil society participants were planning to join us in person.”

The Chinese Embassy in Washington, DC, and the United States Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office did not immediately respond to requests for comment. When WIRED called the Zambian embassy in Washington, a member of the staff answered the phone and transferred the call to another staff member who then picked up for several seconds before hanging up. A follow-up call went unanswered.

Access Now says it was told “informally from multiple sources” that “in order for RightsCon to continue, we would have to moderate specific topics and exclude communities at risk, including our Taiwanese participants, from in-person and online participation.”

RightsCon 2026 was set to feature several panels on China’s international influence, including about how Beijing exports digital authoritarianism and spreads disinformation in regions like Africa, as well as discussions on Chinese cyberattacks and the global spread of its censorship and surveillance technologies.

Arzu Geybulla, the co-executive director of Access Now, tells WIRED that “multiple pieces of information we received indicated that foreign interference by the People’s Republic of China played a role in the abrupt disruption of RightsCon 2026.”

A week before the conference was scheduled to take place in Lusaka, Zambia, the Zambian government abruptly announced that it would be postponed to an unspecified date. In a statement on April 28, the country’s minister of technology and science, Felix Mutati, said that certain “speakers and participants remain subject to pending administrative and security clearances.” The following day, Thabo Kawana, Zambia’s minister for information and media added that the “postponement was necessitated by the need for comprehensive disclosure of critical information relating to key thematic issues proposed for discussion during the Summit.”

On April 27, two days before the Zambian government’s announcement, Access Now “became aware that the in-person participation of people from Taiwan had caught the attention of the Government of the People’s Republic of China. In turn, Chinese authorities were, apparently, trying to influence the Zambian government’s approach to Taiwanese participants’ movement across the border,” says Geybulla. “Soon after, the Zambian government publicly referred to ‘diplomatic protocols’ and ‘pending administrative and security clearances’ of participants as reasons for their disrupting RightsCon.”

Open Culture Foundation, a Taiwanese nonprofit organization that was scheduled to attend RightsCon this year, says that it was warned by Access Now that Taiwanese citizens may have problems entering Zambia due to possible concerns from the Chinese Embassy. They were told to pause their travel plans while the host coordinated with Zambian officials.

Nikki Gladstone, RightsCon director at Access Now, confirmed to WIRED that the organization had been in contact with Taiwanese participants about potential issues traveling to Zambia. “Given the potential access issues this would present to that community, many of whom were set to begin traveling imminently, we felt a duty to inform our registered Taiwanese participants of this development while we sought more details and information,” says Gladstone. “We said we would be hesitant to recommend travel until there was more clarity.”

An employee of another human rights organization, who asked not to be named for security reasons, tells WIRED that after RightsCon was officially postponed, they were told by one of their grant funders that the Chinese government had been pressuring the Zambian government for days over the presence of a Taiwanese delegation at the conference.

The retro audio wave isn’t slowing down—it’s getting louder. And heavier. Bumpboxx, founded in 2016, is leaning all the way in with the BB-777, a modern boombox modeled after the legendary Sharp GF-777. Developed over three years, this isn’t a gimmick. It’s a full-format system with dual cassette decks, a CD player, AM/FM/Shortwave radio, Bluetooth, and USB playback—built for people who still own music across multiple formats and want one machine that actually plays all of it.

Boomboxes, also known as ghetto blasters, are suddenly back in rotation, especially with Gen Z and younger millennials. What has changed is perspective. A lot of them never carried one of these monsters loaded with eight D cell batteries in the middle of summer, so the idea feels fresh instead of punishing. We also never saw Radio Raheem sitting at a Starbucks drinking an oat milk macchiato while blasting Public Enemy, but here we are. The BB-777 keeps the scale and presence, adds modern power management and connectivity, and somehow makes this whole thing feel usable in 2026 without needing a chiropractor on standby.

Despite the oversized footprint, the BB-777 is not just for show. Bumpboxx built this around a high output speaker system with dual super woofers, precision tweeters, and a chambered bass enclosure, rated at 270 watts for room filling sound. If one is not enough, two BB-777 units can be paired for a larger stereo or party setup.

Format support is where this thing separates itself from most modern portable audio. Bluetooth streaming and USB playback are here, but so are a CD player, dual cassette decks, AM FM and shortwave radio, auxiliary input, and wired microphone support. It also goes a step further with direct USB recording from tapes, CDs, or radio broadcasts, which makes it more than just a playback device.

Power has been updated for 2026 reality. A TSA approved rechargeable battery is included with up to 15 hours of operation, and interchangeable battery packs allow for longer sessions without downtime. Multi voltage 100 to 240 volt AC compatibility means it can be used in multiple regions without needing external converters.

“We didn’t want to make a retro speaker,” says Rob Owens, Founder and CEO of Bumpboxx. “We wanted to build the boombox we grew up with, but engineered for today. Something powerful, reliable, and complete. The BB-777 is our way of proving that physical sound still matters.”

Bumpboxx BB-777 Specifications

The Bottom Line

The Bumpboxx BB-777 knows exactly what it is and doesn’t pretend to be anything else. At $649, it’s one of the very few modern systems that actually consolidates this many playback options into a single portable unit. Dual cassette decks, CD player, radio, Bluetooth, USB playback, and even direct USB recording from legacy formats—there’s nothing else at this price doing all of that in one box with this kind of output and physical presence. That’s the hook.

Who is this for? Not minimalists. Not the “everything lives on my phone” crowd. This is for people sitting on shelves of tapes and CDs who are tired of digging out multiple components just to play them. It’s also for a younger audience that wants something loud, visual, and different from another anonymous Bluetooth speaker. And yes, for anyone who understands that audio used to be something you carried, not just something you tapped on a screen.

What’s missing? Quite a bit if you look at it through a modern audiophile lens. There’s no Wi-Fi streaming, no AirPlay or Chromecast, no app ecosystem, no hi-res audio support, and no real ecosystem integration with anything else in your home. There’s also no mention of advanced codec support or a headphone output, which feels like an odd omission for something positioned as an all-in-one. And while it does a lot, it’s not trying to replace a dedicated hi-fi system in terms of refinement. If that lines up with how you actually listen to music, it makes a lot more sense than most of the “smart” gear being pushed right now. Fight the power.

Price & Availability

BB-777 is available on Kickstarter. Backers will have access to prices based on the reward level. Prices start at $649. Campaign details and launch updates are available on the official BB-777 campaign page. 

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Impacted employees reportedly received retrenchment notices on Apr 15

Global real estate consultancy JLL has laid off some staff in Singapore following a recent organisational restructuring exercise.

According to a report from The Straits Times, the firm confirmed the restructuring but did not disclose the number of roles impacted.

A former employee who spoke to the publication said that those affected, including colleagues in the US market, received retrenchment notices on Apr 15. Staff were given the option of an early release or serving out their full notice period.

Separately, some JLL employees have also shared on LinkedIn about the layoffs. One post even reportedly stated that at least four employees from the same department were let go.

A spokesperson from JLL told The Straits Times that the restructuring is part of a global effort to streamline operations and position the company for long-term growth amid shifting conditions in the real estate market.

“As a global company, JLL undertakes organisational realignment to streamline operations and position the business for long-term growth in a rapidly evolving real estate services market,” the spokesperson said.

“As part of this broader transformation across multiple markets, we have made the difficult decision to restructure certain functions in Singapore over recent weeks, which has impacted a limited number of roles.”

The firm added that it has notified the Ministry of Manpower and complied with Tripartite Guidelines on responsible retrenchment.

Vulcan Post has reached out to JLL for comments.

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

Featured Image Credit: JLL

Nahla Davies looks at the blind spot between information security controls and genuine data integrity governance.

There’s a strange kind of confidence that comes with getting ISO 27001 certified. The audit’s done, the certificate’s on the wall, and suddenly everyone in the building sleeps a little better at night. It feels like you’ve handled the security question once and for all.

But here’s what nobody talks about at the celebration dinner: most of the data risks that actually burn companies in 2026 have very little to do with whether you passed an audit. They’re messier than that.

They live in the mundane, everyday chaos of how teams create, move, copy and forget about data. And that’s exactly where ISO 27001, for all its value, starts running out of answers.

The certification covers the framework, not the mess

ISO 27001 is genuinely useful. Let’s get that out of the way. It gives organisations a structured approach to information security management, and it forces leadership to actually think about risk in a systematic way. For companies that had nothing before, it’s a massive step forward.

But the standard was designed to assess whether you have the right policies, controls and processes in place. It’s checking that the architecture exists. What it can’t do is follow your data around on a Tuesday afternoon when someone in marketing copies a client list into a personal Google Sheet to ‘just quickly check something’.

That’s where the gap lives. The certification tells auditors you’ve built the walls. It doesn’t tell anyone what’s happening inside the rooms. And in most organisations, what’s happening inside the rooms is borderline chaotic.

Think about how data actually moves through people in a modern company. It starts in one system, gets exported into a spreadsheet, emailed to a colleague, uploaded to a shared drive, duplicated across three departments, and eventually forgotten in a folder nobody’s opened since last quarter. None of that necessarily violates your ISO 27001 controls. All of it creates risk.

The standard asks whether you have an asset inventory and data classification policy. Most certified companies do. But the reality of enforcing classification at scale, across thousands of files and dozens of tools, is a completely different problem. It’s like having a fire evacuation plan pinned to the wall while half the exits are blocked with furniture. Technically compliant, but practically dangerous.

Data governance is the part everyone skips

There’s a reason data governance keeps coming up in security conversations, even though it sounds painfully boring. It’s because governance is the layer that sits between policy and reality. It’s the part that answers questions like: who actually owns this dataset? When was it last reviewed? Does anyone know it’s still being stored in three places?

ISO 27001 touches on some of this. Annex A has controls around information classification, access management and asset ownership. But the standard treats these as boxes to check during an audit cycle. In practice, data governance requires constant, active attention. It’s operational, not periodic.

Most companies that get certified build their documentation, assign their roles, and move on. Six months later, the data landscape has shifted entirely. New tools get adopted, teams reorganise, people leave and their access lingers. The certificate stays valid. The risks multiply.

And this is particularly true with unstructured data, which makes up the vast majority of what most organisations hold. Emails, documents, chat logs, shared files. ISO 27001 doesn’t have a great answer for the sheer volume and unpredictability of unstructured data. It assumes you can classify and control it. Anyone who’s tried knows that’s optimistic at best.

What’s really needed alongside certification is a living, breathing data governance practice. One that maps where sensitive data actually resides (not just where it’s supposed to), monitors how it moves, and flags when something drifts outside acceptable boundaries. That’s not an audit exercise. It’s an ongoing operational function.

Compliance creates a floor, not a ceiling

There’s a broader point here that applies beyond ISO 27001. Compliance frameworks, by their nature, set a minimum bar. They define what ‘acceptable’ looks like at a given point in time, even with edge cases like using AI for software testing. But threats evolve, technology changes, and the way people work shifts constantly. A standard that’s reviewed every few years simply can’t keep pace with how quickly the data landscape moves.

This is especially relevant as AI tools become embedded in everyday workflows. Employees are feeding company data into large language models, using AI assistants to summarise internal documents, and generating content based on proprietary information. ISO 27001 wasn’t written with that reality in mind. The 2022 update made strides, sure, but the speed of AI adoption has outpaced what any standard can reasonably address.

Companies that treat certification as the finish line tend to develop blind spots in exactly these areas. They’re compliant on paper but exposed in practice. The data risks they face aren’t coming from sophisticated external attacks (though those matter too). They’re coming from inside the house, from the everyday, unglamorous ways people interact with information.

The smartest organisations use ISO 27001 as a foundation and then build upward. They invest in data discovery tools that map shadow data. They implement real-time monitoring for sensitive information. They train employees not just on policy, but on the practical habits that keep data from wandering into places it shouldn’t be. Certification becomes the starting point of the security conversation, not the conclusion.

Final thoughts

ISO 27001 deserves its reputation as a serious, credible framework. Getting certified takes real effort, and it signals that an organisation takes information security seriously.

But there’s a growing disconnect between what the certificate proves and what modern data environments actually demand. The biggest risks today come from data sprawl, from duplication and drift and the quiet entropy of information that nobody’s actively managing.

Addressing that takes more than a framework. It takes a culture of continuous governance, practical tooling, and an honest look at the gap between how data should behave and how it actually does. The certificate opens the door. What you build behind it is what actually matters.

By Nahla Davies

Nahla Davies is a software developer and tech writer. Before devoting her work full time to technical writing, she managed – among other intriguing things – to serve as a lead programmer at an Inc 5,000 experiential branding organisation, where clients include Samsung, Time Warner, Netflix and Sony.

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.

Presented by TeamViewer

Enterprise technology failures are largely invisible. Research from TeamViewer, based on a global survey of 4,200 managers and employees, finds that the majority of digital dysfunction never reaches the IT help desk.

Employees work around slow applications, failed logins, and intermittent glitches rather than reporting them, leaving organizations without an accurate picture of how their technology is performing. The cumulative cost is significant: employees lose an average of 1.3 workdays per month to digital friction, with impacts ranging from delayed projects and lost revenue to increased employee turnover.

The research, which surveyed managers and employees across nine countries, confirms what many have long suspected: the productivity loss from digital friction is significant, and most of it never surfaces in an IT support queue, says Andrew Hewitt, VP of strategic technology at TeamViewer.

“Enterprise outages are visible because they trigger clear, system-level failures,” Hewitt says. “But much of the real disruption happens earlier, in the form of digital friction: slow apps, login issues, or intermittent glitches that don’t cross alert thresholds. These smaller issues often go unreported or are normalized by employees, even though they quietly drain productivity.”

What is digital friction and why does it go unreported?

The most common sources of friction — connectivity failures, software crashes, hardware problems, and authentication issues — aren’t edge-case scenarios, but everyday experiences employees have learned to absorb without escalating. Connectivity problems were the most widespread, with nearly half identifying them as the top productivity killer among common technology issues.

That tendency to absorb rather than report is central to the problem. Many workers don’t trust their IT team to resolve issues quickly or effectively, so when a login fails or an application stalls mid-task, the path of least resistance is to restart the device, switch tools, or use a personal phone.

“Employees are under more pressure than ever to prove output,” Hewitt says. “When reporting feels unlikely to result in a quick resolution, it creates a false sense of stability at the system level while the employee experience quietly deteriorates.”

How much productivity does digital friction cost organizations?

The business consequences extend beyond inconvenience. Many organizations report delays in critical operations, revenue loss, and lost customers as a result of IT dysfunction. Most respondents lose time each month, and few expect improvement, citing increasing complexity of workplace technology as a primary concern.

The human cost runs parallel. Workers link digital friction to frustration, decreased motivation, and burnout, and many believe it contributes to turnover, with onboarding replacements stretching to eight weeks or more.

“Employees are happiest when they feel productive and accomplished at the end of the day,” Hewitt says. “When people can’t make progress in their day-to-day work, frustration builds and burnout follows. Great technology might not be a main attractor of talent, but bad technology can certainly play a role in driving it away.”

Why employees use personal devices and unauthorized tools instead of reporting IT problems

When workplace technology consistently fails to meet employee needs, workers find alternatives, with a substantial share of respondents admitting to using personal devices or unauthorized applications as workarounds. That’s the entry point for shadow IT, or the use of unapproved hardware, software, or cloud services outside IT’s visibility and control. While employees turn to these tools simply to stay productive, they introduce security vulnerabilities, data leakage risks, and compliance gaps that IT teams may not discover until a breach occurs.

“Quite simply, it demonstrates that the IT environment is not meeting the employees’ needs,” Hewitt said. “While this helps maintain short-term productivity, it introduces significant risks and pushes work outside of IT’s visibility and control.”

TeamViewer ONE addresses this by combining remote connectivity with real-time endpoint monitoring, giving IT teams the ability to detect and resolve device and application issues before employees reach for an alternative. When the underlying environment is stable and support is fast, the impulse to work around it diminishes.

How fragmented IT infrastructure creates blind spots across devices, apps, and networks

Addressing digital friction at scale requires more than faster help desk response times. Traditional metrics such as mean time to resolution and ticket volume capture only a fraction of actual issues. A more complete picture requires measuring lost time, interrupted workflows, and employee sentiment across devices, applications, and network environments.

“Leaders need to move beyond measuring performance through IT tickets alone,” Hewitt said. “Performance should be viewed through the lens of employee experience and real-time digital workplace data.”

Fragmented infrastructure makes this difficult. When devices, applications, and networks operate in separate silos, IT teams struggle to trace root causes or identify systemic issues before they spread, often responding to symptoms rather than underlying problems.

TeamViewer ONE is designed to close that gap, integrating digital employee experience analytics, remote support, and device management into a single platform. Instead of piecing together signals from disconnected tools, IT teams get a consolidated view of endpoint health, application performance, and network conditions across the entire organization.

How organizations can shift from reactive IT support to proactive system monitoring

Achieving proactive IT is not a single-step transformation. Hewitt describes it as a progression: starting with endpoint management and security, building toward real-time visibility into the digital employee experience, and ultimately using automation and AI to resolve issues before they reach employees.

TeamViewer AI is built to support each stage of that progression, using continuous monitoring to surface anomalies and correlate signals across the digital environment, identifying patterns of poor experience before they escalate. When issues are detected, it suggests remediations, generates scripts to fix problems autonomously, and handles routine tasks such as common troubleshooting without requiring IT intervention, shifting the workload from reactive firefighting toward proactive oversight.

And while AI’s effectiveness depends on the completeness of the data it works with, consolidating onto a platform like TeamViewer ONE removes that limitation by giving AI a complete, real-time data foundation to work from.

How system performance lays the foundation for productivity, retention, and competitive advantage

TeamViewer ONE isn’t a wholesale replacement of existing IT infrastructure, but a unifying layer that connects insight with action, which enables organizations to ramp up productivity, improve retention, and ultimately realize a significant competitive advantage. It begins with visibility into what is actually causing friction across their environment. From there, leaders can use that data to prioritize fixes, and then scale remediation through automation as confidence and capability grow.

“Reducing digital friction isn’t about overhauling everything at once,” Hewitt said. “Leaders should start small, gain visibility into what’s actually causing friction, fix the biggest pain points, then scale those improvements through automation and AI. Even incremental progress can make an impact on employee engagement and productivity.”

Dig deeper: Fix it before they feel it from TeamViewer.

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from the silent-treatment dept

Over a decade ago, Microsoft was getting set to release its new Xbox One console. In the lead-up to launch day, a bunch of rumors began swirling about some of the online requirements the console would come with. Details weren’t to be found, so the public was left to speculate what these requirements would entail. Would the console always need to be online when launching games? Would it need to check in online on a certain cadence for games to work, such as every day? Every 30 days?

Microsoft did very little to calm the waters in all this speculation. Very little came out from the Xbox team prior to launch, and what did come out was often confusing. What became very obvious, however, was that the lack of clear and direct messaging from Microsoft made a bad situation much worse. The backlash to the requirement rumors was severe and Xbox largely ended up scrapping them.

Fast forward to the present and the internet has exploded the past few days with claims that an update pushed to PlayStation consoles has introduced a 30 day online check in requirement for newly purchased games.

Some PlayStation users have noticed a new online DRM policy for digital games purchased on the PlayStation Store: newly purchased digital games now display a “Valid Period” tag showing a start date, an end date, and a countdown timer. If the console does not connect to the internet within 30 days, the game’s license reportedly expires, and the title becomes unplayable until an online connection is restored.

The story broke over the weekend through Lance McDonald, the well-known modder who managed to patch Bloodborne to run at 60 frames per second. He posted on X: “Hugely terrible DRM has now been rolled out to all PS4 and PS5 digital games. Every digital game you buy now requires an online check-in every 30 days. If you buy a digital game and don’t connect your console to the internet for 30 days, your license will be removed.

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We thought about reporting this story as soon as McDonald surfaced it. However, several users also swore they saw nothing of the sort in their libraries, so we waited. Thus far, Sony has not made any official public statement, but a few hours ago, a PlayStation Support assistant confirmed to a user that the 30-day timer is not a bug at all.

That support assistant being referenced is a bot, however, not a human being behind a keyboard. You can see the response it gave in the screenshot below.

That is, at the time of this writing, the most that Sony has said about whatever the hell is going on here. As a result, all kinds of people, big and small within the gaming community, are losing their shit over this new “online DRM requirement” for existing consoles that previously didn’t have it. Oh, and it’s a requirement that Sony mocked Microsoft for trying to require way back in 2013 before the backlash.

The silence is, as they say, deafening. Is this fully intentional? Not all the reporting suggests that at all. Other reports indicate that this is just a bug in the update and this was not intended to be rolled out at all.

Shortly after the issue surfaced, video game preservation site Does it play? weighed in on the matter. It reported hearing from an anonymous insider that the timer was actually just a bug. “From what we gathered, Sony accidentally broke something while fixing an exploit. They’ve known about the confusing UI for a while, but didn’t see it as urgent,” their X post read.

However, many noted that an accidental deployment still implies Sony was testing the concept, since the interface had already been built. Throughout the confusion, Sony has yet to provide an official comment regarding the issue.

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That last sentence is the most important one. Hey, Sony: what the actual hell is going on here?

The fact that all of this rumor, speculation, and angst has gone on for at least a couple of days now without a single word being uttered directly from Sony is remarkably stupid. The waters need to be calmed and that’s only going to happen by the company speaking up. Was it a bug? Cool, say so and let’s move on. Is the online requirement DRM now a thing? Much less cool, but at least we’ll know where the company stands (though, then we can start talking about Sony changing its policies on consoles after they are sold).

What can’t happen is this vacuum of information because Sony wants to give the public the silent treatment. That’s just bad business.

Filed Under: 30 day timer, drm, playstation, playstation online assistant

Companies: sony