Vort3x | Cybersalon | January 15, 2026
Vort3x, published on the 15th of each month, aims to pick out significant developments in the intersection of computers, freedom, privacy, and security for friends near and far. The views expressed in these stories do not necessarily reflect those of Cybersalon, either individually or collectively.
Prepared by Wendy M. Grossman.
Contents: Cybersalon events | News | Features | Diary
Cybersalon Events
Join us to celebrate 30 years of the first Internet Café Cyberia in Paris in Centre Pompidou
With Virtual Reality Party in Digital Twin of the physical Café, recreated faithfully to bring you 90’s vibes. With new art from Zoe Camper (our original Cyberian), ambient sounds from Miss Naivety and live coding from @SimonsMine – creative Blauel Architects @PCMCreative VR Agency
Meet in VR Cyberia Café Whitfield Street – accessible just from mobile/laptop, just download Spatial.IO app. No need for headsets unless you have set up. Email [email protected] to contribute artwork, photos, music. The event is part of Arts Birthday celebrations in France and UK
NEWS
AI Slop Pervades YouTube
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More than 20% of the videos offered to new users on YouTube are “AI slop”, Aisha Down reports at the Guardian, based on new research from the video editing company Kapwing. In a survey of the top 100 video channels in every country – 15,000 in all – the company found that 278 were entirely AI-generated. The channels are estimated to generate $117 million in revenues per year. In a new paper, “FakeParts”, researchers at the Institut Polytechnique de Paris warn about fake elements inserted into real videos, which are far harder to detect than complete fakes. A small change to a facial expression or gesture can completely alter a clip’s emotional content without altering any of the facts or speaker’s words.
Comment: The term in common use for AI slop and other low-quality content is “brain rot”. Given the financial rewards, expect to see a lot more of it.
European Council Votes to Back Digital Euro
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At the end of December 2025 the European Council voted to back a digital euro with both online and offline functionality, Reuters reports. The European Parliament will vote on it in the first half of 2026. The goal is to modernize the European payment system and maintain the relevance of the central bank. If it’s adopted, the European Central Bank would proceed with a pilot in 2027 with a view to issuing the currency in 2029.
iRobot Sells Itself to Chinese Supplier Picea
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The robot vacuum pioneer iRobot has filed for bankruptcy and sold itself to Picea, one of the company’s Chinese suppliers, David Nield reports at TechRadar. The company says there should be no immediate loss of support for existing products. At BIG, Matt Stoller says that although many on Wall Street are blaming former Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan and other trustbusters for allowing iRobot to go to China rather than be bought by Amazon, in fact Wall Street financiers hobbled the company by forcing it to divest its defense business, offshore its production, and cut its research budget. As a consequence, iRobot lost its ability to compete effectively despite the growing market.
High-Speed Traders Fight Over Billionths of a Second
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High-speed traders are shaving 3.2 billionths of a second of trading times by bombarding Frankfurt-based Eurex with data to keep the connections open, Alexander Osipovich reports at the Wall Street Journal. French firm Mosaic Finance has complained to Eurex and European regulators that the traders are breaking the law; Eurex disagrees but has announced an update that looks likely to block the practice.
Comment: This is the latest version of the shenanigans Michael Lewis documented in his 2014 book, Flash Boys.
We love humans – Salesforce U-turn on labour Approach to AI
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Having publicly announced in September that it was laying off 4,000 people because AI could do their work, in December Salesforce executives admitted they overestimated AI’s capability, Sara Jones reports at TechStory. The executives now admit that AI couldn’t match the depth of knowledge and experience of the human staff. At The Information, Aaron Holmes and Kevin McLaughlin find that Salesforce’s executives admit their trust in generative AI and large language models has declined over the last year. At the Wall Street Journal, Christopher Mims asks why we continue to prefer human decision making, even when some provide evidence that that AI is more trustworthy.
Comment: To some extent, “trustworthy” is in the eye of the beholder. For many people, in life-threatening contexts such as driving and criminal justice they want the entity making the decision to understand its individual impact, not just the operational rules it’s been programmed to observe.
FEATURES & ANALYSIS
Legislative Agenda for 2026 Threatens Privacy
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In this article at Computer Weekly, Bill Goodwin surveys the landscape of pending legislation in the UK and EU, and warns that privacy will be under threat to an unprecedented degree. Up for legislative consideration: attacks on strong encryption, client-side scanning for illegal material, perceptual hash matching, digital ID, and legal challenges to the privileged confidentiality for journalists and lawyers. At Salon, Russell Payne performs a similar job on “bad Internet bills” in front of the US Congress.
Comment: Most of the items on both lists are extensions of decades-old debates in which political expediency never gives way to the evidence base, which continues to grow.
Study Finds Uneven Effect of Movie Piracy
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In this article at TorrentFreak, Ernesto Van der Sar reads a new study that analyzes years of data from The Pirate Bay and concludes that high-quality leaks of “spectacle” movies raise theatrical ticket sales, but that the opposite is true for story-driven films or low-quality releases of spectacle movies. Hollywood, however, continues to believe that piracy is uniformly destructive. At Android Authority, Adamya Sharma reports that Anna’s Archive has scraped almost all of Spotify’s metadata and audio, and the results are available via torrents. Spotify says it has disabled the accounts involved and put new safeguards in place to prevent similar actions in future.
Bad time for chefs: At the Guardian, Aimee Levitt finds that Google’s AI summaries are killing recipe writers’ livelihoods by combining instructions from multiple writers and siphoning away ad-bearing traffic. The writers have little ability to push back, as recipes cannot be copyrighted.
At NeurIPS AI Reaches a Crossroads
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In this article at the Wall Street Journal, several reporters attend the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), which in recent years has transformed from a niche academic meeting of researchers to a giant industry-driven event also drawing venture capitalists and others intent on commercial exploitation of new developments. In conference discussions, academics pondered whether today’s methods will lead to new breakthroughs and approaches to learning, but found that companies are becoming less open about sharing research.
Comment: The day will come when the money leaves and the conference will return to its academic roots.
LA’s Surveillance Technology Finds Nick Reiner
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In this article at the LA Times, Richard Winton, Hannah Fry, and Gavin J. Quinton explain what is known about the geolocation technology used by the Los Angeles Police Department to track down Nick Reiner after his parents’ murder. Among other technologies, they used geolocation data from his phone, footprints generated by apps, and images picked up by cameras. It took the LAPD a little over two hours to locate and arrest him.
Comment: While probably everyone welcomed the capture and arrest, the story shows a lot about the efficiency of LA’s surveillance technology. The area the city covers can easily take two hours just to drive across.
Cory Doctorow Finds Hope for General Computing
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In this posting at Pluralistic, Cory Doctorow provides the text and video of his talk at the 42nd Chaos Communications Congress, “The Post-American Internet”. The actions of the Trump administration, he says, have cracked open – even if only just a little bit – the door to a new coalition of partners finding common cause against Big (US) Tech and for preserving access to general computing. Doctorow offers concrete actions for change.
DIARY
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February 1-2, 2026
Boulder, Colorado, US, and online
In its flagship conference, entitled ”To Have and Have Not: Growing Asymmetries in Communications Technology”, Silicon Flatirons will consider emerging gaps in technology access – and the impact of the collective regulatory landscape of local, state, federal, and international governance. The conference brings together scholars, policymakers, and industry leaders to discuss the challenges and opportunities in the regulation of advanced technologies.
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February 23, 2026
Washington, DC, USA and online
The State of the Net Conference Series is hosted by the Internet Education Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to educating the public and policymakers about the potential of a decentralized global Internet to promote communications, commerce and democracy. IEF works closely with leaders on Capitol Hill and in the private sector to host the most important debates in Internet policy. IEF’s board of directors comprises public interest groups, corporations, and associations representative of the diversity of the Internet community.
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February 28, 2026
London, UK, and online
Now in its fourteenth edition, State of the Browser is a yearly one-day, single-track conference with widely-varying talks about the modern web, accessibility, web standards, and more, organised by London Web Standards.
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March 3-5, 2026
Berkeley, CA, USA
The fifth ACM symposium on computer science and law is the flagship conference for the emerging field of computer science and law. It brings together a community—scholars, practicing lawyers, and computing professionals—who are fluent both in computational thinking and its rigorous mathematical formalisms and in legal scholarship and thought with its equally rigorous yet human-centric set of principles, methodologies, and goals. Central to the study of “computer science and law” is the creation of a body of scholarship aimed towards the co-design of law and computing technology to promote social goals. We seek papers that combine rigorous technical computer-science reasoning with rigorous legal analysis to integrate the two disciplines.
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April 13-16, 2026
Boulder, CO, USA
For over 75 years, the Conference on World Affairs (CWA) has brought together global leaders and experts from a wide range of fields to spark lively, thought-provoking conversations on the most pressing issues of our time. Free and open to all—whether in person at CU Boulder or via livestream—CWA is designed to inform, inspire, and engage diverse audiences.
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April 23-35, 2026
Berlin, Germany
We Robot is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed conference that brings together leading scholars and practitioners to discuss legal, ethical and policy implications of robots and other emergent digital technologies. Since its inception in 2012, the conference has fostered dynamic conversations regarding robot theory, design, ethics and development. We Robot 2026 will create an international platform to discuss current and future AI and robotics policy, especially at a time when legal frameworks are evolving in different directions around the world. A major focus of the 2026 edition, the first to be held outside the US, will be a comparative analysis of different approaches to regulation, with the goal of fostering mutual learning and dialogue.
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April 25-26, 2026
Manchester, UK
OggCamp is an unconference celebrating Free Culture, Free and Open Source Software, hardware hacking, digital rights, and all manner of collaborative cultural activities and is committed to creating a conference that is as inclusive as possible. If you’ve got a story to tell, no matter your background or current status, whether it’s your first talk or you’ve loads of experience, as long as the talk is connected (somehow) to our theme then we want to know about it.
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May 5-8, 2026
Lusaka, Zambia and online
The goal for RightsCon 2026 is to strike a balance between a clear, familiar structure and the flexibility to respond to a rapidly changing digital landscape. At a time when the digital rights sector is facing unprecedented pressure and uncertainty, from political volatility to disruptive emerging technologies, we want to ensure that the program is able to address urgent, time-sensitive issues, while maintaining a stable foundation for participants to prepare and engage meaningfully.
