Anthropic built an AI model that found thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities in every major operating system and web browser. The Federal Reserve chair and the Treasury secretary called bank CEOs to discuss it. The company says there is a six-to-twelve month window to patch the flaws before adversaries build models that can do the same thing. The cybersecurity industry says the threat was already here. Both are right.

Claude Mythos Preview is the model. It is not yet publicly released. In controlled testing, it surpassed all but the most skilled humans at finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities, identifying flaws that had existed undetected for decades, including a 27-year-old bug in OpenBSD and a 17-year-old remote code execution flaw in FreeBSD. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei described the current period as a “moment of danger” and warned of “some enormous increase in the amount of vulnerabilities, in the amount of breaches, in the financial damage that’s done from ransomware on schools, hospitals, not to mention banks.”

The discovery

Mozilla released Firefox 150 with fixes for 271 security vulnerabilities identified by Mythos in a single evaluation pass. The number is striking not because Firefox is unusually insecure but because no human team had found them. The vulnerabilities had accumulated across years of development, each one a potential entry point for an attacker with the right tools. Mythos found all 271 in one run.

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The model’s capability raises a question that the cybersecurity industry has been theorising about for years and now must answer practically: what happens when the cost of finding vulnerabilities drops to near zero? The traditional economics of cybersecurity depend on the asymmetry between attackers, who must find one flaw, and defenders, who must secure all of them. Mythos collapses the cost on both sides. Defenders can now scan their entire codebase for flaws they never knew existed. Attackers, once they build or obtain equivalent models, can do the same.

The response

Anthropic chose a controlled rollout, which it calls Project Glasswing. Approximately 40 technology companies and institutions have initial access to Mythos to bolster their systems. The list does not include most central banks and governments. The asymmetry is intentional: give defenders a head start before the capability becomes widely available.

The response from financial regulators was immediate. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent convened a meeting with major US bank CEOs to discuss the cyber risks raised by Mythos. The IMF flagged AI-powered cyber threats to the global banking system. The concern is not that Mythos itself will be used to attack banks. It is that the capability Mythos demonstrates, automated discovery of vulnerabilities at superhuman speed, will be replicated by adversaries who are not bound by Anthropic’s responsible disclosure practices.

Anthropic shipped financial services agents the day after announcing its 1.5 billion dollar Wall Street joint venture, a sequence that illustrates the company’s dual positioning: it is simultaneously the entity warning banks about AI-powered cyber threats and the entity selling AI products to banks. The joint venture with Blackstone and Hellman and Friedman is anchored at approximately 300 million dollars from Anthropic and will deploy AI across private equity operations.

The race

Amodei’s six-to-twelve month window is a prediction about how long it will take Chinese AI companies to build models with equivalent vulnerability-discovery capabilities. The window is not about whether adversaries will develop the capability. It is about when. The controlled rollout of Mythos is designed to give the companies that receive early access enough time to patch their most critical flaws before the window closes.

OpenAI released GPT-5.4-Cyber for vetted security teams, scaling its Trusted Access programme in direct response to the Mythos disclosure. The competitive dynamic between Anthropic and OpenAI has extended from commercial AI products into cybersecurity, with both companies positioning themselves as defenders of the software infrastructure their own models could be used to compromise.

Researchers have already demonstrated that AI agents from Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft can be hijacked via prompt injection to steal API keys and tokens, and all three vendors paid bounties but skipped public disclosure. The irony is precise: the AI agents that companies deploy to improve security are themselves vulnerable to attacks that could compromise the systems they are meant to protect.

The tension

The cybersecurity community’s response to the Mythos disclosure has been a mixture of alarm and scepticism. Security researchers note that AI-assisted vulnerability discovery has been developing for years and that the capabilities Mythos demonstrates, while impressive in scale, are an acceleration of existing trends rather than a discontinuous leap. The threat of AI-powered cyberattacks was identified by the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre more than a year ago. What Mythos changes is not the existence of the threat but the specificity of the evidence.

Anthropic occupies an unusual position. It is a company whose business model depends on selling AI capabilities to enterprises, including banks, while simultaneously arguing that AI capabilities of the kind it is developing pose an existential threat to the cybersecurity of those same enterprises. The resolution of the contradiction is commercial: Anthropic’s pitch is that you need its AI to defend against AI of the kind it builds. The logic is circular but the threat is real.

The 271 Firefox vulnerabilities were real. The 27-year-old OpenBSD bug was real. The meeting between the Fed chair and bank CEOs was real. The question is not whether AI will transform cybersecurity. The question is whether the six-to-twelve months Amodei describes is enough time to patch decades of accumulated vulnerabilities across every operating system, browser, and financial platform in production, or whether the window is an estimate designed to create urgency for a problem that cannot be solved on any timeline. Mythos found the flaws. Fixing them is a human problem.

In modern datacenters, storage can live anywhere — local to the machine, remotely accessed over the network, and/or shared between systems.

The next generation of servers will treat system memory in much the same way. Systems will still have some local DDR5, but the bulk of it will be remotely accessed from what some have taken to calling the memory godbox.

The ongoing DRAM shortage has created a perfect storm for the proliferation of the appliances, which not only allow for memory to be pooled, but also data stored in that memory to be shared by multiple machines simultaneously. In effect, memory becomes a fungible resource.

More importantly, your next round of servers will probably support the tech, if they don’t already.

CXL finally has its moment to shine

The technology at the heart of these memory godboxes isn’t new. Compute Express Link (CXL) has been slowly gaining traction since its introduction seven years ago.

As a quick refresher, CXL defines a common, cache-coherent interface for connecting CPUs, memory, accelerators, and other peripherals.

The technology comes in a couple of different flavors: CXL.mem, CXL.cache, and CXL.io, which, as a whole, have implications for disaggregated compute. Imagine a rack with a CPU node, GPU node, memory node, and storage node, which can talk to one another completely independently. That’s the core idea behind CXL.

CXL piggybacks off the PCIe standard, which means in theory it should be broadly compatible, but, up to this point, it’s primarily been used with memory devices.

The 1.0 spec opened the door to memory expansion modules, which allow you to add more memory by slotting them into a CXL-compatible PCIe slot. To the operating system — assuming you’re running Linux that is — the extra memory is largely transparent, showing up as if it were attached to another CPU socket, just one without any additional compute.

The 2.0 spec, which showed up in 2020, added basic support for switching, which meant memory could be pooled and then allocated to any number of connected systems.

AMD and Intel’s current crop of Epycs and Xeons already support these appliances. But while the memory can be partitioned and reallocated to different machines as needed, two machines can’t work on the same data simultaneously.

Unless you were memory-constrained, the added complexity of CXL 2.0 didn’t offer much benefit over simply using higher capacity DIMMs in the first place. 

At least, not until memory prices went through the roof.

Where things really get interesting is when the 3.0 spec arrives in AMD and Intel’s next-generation of Epycs and Xeons. In fact, from what we understand, Amazon’s Graviton5 CPUs we looked at in December already support the spec.

CXL 3.0 introduces two key capabilities that make it particularly interesting for memory appliances. The first is support for larger topologies: Multiple CXL switches can be stitched together into a fabric. The second is support for memory sharing: Rather than partitioning memory into slices only accessible to one machine at a time, memory can be shared between machines.

In theory this could allow two machines running the same set of workloads to use the memory closer to that of one. It’s a bit like deduplication for memory. In fact, we already do this in virtualized environments like KVM, but it now works across machines.

There are security and performance implications to all of this. Thankfully in CXL 3.1 and later, the consortium introduced confidential computing capabilities into the spec, allowing for isolation where necessary.

On the performance end of things, CXL 3.0 moves to PCIe 6.0 as a baseline, which provides 16 GB/s of bidirectional bandwidth per lane. Assuming 64 lanes of CXL per CPU, that works out to an additional 512 GB/s of bandwidth. So memory bandwidth shouldn’t be too much of an issue for most applications. Latency, on the other hand, is a different story. 

CXL-attached memory is going to add some latency. However, as we’ve previously discussed, the latency isn’t as bad as you’re probably thinking — on the order of a NUMA hop, or about 170 to 250 nanoseconds of round trip latency. Obviously, the farther the memory appliance is from the host CPU, the worse the latency is going to be.

Late last year, the CXL consortium ratified the 4.0 spec, which among other things doubles the bandwidth from 16 GB/s per lane to 32 GB/s by re-basing on PCIe 7.0. However, it’ll be a while before we see appliances based on the spec.

Where’s my memory godbox?

There are several companies developing hardware for these kinds of networked memory appliances. 

Panmnesia’s CXL 3.2-compatible PanSwitch is one of the most sophisticated examples. The switch features 256 lanes of connectivity for CXL memory modules, devices, or CPUs to connect, pool, or share resources.

If you’re okay with memory pooling and don’t need the niceties of CXL 3.0, then there are already several memory appliances available that are compatible with the latest generation of Xeon 6 and Epyc Turin processors.

Liqid’s composable memory platform, for example, can provide a pool of up to 100 TB of DDR5 to as many as 32 hosts. Meanwhile, UnifabriX Max systems provide CXL 1.1 or 2.0 connectivity to 16 or more systems with support for CXL 3.2 already in the works.

We suspect that as more CXL 3.0 compatible CPUs and GPUs hit the market, more of these memory godboxes will appear.

AI eats everything

Don’t get too excited. While network attached memory has the potential to reduce an enterprise’s infrastructure spend, those same qualities make it attractive for the very thing driving the memory shortage in the first place.

AI adoption has driven demand for DRAM off the charts. In addition to the HBM used by GPUs, DDR5 is being used for key value cache offload during inference.

These KV caches store model state and can chew significant amounts of memory — often more than the model itself — in multi-tenant serving scenarios.

Rather than discard these caches and recompile them when the model state is restored, it’s more efficient to offload them to system memory and eventually flash storage.

The problem with using flash storage is that it has a finite write endurance. After a while it wears out. Instead, CXL memory vendors are positioning the tech as a more resilient alternative.

That’s bad news for enterprises looking to these memory godboxes for salvation from the RAMpocalypse. ®

Designer Matty Benedetto of Unnecessary Inventions runs a studio in Vermont where he makes contraptions to tackle problems that no one has ever asked about. His most recent project mixes two known elements to create something new, which has the potential to change how teams handle lengthy discussions around a table. He transformed conventional office chairs into a full seesaw that rocks up and down while spinning in a complete circle.

Benedetto started simple by collecting a couple of worn-out office chairs from storage. He wanted seats that everyone was familiar with, so no one felt out of place when they sat down. A simple test compared the wheels on each base to determine which pair rolled and slid the best across a floor. These results allowed him to choose the right parts without guesswork. He then gently separated the chairs, keeping the seats and center supports intact. A small 3D printed model allowed him to see how the elements would connect and move together. The initial chair bases already spun freely in all directions, so he retained that motion for the finished form. He then designed a bespoke bracket to connect everything at the midway point.

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Ball bearings in the new bracket provided smooth, effortless seesaw movement as needed. He assessed the distances and opted on chairs spaced ten feet apart along a robust metal tube that cost him $100. That tube served as the main beam, measuring a solid 5 feet square to maintain equilibrium. A simple hex bolt held the tube in place and prevented it from slipping around during operation. The early brackets he created on his 3D printer were ideal for brief test runs, but they were too flimsy for real-world use. So he bought some CNC machined aluminum replacements and gave them a lovely bead blast finish with a layer of black anodizing to clean up the lines and make them more durable. These new pieces were high-quality, solidly constructed, and arrived with an aura of precision, so assembly seemed substantial right away.

Drilling guide holes in those printed copies ensured that everything fit together seamlessly. He inserted the machined brackets directly into the chair bases after a test run revealed that individual seat rotations were producing much too much wobbling. By removing the extra spin and lowering the overall height, he created a more stable configuration that let people to securely climb on and off. The new design secured the chairs in place, but the middle pivot allowed the entire seesaw to glide smoothly up and down and spin freely. When two people of nearly equal size sat down, equilibrium just happened. Benedetto persuaded his friend to accompany him on his first official test run.

They climbed to the opposite ends and adjusted their weight to see how it worked. The beam went up and down smoothly, while the base turned the entire seesaw in wonderful huge circles. In one humorous run, they pretended to be an office staff disputing deadlines over a stack of paperwork, but the soft, steady motion kept the mood light and enjoyable. The finished design measured ten feet long and was low enough to fit between two normal desks in a shared workspace. The chairs are linked beneath the worktable, allowing users to lean forward and type or write without having to climb off. After many test sessions, the bearings have demonstrated their ability to tolerate frequent rocking without making a noise or sticking, while remaining lovely and smooth.

A 34-year-old Virginia man was found guilty of conspiring to destroy dozens of government databases after getting fired from his job as a federal contractor.

In 2016, Sohaib Akhter and his twin brother and co-defendant Muneeb Akhter were also sentenced to several years in prison after pleading guilty to accessing U.S. State Department systems without authorization and stealing the personal information of dozens of co-workers and a federal law enforcement agent who was investigating their crimes.

After serving their sentences, the two brothers were rehired as government contractors by a company that worked with more than 45 federal agencies and hosted government data on servers in Ashburn.

“When the company discovered Sohaib Akhter’s felony conviction, it terminated both brothers’ employment during an online remote meeting on Feb. 18, 2025,” the Justice Department said. “Immediately after being fired during this meeting, the brothers sought to harm their employer and its U.S. government customers by accessing computers without authorization, write-protecting databases, deleting databases, and destroying evidence of their unlawful activities.”

In November 2025, Muneeb and Sohaib were again charged with destruction of records, aggravated identity theft, computer fraud, and theft of government information.

According to court documents, the two brothers wiped roughly 96 government databases within several hours in February 2025, including sensitive investigative documents from multiple federal agencies and Freedom of Information Act records. Additionally, immediately after deleting a Department of Homeland Security database, they also allegedly asked an artificial intelligence assistant how to clear system logs.

Prosecutors added that they allegedly ran commands to prevent others from modifying the targeted databases before deletion, and destroyed evidence of their activities. The men also discussed cleaning out their house in anticipation of a potential law enforcement search and wiped company laptops before returning them to their employer.

“As proven at trial, Akhter participated in the unauthorized access of protected computer systems, the theft of credentials, and the destruction of government data affecting numerous federal agencies,” said Inspector General Jennifer L. Fain of FDIC-OIG.

“The deliberate deletion of databases containing sensitive government information and the subsequent attempts to conceal that criminal activity demonstrated a blatant disregard for the security and integrity of federal information systems.”

Sohaib Akhter will be sentenced on September 9, 2026, and is facing a maximum penalty of 21 years in prison.

His brother, Muneeb Akhter, also faces a maximum of 45 years for two counts of computer fraud, conspiring to commit computer fraud and destroy records, two counts of aggravated identity theft, and theft of U.S. government records.

AI chained four zero-days into one exploit that bypassed both renderer and OS sandboxes. A wave of new exploits is coming.

At the Autonomous Validation Summit (May 12 & 14), see how autonomous, context-rich validation finds what’s exploitable, proves controls hold, and closes the remediation loop.

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Trump Media & Technology Group reported a $405.9 million net loss for the first quarter of 2026, the company said on Friday, almost all of it driven by unrealised losses on the cryptocurrency holdings it has spent the past nine months building.

Operating cash flow was a positive $17.9 million; total financial assets stood at $2.1 billion, roughly triple the same point a year earlier.

The numbers below the headline are unusually small. Truth Social and the company’s adjacent media properties produced about $871,000 of revenue, up about 6% on the same quarter last year.

Truth.Fi, the financial-services brand built around exchange-traded funds and managed accounts, contributed $61,100 in management fees. Together, the operating businesses ran a small profit on a cash basis. The reported loss is almost entirely a balance-sheet event.

That balance sheet now contains 9,542 bitcoin, purchased starting in July 2025 at an average cost of $108,519 per coin, and 756 million CRO, the token associated with the Crypto.com exchange.

With bitcoin trading sharply below the entry mark and CRO down further, the digital-asset book stood at about $821.9 million against a $1.24 billion cost basis, an unrealised loss of roughly $423 million.

Most of the rest of the quarter’s $405.9 million loss came from a separate $108.2 million markdown on equity investments.

The combination explains why an underlying business that generates positive operating cash flow can publish a loss number that is several hundred times the size of its revenue.

CEO Devin Nunes has described the crypto treasury strategy as a balance-sheet diversification choice, comparable to the playbooks adopted by Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) and a growing list of public companies that have moved cash reserves into bitcoin.

The mechanics differ. Strategy issues debt to buy bitcoin in size; Trump Media has used cash raised from a 2025 stock-and-convertible-note placement of about $2.3 billion to acquire its position outright.

The company has framed the strategy as long-term, meaning the unrealised losses are being held for an eventual recovery rather than crystallised.

How that plays in the equity narrative depends on which company the market thinks DJT now is. As a media business, the loss reads as catastrophic against $871,000 of revenue.

As a crypto-treasury vehicle, it reads as a normal quarterly mark-to-market in an asset class that moves 30% in either direction over the course of a few months.

Some analysts have started referring to DJT as a bitcoin proxy with a small media business attached, the same framing analysts apply to Strategy. The premium to net asset value DJT has historically traded at suggests retail investors are pricing it that way, too.

There are reasons the analogy is imperfect. The Trump family ownership and the political halo that defines the brand are factors that a pure crypto-treasury structure does not carry.

Truth Social’s user base, monetisation and regulatory posture are all dependent on the political cycle in a way that Bitcoin’s balance is not. And the equity-investment line that contributed the additional $108 million markdown is opaque on a cost-basis level, making the underlying portfolio harder to value.

The operational figures that are not balance-sheet noise are slightly more encouraging. Fourth consecutive quarter of positive operating cash flow. Total assets up to about $2.2 billion.

Truth.Fi has begun signing up institutional customers for its ETF and managed-account products. None of those is a story that would justify the company’s market capitalisation independently, but each gives Nunes more time to argue that the underlying business is real.

The harder question for the next quarter is what the crypto holdings do. Bitcoin has stabilised around levels well below the cost basis; CRO has not.

If digital-asset prices recover before the second-quarter close in early August, the unrealised loss reverses, and DJT books a paper gain that would dwarf media revenue in the opposite direction.

If they do not, Trump Media will have to either explain a second large loss or restructure the position. The company has so far not indicated that it intends to do the second.

from the scattered-to-the-wind dept

By now you likely have caught wind of GameStop, the video game and collectables retailer, announcing a bid to buy eBay. Perhaps you heard of this, as I did, because of GameStop’s CEO, Ryan Cohen, showing up to CNBC’s Squawk Box program where he pulled off one of the strangest interviews about business I’ve ever seen.

In a six-minute interview with CNBC‘s Andrew Ross Sorkin, Cohen gave a series of mostly incoherent responses to the most basic questions, unable to provide any decipherable reasons why a flailing video game retail chain that’s relied on meme stocks and Pokémon cards for its recent survival would even think of trying to buy a massively larger, international e-commerce company. When asked by CNBC, “So you’ve built up a stake in this company already, you’ve had conversations with the company? You’ve tried? What’s happening here?” there’s a deeply awkward pause before Cohen, in his mid-life-crisis black leather jacket, says “…No.” Then after another glacial pause, “We’re just starting,” followed by a very peculiar smirk.

It got stranger and more passive aggressive from there. Cohen indicated that through a stock issuance the company would directly put up $20 billion for the purchase, along with another $20 billion from investors. The problem is that the eBay purchase would require roughly $56 billion. It doesn’t take a professor in advanced mathematics to see the issue here.

Cohen seemed to approach the entire interview with an affected air of disgust and disdain, as if it’s just so beneath him to even have to answer questions based on his announcements. The mini-Musk rolls his eyes and glibly dismisses reasonable questions, which was going badly enough until Sorkin asked the most obvious question of all: “How does the math math?” How does around $20 billion from GameStop and $20 billion from an investor get close to $56 billion? “Half cash, half stock” Cohen replies, after more eye rolling and disdain. And then he appears to get stuck in a loop, like a rubbish sleepy robot.

Watch the entire interview if you like, but it’s pretty hard to get through it, honestly.

Going along with that very bizarre interview was the sudden appearance of all kinds of video game memorabilia, with some of it appearing to come directly from the “vault” that had been kept by GameStop’s Game Informer magazine, before Cohen shuttered it.

The stunt follows criticisms that the executive doesn’t have enough cash to actually make that acquisition. But it appears that at least some of the items being auctioned could be remnants looted from the legendary Game Informer Vault, where the long-running publication housed decades of video game history before GameStop shut down the publication in 2024.

Sources close to the situation who spoke under the condition of anonymity told Kotaku that while some of the products in Cohen’s eBay listings, such as the baseball cards, weren’t from the Game Informer Vault, other items, including some rare retro games, likely were. Some details like the sticky tab on the front of the sealed copy of Dracula for the NES and the sealed casings on copies of Yoshi’s Cookie and F1 Pole Position match photos and descriptions from the Vault verified by Kotaku.

Now, the Kotaku article suggests that Cohen is selling these items as an effort to raise money for the eBay bid. That’s a very silly thing to suggest. We’re talking about a $16 billion shortfall, unless Cohen plans to seriously dilute the stock value of current shareholders. Historical gaming items like we’re talking about, while certainly of import and value, aren’t going to net you $16 billion.

But it’s worth noting how cavalier Cohen is being here with very real gaming history and culture. It’s not surprise that the Video Game History Foundation and others are pointing out how an eBay auction like this is going to scatter all of this cultural history to the wind, and what a shame that is.

Video Game History Foundation founder Frank Cifaldi posted on Bluesky accusing Cohen of selling off items from the Vault. Though Game Informer has since returned as a print publication after the outlet was acquired and revived by Gunzilla Games in 2025, the Vault and all the contents found inside remained GameStop property.

“I’m very happy Game Informer is out from under GameStop, but choices like these remind people of the brutal closure of the magazine in 2024,” MinnMax founder and ex-Game Informer video producer Ben Hanson said in a statement to Kotaku. “Game Informer‘s history belongs in a museum, not some schmuck’s eBay listings. Show some love to the current Game Informer crew, subscribe to the physical magazine, and please try to ignore Ryan Cohen’s pleas for attention.”

Will GameStop actually buy eBay? I very much doubt it. I don’t think the company can pull off this kind of leverage while maintaining a credit rating post-acquisition that would satisfy the banking investment requirements as outlined in Cohen’s own financing letter. Moody’s doesn’t seem to think so, either.

Somewhat hilariously, Cohen’s own eBay account was also suspended shortly after he began auctioning these items off. But if he really wants to sell off the Game Informer vault, he’ll find a way. And that is a damned shame from a gaming preservation standpoint.

Filed Under: ryan cohen, wtf

Companies: ebay, gamestop

Last month, NASA astronaut Chris Williams floated aboard the Crew Dragon Freedom, pointing his camera out the window. What he photographed shows our planet enveloped in a delicate ribbon of light, called airglow, with the Milky Way arching overhead like a faint road through the stars. The photograph, shot on April 13 while the spacecraft was docked to the International Space Station, provides a clear view of something that occurs high above us every night.

Earth softly curves over the bottom of the frame, with brown and reddish land extending out next to patches of deep blue ocean, all speckled with beautiful white clouds. A thin, consistent ribbon of green and yellow hugs the edge of the atmosphere, where the planet meets empty space. Above that ribbon, the sky becomes absolutely dark, with thousands of sharp stars. The Milky Way traces a wide, hazy path across the top, with dense star fields and dark dust lanes easily visible.

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Williams captured the image from the zenith docking port on the night side of the orbit. The window frame and a bit of the station’s solar array emerge at the borders, reminding viewers that this sight came from a small spacecraft hundreds of miles high. The camera was pointed at the horizon, where the glow is greatest, so no city lights appear. Instead, the attention is on the natural light that surrounds the entire globe.

That light is known as airglow, since sunlight penetrates the upper atmosphere during the day and provides energy to the atoms and molecules that float there. After sunset, such particles gradually release their additional energy as weak photons. The procedure creates the colored layers that Williams recorded. Green and yellow tones are most common because oxygen and nitrogen react in different ways at different heights. The effect is similar to the soft brightness inside a glow stick after snapping it, but on a planetary scale and driven by ordinary daylight rather than chemicals.

People occasionally mix airglow with the brighter curtains of an aurora. Both include charged particles emitting light, while airglow relies on consistent solar energy that arrives each day. Auroras require bursts of solar wind to light up. Airglow is always present, but it is too dim for most ground viewers to see unless the sky are very black and the camera exposure is long.

Williams later explained that the night side of the orbit is comparable to standing in one of Earth’s most isolated dark-sky locations. The station’s path allows him to observe stars in both the northern and southern sky at the same time. In his words, the view of the galactic plane is clear because nothing in the thin air above obscures the distant stars. This single frame combines those details: the planet’s curve, the luminous atmosphere shell, and the galaxy beyond.
[Source]

Man on Fire is a story that first hit my radar, like many of you, when Denzel Washington stepped into the role of former CIA operative John Creasy in Tony Scott’s 2004 action film. The story of that film, like Netflix‘s new thriller, draws inspiration from A. J. Quinnell’s book of the same name — which is the first entry in the five-book series.

For all intents and purposes, the 2004 film is a solid adaptation, and thanks to the performances of Washington (who plays Creasy) and a young Dakota Fanning, it has stood the test of time and remains a quality actioner to dig into.

Also, potentially like many of you, I’m shocked to say that Netflix’s episodic adaptation of Quinnell’s work is far superior. 

If you’ve paid attention to the numbers, you already know that Man on Fire hit the top of Netflix’s streaming charts with a whopping 11 million views in the show’s first four days on the platform. It was this news that nudged me to give the show a try — and I was immediately hooked.

Read more: 40 of the Best Movies on Netflix You Should Stream Now

Netflix’s Man on Fire isn’t a retread of the 2004 movie because the series loosely adapts the original material. Taking a note from shows of a similar ilk, like Reacher and Cross, Man on Fire takes its own creative liberties while using the books as a narrative foundation. And it works brilliantly.

This Man on Fire takes to the streets of Brazil, altering the conflict of the original story, while adhering to the basics of a weathered man doing anything and everything to protect a girl who’s being hunted by gangs and terrorists hell-bent on killing her. That’s just one piece to an intricate and violent puzzle. 

If it sounds heavy, that’s because it is. But thanks to smart writing and the emotional resonance of the cast performances, the movie is as engaging and heartfelt as it is bloody. 

You want to watch this beatdown man get lit on fire for this purpose — it’s Death Wish for a whole new generation.

Abdul-Mateen stars as Creasy in this rendition, which shifts the character’s backstory from CIA officer to PTSD-stricken Special Forces operative, and from the get-go, the emotional stakes are viscerally there. They steadily ramp up through each episode, justifying Creasy’s Jack Bauer-style actions, all with the motivations of enforcing justice and eliminating every evildoer he crosses paths with.

Abdul-Mateen holds his own in the role, quickly eliminating the remnants of Washington’s performance two decades earlier. And that’s no easy undertaking. Yet, as we’ve seen with the roles the actor has taken, from Dr. Manhattan in HBO’s Watchmen to playing Candyman in the 2021 horror remake and Wonder Man earlier this year on Disney Plus, he’s got range and a top-tier skill of wearing his heart on his sleeve, no matter what his character must do on screen. 

In short, you can’t help but root for Abdul-Mateen, which means it’s nearly impossible to not root for Creasy.

It doesn’t stop with him, though. Every actor that graces the screen in Man on Fire is legit (as the kids say) fire. Bobby Cannavale dips in for a hot second to remind everyone of how great he is. Alice Braga, as Valeria, serves as a supportive counterpoint to Creasy’s hotheaded actions.

It’s Billie Boullet as Poe, the teenage girl Creasy protects from every possible danger, who steals the show, though. She’s got the same sort of wide-eyed emotional resonance Fanning had opposite Washington, yet it hits different and better here. She’s notably older than Fanning was, and the character she’s playing is a departure from earlier portrayals. That only works to her benefit, allowing her to find her own emotional footholds in the character. Boullet paired with Abdul-Mateen is a perfect match, full stop.

Instead of taking place in Mexico City, where Washington unleashed hell in the Tony Scott movie, this rendition sends Creasy to Brazil. The Netflix series shows off the beautiful, tourist-friendly areas of the country, then flips it, shoving us deep into the favelas to explore an often misrepresented culture. 

The entire time I watched the show, I found myself leaning in close to take in the surroundings of each scene. Was this shot in a studio in front of a blue screen or on location? I’m pleased to say it was shot in multiple urban landscapes, like Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro. That tactile authenticity brings the story to life in a necessary way, embracing its realness rather than re-creating it in post.

Oh, and did I mention how action-packed and violent the show is? I did, but it bears repeating. 

This is Jason Bourne-style action, in the form of a TV show where each episode runs approximately 40 minutes. If ever there was a way to guarantee my attention and keep me glued to the screen for hours on end, everything I just mentioned — from the writing to the acting and the viscera in between — adds up to the perfect formula to do just that. If you’re anything like me and you’ve read this far (so I assume you are), you’ll feel the exact same way.