New story in Technology from Time: How Domestic Abusers Have Exploited Technology During the Pandemic

When Julie’s boyfriend came home with a brand new iPhone for her at the end of the summer in 2019, Julie saw it as a peace offering—a sign that their relationship was on the mend.

A few weeks earlier, her boyfriend Steve had flown into a rage, trashing the apartment they shared, punching Julie in the face and breaking her nose. He’d smashed her phone when she tried to call for help. But now, here he was with a replacement phone, and despite Steve’s past behavior, Julie convinced herself the gift was a sign things would be alright. (Julie asked TIME to use pseudonyms for her and Steve to protect her privacy.)

She was particularly impressed that her boyfriend of two months had set up the new phone with her favorite apps and was encouraging her to get out and see friends.

“I had never been allowed to go out and enjoy myself,” says Julie, a 21-year-old living in London. “I thought it was a change in our relationship.”

The euphoria didn’t last. Six months later, as COVID-19 sent the U.K. hurtling into a lockdown, Julie found herself in a nightmare shared by untold numbers of domestic violence victims: trapped with an abuser who was exploiting the pandemic and using technology to control her every movement.

Read More: As Cities Around the World Go on Lockdown, Victims of Domestic Violence Look for a Way Out

Abusers have long used tech to spy on victims, but the pandemic has given them greater opportunities than ever before. It’s much easier to get access to a partner’s phone to alter privacy settings, obtain passwords, or install tracking software when people are spending so much time together in close proximity. For couples not in lockdown together, abusers may feel a greater need to track their partners. Survivors have also reported that their abusers are surveilling them in an attempt to gather evidence of them breaking lockdown rules and using it against them.

Compounding the problem: it’s much harder for targets of abuse to escape as the fear of infection discourages them from moving in with relatives and friends or fleeing to shelters. And in-person counseling and other programs that serve people in abusive relationships who need help have been curtailed.

The problem of tech abuse pre-dates the pandemic, though data is limited. The U.K.-based organization Refuge, which assists domestic violence survivors, said in 2019 that around 95% of its cases involved some form of tech abuse ranging from tracking a partner’s location using Google Maps to downloading stalkerware and spyware apps on phones. In 2019, the U.S.-based National Network to End Domestic Violence found that 71% of domestic abusers monitor survivors’ device activities: 54% downloaded stalkerware onto their partners’ devices. A study published by the Journal of Family Violence in January 2020 found that 60–63% of survivors receiving services from domestic violence programs reported tech-based abuse.

Experts say that the pandemic has likely made the problem worse. In July, the antivirus company Avast said that after COVID-19 placed people around the world in lockdown, rates of spyware and stalkerware detection skyrocketed, increasing by 51% globally within a month of lockdowns being implemented in March. In June, the antivirus company Malwarebytes found that there was a 780% increase in the detection of monitoring apps and a 1677% increase in the detection of spyware since January. While anti-virus companies expected to see a small rise in the number of detected spyware apps due to improvements in their detection technology, the dramatic increase during lockdown was a red flag to them that abuse was increasing.

Eva Galperin, the director of cybersecurity at Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that anti-virus companies have good reason to warn that tech abuse is on the rise—it lets them portray themselves as solutions to a dangerous problem. “Having said that, this doesn’t mean stalkerware isn’t an increasing problem,” she says, “and that they aren’t the solution.” Domestic violence organizations have reported an increase in the number of reported tech abuse cases since the pandemic began in March, corroborating the findings of antivirus companies. Some survivors have reported stealth surveillance while others have been forced to share their locations with their abusers 24/7. Refuge reports that 40% of the 2,513 tech-abuse survivors who have sought their services since the pandemic began had also experienced sexual violence and 47% had been subject to death threats

“In lockdown, many of the women we supported were living with perpetrators of abuse, and we received countless reports of tech threats,” says Jane Keeper, the director of operations at Refuge.

One of those women was Julie.

When Julie, a hairdresser, met Steve on Tinder in June 2019, the connection was immediate. Within weeks, they were living together. And just weeks later, he began hitting her. Like many people in abusive relationships, Julie convinced herself that Steve would change, even as the violence became worse during their time together.

Then he gave her the new phone. Things seemed to improve, though Julie noticed that Steve was obsessed with making sure she always carried the phone with her and didn’t let the battery die. One evening a few weeks after he gave her the phone, Julie was on a cab ride home and received a text from Steve asking her to stop at McDonalds to grab dinner, telling her she would be passing one in five minutes. “How does he know what I’m doing?” Julie remembers thinking to herself.

She knew better than to ask him to explain. It would only make him angry. As months passed, Steve’s violent flare-ups returned, and Julie became increasingly concerned for her safety.

Finally in February 2020, Julie felt she could no longer handle the violence and controlling behavior. She contacted police, who put her in touch with Refuge, whose tech team assessed her phone.

“That’s when it clicked,” Julie says. “The phone was hacked.”

Getty Images

Steve had been using the new phone against Julie from the start. Among other things, he’d obtained her passwords to log into her social media accounts and had changed the privacy settings to track her location when she was out.

Such tactics instil fear in a person being abused; they know that if they change their phone’s settings, it will quickly become clear to the abuser. “So you just have to let it happen,” says Julie, who blocked Steve in February, only to have him find a way to access her accounts again later when they got back together.

Another form of tech abuse involves installing software on a device that enables someone to track and record everything, from text messages to phone calls. Steve had also done this with Julie’s phone.

Rebecca, 42, endured yet another form of tech abuse—involving a “smart” doorbell. Rebecca learned that her ex-husband was keeping tabs on her via the camera-equipped doorbell system on the London home where she lived with the couple’s children. (Rebecca asked that TIME use a pseudonym to protect her and her children’s privacy). But Rebecca feared taking the camera down. “He would tell me, ‘if you take those cameras down, you’re compromising the security of our children and I’ll report you to the police,’” she says.

So when the pandemic struck, Rebecca kept the cameras in place. In April, she says a neighbor saw Rebecca’s ex-husband beating her and called police. When officers arrived, the ex-husband told them he had video footage of Rebecca’s friend visiting her during the lockdown period, against coronavirus restrictions. “He used the doorbell to spy on what I was doing to try to get me in trouble with the police,” says Rebecca. (Police never followed up on the claims by Rebecca’s ex-husband that she was violating quarantine rules, she says.)

Many countries, including the U.K., have laws against stalking, but stalkerware apps themselves generally are not illegal unless it can be proved that they marketed themselves specifically to enable abuse. In the United States, for instance, only two stalkerware companies faced federal consequences between 2014 and 2019. One was ordered to shut down their application and pay a $500,000 fine. The other was barred from promoting their products.

Companies that market the software have a variety of means for dodging liability. Some avoid legal action by disguising themselves as parental surveillance applications. A stalkerware company that used to market itself as “Girlfriend Cell Tracker” now identifies as “Family Locator for Android,” according to Kevin Roundy, a researcher at NortonLifeLock, a cybersecurity company based in Tempe, Arizona.

“The application has the same functionality,” Roundy says. “It was clearly designed to covertly track a girlfriend but now is saying its purpose is to keep kids safe.” Part of the problem is that app stores allow these companies to market their products on their platforms: ‘Family Locator for Android’, for instance, remains available on Google Play Store.

Advocates say one solution would be to make it illegal for parental surveillance applications to operate in stealth mode, which leaves users of devices unaware they are being watched by an application downloaded onto their device without their knowledge. “It’s the stealth mode functionality of stalkerware that is extremely problematic and allows it to be misused,” says Galperin. “There is no reason whatsoever for companies not to have addressed this except that there is a market for it.”

Galperin says a big challenge of getting lawmakers interested in the problem is that cybersecurity debates orbit around questions of national security, not threats to individuals.

During the nearly one year they were together, Julie broke up with Steve at least once and even called the police on him to report the abuse. He was arrested, then released on bail, and the case was dropped. Eventually, the couple reunited—not unusual in abusive relationships, where victims are often driven by fear, financial dependence, and a genuine belief that they can fix the relationship.

But after the U.K. went into lockdown on March 23, Julie regretted letting Steve move back in with her. “It was his perfect scenario,” she says. “He could see and watch everything I was doing.”

Once, she sought refuge at a friend’s house. When she returned to the apartment, Steve poured bleach on her. “He said he could smell someone else on me,” Julie says. Finally in June, she broke up with Steve for good after again reporting his abusive behavior to police. They arrested Steve on domestic abuse charges, then released him on bail a few weeks later. Julie says she has not had contact with him since then.

Julie is now free from her previous relationship, but knows many others are not. And though the pandemic makes it more difficult for survivors to seek help, Diana Freed, a PhD candidate in Computing and Information Science at Cornell Tech who volunteers at the Clinic to End Tech Abuse, says it is crucial that survivors know there are still resources available to them. Her clinic, like many organizations, has made tech abuse services and information available online, offering webinars on how to disconnect from surveillance applications or leave toxic relationships.

For women like Julie and Rebecca, these services have been lifesaving during the pandemic. With the help of Refuge, Julie has secured all her devices and passwords as well as moved into a house with CCTV cameras installed outside. These services have helped her feel safe and secure. As the pandemic rolls on, Julie and Rebecca urge others not to delay seeking help.

“Because I can tell you,” Julie says, “it gets more dangerous when they start tracking you.”

 

New story in Technology from Time: What Happens Next with the Massive SolarWinds Hack

The cyber security firm FireEye revealed that it has been the victim of a massive, long-running hack of its network. Given FireEye’s stature in the tech community, that alone would have made headlines, but the company went on to explain that the hackers were able to gain access to their system through corrupted software updates dispatched by SolarWinds, a company whose network monitoring programs are used by the vast majority of the Fortune 500; top U.S. telecom companies; every branch of the U.S. military; the departments of Justice, State and Defense; the White House Executive Office; the National Security Agency; the Department of Energy and National Nuclear Security Administration; a number of state governments and private sector actors; and many more.

Even in a year like 2020, this is massive news.

Why It Matters:

This is a nightmare scenario for the U.S. government: A private sector company hired by multiple U.S. agencies was used as Trojan horse to gain access to wide swaths of some of the most sensitive data the U.S. government possesses. Cyberattacks like this are called “supply chain attacks,” where hackers hijack trusted software updates provided by legitimate companies to break into their customers’ networks. While the perpetrators have yet to be conclusively identified, the resources needed to pull off this kind of operation and keep it undetected for months—the compromised updates started going out in March and continued as recently as this past weekend—mean nation-states are the prime suspects. Given its history with these kind of attacks and the desire for payback against the NSA and CIA for past cyber operations as revealed by Edward Snowden and data dumps like Vault 7, the leading suspect is Russia. More specifically, suspicion has fallen on a group known as APT29, aka Cozy Bear, which is affiliated with Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR.

Whoever was behind it, the damage to U.S. national security (and the reputation of its key agencies that are responsible for protecting and deploying the country’s most sophisticated cyber weapons) is substantial. The hack has revealed that U.S. critical infrastructure and sensitive data remain vulnerable to threats from cyberspace. But we already knew that (see the Office of Personnel Management attacks from a few years ago); the real question is what the U.S. can do about it. And therein lies the problem.

What Happens Next:

For the next months (at least), the focus will be on assessing the damage done, patching up any remaining vulnerabilities, and rooting out hackers who may have used the initial breach to gain “persistent” access to sensitive networks. Rather than downloading all the critical data immediately, the attackers used their access to install additional backdoors and cover their tracks, allowing them to monitor developments over the course of the year. In other words, the hack remains “ongoing”.

The next goal will be to determine the actual purpose of the cyberattack, which will be critical in forming the official response of the U.S. government. If it’s decided this was a more classic attempt at espionage—albeit updated for our 21^st century reality—then more defensive cyber tools (like beefed-up firewalls) will be deployed in response to shore up network defenses. A Biden administration would also try do this as part of a coordinated international effort, which makes sense as SolarWinds—a publicly-traded company—has multiple international corporations and other governments as clients as well. The overall U.S. response in this scenario will be measured, part of the business of 21^st century politics, and will focus on targeting individuals and entities responsible for the attack, but nothing sweeping against Russia (or whatever state) perpetrated it.

Why not more aggressive? Two critical reasons—the first is that the U.S. has never had solid responses to existing cyberattacks given the amount of confusion inherent in them, and things can quickly escalate unintentionally in the cyber realm. The second, and arguably more critical reason, is that the U.S. engages in similar activities, and escalating the response also runs the risk of exposing covert U.S. activities under way.

That doesn’t mean foreign adversaries aren’t keeping a close eye on the response. While the timing of the attack wasn’t intended to target the incoming Biden administration as it was first launched months ago, its exposure on the cusp of Biden assuming office means that how the new administration team responds will set the tone for the next four years of cyber competition. In addition to shoring up defenses, network defenders have already begun targeting the SolarWinds hackers’ command-and-control systems, by seizing IP addresses used in the operation. At the organizational level, look for a White House cyber czar to be coming back, a position that was cut during John Bolton’s tenure at the National Security Council. That makes sense given the need for coordination across the government as the U.S. braces for more of these types of hacks, both because of the growing sophistication of hackers (and the tools they’ve stolen over the years, both the newly disclosed theft from FireEye and the earlier theft of hacking tools from the NSA which were later leaked by a group known as the Shadow Brokers) and because there are just evermore digital targets as our lives and huge chunks of the global economy are increasingly ported over to cyberspace.

But if it’s determined that the hackers were after critical infrastructure (with the potential of costing American lives) or to kneecap U.S. industries, then the response gets more serious and aggressive. We’re just unlikely to hear about it. That’s because…

The One Major Misconception About It:

The U.S. is not engaging in the same kinds of cyber operations against our adversaries. Don’t believe it. The U.S. has the same, if not greater, offensive capabilities than other nation states out there. But cyberspace isn’t like more traditional domains of conflict, where you want your adversary to know you have the bigger and better weapon to act as a deterrent; it’s wiser to keep your most advanced capabilities under wraps. Another reason you don’t hear about U.S. cyberattacks? Because many of the countries that are the targets of U.S. cyber operations—Russia, China, and North Korea—are authoritarian regimes that would never publicize their failures. In the U.S., exposing hacks like this leads to short-term political embarrassment, but also stronger cyber systems over the long run as key weaknesses are addressed. Think of it as the inherent long-term tech advantage of operating in an open political system.

The One Thing to Say About It on a Zoom Call:

America’s reliance on the private sector, one of its greatest strengths in a traditional economy, is also the source of one of its biggest vulnerabilities in the digital world if left unaddressed. SolarWinds just proved that; what’s left to be seen is how well the government can adapt to this new reality. Yet one more urgent thing on Biden’s plate come January 20^th.

New story in Technology from Time: U.S. Blacklists More Than 60 Chinese Firms, Including Drone Giant DJI

The U.S. Commerce Department announced it’s blacklisting Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp., drone maker SZ DJI Technology Co. and more than 60 other Chinese companies “to protect U.S. national security.”

“This action stems from China’s military-civil fusion doctrine and evidence of activities between SMIC and entities of concern in the Chinese military industrial complex,” the Commerce Department said in a statement.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross confirmed the move in a Friday morning interview with Fox Business. It was reported first by Reuters overnight. Shares in SMIC, China’s top chipmaker, slid 5.2% Friday in Hong Kong on the news.

Other affected Chinese entities include those “that enable human rights abuses, entities that supported the militarization and unlawful maritime claims in the South China Sea, entities that acquired U.S.-origin items in support of the People’s Liberation Army’s programs, and entities and persons that engaged in the theft of U.S. trade secrets,” according to the U.S. government statement.

“There’s plenty in the open press about how DJI has been part of the surveillance state and overall suppression within China,” a senior Commerce official said.

The majority of the newly banned companies are Chinese and will join the likes of Huawei Technologies Co. on a list that denies them access to U.S. technology from software to circuitry.

Companies including Huawei and SMIC have been caught in the middle of worsening tensions between the world’s two largest economies, which have clashed on issues from trade to the pandemic.

President Donald Trump had been widely expected to level more sanctions against China’s national champions before Joe Biden formally took office.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi called the U.S.’s expansive use of sanctions against Chinese companies “unacceptable” in a video address to the Asia Society on Friday. He urged the U.S. to stop “over stretching the notion of national security,” and “the arbitrary suppression of Chinese companies.”

Shanghai-based SMIC, a supplier to Qualcomm Inc. and Broadcom Inc., lies at the heart of Beijing’s intention to build a world-class semiconductor industry and wean itself from reliance on American technology. Washington in turn views China’s ascendancy and its ambitions to dominate spheres of technology as a potential geopolitical threat. A blacklisting threatens to cripple SMIC’s longer-term ambitions by depriving it of crucial gear.

For U.S. companies exporting items to SMIC for making 10-nanometer or more advanced chips, their applications for a license will face “presumption of denial,” while items for producing chips more mature than 10-nanometer will be reviewed on a case by case basis, according to a senior Commerce official.

Companies exporting parts made outside of the U.S. to SMIC will face certain restrictions depending on how much of their technologies are U.S.-origin, and Washington is talking to “like-minded governments” about forming a unified approach to the Chinese chipmaker, senior Commerce officials said. They declined to give details on which governments the U.S. is talking to and potential implications on non-U.S. companies like ASMl Holding NV and Tokyo Electron Ltd. that also supply equipment for making advanced chips.

In response to the widening U.S. crackdown, China is planning to provide broad support for so-called third-generation semiconductors in its next five-year plan to increase domestic self-sufficiency in chip manufacturing, people with knowledge of the matter have said. SMIC, backed by the China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund as well as Singapore’s sovereign fund GIC Pte and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, is expected to play a central role in that overall effort.

SMIC representatives didn’t respond to requests for comment. The company had already been laboring under similar, less severe curbs after the Commerce Department in September placed it on a separate export restrictions list, accusing SMIC of supplying the military. Those sanctions took a toll on shares of the company, whose co-CEO Liang Mong Song this week unexpectedly resigned, triggering another selloff.

—With assistance from Jing Li and Peter Martin.

New story in Technology from Time: U.S. Nuclear Weapons Agency Hacked as Part of Massive Cyber-Attack

The U.S. nuclear weapons agency and at least three states were hacked as part of a suspected Russian cyber-attack that struck a number of federal government agencies, according to people with knowledge of the matter, indicating widening reach of one of the biggest cybersecurity breaches in recent memory.

Microsoft said that its systems were also exposed as part of the attack.

Hackers with ties to the Russian government are suspected to be behind a well coordinated attack that took advantage of weaknesses in the U.S. supply chain to penetrate several federal agencies, including departments of Homeland Security, Treasury, Commerce and State. While many details are still unclear, the hackers are believed to have gained access to networks by installing malicious code in a widely used software program from SolarWinds Corp., whose customers include government agencies and Fortune 500 companies, according to the company and cybersecurity experts.

“This is a patient, well-resourced, and focused adversary that has sustained long duration activity on victim networks,” the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said in a bulletin that signaled widening alarm over the the breach. The hackers posed a “grave risk” to federal, state and local governments, as well as critical infrastructure and the private sector, the bulletin said. The agency said the attackers demonstrated “sophistication and complex tradecraft.”

The Energy Department and its National Nuclear Security Administration, which maintains America’s nuclear stockpile, were targeted as part of the larger attack, according to a person familiar with the matter. An ongoing investigation has found the hack didn’t affect “mission-essential national security functions,” Shaylyn Hynes, a Department of Energy spokeswoman, said in a statement.

“At this point, the investigation has found that the malware has been isolated to business networks only,” Hynes said. The hack of the nuclear agency was reported earlier by Politico.

Microsoft spokesman Frank Shaw said the company had found malicious code “in our environment, which we isolated and removed.”

“We have not found evidence of access to production services or customer data,” he said in a tweet. “Our investigations, which are ongoing, have found absolutely no indications that our systems were used to attack others.” Reuters had earlier reported that Microsoft was hacked and that its products were used to further the attacks.

In addition, two people familiar with the broader government investigation into the attack said three state governments were breached, though they wouldn’t identify the states. A third person familiar with the probe confirmed that state governments were hacked but didn’t provide a number.

Biden’s Pledge

While President Donald Trump has yet to publicly address the hack, President-elect Joe Biden issued a statement Thursday on “what appears to be a massive cybersecurity breach affecting potentially thousands of victims, including U.S. companies and federal government entities.”

“I want to be clear: My administration will make cybersecurity a top priority at every level of government — and we will make dealing with this breach a top priority from the moment we take office,” Biden said, pledging to impose “substantial costs on those responsible for such malicious attacks.”

Russia has denied any involvement in the attack.

Hynes, the Department of Energy spokeswoman, said that efforts were immediately taken to mitigate the risk from the hack, including disconnecting software “identified as being vulnerable to this attack.”

–With assistance from Ari Natter and Dina Bass.

New story in Technology from Time: Cyberpunk 2077 Is a Mess On Every Level

Cyberpunk 2077 and the constellation of controversy orbiting it—at nearly every level of its making—is almost laughable. The open-world shooter game, developed by Polish studio CD Projekt Red, was billed as the next big thing in video games, an experience that would impress both visually and narratively. From a huge city full of opportunities to an arsenal of upgradable elements for your customizable character, how could one not be enticed by the previews ahead of the Dec. 10 release? Hell, it’s even got Keanu Reeves in it, and a lot of him!

In hindsight, Cyberpunk 2077’s seven-year lead up didn’t do it any favors. After all, you can only rely on hype for so long.

Since release, players have experienced a broken, incomplete title pockmarked with bugs and errors so extensive many found themselves unable to make much progress, myself included. In the aftermath of its controversial launch, CD Projekt Red admitted to relying on the harmful practice of crunch—demanding longer hours from employees for weeks or months at a time—in order to finish development. The game’s available on last-gen consoles, but looks like garbage on them. Accessibility issues led people with epilepsy to have seizures during gameplay, an issue that’s since been addressed, but should never have been a problem in the first place. Facing intense disappointment from fans who long awaited the game, the studio announced Tuesday that unhappy players can get a refund, though some are having trouble getting their money back from outlets like GameStop and Sony’s PlayStation Store.

In short, Cyberpunk has a tough 2021 ahead before it can think about 2077.

In Cyberpunk 2077’s gritty reimagining of America, you play as “V,” your custom-made ne’er-do-well thrown into mercenary life after a fall from grace. Following a botched heist that puts a time limit on your lifespan, you go on a journey through the seedy underbelly of Night City to make deals with crooks, gangs, cops, and corporations in search of a cure for your terminal illness that manifests as a virtual hologram of a certain Night City celebrity.

Night City itself, as with the rest of Cyberpunk, is only “edgy” as defined by a 14-year-old in 2004. It’s replete with Blade Runner-esque neon lights and holograms complete with more than suggestive advertisements. Everyone and their grandma has a cybernetic enhancement. Dildos litter the street, and you can use them as components in the game’s crafting system. Transphobic ads mar an already garish world that lacks any sort of subtext or nuance. The environmental “jokes” don’t land, and offensive jabs are present throughout, giving me pause as to the game’s target audience.

Look, I get it. It’s cyberpunk! The gritty future, baby! Everything is chromed out, gaudy advertisements run amok, corporations run everything, and the line between law enforcement and lawlessness is as thin as the card full of eddies you pay your private security team (oh, and money is called “eddies” now). But that’s not enough to hold the fantasy together. Once you look a little deeper, or stand in the same spot for longer than four minutes, you start to notice the cracks.

It would be easier to praise the immersive world of Night City if it decided to stick around during gameplay. Cyberpunk’s open world is largely farcical, mostly an illusion meant to convey breadth without actually delivering. Whether or not you’ll see crowds milling about (as seen in various preview videos) is a crapshoot depending on where you’re standing and what your computer’s processing power can handle. My own playthrough left me befuddled after sprinting for a car that rounded a street corner only to disappear. Other players have found the world basically devoid of any advanced activity—people mill about aimlessly, cars are usually still, and cops you decide to help may randomly decide you’re the enemy should a single bullet go astray.

Patrick Austin

As you interact with Night City’s factions and gangs, you’ll quickly realize they’re disturbingly and stereotypically divided by race. As a Haitian-American, I took particular interest in the Haitian Voodoo Boys, one of the game’s many ethnically divided paint-by-numbers gangs. I can’t help but wonder what lack of imagination it took to put the primarily Haitian group—and the only black gang, full of the city’s most elite hackers—in the poorest part of town (V also makes a surprisingly racist comment in a Haitian doctor’s office, catching me off guard). It’s also confusing how much the gang relies on the exaggerated vodou aesthetic only to have the characters explicitly state they have abandoned the concept of god, “leaving them” on Haiti (despite the fact that Haiti is predominantly Roman Catholic). At least their Creole isn’t bad, I suppose.

This game is full of similar letdowns. It has intricate RPG elements, with a complex and tiered leveling system that gives you points for doing everything from helping the Night City Police Department (gross) to taking apart junk you find in the street. But there’s nothing new happening. If you’re familiar with open-world adventure games like Fallout or Grand Theft Auto, Cyberpunk 2077 will feel predictable—and all the bugs will make you realize how much fun those other games are by comparison.

On the right hardware, Cyberpunk 2077 is visually stunning—just be prepared to spend thousands of dollars for the best experience. Until then, your options are to play it on your PC and hope it runs properly, or stream it. There’s no “true” PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series S/X version of the game just yet, those are scheduled for release in 2021. You can still play it on the consoles, but they’ll be running the PS4 or Xbox One version of the title. Streaming options, like Nvidia’s GeForce Now and Google Stadia, can give you a pretty good approximation of playing on a high-end gaming PC, as long as your internet connection is quick and lag-free enough.

The game’s main storylines are pretty engaging, from the moment you meet Reeves’ character, Johnny Silverhand, to your last interaction with it. When the game’s set pieces work, they work quite well. Stealth elements are forgiving, letting you make risky and exciting dodges behind crates and cars. I felt a thrill concocting a plan using enemy-disabling “quickhacks” to take out four gangsters out without firing a single bullet, only to have it fall apart at the last second when a fifth suddenly appeared. Instead of blowing his head off, I opted to use more of V’s computer-based attacks, frying his brain before he could make a move.

But by the end of the game, I found myself relying on good old-fashioned bullets rather than those special abilities, akin to a wizard’s spells. Ironically, the unreliable hacking system sometimes worked only after repeated attempts. It makes you wonder if all the bugs in Cyberpunk add up to some sort of experiential art piece, where the glitches are a metaphor for the errors prevalent throughout Night City’s society.

Then there are the implications of the world Cyberpunk 2077 paints—a world where most people are cybernetically enhanced, be it with robotic limbs or synthetic organs. You must have a pretty good reason for removing your perfectly good legs or arms or face and replacing them with robotic prosthesis, right? Yet the game never really explains why everyone looks like they just crawled out of a Best Buy dumpster. The game opens with a very cool scene that puts you in the chair at your local “ripperdoc” office, where an automated tool tattoos a cybernetic attachment to your palm. Yet as you get even more invasive items installed, none of that attention to detail is present. There’s no mention of your natural limbs’ fate as they are removed without fanfare, and only sometimes reattached.

Cyberpunk 2077 left me both disappointed and frustrated. When it actually works, it’s somehow both enjoyable to play but incredibly difficult to stomach. But between the largely unplayable overall experience to its use of tried stereotypes of people of color and transphobic imagery in a misguided pursuit of “cool,” Cyberpunk is an undeniable mess. It’s a broken promise made to consumers who assumed it would look as advertised on their last-gen game consoles, complete with unforced errors and disingenuous apologies to both the studio’s own staff and to players who pre-ordered it sight unseen (The studio says Cyberpunk has already recouped its nearly decade-long marketing and developer costs from presales alone; it would likely have been a commercial flop in a world where people wait to read reviews before committing their money to new game.)

So let me be clear. If you still want to play Cyberbunk 2077 and own a next-gen console or a PC that exceeds the system requirements, you should avoid it for a few months while the issues are worked out and a dedicated version for those consoles is available. If you’ve got an Xbox One or PlayStation 4, you probably shouldn’t buy this game at all. If you’re mad about one of the most anticipated games of the decade turning out to be a hot mess, don’t worry. Everyone is.

New story in Technology from Time: European Union Announces Sweeping New Regulations Against Big Tech Companies

Big tech companies could face multibillion dollar fines in Europe and the threat of being broken up unless they comply with sweeping new regulations announced by the European Commission on Tuesday.

After years of wrangling in the U.S. over whether to hold tech companies accountable for data practices and anticompetitive behavior, the new rules in the E.U.—which has a total population of some 450 million across 27 countries —could force tech companies to change their practices globally.

The E.U. regulations come in the form of two new laws, one called the Digital Services Act and another called the Digital Markets Act. Both still need to undergo a consultation period and then be passed by European lawmakers, a process which could take years.

The Digital Services Act (DSA) would introduce new obligations on platforms to reveal information and data to regulators about how their algorithms work, how decisions are made to remove content, and how adverts are targeted at users. Many of its provisions only apply to platforms with more than 45 million users, a threshold surpassed by several services including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and TikTok.

“With size comes responsibility,” said Margrethe Vestager, the European Commissioner for competition, on Tuesday.

Fines for failing to comply with the rules can be up to 6% of a company’s annual revenue—a sum which if levied at Facebook, for example, would amount to $4.2 billion.

Meanwhile on Tuesday, the U.K. government is also expected to announce a similar law that if passed would include fines of up to 10% of annual global turnover for platforms that fail to remove illegal content.

The other law announced by the European Commission on Tuesday, the Digital Markets Act (DMA), is closer to antitrust legislation. It aims to give smaller companies greater ability to compete with big tech platforms, which some European lawmakers have long thought of as monopolistic entities. Repeat violations of this law could lead to big tech companies being broken up, Vestager said. Fines for anti-competitive behavior could amount to up to 10% of a company’s annual turnover, and the E.U. will attempt to break up repeat offenders fined three times within five years.

Experts say the regulation could have consequences for tech companies beyond the borders of the E.U. “Europe increasingly sees itself as a trailblazer for what it sees as tech-savvy, human rights-proof tech regulations,” says Mathias Vermeulen, the public policy director at data rights consultancy AWO. “The mere fact that these companies will be forced to improve their content moderation and content distribution mechanisms—that is going to lead to a change in practices in the U.S., for instance. If you’re a global company, and you have to deal with new obligations in one very big and crucial market, then similar features could be taken up elsewhere even though there’s no hard requirement to do so.”

What is the Digital Services Act?

The DSA is aimed at improving what many European lawmakers see as the lack of oversight over large tech companies.

“The problem is that now tech companies can say they’ve been taking measures, but there’s absolutely no independent third party who can verify their figures,” Vermeulen says. “The idea with the Digital Services Act is to exercise more democratic control over how our rights are being affected by the products of these companies.”

The act obliges platforms with more than 45 million users in the E.U. to tell users in plain language the “main parameters” used in algorithms that rank content, and allow users to “select and modify their preferred option” for algorithms that determine the “relative order of information presented to them.” In a measure that appears tailored to allow users to opt out of having algorithms serve up content based on their past activity, it says platforms must offer users at least one option which is “not based on profiling,” according to a draft copy of the act seen by TIME.

When it comes to illegal content, the act upholds existing E.U. principles that—similarly to the U.S.— platforms should not be held accountable for illegal content posted by users. But it does state that if platforms do not act quickly to make that content inaccessible once they are made aware of it, they could be held liable.

The act does not expand the definition of illegal content. But it does lay out a list of content that is already illegal that the new regulations apply to, including illegal hate speech, terrorist content, images of child sexual abuse, non-consensual sharing of private images, stalking, counterfeit products, and copyright violations.

The act doesn’t spend much time discussing details of what content should be counted as illegal. Instead, it states that companies must carry out their own “risk assessments” about how their services could be used to spread illegal content or allow manipulation that has “an actual or foreseeable negative effect on the protection of public health, minors, civic discourse … electoral processes and public security.” It obliges platforms to then act to “mitigate” those risks.

“Before, the trend was to hold companies responsible for specific pieces of content that could still be found on their site,” says Vermeulen. “But this is more of a holistic vision, looking at what these companies are doing to address the risks their systems are posing.”

Amid pressure on social media companies for their role in amplifying political extremism across the globe, the act will give European regulators more power to demand information from tech companies about how both their moderation teams and their algorithms work at scale. The threat of large fines, officials hope, will force companies to roll out new institutional practices even before a single fine is imposed.

Alongside fines of 6% of turnover for failure to comply with the regulations, the DSA says that platforms must also allow regulators insight into how their systems work—with fines of up to 1% of annual revenue if platforms “supply incorrect, incomplete or misleading information” to regulators, or “refuse to submit to an on-site inspection,” according to a draft copy of the act seen by TIME.

The DSA says that those obligations will be accompanied by the ability to enforce changes to tech companies’ services, including “discontinuing advertising revenue for specific content, or other actions, such as improving the visibility of authoritative information sources,” according to the draft legislation.

In the Brexit referendum and 2016 U.S. election, so-called “dark ads” were common on social media platforms—adverts without any accompanying information about their funding or why they were targeted at users. The DSA introduces a legal requirement for platforms to maintain libraries of historical ads, and give people who see the ads more detailed information about the reasons they are being targeted. “Recipients of the service should have information on the main parameters used for determining that specific advertising is to be displayed to them, providing meaningful explanations of the logic used to that end, including when this is based on profiling,” the draft states. (Platforms including Facebook and Twitter have already introduced measures along these lines.)

What is the Digital Markets Act?

With the development of the technology sector, economic activity increasingly happens online—but in some cases “online” means within the bounds of specific services designed by big tech companies. Think buying an app through the Apple app store, or buying goods on Amazon.

Systems like that open the door to anticompetitive behavior, E.U. officials say. In November, the European Commission said it believed Amazon was acting anti-competitively by collecting data on independent sellers that use the Amazon platform, and using that data to benefit Amazon’s own competitior products.

Just as its sister legislation only targets companies with more than 45 million users, the Digital Markets Act only targets “gatekeeper” companies, or those defined–at some point in the future–as dictating the terms of a marketplace.

The act makes three main provisions: forcing “gatekeeper” companies to act fairly by not using competitors’ data to disadvantage them; by enforcing interoperability, allowing users to take their data elsewhere and still interact with their services; and by not treating their own services more favorably than competitors that use their platform.

“The business and political interests of a handful of companies should not dictate our future,” wrote Margrethe Vestager and Thierry Breton on Sunday, the two European commissioners leading on the regulations. “Europe has to set its own terms and conditions.”

Along with fines of up to 10% of global turnover for violations of antitrust law, the European Commission threatens that it could break up the businesses of repeat offenders—a step further than anything the incoming Biden Administration has pledged to do. “If a gatekeeper breaks the rules … several times repeatedly, we can also impose structural remedies, divestiture, that sort of thing,” Vestager said on Tuesday. (The E.U. has fined big tech companies for antitrust violations before — the most expensive instance being a $4.3 billion fine against Google in 2018.)

“The Digital Markets Act imposes new obligations on these so-called gatekeeper companies, which have enormous power to control the markets they are operating in,” says Vermeulen. “This is mainly geared at marketplaces, search engines, operating systems and cloud services. It would prohibit companies from giving preferential treatment to their own products and services in, for instance, search rankings.”

New story in Technology from Time: People Are Finally Downloading COVID-19 Exposure Notification Apps. Will They Make a Difference?

In the early weeks of the U.S. COVID-19 outbreak this spring, technologists pushed forward an idea to help bring the spread of the new virus under control: smartphones could notify users who had potentially been exposed to others with COVID-19, transforming millions of devices into the world’s most efficient army of public health contact tracers. Big tech got on board, with Apple and Google jointly releasing software in May that enabled state and national public health departments to build such “exposure notification” (EN) apps.

But as the pandemic burned through the country, slow development, sparse public outreach and suspicion of the new software from both states and users stymied the effort for months. Over the summer, only six states released apps using the software; just four more joined by October. Even in states that released EN apps, adoption was often agonizingly slow, with downloads far outpaced by similar efforts in countries like Ireland, where around a third of adults were using COVID-19-tracking apps as of November. In Alabama, only 3% of the state’s adult population had downloaded the state’s EN app by late October, more than two months after launch; by early December, that number was still just 4.6%. North Carolina and Pennsylvania, which both launched EN apps in late September, each managed to get around 6% of their adult populations on board as of early December.

But EN app adoption rates in some states are now skyrocketing by comparison, thanks in part to a new approach from Apple and Google. States using the new protocol, called Exposure Notifications Express (EN Express) and launched in September, can quickly and easily deploy a basic, pre-formatted version of the Apple/Google-enabled contact tracing apps, saving costs and development time. EN Express also lets states send push notifications encouraging residents to opt in, a feature that appears to be driving faster adoption.

Some states that recently launched apps with the updated approach have leapt ahead in sign ups, offering a glimmer of hope that smartphone-based exposure notification technology might finally start helping to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 in the U.S. Colorado, which launched EN Express in late October, signed up the equivalent of more than 28% of adults by the end of November. In Washington state, which launched EN Express on Nov. 30, nearly 17% of the state’s adults enabled the software in just four days. Adoption of Connecticut’s EN Express app topped 20% less than a week after it launched in mid-November. California’s state health department estimates that 13% of adults opted in within a day after it launched an EX Express app on Dec. 10. And in Nevada, where only 5% of adults were using an app published in late August, the launch of a complimentary EN Express service on Dec. 10 led to adoption of more than 9% in just four days.

Nowhere is the contrast between the old and new systems sharper than in Maryland and Virginia. Virginia launched the first U.S. Exposure Notifications app in August, and slowly accumulated users through aggressive outreach in what had been one of the country’s most successful adoption efforts so far; 13% of Virginia adults were signed up by December. Just across the border in Maryland, officials launched the state’s first exposure notification app, using EN Express, in mid-November. By month’s end, more than a quarter of the state’s adults had signed up, leapfrogging Virginia’s months-long effort in just weeks.

“Our delay was somewhat intentional,” says Kathleen Feldman, chief public health scientist at Maryland’s Department of Health. While Virginia was rushing to deploy a contact tracing app this summer, Maryland public health officials put their resources toward traditional contact tracing efforts while waiting to see how newer digital efforts worked out elsewhere, Feldman says. When Maryland’s program finally launched, they were able to take advantage of EN Express, which was not available when Virginia launched its app.

Colorado officials also intentionally waited to deploy an Exposure Notifications app. “When EN Express became an option, it was clear to us that the technology had matured,” says Sarah Tuneberg, leader of Colorado’s Coronavirus Innovation Response Team. Among the factors that helped spur adoption, Tuneberg cites the simpler user experience (on iPhones, for instance, users can turn on EN Express in their settings instead of downloading an app) as well as the fact that the state didn’t need to contract a private developer to build its app, and could devote those resources toward outreach instead.

“We know that states don’t have great adoption of apps you have to download from an app store,” says Tuneberg. “There was a service that didn’t require us to pay six, seven, eight figures…it just made it the right time for us.”

In Virginia, officials are planning to launch EN Express to supplement their contact tracing app (the two approaches are intercompatible, and both use the same underlying system). But other states, like North Carolina, Alabama and Delaware, which have released coronavirus-tracking apps but where adoption has been slower than that of many states using EN Express, still don’t have plans to use the newer tool. Representatives at Apple say they recommend all states adopt EN Express, even if they have already built their own app.

Still, even in states with high adoption rates, it’s difficult to tell how much difference the software is making in the fight against the pandemic. Health officials and technologists often argue that 15% adoption could reduce COVID-19 infections by 15% and deaths by 11%, a statistic based on modeling published by Oxford University and Google this fall. Either way, with EN Express substantially reducing the upfront investment for state governments, it seems likely that more states will get on board. “I think [EN Express] is helping,” says Tuneberg of Colorado. “The funny thing about a global pandemic is that you don’t have a control group, so we won’t ever know exactly how efficacious it was. But it’s not harming anything.”

New story in Technology from Time: Hackers Break Into U.S. Treasury and Commerce Departments

(WASHINGTON) — Hackers broke into the networks of federal agencies including the Treasury and Commerce departments in attacks revealed just days after U.S. officials warned that cyber actors linked to the Russian government were exploiting vulnerabilities to target sensitive data.

The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity arm are investigating what experts and former officials said appeared to be a large-scale penetration of U.S. government agencies.

“This can turn into one of the most impactful espionage campaigns on record,” said cybersecurity expert Dmitri Alperovitch.

The hacks were revealed just days after a major cybersecurity firm disclosed that foreign government hackers had broken into its network and stolen the company’s own hacking tools. Many experts suspect Russia is responsible for the attack against FireEye, a major cybersecurity player whose customers include federal, state and local governments and top global corporations.

The apparent conduit for the Treasury and Commerce Department hacks — and the FireEye compromise — is a hugely popular piece of server software called SolarWinds. It is used by hundreds of thousands of organizations globally, including most Fortune 500 companies and multiple U.S. government agencies who will now be scrambling to patch up their networks, said Alperovitch, the former chief technical officer of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.

The attacks were disclosed less than a week after a National Security Agency advisory warned that Russian government hackers were exploiting vulnerabilities in a system used by the federal government, “allowing the actors access to protected data.”

The U.S. government did not publicly identify Russia as the culprit behind the hacks, first reported by Reuters, and said little about who might be responsible.

National Security Council spokesperson John Ullyot said in a statement that the government was “taking all necessary steps to identify and remedy any possible issues related to this situation.”

The government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said separately that it has been working with other agencies “regarding recently discovered activity on government networks. CISA is providing technical assistance to affected entities as they work to identify and mitigate any potential compromises.”

President Donald Trump last month fired the director of CISA, Chris Krebs, after Krebs vouched for the integrity of the presidential election and disputed Trump’s claims of widespread electoral fraud.

In a tweet Sunday, Krebs said “hacks of this type take exceptional tradecraft and time” and raised the possibility that it had been underway for months.

“This thing is still early, I suspect,” Krebs wrote.

Federal government agencies have long been attractive targets for foreign hackers.

Hackers linked to Russia were able to break into the State Department’s email system in 2014, infecting it so thoroughly that it had to be cut off from the internet while experts worked to eliminate the infestation.

Reuters earlier reported that a group backed by a foreign government stole information from Treasury and a Commerce Department agency responsible for deciding internet and telecommunications policy.

The Treasury Department deferred comment to the National Security Council. A Commerce Department spokesperson confirmed a “breach in one of our bureaus” and said “we have asked CISA and the FBI to investigate.” The FBI had no immediate comment.

The Washington Post reported Sunday, citing three unnamed sources, that the two federal agencies and FireEye were all breached through the SolarWinds network management system.

Austin, Texas-based SolarWinds confirmed Sunday in an email to The Associated Press that it has a “potential vulnerability” related to updates released earlier this year to its Orion products, which help organizations monitor their online networks for problems or outages.

“We believe that this vulnerability is the result of a highly-sophisticated, targeted and manual supply chain attack by a nation state,” said SolarWinds CEO Kevin Thompson in a statement.

The comprise is critical because SolarWinds would give a hacker “God-mode” access to the network, making everything visible, said Alperovitch.

Last Tuesday, FireEye said that foreign government hackers with “world-class capabilities” broke into its network and stole offensive tools it uses to probe the defenses of its thousands of customers. Those customers include federal, state and local governments and top global corporations.

The hackers “primarily sought information related to certain government customers,” FireEye CEO Kevin Mandia said in a statement, without naming them. He said there was no indication they got customer information from the company’s consulting or breach-response businesses or threat-intelligence data it collects.

Former NSA hacker Jake Williams said it seemed clear that both the Treasury Department and FireEye were hacked using the same vulnerability.

“The timing of the release here is, I think, not at all a coincidence,” said Williams, the president of the cybersecurity firm Rendition Infosec.

He said FireEye surely told the FBI and other federal partners how it had been hacked and they determined that Treasury had been similarly compromised.

“I suspect that there’s a number of other (federal) agencies we’re going to hear from this week that have also been hit,” Williams added.

FireEye responded to the Sony and Equifax data breaches and helped Saudi Arabia thwart an oil industry cyberattack — and has played a key role in identifying Russia as the protagonist in numerous aggressions in the burgeoning netherworld of global digital conflict.

Neither Mandia nor a FireEye spokesperson said when the company detected the hack or who might be responsible. But many in the cybersecurity community suspect Russia.

___

Krisher reported from Detroit and Bajak reported from Boston. Associated Press writer Matt O’Brien contributed to this report from Providence, R.I.

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New story in Technology from Time: The Facebook Antitrust Case Is a Vital First Step. But More Needs to Happen

On Wednesday, the Federal Trade Commission and the attorneys general of 48 states and territories filed antitrust cases against Facebook. The state case is broader than the FTC’s, but both call for unwinding Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp. On the heels of the House Antitrust Subcommittee report – which concluded that Facebook, Google, and Amazon are guilty of antitrust violations – and the Department of Justice antitrust case against Google, the FTC and state AG suits confirm a broad based change in philosophy relative to concentrated economic power.

Few who observed Mark Zuckerberg’s first appearance before a Senate committee in 2018 imagined that any regulators would be able to figure out the intricacies of internet platforms quickly enough to make a difference. The House Antitrust report confirmed that Congressional oversight has made the giant leap. Now the FTC and 48 states have done so. The theory of their case is as elegant as it is sophisticated. For proof of harm, the case leans on the work of legal scholar Dina Srinivasan, who demonstrated that Facebook consistently offers relatively attractive privacy terms until it achieves dominance, after which it plunders user data.

The new cases against Facebook acknowledge that industrial age concepts like market share are not the right way to measure the economic power of Facebook. If the case is successful it could bring about a vital change in how we view economic power in this country. It’s an important first step but it won’t be enough to constrain the vast powers of Facebook and other tech giants. We will need to do more.

The first test of economic power is whether there are any constraints on Facebook’s actions. Governments have imposed no meaningful constraints. Would be competitors steer clear of Facebook. Suppliers, such as news organizations, have been powerless as Facebook has used their content to siphon off their ad revenues. Advertisers know that Facebook’s user count and ad views are overstated, but are powerless to effect change. In each case, the source of Facebook’s economic power is network effects, which occur when the value of product or service increases as a function of the number of users. Network effects are a relatively new source of economic power, and Facebook has accumulated enough that no competitor can threaten it. In the absence of regulatory constraints, Facebook has been able to acquire many startups that might have threatened its market dominance. That is what happened with Instagram and WhatsApp. It happened again last month with Facebook’s acquisition of Kustomer.

The new antitrust cases will take years to resolve. Along the way, Facebook will have its days in court. Evidence from internal Facebook communications leaves no doubt that FB’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp were motivated by fear of competition. Whatever the outcome, this case should matter to every American. It may determine the degree to which economic policy will remain captive to the largest corporations. If there are no consequences for FaceBook’s willful undermining of democracy, public health, privacy, and competition, then it is hard to imagine a limit on corporate malfeasance.

Opposition to monopolies has been an American value from the beginning. Our founding fathers understood monopoly to be incompatible with the new country’s values, which emphasized democracy and self-determination. They favored distributed economic power and entrepreneurship. This idealized vision of capitalism matched the founders’ vision of democracy, as a worthy alternative to the authoritarian values of monopoly and monarchy.

The economic history of the United States has been a battle between those who favor limits on economic power and those who oppose them. Each major economic transition – from agrarian to industrial in the 19^th century, from industrial to information at the end of the 20^th – has disrupted the equilibrium, necessitating a new debate about economic power.

Entrepreneurial capitalism is not a natural state. It requires the government to set rules and enforce them fairly. Changes in the structure of the economy, as occurred with industrialization and the information economy, change the balance of economic power, creating a window of opportunity for concentration of economic power. The giant capital investments required by industrial capitalism led to trusts like Standard Oil, whose power rivaled that of the federal government, necessitating the first wave of antitrust laws, the Sherman (1890), Clayton (1914), Federal Trade Commission (1914) Acts. In combination with laws to protect workers, and later the social safety net created in response to the Depression, the antitrust laws ushered in a long period of widely distributed economic power.

For most of our history, Americans have understood that the government represents our interests in the battle against threats, whether they be foreign or domestic. Concentrated economic power poses a threat to democracy and self-determination, so it makes sense to regulate it.

That view lost political potency in the 1980 presidential campaign, when Ronald Reagan told us that government was “the problem.” Reagan embraced the notion that markets always do the most effective job of allocating capital and government should not interfere. In an era of high inflation and low economic growth, that message found a receptive audience. The presidents who followed Reagan embraced his market-centric philosophy. They deregulated and abandoned the philosophy at the foundation of antitrust policy. They permitted a transformation of the economy, shipping most manufacturing jobs overseas, and removing worker protections for many of the jobs that remained.

Read More: Roger McNamee’s TIME cover story about investing in Facebook and how the company lost its way

Facebook and the other internet platforms came along after laissez faire economic policies were deeply entrenched. The industry transformed the economy with a model that Harvard scholar Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism”, where data replaces oil as the driver of economic activity. As with the robber barons at the turn of the 20^th century, internet platforms like Facebook and Google have amassed economic power that threatens democracy, self-determination, and the diversity of the economy. By amplifying disinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic, they have also harmed public health. These harms are not incidental to an otherwise legitimate business model; they are foreseeable consequences of a business model that is flawed. And that flawed business model is also employed by Google, Microsoft, and Twitter.

To date, no surveillance capitalist has been willing to sacrifice profits to limit further harm. That should not be acceptable. The rules imposed by these platforms (such as constrain us far more than the laws where we live, they are enforced inconsistently, and there is rarely a right to appeal. They are authoritarian businesses imposing their vision on our lives. Each new feature and product reduces our autonomy. We have the right and a duty to push back.

As if undermining public health, democracy, privacy, and competition were not enough damage, Facebook continues to expand its reach and is about to reintroduce a slimmed down version of its cryptocurrency, Libra. The new “stablecoin” will enable anonymous payments, which in different circumstances might be a good thing. Given Facebook’s past behavior, one would expect Libra to foster a black market payments systems for people who want to avoid taxes and government restrictions on currency flows. Who are the losers from Libra? We are. Libra is a threat to our country’s sovereignty because it undermines democratic control of our economy.

Antitrust intervention, like this suit, is an essential tool for limiting the power of corporations, but the harms from internet platforms require more, in the form of safety and privacy regulations. Fortunately, policy makers in the U.S. and Europe are finally rising to those requirements as well. Constraining internet platforms will not be enough to restore democracy, public health, privacy, and competition, but it is the first step.

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New story in Technology from Time: The Perfect Last-Minute Gifts for the Gamers in Your Life

Looking for last minute gifts for someone with a particular hobby is one thing, but buying a gift for a gamer is another matter entirely, especially if they’re a connoisseur in the field.

With the most anticipated holiday gifts—the Xbox Series S/X and PlayStation 5 consoles—in short supply, and the holidays only days away, what do you get the gamer in your life that has (almost) everything? Get them what they didn’t know they needed.

Play great games with a great controller

It might seem unreasonable to spend close to two hundred bucks on what amounts to a nice controller, but the $180 Xbox Elite Wireless Controller Series 2 delivers in terms of build quality, features, and convenience, catering to the serious gamer in your life.

Unlike your average Xbox controller, the Bluetooth controller—compatible with not just the Xbox but PCs as well—is made using sturdier materials like steel rather than plastic, and features additions like a more rubberized grip, interchangeable directional pad, and a set of paddle buttons on the back to reduce hand strain and assist in the accessory’s more advanced features.

The accompanying software lets you customize the responsiveness of things like triggers and joysticks, and map button combos and commands to whatever buttons you wish. The Xbox Elite Wireless Controller Series 2 is a controller with a big name and a bigger price tag, but what you get is a device built to last years, handle long hours of gaming, and offer gamers a slew of options to make you feel comfortable no matter what title they’re playing.

Get some specialized gear for driving (or flying)

If you’re looking for something more niche, or know your gift recipient is into more technical genres like racing, why not spring for a dedicated racing wheel? Logitech’s new G923 racing wheel, compatible with both consoles and PCs, makes racing games a much more approachable affair compared to steering with a joystick, or worse, a keyboard.

The G923’s solid build, powerful motor, and easy customization options make it a great wheel for beginners and veteran players alike. In some supported games, players can take advantage of Logitech’s new haptics system that mimics the vibrations they’d feel driving on whatever surface their car is on, be it asphalt or the dirt.

If you’ve got someone in your life more enthused about planes than cars, try a flight stick. With games like Microsoft Flight Simulator encouraging a resurgence in the iconic flight sim genre, and more fast-paced team-based games like Star Wars: Squadrons turning it into an arcade-like experience, the sim fan in your life will appreciate a gift that alleviates the most annoying thing about controlling a plane: using your thumbs. Companies like Logitech make flight sticks in a wide price range that will give you an advantage in a dogfight for without breaking the bank, while you can look to peripheral company Thrustmaster for more advanced options like the Hotas Warthog PC joystick, which is made almost entirely of metal, and features nearly two dozen programmable buttons, switches, and triggers.

Play high-end games anywhere, anytime

What do you get the player that has a high-end PC or next-gen console with all the fixings? You get them the option to play those games anywhere. Streaming games is the next big thing in gaming, and for good reason. For a monthly fee, gamers can get access to a smorgasbord of titles to choose from, or play their own on pricey hardware.

Services like Game Pass Ultimate and PlayStation Now offer a library of current and last-generation titles to choose from for a monthly fee, while offerings like Nvidia GeForce Now or Shadow offer access to their high-performance cloud servers from which you can stream the games players already own to any device, be it their laptop, TV, or smartphone.

USB-C cables (trust me)

One time at an office holiday party, I was given a miniature iPhone cable as a gift to keep in my bag for emergencies. While always happy to receive a utilitarian gift, I didn’t think much of it until the first time I needed it. That cable helped me get through more situations than I can count, saving me from a dead battery and a severed connection from the outside world when I needed it most (see: when I was out partying with friends and forgot to charge my smartphone during work hours). And it proved to me that you can never have too many cables around.

While last generation’s consoles used micro-USB cables to charge basically everything, USB-C has finally caught on. Both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S/X consoles use the reversible connector on their controllers, and the PlayStation 5 even has a USB-C port on its face. That console might come with a cable, but if gamers have another controller they want to use, a long USB-C cable is a cheap stocking stuffer that’ll most assuredly come in handy.