Netflix executives have reportedly discussed adding always-on, genre-based live channels and folding rival subscriptions such as Peacock into Netflix as billed add-on tiles, per a Wall Street Journal report. Neither is confirmed; both are internal discussions with no launch date or pricing. The logic is engagement and unskippable ad inventory, at a moment when free ad-supported rivals are capturing casual viewing and Netflix is defending an addictive-design lawsuit it disputes.
TL;DR
Netflix executives have reportedly discussed adding always-on live channels to the service. The channels would run genre-based programming around the clock, all comedies or all action films, according to a Wall Street Journal report relayed by The Verge.
They have also discussed folding rival streaming subscriptions into Netflix itself. Peacock was named specifically, appearing as a tile on the Netflix home page and billed through Netflix.
Neither is a product. Both are internal conversations, with no launch date, pricing, or confirmation from the company.
The comparison writes itself. A grid of always-on genre channels bundled with other people’s services, billed on one invoice, is a fairly precise description of the thing Netflix spent two decades dismantling.
The bundling half is not novel. Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV+ have sold third-party subscriptions as add-ons for years, and it is a reliable way to take a cut of someone else’s revenue.
The channels half is more interesting, because it addresses a problem Netflix built itself.
Netflix made browsing exhausting. The library grew so large that picking something became the hardest part of the evening, and the company has already turned to generative AI to fix the content overload it helped create.
A channel solves that instantly. It removes the decision entirely, which is precisely why linear television survived as long as it did.
It is also a defensive move. Free ad-supported services like Pluto TV and Tubi have captured exactly this casual, low-effort viewing, and Paramount is consolidating Pluto TV onto a unified stack to press the advantage.
Follow the inventory. A channel that never stops is a stream of unskippable ad slots, which a browse-and-pick catalogue is not.
That matters more than it used to. Netflix has been chasing attention wherever it lives, striking short-form video deals with publishers to compete with YouTube and TikTok.
The financial context is not comfortable either. The company authorised a $25bn share buyback after its stock fell 10%, which is what a business does when it wants to reassure people.
Always-on channels are, by design, engagement machinery. They exist to keep the screen on after the thing you chose has finished, and to make stopping require an act of will.
Netflix is currently defending a lawsuit from the Texas attorney general alleging addictive design and improper data collection, claims the company disputes and which remain unproven. Shipping a feature explicitly built to reduce the friction of not stopping is, at minimum, awkward timing.
None of this makes the idea bad. Removing decision fatigue is a real service, and plenty of people want the television equivalent of a radio station.
But it is worth naming the trade. Netflix disrupted cable by giving viewers control, and it may be about to discover that control was never what most viewers wanted, only what they said they wanted.
In my current season of toddler parenthood, I’ve sometimes felt that I could cut the tension between myself and the TV remote with a knife. As much as I try to keep screen time in check, sometimes I need 10 uninterrupted minutes to unload the dishwasher before a certain almost-2-year-old goes for the dog bowl.
That’s where audio players are handy. In a world where screens are increasingly hard to avoid, parents are looking for alternatives—and these players, in their various formats, are to the rescue. The devices mark a sweet spot between independent play and story time, letting kids listen to music, audiobooks, and interactive stories without a tablet in sight. Some audio players are geared toward younger kiddos who enjoy tactile toys and familiar characters like Elmo and Bluey, while other options are designed to grow with them to chapter books, podcasts, and beyond.
Over the past several weeks, my family has tested some of the biggest names in the category to see how they stack up. Here’s the verdict on which ones are best suited for different families and their needs.
Want more recommendations for WIRED-tested kids’ toys? Here’s our guide to Brain-Boosting Toys for Kids, Kid-Approved STEM Toys, and the Best Gifts for Lego Lovers.
Photograph: Nicole Kinning
Photograph: Nicole Kinning
Yoto
The Yoto Player is simple enough for toddlers to operate independently while offering a broad enough content library to keep it relevant as kids grow. Stories and music live on credit card–sized cards that my daughter could swap in and out with her little hands, and the small pixel display on the front of the machine adds a visual element without becoming another distracting screen.
You can add each Yoto card to your child’s library through the device’s companion app. Once you do, you can stream the content directly from your phone or remotely send it to the Yoto. That means you’re not necessarily tied to bringing the speaker with you everywhere you go. I saw this capability as being especially useful on road trips—you can play stories through your car speakers or listen from your phone if the player gets left behind or its battery dies.
Yoto offers more than the stories and songs from its player cards. You’ll also get kid-friendly daily radio, draw-alongs, toothbrush timers, white noise, a wake-up clock, and a nightlight that activates when you flip the player screen-side down. I only see it getting more useful as my daughter grows, and if I’m being honest, there is a Nancy Drew story collection I am secretly eyeing for myself.
The incredibly useful feature is only present in specific headphone and earbud models.
Bluetooth headphones have exploded in popularity, with the market continuing to grow each year. The category, which includes over-ear headphones like the Sony WH-1000XM6 and in-ear devices like Apple’s AirPods line, offers a mix of comfort and convenience, and we’ve reached a point where it’s hard to find name-brand headphones that don’t sound at least somewhat decent. But while most marketing for consumer-grade wireless headphones focuses on headline features like active noise canceling, there’s another feature most people should add to their list of non-negotiables.
Once upon a time, during the halcyon days of the ubiquitous headphone jack, swapping between devices was a matter of popping the plug out of one and into the other. Maybe you’d get an audio splitter if you really needed to use two audio sources at once, but that was as complicated as things usually got. With Bluetooth, simply switching even the best wireless headphones over to another device involves fiddling with settings menus and dealing with frustrating connection issues.
Finicky connections are a defining trait of the decades-old Bluetooth protocol, and although improvements continue to be made with each generational update, that essential character remains. That’s where Bluetooth multipoint comes in. It’s a feature that allows a Bluetooth device to remain connected to multiple devices at once, swapping between audio streams from each as you use them. While multipoint can introduce some annoyances of its own, it’s still far preferable to manually switching between devices over Bluetooth. Here’s why it’s a must-have for most headphone shoppers.
Bluetooth multipoint is a manufacturer-introduced technology which can allow for a wireless audio device to maintain a connection to multiple audio sources. It usually allows for a connection to two devices, though there are exceptions. The feature is more common on high-end consumer headphones like the Sony WH-1000XM6, though it can sometimes be found on downrange products.
Your Bluetooth devices use different Bluetooth profiles for different types of audio. Music and other media streams use the A2DP profile. On certain devices, this can also transmit high-resolution wireless codecs like Qualcomm AptX and Sony LDAC. You may simultaneously use an AVRCP profile to send volume and play/pause commands to the host device. When you get a phone call, you’ll switch over to the lower-quality audio of the bidirectional HFP profile. When you’re listening to music on your laptop, you might get a phone call, and your headphones will prioritize the HFP connection to switch over. However, if you’re using HFP for a Zoom call, it may retain priority until you answer the incoming call.
Not all multipoint is made equal, and whether a particular implementation of it works for you depends on which devices you plan to use the headphones with. It’s a good idea to test the multipoint functionality of a pair of headphones before you buy them, if possible, to ensure that their multipoint implementation works well with your particular devices. If you can’t test that functionality before buying, do so before the return period ends.
Bluetooth multipoint can make it much easier to use multiple devices with a single pair of headphones, but it can also introduce new headaches. Multipoint is not part of the Bluetooth specification, and is instead implemented by device manufacturers on top of the Bluetooth stack. This explains why it remains a relative rarity despite consumer demand. The ability to handle multiple streams was added with Bluetooth 4.0, but multipoint features are logics built atop the Bluetooth protocol. Bluetooth cannot mux or sum together multiple audio streams, so multipoint does not allow a user to listen to audio from multiple devices at once. Instead, it decides which stream should take priority and pipes that to your ears, often pausing other media. Incoming phone calls usually demand precedence, for example.
Multipoint often assumes you’ll only use one device at a time, but try scrolling Instagram on your phone while listening to a podcast on your computer. As Instagram’s annoying autoplay causes the app to output audio, your multipoint headphones will divert away from your podcast. This will often happen even if your phone’s media volume is set to zero. Equally annoying notification dings on your phone may ride along on the same Bluetooth profile as phone calls, interrupting you with every group chat message.
Apple and Samsung have their own solution to this issue. Technically, the best AirPods and Galaxy Buds do have multipoint — a modified version designed to work exclusively with their own products. While often justifiably perceived as user-hostile, this approach can yield better Bluetooth switching results in normal use because the company controls the way Bluetooth is implemented on its headphones, phones and laptops, whereas companies like Sony or Bose do not have the benefit of bespoke ecosystems.
Hi readers! Shayla Love here, science journalist and longtime fan of Your Mileage May Vary. I’m honored to be subbing for Sigal Samuel while she’s out on parental leave. I’m diving into your questions as a way to help understand human nature and our choices through multiple lenses: philosophical, psychological, and beyond. Please send in any emotional, body/brain, sociological, perceptual, or other kind of life quandaries you might have.
I’m swimming in information. I have tracking apps to keep tally of my daily steps, minutes online, my calories, my sleep. Throughout the day, I am awash with data — some “actionable” and some useless. I find it a struggle to prioritize. I find myself looking up the latest betting odds for a Senate race in a state where I don’t live. (I didn’t bet on the race.) What I want to know is: What should I know less about? I’ve heard that ignorance is bliss, though I don’t often find that to be the case. But maybe I know too much, or…too little about how much to know?
Dear Un-blissfully Aware,
As a fellow know-it-all, I relate to your impulse to gather as much information as possible. I used to obstinately reject the idea that ignorance was bliss. Even if I learned something that was unpleasant, wouldn’t it be much worse not to know it?
But, as you may suspect from sharing my temperament in this arena, this approach to life can lead to hoarding knowledge like a frantic animal preparing for winter. You’re acquiring information as if it’s a scarce resource (which it’s not) and as if choosing to know something is neutral (it isn’t). What helped me understand the implications of this sort of approach was learning about the cases when people decided not to know, or the study of “deliberate ignorance.”
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Several years ago, a psychologist, Ralph Hertwig, and lawyer, Christoph Engel, who both work at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, examined what happened in the early 1990s, when the archives of East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi, opened to the public. Any person who had been living in the German Democratic Republic could check if they had been spied on. There was a pretty substantial catch, though: The spies were often “unofficial collaborators” — friends, family, teachers, or lovers who had been tasked with covertly collecting information. When the files were opened, many elected not to look. Hertwig and Engel estimated that potentially more people chose not to know what their files contained than those who did.
This goes against what we think we know about humans and how you have described yourself. Even Aristotle seemed quite certain that “all men naturally desire knowledge.” In the 1980s, the psychologist George Miller followed along in this line of thinking. He described humans as informavores: creatures with minds that constantly seek out and consume information. So, it can feel surprising to hear about occasions when people didn’t start grabbing for every available datapoint like squirrels dashing for acorns as the first winds of fall arrive.
But, as Hertwig and Engel — who collaborated on an entire book called Deliberate Ignorance: Choosing Not to Know — point out, we’re surrounded by people choosing ignorance all the time. They avoid looking at their bank statements, they skip doctor’s appointments, and they cover their ears and say “no spoilers” if someone is talking about a movie they haven’t yet seen.
Even Nobel Laureates do this. When James Watson, one of the co-discoverers of DNA’s double helix, had his own genome sequenced, he requested that a specific gene be left out: ApoE4, which can reveal an increased Alzheimer’s risk. Watson’s grandmother had Alzheimer’s, and her experience clearly made an impression on him. (Then, many in the scientific world tried to remain ignorant to Watson’s increasingly misogynistic and racist comments, until it was unignorable.)
Why do people choose not to know? The most common reason: Ignorance can be an extremely effective way to regulate any emotions that might crop up in response to knowledge. You can minimize negative feelings by, for example, not knowing that your otherwise friendly neighbor had been reporting on your comings and goings.
In a study about romantic relationships, a majority of people said they didn’t want to know if their partner had ever thought about cheating on them (but never acted on it). Other research showed that most people wouldn’t want to know the exact time of their death. Alternatively, someone could cultivate the feelings of joy and surprise by waiting to find out the sex of a baby until it’s born.
Deliberate ignorance can also be used to protect us from our biases. Scientists do blinded studies, because the knowledge of what drugs are being used can unwittingly change the outcomes or research. When orchestras implemented blind auditions, more women musicians were accepted.
Of course, deliberate ignorance can be problematic when it causes harm to yourself or others, like failing to gather basic information about your financial or physical health. In some cases, for instance, about 10 percent of people who got tested for HIV didn’t come back for their results — which could lead to further spread of the disease.
But when skipping out on knowledge doesn’t endanger you or those around you, it’s worth asking: How would this information make me feel?
This sounds like a question that’s missing from your information-ingestion habits. You don’t have to — and shouldn’t — ignore everything that comes across your desk. But your deliberate ignorance filter is turned entirely off; seemingly anything passes through it. To take just one of your examples, you mentioned fitness wearables. It can be useful to be aware of your general activity levels and your sleep, but honestly, don’t you already know enough from your memories of a workout class and how rested you feel in the morning? A quest for more detailed knowledge like this can backfire, making people more anxious, and disconnected from their actual physical experience.
It’s not just about how much knowledge to take in, it’s also about what kind. The breadth of information that you’re seeking out makes me wonder if you’re not already using knowledge to regulate your emotions by favoring superficial knowledge over the meaningful. When we face difficult tasks (even if they’re important, and we want to get them done), that’s usually when, suddenly, a Senate race in a far-off state starts to become interesting, or you find yourself scrolling a high school acquaintance’s wife’s Instagram.
In the 1990s, two technology researchers proposed the concept of “information foraging,” which was inspired by early user behavior on the web. A few years later, Webster’s dictionary announced that their word of the year was “infosnacking,” or mindless grazing for useless knowledge online in order to pass the time.
Snacking sometimes is fine, but you’ll start to suffer if you only eat chips for every meal rather than something more nutritious. I suspect you might be avoiding the slightly more challenging task of taking in other, more nutrient-dense knowledge. If you cut out the step tallies, screen minute totals, and news headlines scrolling, what could you choose to know instead?
What I’ve learned about myself is that I will always lean towards being an informavore. I can’t help it. I am hungry to know, and there is no need to totally overhaul this valuable part of who you are (as I also tell myself!). This means you don’t need to replace your infosnacking with zenfully staring at the ceiling or emptying your mind through meditation. You can still put new things into it! But you could worry less about your daily information calorie intake and spend more time thinking about the nutrition content of your knowledge diet.
Take a lesson from our many deliberately ignorant friends, and try disregarding some of the little stuff — the body tracking, the random factoids — for a period of time. But, at the same time, increase your knowledge about other subjects: a neglected hobby or a nonfiction book collecting dust on your shelf. Have a long conversation with your best friend and ask each other questions you’ve never asked before or interview an older relative about their childhood.
And remember that all of this knowledge relates back to your emotional life. Rather than asking yourself what you should or shouldn’t know, examine how you might be using knowledge to alter how you feel. Knowledge changes us. It can make us happy, anxious, excited, or sad; it impacts our decisions and how we see ourselves and other people.
In some of your newfound spaces of intentional ignorance, you may find just some surprising moments of bliss.
Hank Green, a novelist, comedian, and YouTuber with 3.2 million subscribers, recently apologized to his audience for his growing reliance on AI chatbots.
The controversy started when, in the middle of a video posted on the educational channel Complexly, Green incongruously used the phrase “I appreciate the pushback,” leading viewers to speculate that he’d written the script with a chatbot — and, in the process, accidentally included its response to one of his prompts.
In response to a since-deleted post on X, Green acknowledged that he’d produced the video “under a ton of pressure” and used ChatGPT “for research on this script.” At the same time, he said the “pushback” line was actually a response to the episode’s guest.
Green then offered a more in-depth apology on Reddit, where he said he was “mortified” that he’d “let so many people down” and that he plans to reduce his video production as a result.
Green insisted that he’s only used ChatGPT to “locate papers and other resources for learning about topics,” and that the words and the “takes” have still been his. At the same time, he admitted it was fair to criticize him for “diluting” himself.
He also clarified that he’s “not a pure AI-hater,” while also listing a number of concerns about the technology, including its impact on climate change and “the speed at which these companies are trying to consolidate economic power.”
“Ultimately, what I am most scared of is ruining myself for people, but I have not been managing my impulses well,” he said. “You need to know that my words are mine. I don’t think that this hasn’t been true, but I’ve been moving so fast that my own process isn’t actually clear to me and I want to have it be a guarantee moving forward.”
It sounds like Green is going to take some time to figure out how to make that guarantee a reality. In the meantime, he’ll be pausing or posting less frequently to his various YouTube channels. Green said he wants to do more work like a recent meditative video “where the writing was the whole thing and I felt it all the way down.” Green also said he’ll probably make more videos with his “dumb unscripted straight to camera thoughts.”
“But mostly I need to come to terms with the fact that the level of dopamine I’ve been getting from interacting with LLMs…with doing more and more and more and more…is not healthy for me or good for the world,” Green said. “It is careless, and has disconnected me from where people are on this.”
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Several popular Samsung smart TV apps contain code that share the owner’s internet connection with strangers, potentially putting millions of Samsung smart TVs at risk of hijacking, according to new security research published on Monday.
Some of these apps claim to have been installed on hundreds of millions of smart TVs in people’s homes, per the app developers.
At least one of the smart TV apps was a simple Pac-Man game that Samsung had endorsed and prominently featured in its “Editor’s Choice” section on customers’ TV screens.
These apps contain software that funnels outsiders’ web traffic through ordinary home and office internet connections, known as residential proxy networks (or “resproxies”), which are increasingly being linked to cybercrime. When opened, apps with resproxy code can turn the smart TV into an always-on tunnel for outsiders to funnel their web traffic through, known as an exit node — even when the app is no longer open.
The security research by Norwegian cybersecurity company Mnemonic describes a perfect storm of problems that allows low-quality apps to proliferate across Samsung’s app store, containing code that puts users at risk of having their internet connections tapped by a rogue app.
Many of these apps are bare-bone shells, made from only a few lines of code, and are designed solely to load content from another website, such as a game. While such smart TV apps load content from another server, any review of these apps sees only the few lines of code within, and not necessarily the content itself.
“What was reviewed is not necessarily what is running,” wrote Harrison Sand, an offensive security consultant at Mnemonic.
After TechCrunch contacted Samsung with a request for comment about the research, the electronics giant said in an emailed statement that it was banning apps that share their users’ internet connections, and will remove apps that contain the functionality.
“We have already restricted new app registrations that incorporate such proxy functionalities on our Smart TV platform,” said a Samsung spokesperson. “We are currently implementing strict platform-wide developer policies explicitly banning residential proxy SDKs, and we are working to identify and remove all apps currently available in our store that contain these components.”
The move comes after LG said last month that it would ban apps that contain resproxy software after recent reporting found that around 42% of apps on the company’s app store enlisted a smart TV into a proxy network.
The research also offers a rare look inside a residential proxy network.
Resproxy code can also be found in regular consumer phone apps, as well as other consumer electronics, like digital frames and Android streaming boxes, which then share that device’s internet connection.
Any time a resproxy app or device connects to the internet, an outsider can also pay to use it.
Resproxies are not inherently illegal. Some are used for evading censorship by routing internet traffic through ordinary looking residential homes. AI companies, for example, increasingly rely on resproxies to scrape data from multiple places on the internet in one go to train their AI models.
But cybersecurity companies say resproxies have gained a reputation for allowing hackers and spies to carry out cyberattacks and data breaches while hiding their malicious activity.
Cybersecurity companies find resproxies challenging to tackle because the network traffic looks like it’s coming from an ordinary household, rather than a malicious hacker located overseas, as they might expect.
Moreover, the network traffic that flows through a user’s device over resproxies is generally encrypted, which is generally impossible to unscramble and inspect.
By rooting a Samsung smart TV’s software, Mnemonic’s Sand gained deep access to the television’s internals and analyzed all of the network traffic that flowed in and out of the TV. This included any app that was sharing the smart TV’s internet connection with someone else.
He found the Pac-Man game contained resproxy code from Bright Data, an Israel-based company that provides proxy networks touting access to millions of residential networks around the world. The company also has a marketplace for selling access to scraped datasets. These datasets are derived from a network of enlisted smart TVs as exit nodes, which are used to download large amounts of public data from the web from multiple sources at once, often to circumvent systems designed to prevent scraping.
Sand found that Bright Data’s resproxy code loaded when opening the Pac-Man game, but noted that this did not automatically turn the Samsung smart TV into an exit node. Sand said the resproxy code is dormant until the user accepts a consent screen, which immediately activates the resproxy code to run in the background until the user deletes the app.
Aside from the user themselves consenting to enlisting their device into a resproxy, Sand warned that a “simple code change on a web server” could instantly activate hundreds of millions of smart TVs into a potentially malicious botnet.
With access to the network data flowing through his smart TV, Sand could see that much of it appeared to suggest the resproxy network was used for large-scale scraping of LinkedIn profiles, and for collecting AI training data. Sand said he only saw a tiny percentage of what was routed over Bright Data’s network.
Bright Data did not respond to a request for comment.
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Apple TV‘s adaptation of Cape Fear saw a chilling finale recently, and it was as grisly as we’d expected it to be. Over the past few weeks we’ve followed Javier Bardem’s take on Max Cady, delivering a performance so scary it’s left some of us sleeping with the lights on.
Cady was particularly unhinged in Cape Fear‘s finale, which saw him killing his own family and taking the Bowdens hostage in one final altercation.
It’s an important moment in the series and allows Cady to have a do-over by setting up a mock trial, once again including attorney couple Tom and Anna who were responsible for sending him to prison in the first place.
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But what went down, and should we be expecting a Cape Fear season 2? Here’s everything you need to know.
Max Cady kills his half-sister Crystal, his father Robert, and Crystal’s apparent son Luke in the season finale. He wanted to eliminate the whole family after what happened to him, as it was revealed that Crystal killed Max’s former wife Melissa, the crime that he was wrongfully sentenced for instead.
By killing the family he believes betrayed him, Cady hopes to achieve peace, but instead he ends up with just another tragedy when he finds out who Luke really was. As it happens, when Crystal murdered Melissa, she didn’t kill her unborn baby and instead took him to raise as her own child.
So Luke is Cady’s biological son, who he murdered in a rage thinking he was actually the son of his half-sister instead. This cruel twist is a shocking one, creating even more pain for Cady.
After Cady broke into the Bowden family home, they manage to get free and Anna stabs Cady. She’s given the opportunity to kill him, but doesn’t, saying that they should “let him die in a cage”.
We don’t see Cady after this point, but it’s assumed he’s arrested and sent to back to prison. But Cady’s fate could be explored in season 2, if one is greenlit by Apple TV. Right now, though, we assume he’s gone.
His presence still lingers, however, because the final scene of Cape Fear shows that the Bowdens are still looking over their shoulder, assuming he’s lurking somewhere in the shadows.
The family twists don’t stop there, as Tom and Anna’s daughter Natalie is also going through an identity crisis. Throughout the series it was always assumed that Natalie’s father was Anna’s ex Paul, and that Tom stepped up as a step-parent after he and Anna got together.
As it happens, Natalie’s father could actually be Cady, as he and Anna have a history. Natalie’s real father is not revealed to us, but she does receive an envelope at the end of the finale which includes DNA results. We don’t get to see these, leaving her true roots a mystery for now.
It is likely we will never know the answer, but Natalie is seen walking over to join the family in the finale’s barbecue scene, implying she has made peace with having Tom as a parental figure.
Even though this story has been wrapped up, there are still loose ends that could well be explored if Cape Fear comes back for season 2. Cady’s fate is one of them, of course, especially if he manages to escape once again.
Or, we could take a look at the Bowden family and how they recover from what happened to them. Especially Natalie, and the mystery around who her father is. But right now, nothing has been set in stone and this could be the end of Nick Antosca’s take on Cape Fear.
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ExfilSquad claims 135,000 contact records weeks after hitting the Department for Education
The Police National Legal Database (PNLD) is the latest UK public sector outfit to admit that cybercriminals made off with its data, including the names and work email addresses of police officers, justice staff, government partners, and customers.
The legal lookup service relied upon by police forces and criminal justice agencies across the UK said it discovered the “data security incident” on July 26 and is investigating alongside specialist cybersecurity firms and the National Crime Agency.
According to the PNLD, the leaked information includes the names, organizations, and work email addresses of police officers, police staff, criminal justice professionals, government partners, and customers. It insists there is “no evidence” that passwords or other authentication data were compromised.
The breach also affected Ask the Police, a public-facing legal advice website operated by PNLD. There, the fallout appears limited to the names and email addresses of people who previously submitted questions through the service.
That’s about where the explanation ends. PNLD has yet to say how attackers got in, when the data was stolen, how many people were affected, or whether anyone tried to shake it down before the information appeared online. West Yorkshire Police, which operates PNLD, did not immediately respond to The Register’s questions.
However, the breach appears linked to the same extortion crew that last week claimed responsibility for a similar breach of the Department for Education (DfE). The group, which calls itself “ExfilSquad,” currently lists both the PNLD and DfE among its latest victims on its dark web leak site, seen by The Register.
For PNLD, the crooks claim to have lifted a 1.9 GB dataset containing roughly 135,000 law enforcement contact records, including names, email addresses, and police force areas. The DfE listing boasts of around 600,000 parent and staff contact records, plus another 7,000 from its Turing Portal. The education department confirmed last week that more than 607,000 records had indeed been exposed.
The DfE has confirmed that the compromised information was limited to customer service contact details from its Customer Help Portal and Turing Scheme, and said no other departmental data had been accessed.
Like most cyber-extortion outfits, ExfilSquad doesn’t exactly do understatement. Its leak site warns victims that once data appears there, it is “NEVER leaving the public eye,” before suggesting any ransom would amount to little more than a rounding error compared with the legal bills that might follow.
The DfE and PNLD’s confirmations don’t validate everything ExfilSquad posts on its leak site. It also lists Microsoft as a victim, alleging a 13 GB haul containing millions of records, password hashes, internal support tickets, and access permissions.
Having two organizations confirm breaches claimed on its leak site makes ExfilSquad harder to ignore. Whether the gang’s other boasts are equally well founded, or simply the usual cybercrook embellishment, remains to be seen. ®
Updated to add at 1517 UTC, August 3:
The North East Regional Organised Crime Unit told The Reg it is investigating the breach. It told us “No ransom demand has been received.”
It also confirmed some numbers, stating the data of around 114,000 PNLD subscriber was involved.
It added: “This involves the names, work email addresses and work organisation of police officers and other criminal justice partners. There are also around 21,000 email addresses of members of the public who have previously used ‘Ask the Police’. There is no evidence to suggest that passwords or other security credentials have been compromised.”
Many small businesses already tap into AI for market research, image and video creation, copywriting, and idea exploration.
Although this single-prompt approach is helpful, it has its limits. Enter AI agents.
Unlike traditional AI, which typically operates within a silo, AI agents can make decisions and take multi-step actions to achieve a predefined goal.
I caught up with Sachin Puri, CEO of Bluehost, to get his thoughts on how AI agents are reshaping how small businesses operate, where the biggest opportunities are, and which risks small businesses should be aware of when using them.
While interest in AI is high, only 16% of SMBs are using AI agents today.
Sachin Puri, CEO of Bluehost
The technology has finally matured beyond generating content and answering questions. AI agents can now understand context, orchestrate workflows, interact with business systems, and complete real business tasks. That makes them practical for small businesses, not just large enterprises with dedicated AI teams.
At the same time, the internet itself is evolving toward an Agentic Web, where rather than just assist people, AI Agents increasingly discover businesses, evaluate products, complete transactions, and interact with other agents on behalf of customers. Small businesses want to participate in that future, but most don’t know where to begin. Our research found that while interest in AI is high, only 16% of SMBs are using AI agents today, with complexity and the lack of SMB-focused solutions being the biggest barriers.
We believe that over time, participating in this new AI-driven economy won’t simply be an advantage; it will become a competitive necessity.
Our role at Bluehost is to make that transition simple. We’ve taken what we’ve learned from deploying AI across our own business and packaged it into purpose-built AI agents that are practical, affordable, and designed specifically for entrepreneurs. Our goal is to help small businesses compete and thrive in the Agentic Era, without requiring them to become AI experts
We are moving from AI that helps entrepreneurs create things to AI that helps them run their business.
Sachin Puri, CEO of Bluehost
Most AI tools in website builders today are generative. You ask for a page, an image, or a piece of copy, and the tool creates that individual asset. Those capabilities are valuable, but they’re largely point solutions. The business owner is still responsible for connecting the dots, coordinating multiple applications, and deciding what happens next.
That’s the problem we’re trying to solve.
Today, millions of entrepreneurs have become the integrators across dozens of applications and workflows. They spend their evenings, weekends, and early mornings moving information between systems, following up with customers, updating websites, managing inventory, booking appointments, and coordinating work that software still can’t do on its own. That’s time they could be spending with their families, serving customers, or creating value through their craft.
AI agents are fundamentally different. They don’t just generate content; they work toward a business outcome. They understand the goal, use business context, orchestrate multiple steps across applications, interact with data, and complete work on the owner’s behalf.
Take website creation as an example. Instead of generating one page at a time, an AI agent can understand the business, create a complete on-brand website, optimize it for search, publish it, and continue improving it over time. But the bigger opportunity begins after launch.
An AI Store Agent can monitor products, inventory, orders, and sales trends, then recommend or take actions to improve performance. An AI Front Desk Agent can answer customer questions using the business’s own knowledge, qualify leads, check real-time calendar availability, and book appointments automatically.
That’s the shift we believe matters. We are moving from AI that helps entrepreneurs create things to AI that helps them run their business.
We believe every small business will eventually have a digital workforce of AI agents working alongside its human workforce. The entrepreneur remains in control, but instead of acting as the integration layer between disconnected software, they become the conductor of a team—both human and digital—focused on growing the business.
GatorClaw is our intuitive AI agent builder for businesses that want to go beyond using AI and start creating AI-powered workflows of their own.
While we’ll offer purpose-built AI agents for common business needs, we also recognize that every business has unique processes. GatorClaw gives entrepreneurs the flexibility to build AI agents tailored to how they operate.
It’s a visual platform built on the OpenClaw ecosystem that makes it incredibly simple to build, connect, deploy, and manage AI agents without assembling the underlying infrastructure or writing complex code, and without needing to be a developer or an AI expert. If you can build a website, you could build an AI agent. Running on Bluehost VPS, GatorClaw lets entrepreneurs automate sophisticated workflows through an intuitive visual experience.
For example, an agent could detect a new inquiry in Gmail, qualify the lead, summarize the customer’s needs, update a CRM, and notify the right person, all automatically.
My advice is to start with one repetitive process that consumes meaningful time and has clear rules. Measure the outcome, build confidence, and then expand from there. Every business is unique, and over time we believe every business will have a digital workforce of AI agents tailored to its own needs.
AI agents excel at repeatable tasks that follow a defined business workflow. They can orchestrate both simple and complex processes, interact with business applications and data, and complete work across multiple systems. That’s where their real power lies. For small businesses, this means offloading repetitive administrative work so owners can focus on serving customers, growing their business, and doing what they do best.
When we asked small business owners where they would deploy AI agents first, repetitive marketing and sales tasks topped the list, including website and SEO updates, managing social media and digital advertising, and booking customer appointments.
Take the Bluehost AI Front Desk Agent as an example. The agent acts as a 24/7 receptionist and sales assistant, answering customer questions using the business’s own website and knowledge base, qualifying leads, and booking appointments directly into the business’s Google Calendar. The agent is trained on the business’s own content and is connected to real-time systems; therefore, it behaves more like a knowledgeable team member than a generic chatbot.
For small businesses with limited staff, that’s the real opportunity, not replacing people, but giving every entrepreneur a digital workforce that helps them accomplish more with the team they already have.
Small businesses don’t have to incorporate AI Agents into every workflow.
In fact, doing so would probably erode some of the customer trust they’ve built up. The trick is knowing where AI can streamline your work and where it’s likely to create complications. For example, using agentic AI to offload administrative marketing, sales, and operational work gives small businesses more time to spend with customers.
Use AI agents for efficiency, and not for relationship-building.
To some extent, you can treat AI agents like trusted employees, but inexperienced ones, at least early on.
Sachin Puri, CEO of Bluehost
To some extent, you can treat AI agents like trusted employees, but inexperienced ones, at least early on.
If you train them on a specific task and a clearly defined role, they will complete it and get the basics right. As your confidence in the technology grows, you can deploy them for more complex tasks.
They will learn from your data and workflows and be tuned to your business’s voice and tone. Early on, this will require some handholding and monitoring, always with humans-in-the-loop on the escalation path.
There is also an important difference between a general-purpose agent and one purpose-built for a specific small-business job. With a general-purpose agent, the owner may need to define the workflow, write detailed instructions, connect tools, and establish guardrails.
At Bluehost, we do much of that upfront work. We identify common small-business processes and build specialized agents around them, so the owner is not starting from a blank page.
In Bluehost AI Store, for example, specialized agents monitor products, orders, inventory, customers, payments, and sales channels. A coordinating agent brings those signals together, identifies what needs attention, and presents the owner with a prioritized action plan. The owner can also manage the store through simple conversation rather than navigating complex eCommerce systems.
That does not mean owners should disengage completely.
AI can monitor activity, flag problems, recommend actions, and handle clearly defined tasks, but people should remain involved in decisions affecting customers, finances, or brand reputation. The goal is an appropriate level of trust versus blind trust. You start with a focused, lower-risk process, review the results, and give the agent more autonomy as it demonstrates reliability.
No AI system should be presented as incapable of making a mistake.
Sachin Puri, CEO of Bluehost
That is exactly why customer-facing AI needs more than a generic model and a chat interface. It should be trained on authoritative business information, connected to current systems, given clear boundaries, and monitored like any other customer-facing channel.
With Bluehost AI Front Desk Agent, our team helps configure and train the agent using the business’s own website, documents, policies, and brand guidelines. Its Google Calendar integration uses real-time availability, which helps reduce scheduling errors. Businesses can also review performance, update information, and retrain the agent as prices, policies, or availability change.
No AI system should be presented as incapable of making a mistake. Bluehost is responsible for providing a reliable platform and implementation support, while the business is responsible for keeping its source information accurate and deciding what the agent is authorized to communicate or do.
The risks are manageable, but businesses should look at both the security of the technology and how the agent is configured.
Agents should run on reliable, secure infrastructure, but infrastructure is only one part of the equation. Businesses also need to understand what information the agent can access, where that data is processed, and what actions it is authorized to take. An agent should have only the access and permissions required for its specific job.
Accuracy matters as well. An agent relies on the business information and systems connected to it, so outdated pricing, policies, inventory, or availability can lead to incorrect results. The best approach is to start with a focused, lower-risk use case, keep sensitive or consequential actions behind appropriate approvals, and expand the agent’s responsibilities as it demonstrates reliability. Purpose-built agents can reduce risk because the workflows, integrations, and guardrails have already been designed around a defined business need.
AI agents probably won’t kill traditional website-building tools in general. In fact, drag-and-drop website builders that enable an AI management layer will see acceleration and continue to provide efficiency for small business owners.
In professional settings, though, replacing website builders is just one facet of what AI agents could accomplish. Our hope is that once small businesses realize that AI agents can make website creation more efficient, they’ll be curious about what else these tools can do.
Agentic technology can also automate marketing and sales tasks, scheduling, routine emails, vendor invoicing, employee onboarding, database management, and reports and analytics, among other tasks.
AI agents won’t “kill” the traditional methods, but small businesses might find that deploying agents is a better option in almost every case and frees up time to focus on essential tasks to grow the business.
Bluehost is committed to keeping our tools as affordable as possible, both now and over the next few years. We are doing this following two paths:
We understand the needs of SMB customers like very few in the industry and so this two-pronged approach is a design principle of our new Agentic offerings.
We are working on quite a few AI and Agentic innovations focusing on the needs of SMBs.
We talk to small business owners every day and deeply understand their challenges, pain points, and needs. We are building Agents to help our SMB customers better run their business operations. Please stay tuned over the coming weeks and months as we unveil more purpose-built offerings for SMBs.
Cybersecurity startup Horizon3 has raised a $250 million Series E at a $2 billion valuation, more than tripling its valuation in 14 months. The San Francisco-based firm drew backing from returning investors NightDragon and NEA.
The funding arrives as two major AI research labs disclosed last week that their models had breached systems outside their intended scope. Horizon3, which has spent six years building AI specifically designed to probe networks for vulnerabilities in a controlled, authorized manner, is riding growing enterprise demand. With AI-driven attacks accelerating, enterprises are rushing to stress-test their defenses at scale, a gap that traditional security vendors have largely left unfilled.
Matt Hartley, the company’s chief revenue officer, said that its NodeZero platform has two core strengths: It can test live systems without shutting down operations, a capability other AI-powered tools have struggled to deliver reliably, and it scans an entire infrastructure continuously rather than once a year, examining the full network rather than just 2-3%.
The company approached $100 million in annual recurring revenue last year with 120% year-over-year growth,and expects to accelerate growth this year, Hartley said.
AI tools have made it easier for attackers to develop new exploits quickly, forcing security teams to handle threats faster than they can fix them. Horizon3 spent roughly $100 million in R&D building automated systems designed to stay predictable and controllable, Hartley said. That’s significant given recent breaches at AI labs, which raised questions about whether any AI system can truly remain contained.
“It’s also making people a lot more careful about how they deploy AI,” Hartley said. “We’re getting a lot of questions today around: can you detect AI? Of course we can. But I think a lot of organizations that rushed to deploy AI across the enterprise are now thinking twice about the ramifications of those deployments; what if my own security team gets too aggressive, could there be unintended consequences? So a lot of organizations are moving into what I’d call a bold new world, which is exactly why you need consistent, predictable testing from a company like Horizon3, to know how to strengthen your own defenses against real-world exploits.”
In a statement, Horizon3 has run 310,000 production security tests with zero disruptions, establishing what it calls ‘AI Hackers’, fully autonomous penetration testing.
The real competition isn’t other software vendors; it’s the existing model, according to Hartley. Most companies hire human security firms to run annual tests and those won’t disappear, he continued. What’s shifting is what clients demand after signing up: Instead of sampling 5% of infrastructure once yearly, they now want to scan everything monthly or weekly, tracking whether they’re actually getting safer.
Horizon3’s founders, Snehal Antani and Anthony Pelletier, met while serving at Joint Special Operations Command, where they saw firsthand how resource constraints made continuous security testing difficult. They founded Horizon3 to automate those repetitive assessments.
With the funding, Horizon3 is expanding internationally,including new offices in Amsterdam (in June 2026), Australia, and Singapore, while building a partner network and maintaining substantial R&D spending.
Strategic investors now include Singapore’s EDBI, defense contractor SAIC, and Qualcomm, signaling that the vulnerability they’re addressing extends well beyond any single sector.
Horizon3 has roughly 7,200 to 7,300 customers, ranging from managed service providers serving small businesses to Fortune 10 enterprises. The company claims an addressable market of tens of billions of dollars, a figure that aligns with industry estimates of the broader cybersecurity market, valued at $271.9 billion in 2025 and projected to reach $663.2 billion by 2033, according to Grand View Research.
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Universal Music Group will give paying subscribers in India three days of exclusive access to selected new releases before making them available through ad-supported streaming tiers. Is this a local experiment, or a preview of what could eventually reach North America and Europe?
Universal Music Group lost nearly €9 billion in market value on Friday because investors decided that healthy streaming growth was not growing quickly enough. One of the company’s answers is already on the way: see whether free listeners will pay to stop waiting.
Beginning at the end of August 2026, new releases from major domestic and international UMG artists will be available exclusively to paying streaming subscribers in India for their first 72 hours. Once that window expires, the same music will become available through participating ad-supported streaming services. UMG has not announced a more specific launch date.
UMG’s enormous global roster includes Taylor Swift, The Weeknd, Ariana Grande, Billie Eilish, Kendrick Lamar, Lady Gaga, Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo, Drake, Post Malone, and major Indian artists such as Badshah and Hanumankind.
For American, Canadian and European readers, the most important detail is also the simplest: this has only been announced for India.
There is currently no 72-hour UMG release window scheduled for the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom or the European Union.
Related Reading: Streaming Is Booming but Universal Music Lost Nearly €9 Billion in One Day
UMG Chairman and CEO Sir Lucian Grainge announced the plan during the company’s second-quarter earnings call on July 30.
Under the new model:
This is not an advance release that lets paying customers hear music before its official launch. The music is being released on schedule, but listeners using free streaming tiers in India will receive it three days later.
That distinction matters. Paid subscribers are not receiving something early. Free listeners are being made to wait.
UMG has only said that the policy will apply across “participating global and regional streaming services” in India. It has not published a list of participating platforms.
That means reports naming Spotify, YouTube Music, JioSaavn, Amazon Music, Apple Music or other individual services as confirmed participants are getting ahead of the available information.
Services offering both paid and ad-supported tiers could theoretically restrict UMG’s new releases to their paying customers for the first 72 hours. Apple Music is already an ad-free subscription service, so there is no free Apple Music tier that would need to be delayed. However, UMG has not confirmed Apple Music or any other individual service as part of the rollout.
India has an enormous streaming audience, but only a relatively small percentage pays for music.
According to an EY and FICCI report, India had approximately 178 million online music streamers in 2025, but only 14.4 million paid subscriptions. In other words, roughly 8% of the country’s streaming audience was paying.
Indian listeners generated an estimated six trillion music streams during 2025, but paid streams represented fewer than 3% of that total. Subscription revenue increased 37% to ₹10.3 billion, demonstrating that the paid market is growing quickly, but still has an enormous amount of room to expand.
UMG sees that gap as both a problem and a very large opportunity.
The company says the subscriber-first window will create a healthier music economy, generate improved compensation for artists and songwriters, and encourage deeper fan engagement. There is some truth to that argument because paid subscriptions generally generate more predictable and valuable revenue than free streams supported by advertising.
But let us not pretend this is being done entirely out of artistic charity.
UMG wants more people paying every month, and making impatient fans wait for major releases is a direct way to test how many will open their wallets.
That objective became even more obvious following UMG’s second-quarter results. Total subscription revenue increased strongly, but underlying subscription growth excluding the recently acquired Downtown Music business came in at 6.7% at constant currency. Advertising-supported streaming revenue excluding Downtown increased only 1.7%, while market-share pressure also weighed on performance.
As we explained in our Friday report, consumers are streaming more music than ever. UMG’s problem is that not enough of that increased activity is turning into the level of revenue and profit growth investors expect.
The 72-hour window is one attempt to close that gap.
Grainge presented India’s new release model as an extension of a strategy UMG previously pursued in China.
Beginning in 2019, UMG worked with Chinese streaming services to move more domestic and international music behind subscription paywalls. China subsequently became the world’s fourth-largest recorded music market, with revenue increasing 20.1% in 2025. Premium subscriptions and additional paid fan experiences were significant contributors to that growth.
That does not prove that paywalls alone created China’s growth. Increased smartphone adoption, economic development, licensing enforcement, local artist investment and improved streaming services also played important roles.
However, UMG clearly views China as evidence that a market dominated by free listening can be pushed toward paid subscriptions without destroying overall consumption.
India is the next test.
It is possible, but nothing has been announced.
Grainge said UMG wants India to follow China’s path and that the company believes other “high-potential markets” could do the same. He did not identify the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom or any European country as the next target.
North America and Western Europe are also very different from India. Paid streaming is already well established in those markets, which means a three-day window may convert fewer new subscribers while creating considerably more consumer backlash.
But release windowing is hardly foreign to Western streaming services.
In 2017, UMG and Spotify reached an agreement allowing Universal artists to restrict selected new albums to Spotify Premium subscribers for two weeks, while singles remained available to free users.
UMG’s more recent global agreement with Spotify also calls for new paid subscription tiers, expanded offers and deeper monetization of artist fandom. It does not establish a new 72-hour release window, but it shows that UMG continues to view paid access, premium features and tiered availability as central to its “Streaming 2.0” strategy.
A broader rollout is therefore technically and commercially possible. It is just not confirmed.
The most likely path would be additional tests in markets where free listening remains dominant, rather than an immediate blanket rollout across the United States, Canada and Europe. UMG could also use the concept selectively for major artists, specific platforms or future premium subscription packages.
Much will depend on what happens in India.
If the policy converts a meaningful number of free listeners into paying subscribers without driving them toward piracy, unofficial uploads or competing platforms, UMG will have a reason to expand it. If listeners simply wait three days or find the music elsewhere, the experiment will have created annoyance rather than recurring revenue.
UMG’s new policy does not prevent Indian listeners from hearing new music for free. It makes them wait 72 hours while paying subscribers receive immediate access.
For now, the change applies only to India and only through participating services that have yet to be publicly identified. Nothing has been announced for the United States, Canada or Europe.
Three days may not sound like much. But in a music business obsessed with release-week engagement, social media momentum and turning every possible listener into a subscriber, UMG is about to find out how much fans will pay to avoid being late.
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