Strands is the NYT’s latest word game after the likes of Wordle, Spelling Bee and Connections – and it’s great fun. It can be difficult, though, so read on for my Strands hints.

Want more word-based fun? Then check out my NYT Connections today and Quordle today pages for hints and answers for those games, and Marc’s Wordle today page for the original viral word game.

When a wave of unusual activity swept through Syrian government accounts on X in March, it first looked like pure chaos—trolling, parody names, and even explicit content. But beneath the noise lay something far more telling: a state still struggling with the most basic layer of its cybersecurity.

In early March, several official Syrian government accounts on X—including those linked to the presidency’s General Secretariat, the Central Bank, and multiple ministries—were hacked. The compromised profiles posted “Glory to Israel,” retweeted explicit material, and briefly renamed themselves after Israeli leaders.

Authorities moved to restore control within days, with the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology announcing “urgent steps” to recover the accounts and prevent further breaches. Yet what remained unsettled was the deeper question: How secure is the state’s digital front door?

In a government now dependent on commercial platforms for communication, losing a verified account doesn’t just disrupt messaging—it silences the state’s voice.

When the State Stops Speaking for Itself

At first glance, the breach appeared politically charged. Pro‑Israel messages circulating on verified government accounts during a tense regional moment fueled speculation over motive and attribution. No group claimed responsibility, and officials did not clarify whether internal systems were compromised.

To analysts, the episode pointed less to a geopolitically driven hack and more to a familiar, systemic weakness.

“We still do not know exactly what happened. Whether the accounts were directly hacked or accessed through weak or reused credentials, the conclusion is much the same: very poor digital security practices,” says Noura Aljizawi, a senior researcher at the Citizen Lab, a research organization that monitors threats to civil society in the digital age.

The ministry said it had coordinated with account administrators and X to “restore control and strengthen security,” promising new regulatory measures soon. The perpetrators have not been publicly identified.

One Weak Link, Multiple Accounts

Before the accounts were recovered, several displayed identical pro‑Israel messaging—a detail that suggested shared credentials or centralized access, according to platform monitoring data.

That assessment was echoed across the cybersecurity community.

“The fact that several official X accounts seemed to fall in quick succession suggested some form of centralized control, possibly with the same credentials used across multiple accounts,” says Muhannad Abo Hajia, cybersecurity expert at Damascus-based group Sanad. “That kind of setup is not inherently wrong, but only if proper safeguards are in place.”

Experts say this pattern is consistent with common failures: password reuse, phishing attempts, compromised recovery channels, or the absence of multifactor authentication (MFA). In practice, one careless password or a single compromised recovery email could give outsiders control of multiple institutions.

“Account takeovers of this kind are common enough globally and usually result from familiar vulnerabilities: phishing, password reuse, compromised recovery emails, weak credentials, or the absence of MFA,” says Rinad Bouhadir, a cybersecurity engineer tracking the region.

A System Built on Fragile Foundations

The breach, specialists say, reflects not a targeted cyber‑offensive but deeper structural flaws.

“The current authorities inherited a near-nonexistent cybersecurity system and have yet to treat repairing it as a real priority,” says Dlshad Othman, a Syrian cybersecurity specialist.

He believes the incident likely stemmed from either a centralized unit managing several official accounts or a shared third‑party tool used across ministries—both of which create a single point of failure.

That design makes multiple agencies vulnerable at once. In moments of heightened tension, even one falsified post from a verified government account could stoke panic, misreporting, or escalation before correction.

A verified government account can be weaponized to spread false information in real time, particularly during periods of regional escalation, when confusion carries immediate real-world risk.

The Artemis II crew is almost at the moon, and the astronauts spent this weekend carrying out preparations for their lunar flyby on Monday. That included manual piloting demonstrations, reviewing their science objectives for the six-hour observation period and evaluating their space suits, which are there for life support in the event of an emergency and for their return home. But, they’ve had plenty of time to take in the views, too — and those views sure are spectacular. In the latest series of images shared by the space agency, the astronauts are seen gazing at Earth through the windows of the Orion spacecraft.

Orion will reach the moon’s vicinity shortly after midnight on Monday, April 6. Later that day, the crew is expected to reach a point farther than any humans have traveled from Earth, surpassing the record of 248,655 miles from Earth set by the Apollo 13 astronauts in 1970.

The lunar observation period will start at 2:45PM ET, and a few hours later, they’ll be behind the moon and briefly drop out of communication. The spacecraft’s closest approach to the moon is expected to occur at 7:02PM, when it will be 4,066 miles from the surface. “From that distance, the crew will see the entire disk of the Moon at once, including regions near the north and south poles,” according to NASA. The crew will later get a chance to see a solar eclipse “as Orion, the Moon, and the Sun align in such a way that the astronauts will see our star disappear behind the Moon for about an hour.” NASA will have coverage of the flyby starting at 1PM ET.

In short: The Court of Rome has ruled that Netflix’s repeated price increases between 2017 and 2024 violated Italian consumer law and EU Directive 93/13/EEC on unfair contract terms. The ruling voids the relevant contract clauses, orders current prices rolled back to 2015 launch levels, and requires Netflix to notify millions of current and former Italian subscribers of their right to a refund, up to €500 for Premium subscribers and up to €250 for Standard subscribers. Netflix has said it will appeal.

A Roman court has given Netflix the bill for nearly a decade of price increases. In a ruling published on 1 April 2026, the Court of Rome found that Netflix had imposed repeated and unjustified price increases on its Italian subscribers in violation of the Italian Consumer Code and EU Directive 93/13/EEC, which prohibits unfair terms in standard consumer contracts. The action was brought by Movimento Consumatori, one of Italy’s largest consumer associations. The ruling, catalogued as sentence 4993/2026, affects up to 5.4 million current Italian subscribers and an unquantified number of former subscribers who cancelled during the relevant period.

Netflix launched in Italy in 2015 with a Premium plan priced at €11.99 per month. It raised prices in 2017, again in 2019, again in 2021, and most recently in November 2024, bringing the Premium plan to €19.99, an increase of €8 per month from its original price. The Standard plan reached €13.99 over the same period. The court found that none of the price changes were accompanied by justified reasons in the contract, and that offering subscribers 30 days’ notice alongside the option to cancel was not a meaningful substitute for genuine consent. Under the directive, contract terms that impose a significant imbalance between a business and a consumer, without the consumer’s substantive agreement, are void from the outset.

What the court has ordered

The ruling imposes several specific obligations on Netflix. The price-hike clauses in its standard contracts are void and unenforceable. Current subscription prices must be reduced: the Premium plan to €11.99 and the Standard plan to €9.99, the levels that applied before the first unlawful increase. Netflix must notify all current and former Italian subscribers, by email, postal mail, its own website, and notices placed in Italian national newspapers, within 90 days of the ruling, or face a daily penalty of €700 for non-compliance. Future contracts must specify the conditions under which prices may change. Eligible subscribers could receive approximately €500 in refunds if they have been on the Premium plan since 2017, and approximately €250 if they have been on the Standard plan.

Not an isolated ruling

The Court of Rome’s decision does not stand alone. In Germany, the federation of consumer organisations vzbv has brought a parallel action against Netflix on the same legal basis, and courts in Berlin and Cologne have already found that Netflix’s price-change clauses are void under German contract law. In Spain, the consumer association FACUA is pursuing a comparable challenge. Each case rests on EU Directive 93/13/EEC as its shared legal foundation,  a regulatory tradition that Europe has been strengthening across its digital markets for years. A defeat in Germany, where the vzbv case continues, would expose Netflix to liability across a subscriber base considerably larger than Italy’s.

The timing of the Italian ruling adds another layer of complexity. It was published on 1 April 2026, three days after Netflix had announced a global price increase on 26 March 2026, raising subscription costs across every major market. In Italy, that announcement arrived into a legal environment that had just ruled in the opposite direction. Netflix’s revised terms of service, updated in April 2025, already include conditions specifying the grounds on which prices may change, citing technical and regulatory factors as potential justifications. Whether those revised terms arrived in time to limit the company’s exposure, or were drafted in direct anticipation of mounting litigation,  is likely to feature prominently in the appeal.

Netflix’s position

Netflix has said it will contest the ruling. The company has not confirmed publicly whether it will comply with the notification and price-reduction obligations while the appeal is pending. Netflix indicated that the revised terms of service introduced in April 2025 already address the transparency concerns the court identified. The expectation that platforms disclose the basis for changes to the terms of a paid service is not limited to any single jurisdiction or sector; it has become a baseline assumption in European and increasingly global regulatory frameworks. The counterargument from Movimento Consumatori is that the obligation to provide justified reasons for price changes has existed in EU law since 1993, and that revising a contract after litigation has commenced does not retroactively cure the clauses that applied during the years of the increases.

What it means for streaming in Europe

Italy is Netflix’s fourth-largest market in Europe, with approximately 5.4 million subscribers as of October 2025 and 8 million unique users recorded during 2024. Europe’s digital market has long been the site of the most consequential tests of how much latitude technology platforms have to set their own commercial terms, and the Rome ruling is among the most direct verdicts yet on the specific question of subscription pricing. Every major streaming service operating in the EU, including Disney Plus, Amazon Prime Video, and Apple TV Plus,  uses a structurally similar mechanism: notify by email, offer a cancellation option, and proceed. If the Rome court’s interpretation of Directive 93/13/EEC is upheld on appeal or replicated by German and Spanish courts, the commercial model underlying a decade of streaming growth would require fundamental redesign across the sector.

Subscription pricing has been one of the defining revenue levers of the past decade, built on the assumption that inertia,  the gap between receiving a price-notification email and actually cancelling, functions, in practice, as consent. European courts are now testing that assumption against the text of a consumer protection directive that has been in force since 1993. Italy’s answer, issued in the first week of April 2026, is that the freedom to cancel is not the same thing as the freedom to agree. The commercial models that scaled through 2025 are increasingly arriving in front of courts equipped with three decades of consumer protection law, and the outcomes are starting to accumulate.

If you’ve been holding off on picking up a PlayStation 5 in hopes of a price cut, bad news: the cost of every model of Sony’s all-conquering console has instead just gone up considerably.

It’s a move that breaks with decades of tradition (or at least consumer expectations) and is undoubtedly a blow for anyone hoping for a discount, five years into the current console generation. However, it’s also a sign that the current generation is likely to stick around for a while yet—and that may be a good thing, for the industry and players alike.

Historically, at this point in a console generation, incumbent hardware sees steep discounts. For example, the PS4, which launched for $400 in 2013, was retailing for $300 by 2018, a 25 percent decrease. Even if hardware is loss-leading, it’s a pricing trajectory that’s usually win-win for manufacturers and customers alike. Production and component costs will typically have dropped over that half-decade, allowing companies to drop the retail price, often alongside slimmed-down hardware revisions. At the same time, players who weren’t won over at a console’s launch have a cheaper entry point and years of games to catch up on. But this generation has been anything but typical.

Generational Abnormalities

The AI bubble has seen RAM and SSD storage prices skyrocket in the last few months, impacting the entire global tech sector. Sony as a whole has been hit hard by this, with the recent announcement that it was suspending its memory card business, while the PlayStation corner of the fiefdom just confirmed long-standing rumors of price increases for its console family.

The new MSRPs went into effect on April 2, and there’s no sugarcoating that they mark significant increases. The “entry-level” digital edition PS5 console—the one without a disc drive—is the worst hit, leaping to $600. That’s $100 higher than its previous US retail price (which was already up following an earlier hike back in August 2025, driven by Trump’s tariffs) and a staggering 50 percent higher than its $400 launch price back in 2020.

The base PS5 with a disc drive is up 30 percent on its original $500 price, now costing $650, while the PS5 Pro “only” goes up around 29 percent from its $700 launch price, setting buyers back $900—though it also doesn’t come with a disc drive, so prepare to shell out another $80 to play physical games or Blu-ray movies. Elsewhere, the PlayStation Portal, Sony’s handheld that allows users to stream games from their PS5 or the cloud, has also increased by $50, from $200 to $250.

PlayStation is far from alone in increasing its prices. Xbox increased its hardware and GamePass subscription costs multiple times in 2025, eventually bringing the MSRP of the top-end 2-TB Xbox Series X to its current $800, and is rumored to be considering another hike. The Switch 2 dodged tariff-induced price hikes at launch but is also reportedly “contemplating raising the price of that device in 2026,” per Bloomberg—and the same report suggests Sony may be delaying the inevitable PlayStation 6 to as far off as 2029, all due to the AI-induced parts crisis.

Even Valve’s handheld Steam Deck isn’t immune—while prices have so far only risen in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, the manufacturer has announced that the original 256 GB, LCD-screen model (the cheapest) “is no longer in production, and once sold out will no longer be available” while the newer OLED models, available with either 512 GB or 1 TB of storage “may be out-of-stock intermittently in some regions due to memory and storage shortages.”

Meet the “journalist” who “uploads press releases or analyst notes into AI tools and prompts them to spit out articles that he can edit and publish quickly,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

“AI-assisted stories accounted for nearly 20% of Fortune‘s web traffic in the second half of 2025.” And most were written by 42-year-old Nick Lichtenberg, who has now written over 600 AI-assisted stories, producing “more stories in six months than any of his colleagues at Fortune delivered in a year.”

One Wednesday in February, he cranked out seven. “I’m a bit of a freak,” Lichtenberg said… A story by Lichtenberg sometimes starts with a prompt entered into Perplexity or Google’s NotebookLM, asking it to write something based on a headline he comes up with. He moves the AI tools’ initial drafts into a content-management system and edits the stories before publishing them for Fortune’s readers… A piece from earlier that morning about Josh D’Amaro being named Disney CEO took 10 minutes to get online, he said…

Like other journalists, Lichtenberg vets his stories. He refers back to the original documents to confirm the information he’s reporting is correct. He reaches out to companies for comment. But he admits his process isn’t as thorough as that of magazine fact-checkers.

While Lichtenberg started out saying his stories were co-authored with “Fortune Intelligence”, he now typically signs his own name, according to the article, “because he feels the work is mostly his own.” (Though his stories “sometimes” disclose generative AI was used as a research tool…) The article asks with he could be “a bellwether for where much of the media business is headed…”

“Much of the content people now consume online is generated by artificial intelligence, with some 9% of newly published newspaper articles either partially or fully AI-generated, according to a 2025 study led by the University of Maryland. The number of AI-generated articles on the web surpassed human-written ones in late 2024, according to research and marketing agency Graphite.”

Some executives have made full-throated declarations about the threat posed by AI. New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger said AI “is almost certainly going to usher in an unprecedented torrent of crap,” referencing deepfakes as an example. The NewsGuild of New York, the union representing Fortune employees and journalists at other media outlets, said the people are what makes journalism so powerful. “You simply can’t replicate lived experiences, human judgment and expertise,” said president Susan DeCarava.

For Chris Quinn, the editor of local publications Cleveland.com and the Plain Dealer, AI tools have helped tame other torrents facing the industry. AI has allowed the outlets to cover counties in Ohio that otherwise might go ignored by scraping information from local websites and sending “tips” to reporters, he said. It has also edited stories and written first drafts so the newsrooms’ journalists can focus on the calls, research and reporting needed for their stories…. Newsrooms from the New York Times to The Wall Street Journal are deploying AI in various ways to help reporters and editors work more efficiently….

Not all newsrooms disclose their use of AI, and in some cases have rolled out new tools that resulted in errors or PR gaffes. An October study from the European Broadcasting Union and the BBC, which relied on professional journalists to evaluate the news integrity of more than 3,000 AI responses, found that almost half of all AI responses had at least one significant issue.
Last week the New York Times even issued a correction when a freelance book reviewer using an AI tool unknowingly included “language and details similar to those in a review of the same book published in The Guardian.” But it was actually “the second time in a few days that the Times was called out for potential AI plagiarism,” according to the American journalist writing The Handbasket newsletter.
We must stem the idea being pushed by tech companies and their billionaire funders who’ve sunk too much into their products to admit defeat that the infiltration of AI into journalism is inevitable; because from my perch as an independent journalist, it simply is not…

Some AI-loving journalists appear to believe that if they’re clear enough with the AI program they’re using, it will truly understand what they’re seeking and not just do what it’s made to do: steal shit… If you want to work with machines, get a job that requires it. There are a whole lot more of those than there are writing jobs, so free up space for people who actually want to do the work. You’re not doing the world a favor by gifting it your human/AI hybrid. Journalism will not miss you if you leave…

But meanwhile, USA Today recently tried hiring for a new position: AI-Assisted reporter. (The lucky reporter will “support the launch and scaling of AI-assisted local journalism in a major U.S. metro,” working with tools including Copilot and Perplexity, pioneering possible future expansions and “AI-enabled newsroom operations that support and augment human-led journalism.”) And Google is already sponsoring a “publishing innovation award“…