14 Nov 2025 UPD: We have up­dated the ar­ti­cle with more in­for­ma­tion on the bailiff re­ports sent to us and the per­son who or­dered them.

The FBI has been in­ves­ti­gat­ing Archive.is (also known as Archive.today), as was re­cently re­vealed. The agency is­sued a sub­poena to the site’s do­main reg­is­trar, ask­ing for in­for­ma­tion about the per­son be­hind it, cit­ing a “federal crim­i­nal in­ves­ti­ga­tion.”

Archive.is was launched in 2012 by some­one us­ing the name Denis Petrov — though whether that’s their real iden­tity re­mains un­clear. The site lets users save “snapshots” of web pages by sub­mit­ting URLs, which makes it a valu­able tool for pre­serv­ing con­tent that might oth­er­wise dis­ap­pear. But be­cause it can also be used to by­pass pay­walls, it’s long been a thorn in the side of many me­dia or­ga­ni­za­tions.

While the ex­act na­ture of the FBI in­ves­ti­ga­tion has­n’t been con­firmed, it is spec­u­lated it can be re­lated to copy­right or CSAM (child sex­ual abuse ma­te­r­ial) dis­sem­i­na­tion is­sues. Altogether, the sit­u­a­tion sug­gests grow­ing pres­sure on who­ever runs Archive.is, and on in­ter­me­di­aries that help make its ser­vice ac­ces­si­ble. AdGuard DNS, as it turns out, may have just be­come one such pres­sure point.

A few weeks ago, we were con­tacted by a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of an or­ga­ni­za­tion called the Web Abuse Association Defense, a French group claim­ing to fight against child pornog­ra­phy. Their web­site is we­babusede­fense.com, and here is the archived ver­sion as of November 7.

They de­manded that we block the do­main archive.to­day (and its mir­rors) in AdGuard DNS, al­leg­ing that the site’s ad­min had re­fused to re­move il­le­gal con­tent since 2023. To be clear, Archive.today al­lows users to take “snapshots” of any web­pages, in­clud­ing po­ten­tially il­le­gal ma­te­r­ial. In such cases, it’s the site ad­min’s job to re­spond to com­plaints and promptly re­move that con­tent.

This struck us as strange — we’re not a host­ing provider, and it seemed un­usual for an in­fra­struc­ture-level ser­vice like ours to be asked to take ac­tion like this.

Soon af­ter, the sit­u­a­tion es­ca­lated into what we could only de­scribe as di­rect threats:

We won’t share all the screen­shots here, but there were sev­eral sim­i­lar mes­sages.

We sought le­gal ad­vice, and un­for­tu­nately dis­cov­ered that French law, specif­i­cally Article 6-I-7 of the Loi pour la Confiance dans l’É­conomie Numérique (LCEN), might ac­tu­ally re­quire us to re­spond and ap­ply block­ing mea­sures, at least for French users.

That said, this whole sit­u­a­tion shows just how in­ad­e­quate this reg­u­la­tion is. Such de­ci­sions should be made by a court — a pri­vate com­pany should­n’t have to de­cide what counts as “illegal” con­tent un­der threat of le­gal ac­tion.

Even so, the story did­n’t quite add up. Since some­one was try­ing to pres­sure us into tak­ing ac­tion, we de­cided to con­tact the other side, Archive.today, di­rectly.

We sent an email to Archive.today’s con­tact ad­dress and asked two sim­ple ques­tions:

Can they re­move the il­le­gal con­tent from the URLs we were in­formed about?

Is it true that they re­fused to re­move such con­tent in the past, and had they been no­ti­fied about it be­fore?

They replied within a few hours. The re­sponse was straight­for­ward: the il­le­gal con­tent would be re­moved (and we ver­i­fied that it was), and they had never re­ceived any pre­vi­ous no­ti­fi­ca­tions about those URLs.

Moreover, they hinted that Archive.today had been tar­geted by a cam­paign of “serial” com­plaints, sup­pos­edly from French or­ga­ni­za­tions, sent to var­i­ous com­pa­nies and in­sti­tu­tions that could po­ten­tially harm the site. They even shared a link demon­strat­ing a com­plaint sim­i­lar to the one we had re­ceived.

At that point, things were look­ing in­creas­ingly odd, so we de­cided to dig deeper into the “complainant.”

The Web Abuse Association Defense web­site ref­er­ences sev­eral well-known or­ga­ni­za­tions — Europol, OFAC, NCA — yet pro­vides no de­tails or ev­i­dence of any co­op­er­a­tion with them.

The as­so­ci­a­tion it­self was reg­is­tered in February–March 2025, around the same time its web­site ap­peared. There is very lit­tle pub­lic in­for­ma­tion about it. Interestingly, reg­is­ter­ing an as­so­ci­a­tion in France can ap­par­ently be done en­tirely on­line and does not re­quire proof of iden­tity.

The as­so­ci­a­tion is reg­is­tered at an ad­dress used for mass com­pany reg­is­tra­tion, which is­n’t in­her­ently prob­lem­atic but it does in­di­cate that the en­tire reg­is­tra­tion process could have been car­ried out on­line by a sin­gle per­son.

Its Twitter/X ac­count ap­peared only re­cently — in August 2025. It has just four fol­low­ers, and its feed con­sists of just a few re­posts.

None of this proves any­thing by it­self, but some­thing still does­n’t add up. In their first email, the “head” of the as­so­ci­a­tion claimed that their cor­re­spon­dence with Archive.today started with a bailiff re­port from 2023. That time­line sim­ply does­n’t fit.

We ex­am­ined the so-called “bailiff re­ports” they had sent us as ev­i­dence. It’s im­por­tant to note that these aren’t bailiff re­ports in the English sense — they’re “constat d’huissier sur Internet,” of­fi­cial records of on­line con­tent such as web­pages, posts, or videos. These par­tic­u­lar re­ports were or­dered on­line via the ser­vice called Qualijuris, and, based on the time­stamps, most of them were also cre­ated in August 2025 — not 2023.

Only two of these bailiff re­ports were or­dered in 2023 from a sim­i­lar ser­vice. What’s in­ter­est­ing is that they weren’t or­dered by WAAD. The name of the per­son who or­dered these bailiff re­ports matches the name that ap­pears in the cor­re­spon­dence shared with us by the Archive.today ad­min­is­tra­tor — the same one he wrote about on X in 2024. In that case, the com­plaint ap­peared to come from a real lawyer — but some­one had reg­is­tered a do­main with the lawyer’s sur­name, con­tain­ing noth­ing but a redi­rect to the lawyer’s ac­tual web­site, and did it on the same day the com­plaint was sent. The do­main was used solely to send the emails and it is not ac­tive any­more. Interestingly, that email also in­voked the LCEN law.

So what is the link be­tween WAAD and that lawyer from be­fore? Are these bailiff re­ports real and could it be that this is a case of im­per­son­ation of a real per­son? We don’t know yet, but we hope to dis­cover the truth soon enough.

Unfortunately, we could­n’t dig any deeper about who ex­actly is be­hind WAAD. The do­main we­babusede­fense.com is reg­is­tered with name.com, but own­er­ship in­for­ma­tion (including his­tor­i­cal records) is hid­den. They use ProtonMail for email, so that’s an­other dead end. The site it­self is be­hind Cloudflare, mak­ing fur­ther trac­ing im­pos­si­ble.

With every­thing said and done, here’s where things stand now:

The il­le­gal con­tent was promptly re­moved from Archive.today af­ter we no­ti­fied them.

The com­plaints against the site look ex­tremely sus­pi­cious. In our case, they came from an or­ga­ni­za­tion that was only re­cently reg­is­tered that seems de­lib­er­ately set up to hide the iden­ti­ties of those be­hind it.

The sam­ple com­plaint shared by Archive.today’s ad­min shows signs of im­per­son­at­ing a real per­son. We have con­tacted the per­son in ques­tion and are cur­rently wait­ing for a re­ply.

In both our case and that other ex­am­ple, the re­cip­i­ents were pres­sured to act un­der the French LCEN law. However, that same law also pro­vides penal­ties for false re­ports:

Art. 6-I-4 LCEN:

4. Any per­son who pre­sents con­tent or ac­tiv­ity to the per­sons re­ferred to in para­graph 2 as be­ing il­le­gal with the aim of hav­ing it re­moved or its dis­sem­i­na­tion stopped, when they know this in­for­ma­tion to be in­ac­cu­rate, shall be pun­ished by one year’s im­pris­on­ment and a fine of €15,000.

We be­lieve there are in­di­ca­tions of crim­i­nal be­hav­ior here that should be in­ves­ti­gated by law en­force­ment. Therefore, we will file an of­fi­cial com­plaint with the French po­lice, in­clud­ing all rel­e­vant de­tails.

All this is un­fold­ing amid re­ports of an FBI in­ves­ti­ga­tion into the owner of Archive.today. It seems that this in­ves­ti­ga­tion may be re­lated to CSAM host­ing. While we can’t con­firm any con­nec­tion be­tween that case and ours, the tim­ing is cer­tainly sus­pi­cious.

Not your com­puter? Use a pri­vate brows­ing win­dow to sign in. Learn more about us­ing Guest mode

Every minute, a new clock is dis­played that has been gen­er­ated by nine dif­fer­ent AI mod­els.

Each model is al­lowed 2000 to­kens to gen­er­ate its clock. Here is its prompt:

Create HTML/CSS of an ana­log clock show­ing ${time}. Include num­bers (or nu­mer­als) if you wish, and have a CSS an­i­mated sec­ond hand. Make it re­spon­sive and use a white back­ground. Return ONLY the HTML/CSS code with no mark­down for­mat­ting.

Created by Brian Moore. You can also fol­low him on Instagram. Idea in­spired by Matthew Rayfield.

LibrePods un­locks Apple’s ex­clu­sive AirPods fea­tures on non-Ap­ple de­vices. Get ac­cess to noise con­trol modes, adap­tive trans­parency, ear de­tec­tion, hear­ing aid, cus­tomized trans­parency mode, bat­tery sta­tus, and more - all the pre­mium fea­tures you paid for but Apple locked to their ecosys­tem.

Most fea­tures should work with any AirPods. Currently, I’ve only got AirPods Pro 2 to test with.

* Noise Control Modes: Easily switch be­tween noise con­trol modes with­out hav­ing to reach out to your AirPods to long press

* Ear Detection: Controls your mu­sic au­to­mat­i­cally when you put your AirPods in or take them out, and switch to phone speaker when you take them out

* Head Gestures: Answer calls just by nod­ding your head

* Features marked with an as­ter­isk re­quire the Bluetooth DID (Device Identification) hook to be en­abled.

See the pinned is­sue for a com­plete fea­ture list and roadmap.

for the old ver­sion see the Linux README. (doesn’t have many fea­tures, main­tainer did­n’t have time to work on it)

If you are us­ing ColorOS/OxygenOS 16, you don’t need root for ba­sic fea­tures! You will still not be able to cus­tomize trans­parency mode and setup hear­ing aid, and use Bluetooth Multipoint. For every­one else:

You must have a rooted de­vice with Xposed to use LibrePods on Android. This is due to a bug in the Android Bluetooth stack. Please up­vote the is­sue by click­ing the ‘+1’ icon on the IssueTracker page.

There are no ex­cep­tions to the root re­quire­ment un­til Google/your OEM fig­ures out a fix.

Until then, you must xposed. I used to pro­vide a non-xposed method too, where the mod­ule used over­layfs to re­place the blue­tooth li­brary with a lo­cally patched one, but that was bro­ken due to how var­i­ous de­vices han­dled over­layfs and a patched li­brary. With xposed, you can also en­able the DID hook en­abling a few ex­tra fea­tures.

Turns out, if you change the man­u­fac­turerid to that of Apple, you get ac­cess to sev­eral spe­cial fea­tures!

Upto two de­vices can be si­mul­ta­ne­ously con­nected to AirPods, for au­dio and con­trol both. Seamless con­nec­tion switch­ing. The same no­ti­fi­ca­tion shows up on Apple de­vice when Android takes over the AirPods as if it were an Apple de­vice (“Move to iPhone”). Android also shows a popup when the other de­vice takes over.

Accessibility set­tings like cus­tomiz­ing trans­parency mode (amplification, bal­ance, tone, con­ver­sa­tion boost, and am­bi­ent noise re­duc­tion), and loud sound re­duc­tion can be con­fig­ured.

All hear­ing aid cus­tomiza­tions can be done from Android, in­clud­ing set­ting the au­dio­gram re­sult. The app does­n’t pro­vide a way to take a hear­ing test be­cause it re­quires much more pre­ci­sion. It is much bet­ter to use an al­ready avail­able au­dio­gram re­sult.

To en­able these fea­tures, en­able App Settings -> act as Apple Device.

Due to re­cent AirPods’ firmware up­grades, you must en­able Off lis­ten­ing mode to switch to Off. This is be­cause in this mode, louds sounds are not re­duced.

If you have take both AirPods out, the app will au­to­mat­i­cally switch to the phone speaker. But, Android might keep on try­ing to con­nect to the AirPods be­cause the phone is still con­nected to them, just the A2DP pro­file is not con­nected. The app tries to dis­con­nect the A2DP pro­file as soon as it de­tects that Android has con­nected again if they’re not in the ear.

When re­nam­ing your AirPods through the app, you’ll need to re-pair them with your phone for the name change to take ef­fect. This is a lim­i­ta­tion of how Bluetooth de­vice nam­ing works on Android.

If you want the AirPods icon and bat­tery sta­tus to show in Android Settings app, in­stall the app as a sys­tem app by us­ing the root mod­ule.

This pro­gram is free soft­ware: you can re­dis­trib­ute it and/​or mod­ify it un­der the terms of the GNU General Public License as pub­lished by the Free Software Foundation, ei­ther ver­sion 3 of the License, or any later ver­sion.

This pro­gram is dis­trib­uted in the hope that it will be use­ful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; with­out even the im­plied war­ranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more de­tails.

You should have re­ceived a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this pro­gram. If not, see https://​www.gnu.org/​li­censes/.

All trade­marks, lo­gos, and brand names are the prop­erty of their re­spec­tive own­ers. Use of them does not im­ply any af­fil­i­a­tion with or en­dorse­ment by them. All AirPods im­ages, sym­bols, and the SF Pro font are the prop­erty of Apple Inc.

Mozilla is de­vel­op­ing a built‑in AI as­sis­tant for Firefox that will be of­fered as a third brows­ing mode along­side Normal and Private tabs. They’re call­ing it “Window AI.”

Details are still scarce. Based on Mozilla’s of­fi­cial an­nounce­ment on Thursday (13th), it looks like a deeper im­ple­men­ta­tion than the ex­ist­ing side­bar that gives ac­cess to third‑party chat­bots (ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, etc.). The post stresses the fea­ture will be opt-in and that the user “is in con­trol.”

There’s a wait­list to try the fea­ture and a Mozilla fo­rum thread invit­ing peo­ple to “help shape” the ini­tia­tive.

It’s safe to say that the peo­ple who vol­un­teered to “shape” the ini­tia­tive want it dead and buried. Of the 52 re­sponses at the time of writ­ing, *all* re­jected the idea and asked Mozilla to stop shov­ing AI fea­tures into Firefox.

I don’t know whether the neg­a­tive re­ac­tions re­flect the ma­jor­ity of Firefox users or are just a noisy mi­nor­ity. Mozilla, af­ter all, likely has a clearer view of the whole user base.

What strikes me as odd is the de­ci­sion to po­si­tion it­self as just an­other AI‑enabled web browser, pick­ing a fight with big techs and bet­ter‑funded star­tups whose users are less hos­tile (and some­times en­thu­si­as­tic) about adding AI to web brows­ing.

Mozilla seems to be try­ing to wedge it­self be­tween those who re­ject AI and those who want gen­er­a­tive‑AI fea­tures in the browser — try­ing to please every­one — as this ex­cerpt from the post shows:

We see a lot of promise in AI browser fea­tures mak­ing your on­line ex­pe­ri­ence smoother, more help­ful, and free from the every­day dis­rup­tions that break your flow. But browsers made by AI com­pa­nies ask you to make a hard choice — ei­ther use AI all the time or don’t use it at all.

We’re fo­cused on mak­ing the best browser, which means rec­og­niz­ing that every­one has dif­fer­ent needs. For some, AI is part of every­day life. For oth­ers, it’s use­ful only oc­ca­sion­ally. And many are sim­ply cu­ri­ous about what it can of­fer, but un­sure where to start.

Regardless of your choice, with Firefox, you’re in con­trol.

Those un­happy have an­other op­tion: use an AI‑free Firefox fork such as LibreWolf, Waterfox, or Zen Browser.

TLDR: I built a portable step-se­quencer syn­the­sizer for my daugh­ter’s third birth­day. It has four slid­ers that con­trol four notes in a loop­ing se­quence. Slide up = higher pitch, slide down = lower.

It’s a child-friendly, tac­tile mu­sic toy. Here’s the pink edi­tion in ac­tion:

My daugh­ter re­ceived a Montessori ac­tiv­ity board full of switches and LEDs for her first birth­day. Watching her twist knobs and flip the switches re­minded me of the con­trol sur­face of a synth, and I won­dered if I could build a mu­si­cal ver­sion - some­thing sim­ple, tac­tile, and cre­ative that did­n’t re­quire hold­ing down but­tons to keep the sound go­ing. A year later I fi­nally de­cided to build it. I had no prior hard­ware ex­pe­ri­ence, so this be­came an ex­cuse to learn about mi­cro­con­trollers, CAD, PCB de­sign, and 3D print­ing.

I started the pro­ject with a 15 year old Arduino Inventors Kit and only a vague idea about how to use it. The first goal was sim­ple: build a ba­sic MIDI con­troller on a bread­board. If I could get some po­ten­tiome­ter read­ings, map them to 12 dis­crete val­ues - one for each note in an oc­tave - and emit MIDI mes­sages, I would have taken a small step in the right di­rec­tion. Adding an on­board synth mod­ule and de­sign­ing a pretty box to put it in could wait un­til later.

Reading the po­ten­tiome­ter in­puts and turn­ing them into the MIDI mes­sages us­ing the Arduino MIDI li­brary was easy enough. To hear the out­put, I wrote a small Python script that in­ter­cepted the MIDI mes­sages and for­warded them to my Mac’s de­fault MIDI de­vice, which Logic Pro could pick up. That let me “play” the bread­board through soft­ware in­stru­ments.

Once I had the hang of wiring up po­ten­tiome­ters and ro­tary en­coders, the next step was to move the au­dio syn­the­sis from Logic to my bread­board. For this I used a lit­tle $12.95 SAM2695 syn­the­siser mod­ule with an in­te­grated am­pli­fier and speaker. Its in­ner work­ings re­main a mys­tery to me but it does what I need it to and I was happy re­duce the amount of time to get a func­tion­ing pro­to­type into my daugh­ter’s hands. I also moved to an Elegoo Nano here due to its low cost and in­creased num­ber of ana­log pins.

Next, I added small OLED screen to pro­vide some vi­sual feed­back and char­ac­ter and used the handy u8g2 graph­ics li­brary. This was trick­ier than I ex­pected: the Nano has so lit­tle RAM that I could­n’t buffer a full frame. I had to up­date the screen in small patches, and large up­dates were slow enough that they oc­ca­sion­ally in­ter­fered with en­coder reads, and caused laggy notes at faster tem­pos. I’ve still got some work to do to iron out block­ing screen up­dates, but for now I pushed through and ac­cepted a bit of lag. I added a lit­tle danc­ing panda that I adapted from one I found in a pixel art tu­to­r­ial which I can no longer find - if you’re the orig­i­nal cre­ator, please let me know so I can credit you!

For de­vel­op­ing on-the-go, I dis­cov­ered the Wokwimicrocontroller sim­u­la­tor. It let me build a vir­tual schematic and test code with­out lug­gin around the my frag­ile pro­to­type. They have a free on­line sim­u­la­tor and a paid VS Code plu­gin that lets you cre­ate your di­a­grams in the IDE.

Once I had a func­tional cir­cuit it was time to move on to de­sign­ing an en­clo­sure and as­sem­bling a com­plete ver­sion of the syn­the­siser that my daugh­ter could play with.

After wiring up the bread­board, the next hur­dle was fig­ur­ing out how to build a proper en­clo­sure. I looked for off-the-shelf cases, but noth­ing matched the size I needed, and every­thing seemed to come in ei­ther black or beige. So I de­cided to learn some ba­sic CAD and 3D-print the en­clo­sure on a friend’s Bambu Labs A1 Mini.

I down­loaded Fusion 360 and started fol­low­ing tu­to­ri­als. With only an hour or two to spare in the evenings, progress was slow at first. I’d never used any CAD soft­ware be­fore, so I was con­stantly switch­ing be­tween learn­ing the soft­ware and try­ing to make ac­tual progress on the de­sign. For other be­gin­ners, I highly rec­om­mend Product Design Online’s Learn Fusion 360 in 30 Days and this ex­cel­lent video by wermy.

After a few weeks of trial-and-er­ror, I fi­nally had a de­sign I could print:

Thank you Tom for print­ing these! A year’s sup­ply of fil­a­ment com­ing your way.

Moving the cir­cuit to a proper PCB felt daunt­ing, so for the first ver­sion I hand-wired every­thing on a sol­der­able bread­board. The good: hang­ing out and drink­ing some wine with my friend, who kindly of­fered to help with the sol­der­ing. The bad: when the time fi­nally came to close the two halves of the en­clo­sure, stuff­ing the rats nest of wires in­side ended up putting pres­sure on a bunch of the del­i­cate sol­dered joints and break­ing them. My daugh­ter could play around a bit with it - enough for me to con­vince my­self that she’d gen­uinely en­joy us­ing it - but it was frag­ile. I also wanted to make a few units for friends, which meant I needed some­thing more ro­bust and faster to as­sem­ble. Time to de­sign a PCB.

Romain, I def­i­nitely owe you a bot­tle or two…

Once again I was back on YouTube and fum­bling my way through an un­fa­mil­iar work­flow, though I stuck with Fusion 360 which has its own elec­tron­ics de­sign suite. For my first at­tempt I de­cided that I’d fo­cus on sur­face-mount­ing the var­i­ous com­po­nents and save in­te­grat­ing the mi­cro­con­troller into the board for a fu­ture pro­ject. A large chunk of the time here was spent read­ing datasheets, sourc­ing parts and im­port­ing their foot­prints/​mod­els into Fusion 360. Once I had learned the ba­sics, I was able to route the cir­cuit on a 2-layer board. One of the nice things about Fusion is that you get a full 3D model of the as­sem­bled PCB, which makes de­sign­ing the en­clo­sure much eas­ier.

When I was fin­ished, I ex­ported the PCB de­sign file and up­loaded it to JLCPCB. Five boards (the min­i­mum or­der) cost £35.41 in­clud­ing ship­ping, and they ar­rived five days later. It blows my mind that this is pos­si­ble.

For my first ver­sion I had de­cided to use 4 AA bat­ter­ies and use the Arduino’s built-in volt­age con­verter to pro­vide a steady 5 volts. Something I over­looked, how­ever, is that the Arduino’s VIN pin that pro­vides a reg­u­lated 5V to the board re­quires 7-12V in­put, while my bat­ter­ies will pro­vide, at best, 6V when new. The board seemed to work OK at this volt­age but it would be vul­ner­a­ble to ran­dom re­sets as the volt­age starts to sag and a short bat­tery life.

For the next it­er­a­tion I de­cided to get rid of one of the bat­ter­ies and in­tro­duce an Adafruit Miniboost to pro­vide a reg­u­lated 5V power sup­ply to the Arduino from the com­bine 4.5V from the three AA bat­ter­ies. This al­lowed me to re­duce the weight a lit­tle bit and pro­vide the synth with a sta­ble sup­ply of power for a longer du­ra­tion.

Finally, I up­dated the en­clo­sure so that I could se­curely at­tach the PCB and added a neat lit­tle bat­tery com­part­ment. I also added a small bezel to raise the height of OLED dis­play.

It’s been just over a week since my daugh­ter un­wrapped her new synth. It now lives on the shelf with her other toys, and so far it gets reg­u­lar use and is hold­ing up well. One of my goals was to make some­thing fun to fid­dle with at a su­per­fi­cial level, but with enough depth to stay in­ter­est­ing as she gets older. The first part seems true, and I’ll see how the sec­ond plays out over the com­ing months. There are still a few kinks to iron out, such as the lag when up­dat­ing the screen. I’m also plan­ning to up­grade the Elegoo Nano to an ESP32, which should sim­plify the firmware and open up more op­tions for fun dis­play graph­ics.

After watch­ing a few chil­dren and adults (musical and non-mu­si­cal) play with it, I think there might be the germ of a real prod­uct here. With a bet­ter synth en­gine, au­dio out­puts, and a way to chain mul­ti­ple units to­gether, it could be a play­ful in­tro­duc­tion to elec­tronic mu­sic for older kids - maybe even adults. However, adding fea­tures is one thing, but ac­tu­ally bring­ing a prod­uct to mar­ket is an­other. The chal­lenges aren’t just tech­ni­cal: they’re reg­u­la­tory and fi­nan­cial. Safety cer­ti­fi­ca­tion (UKCA/CE, and FCC in the US) can cost £5-10K or more. Manufacturing is an­other hur­dle. A 3D-printed en­clo­sure is fine for a pro­to­type, but a real prod­uct likely needs in­jec­tion-molded parts, which re­quire ex­pen­sive tool­ing. Even a small pro­duc­tion run would need more up­front cap­i­tal than I can sen­si­bly in­vest right now.

For the mo­ment I’m treat­ing it as a learn­ing pro­ject, but the re­sponse so far has been en­cour­ag­ing. A more pol­ished open-source ver­sion for mak­ers, or pos­si­bly a small Kickstarter cam­paign, might be vi­able next steps. If any­one read­ing this has ex­pe­ri­ence bring­ing small-run hard­ware to mar­ket, I’d love to hear from you.

A re­port was re­cently pub­lished by an AI-research com­pany called Anthropic. They are the ones who no­tably cre­ated Claude, an AI-assistant for cod­ing. Personally, I don’t use it but that is be­sides the point. Before we start, it’s im­por­tant to say I don’t have any­thing against them, or AI in gen­eral. I do have some doc­u­mented con­cerns but I am not “Anti-AI”, or what­ever. Rather than the tech­nol­ogy it­self, it’s the in­dus­try’s per­cep­tion of it, and the way it is in­serted every­where, even when un­nec­es­sary that both­ers me. However, that too is a bit be­sides the point.

Today, I wanted to dis­cuss the Paper (or Report, how­ever you want to call it) that was re­cently pub­lished by them. Looking at the ex­ec­u­tive sum­mary, this para­graph jumps out im­me­di­ately.

In mid-Sep­tem­ber 2025, we de­tected a highly so­phis­ti­cated cy­ber es­pi­onage op­er­a­tion con­ducted by a Chinese state-spon­sored group we’ve des­ig­nated GTG-1002 that rep­re­sents a fun­da­men­tal shift in how ad­vanced threat ac­tors use AI. Our in­ves­ti­ga­tion re­vealed a well-re­sourced, pro­fes­sion­ally co­or­di­nated op­er­a­tion in­volv­ing mul­ti­ple si­mul­ta­ne­ous tar­geted in­tru­sions. The op­er­a­tion tar­geted roughly 30 en­ti­ties and our in­ves­ti­ga­tion val­i­dated a hand­ful of suc­cess­ful in­tru­sions.

This is ex­tremely in­ter­est­ing for many rea­sons:

* Anthropic seem­ingly dis­rupted an APT’s cam­paign, though a num­ber of com­pa­nies and gov­ern­ment en­ti­ties were af­fected,

* This highly-ad­vanced APT does­n’t use its own in­fra, but rather re­lies on Claude to co­or­di­nate its au­toma­tion (??? Why, though ?),

* I as­sume they run ex­ploits and cus­tom tools ? If so, what are these ?

* Anthropic was able to at­tribute this at­tack to a Chinese-affiliated state-spon­sored group.

If you’re like me, you then ea­gerly read the rest of the pa­per, hop­ing to find clues and tech­ni­cal de­tails on the TTPs (Tactics, Techniques and Procedures), or IoCs (Indicators of Compromise) to ad­vance the re­search. However, the re­port very quickly falls flat, which sucks.

The pri­mary goal of a Threat-Intelligence re­port such as this one would be to in­form other par­ties of a new type of at­tack, and arte­facts they might use to dis­cover the at­tack on their net­work. This is typ­i­cally done by shar­ing do­main-names linked with the cam­paign, MD5 or SHA512 hashes you could look for on Virus Exchange web­sites such as VirusTotal, or other mark­ers that would help you ver­ify that your net­works are safe. As an ex­am­ple, here is the French CERT shar­ing (in French, but an English ver­sion is avail­able too) about APT28’s TTPs.

We can see:

* MITRE ATT&CK used to de­ter­mine what are the tech­niques used (eg: Account Manipulation, Antivirus eva­sion, etc.),

* Emails used for phish­ing, orig­i­nat­ing IPs and even date when these emails are sent,

* Tooling (VPN soft­ware, but also what kind of tools) used by the APT,

This re­port is just one I picked ran­domly by skim­ming through their pub­li­ca­tions. Any se­ri­ous CERT or Threat-Intel com­pany would pub­lish things in the same fash­ion, be­cause this is the in­dus­try stan­dard. These pub­li­ca­tions are made pub­lic to in­form Security Operation Centers around the world about how to de­tect and pre­vent those at­tacks.

In this case, none of the these mark­ers are pre­sent in the re­port. In fact, not a whole lot of the in­for­ma­tion is ver­i­fi­able, which is an­other prob­lem.

The hu­man op­er­a­tor tasked in­stances of Claude Code to op­er­ate in groups as au­tonomous pen­e­tra­tion test­ing or­ches­tra­tors and agents, with the threat ac­tor able to lever­age AI to ex­e­cute 80-90% of tac­ti­cal op­er­a­tions in­de­pen­dently at phys­i­cally im­pos­si­ble re­quest rates

This fig­ure (80-90%) is not ver­i­fi­able ei­ther. How do we know this is ac­tu­ally the case ? I have no doubt so-called Autonomous agents are be­ing used in these cam­paigns, in some ca­pac­ity. However this re­port clearly states that Autonomous Agents per­form ac­tive ex­ploita­tion, and even data ex­fil­tra­tion.

What kind of tool­ing is used ? What kind of in­for­ma­tion has been ex­tracted ? Who is at risk ? How does a CERT iden­ti­fies an AI agent in their net­works ? None of these ques­tions are an­swered. It’s not like Anthropic does­n’t have ac­cess to this data, since they claim they were able to stop it.

Upon re­ceiv­ing au­tho­riza­tion from the hu­man op­er­a­tors, Claude ex­e­cuted sys­tem­atic cre­den­tial col­lec­tion across tar­geted net­works. This in­volved query­ing in­ter­nal ser­vices, ex­tract­ing au­then­ti­ca­tion cer­tifi­cates from con­fig­u­ra­tions, and test­ing har­vested cre­den­tials across dis­cov­ered sys­tems.

How ? Did it run Mimikatz ? Did it ac­cess Cloud en­vi­ron­ments ? We don’t even know what kind of sys­tems were af­fected. There is no de­tails, or fact-based ev­i­dence to sup­port these claims or even help other peo­ple pro­tect their net­works.

The re­port goes on to claim that upon de­tec­tion, the ac­counts were closed and im­ple­mented “enhancements”, and then drops this gem:

We no­ti­fied rel­e­vant au­thor­i­ties and in­dus­try part­ners, and shared in­for­ma­tion with im­pacted en­ti­ties where ap­pro­pri­ate.

What is that even sup­posed to mean ? You claim your agents were able to find ex­ploitable vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties in mul­ti­ple ser­vices. Were these patched ? What about the ex­tracted data ? What about the af­fected peo­ple ? Do you care about this at all ?

Look, is it very likely that Threat Actors are us­ing these Agents with bad in­ten­tions, no one is dis­put­ing that. But this re­port does not meet the stan­dard of pub­lish­ing for se­ri­ous com­pa­nies. The same goes with re­search in other fields. You can­not just claim things and not back it up in any way, and we can­not as an in­dus­try ac­cept that it’s OK for com­pa­nies to re­lease this.

There seem to be a pat­tern for Tech Companies (especially in AI, but they’re not the only cul­prits) out there to just an­nounce things, gen­er­ate hype and then un­der-deliever. Just be­cause it works with VCs does­n’t mean it should work with us. We should, as an in­dus­try, ex­pect bet­ter.

For in­stance, it at­trib­utes the at­tacks to a Chinese State-affiliated (!!!) group, but does not go on to give any de­tails. Which APT is it ? What helped you de­ter­mine this ?

Attribution is a very se­ri­ous mat­ter, with some­times diplo­mat­i­cal im­pli­ca­tions. You can’t just go on and point the fin­ger at any­one and ex­pect peo­ple to be­lieve you for no rea­son. In a time of in­creas­ing ten­sions be­tween the West and China, it does not seem like the smart thing to do at all. Frankly, I don’t un­der­stand who was stu­pid enough to ap­prove this to be re­leased. For all we know, the “advanced threat ac­tors” they’re talk­ing about here could just be script kid­dies try­ing to au­to­mate ffuf and sqlmap com­mands.

If they’re go­ing to re­lease IoCs and proof of every­thing, I’d be happy to share them here. But un­til them, I will say this: this pa­per would not pass any re­view board. It’s ir­re­spon­si­ble at best to ac­cuse other coun­tries of se­ri­ous things with­out back­ing it up. Yes, I am aware that Chinese-linked APTs are out there and very ag­gres­sive, and Yes, I am aware that Threat Actors mis­use LLMs all the time, but that is be­sides the point. We need fact-based ev­i­dence. We need to be able to ver­ify all this. Otherwise, any­one can say any­thing, on the premise that it’s prob­a­bly hap­pen­ing. But that’s not good enough.

So if the re­port does not give any de­tails on TTPs and de­tec­tions, what was the pur­pose of this re­port ex­actly ?

There is a para­graph at the end that seem to give us a clue:

The cy­ber­se­cu­rity com­mu­nity needs to as­sume a fun­da­men­tal change has oc­curred: Security teams should ex­per­i­ment with ap­ply­ing AI for de­fense in ar­eas like SOC au­toma­tion, threat de­tec­tion, vul­ner­a­bil­ity as­sess­ment, and in­ci­dent re­sponse and build ex­pe­ri­ence with what works in their spe­cific en­vi­ron­ments.

“Security teams should ex­per­i­ment with ap­ply­ing AI for de­fense”

Hmm. But who sells this kind of AI they’re talk­ing about here ?

At the end of the day, this shit is a pa­thetic ex­cuse of a re­port and should not be taken as any­thing else than a shame­less at­tempt at sell­ing more of their prod­uct. This is shame­ful and ex­tremely un­pro­fes­sional, at best. This dis­re­gard for ba­sics ethics in or­der to sell just a lit­tle bit more make me want to never use their prod­uct, ever.

Just a few months ago we re­leased Nano Banana, our Gemini 2.5 Flash Image model. From restor­ing old pho­tos to gen­er­at­ing mini fig­urines, Nano Banana was a big step in im­age edit­ing that em­pow­ered ca­sual cre­ators to ex­press their cre­ativ­ity. Today, we’re in­tro­duc­ing Nano Banana Pro (Gemini 3 Pro Image), our new state-of-the art im­age gen­er­a­tion and edit­ing model. Built on Gemini 3 Pro, Nano Banana Pro uses Gemini’s state-of-the-art rea­son­ing and real-world knowl­edge to vi­su­al­ize in­for­ma­tion bet­ter than ever be­fore.

How Nano Banana Pro helps you bring any idea or de­sign to life­Nano Banana Pro can help you vi­su­al­ize any idea and de­sign any­thing - from pro­to­types, to rep­re­sent­ing data as in­fo­graph­ics, to turn­ing hand­writ­ten notes into di­a­grams.With Nano Banana Pro, now you can:Gen­er­ate more ac­cu­rate, con­text-rich vi­su­als based on en­hanced rea­son­ing, world knowl­edge and real-time in­for­ma­tion­With Gemini 3’s ad­vanced rea­son­ing, Nano Banana Pro does­n’t just cre­ate beau­ti­ful im­ages, it also helps you cre­ate more help­ful con­tent. You can get ac­cu­rate ed­u­ca­tional ex­plain­ers to learn more about a new sub­ject, like con­text-rich in­fo­graph­ics and di­a­grams based on the con­tent you pro­vide or facts from the real world. Nano Banana Pro can also con­nect to Google Search’s vast knowl­edge base to help you cre­ate a quick snap­shot for a recipe or vi­su­al­ize real-time in­for­ma­tion like weather or sports.

An in­fo­graphic of the com­mon house plant, String of Turtles, with in­for­ma­tion on ori­gins, care es­sen­tials and growth pat­terns.Prompt: Create an in­fo­graphic about this plant fo­cus­ing on in­ter­est­ing in­for­ma­tion.

Step-by-step in­fo­graphic for mak­ing Elaichi Chai (cardamom tea), demon­strat­ing the abil­ity to vi­su­al­ize recipes and real-world in­for­ma­tion.Prompt: Create an in­fo­graphic that shows how to make elaichi chai

We used Nano Banana Pro to pull in real-time weather via Search ground­ing to build a pop-art in­fo­graphic.

Generate bet­ter vi­su­als with more ac­cu­rate, leg­i­ble text di­rectly in the im­age in mul­ti­ple lan­guages­Nano Banana Pro is the best model for cre­at­ing im­ages with cor­rectly ren­dered and leg­i­ble text di­rectly in the im­age, whether you’re look­ing for a short tagline, or a long para­graph. Gemini 3 is great at un­der­stand­ing depth and nu­ance, which un­locks a world of pos­si­bil­i­ties with im­age edit­ing and gen­er­a­tion - es­pe­cially with text. Now you can cre­ate more de­tailed text in mock­ups or posters with a wider va­ri­ety of tex­tures, fonts and cal­lig­ra­phy. With Gemini’s en­hanced mul­ti­lin­gual rea­son­ing, you can gen­er­ate text in mul­ti­ple lan­guages, or lo­cal­ize and trans­late your con­tent so you can scale in­ter­na­tion­ally and/​or share con­tent more eas­ily with friends and fam­ily.

A black and white sto­ry­board sketch show­ing an es­tab­lish­ing shot, medium shot, close-up, and POV shot for a film scene.

The word ‘BERLIN’ in­te­grated into the ar­chi­tec­ture of a city block, span­ning across mul­ti­ple build­ings.Prompt: View of a cozy street in Berlin on a bright sunny day, stark shad­ows. the old houses are oddly shaped like let­ters that spell out “BERLIN” Colored in Blue, Red, White and black. The houses still look like houses and the re­sem­blance to let­ters is sub­tle.

Calligraphy in­spired by mean­ing, show­cas­ing the abil­ity to gen­er­ate ex­pres­sive text with a wider va­ri­ety of tex­tures and fonts.Prompt: make 8 min­i­mal­is­tic lo­gos, each is an ex­pres­sive word, and make let­ters con­vey a mes­sage or sound vi­su­ally to ex­press the mean­ing of this word in a dra­matic way. com­po­si­tion: flat vec­tor ren­der­ing of all lo­gos in black on a sin­gle white back­ground

A bev­er­age cam­paign con­cept show­cas­ing ac­cu­rate trans­la­tion and ren­der­ing of English text into Korean.Prompt: trans­late all the English text on the three yel­low and blue cans into Korean, while keep­ing every­thing else the same

Prompt: A vi­brant, eye-catch­ing “TYPOGRAPHY” de­sign on a tex­tured off-white back­ground. The let­ters are bold, blocky, ex­tra con­densed and cre­ate a 3D ef­fect with over­lap­ping lay­ers of bright blue and hot pink, each with a halftone dot pat­tern, evok­ing a retro print aes­thetic. 16:9 as­pect ra­tio

Blending text and tex­ture in a cre­ative way by in­te­grat­ing the phrase into a wood­chop­ping scene.Prompt: Create an im­age show­ing the phrase “How much wood would a wood­chuck chuck if a wood­chuck could chuck wood” made out of wood chucked by a wood­chuck.

Consistency by de­sign: With Nano Banana Pro, you can blend more el­e­ments than ever be­fore, us­ing up to 14 im­ages and main­tain­ing the con­sis­tency and re­sem­blance of up to 5 peo­ple. Whether turn­ing sketches into prod­ucts or blue­prints into pho­to­re­al­is­tic 3D struc­tures, you can now bridge the gap be­tween con­cept and cre­ation. Apply your de­sired vi­sual look and feel to your mock­ups with ease, en­sur­ing your brand­ing re­mains seam­less and con­sis­tent across every touch­point.

Maintaining the con­sis­tency of up to 14 in­puts, in­clud­ing mul­ti­ple char­ac­ters, across a com­plex com­po­si­tion.Prompt: A medium shot of the 14 fluffy char­ac­ters sit­ting squeezed to­gether side-by-side on a worn beige fab­ric sofa and on the floor. They are all fac­ing for­wards, watch­ing a vin­tage, wooden-boxed tele­vi­sion set placed on a low wooden table in front of the sofa. The room is dimly lit, with warm light from a win­dow on the left and the glow from the TV il­lu­mi­nat­ing the crea­tures’ faces and fluffy tex­tures. The back­ground is a cozy, slightly clut­tered liv­ing room with a braided rug, a book­shelf with old books, and rus­tic kitchen el­e­ments in the back­ground. The over­all at­mos­phere is warm, cozy, and amused.

Prompt: Combine these im­ages into one ap­pro­pri­ately arranged cin­e­matic im­age in 16:9 for­mat and change the dress on the man­nequin to the dress in the im­age

Prompt: Combine these im­ages into one ap­pro­pri­ately arranged cin­e­matic im­age in 16:9 for­mat

A high-fash­ion ed­i­to­r­ial shot set in a desert land­scape that main­tains the con­sis­tency and re­sem­blance of the peo­ple from the 6 in­put pho­tos.Prompt: Put these five peo­ple and this dog into a sin­gle im­age, they should fit into a stun­ning award-win­ning shot in the style if [sic] a fash­ion ed­i­to­r­ial. The iden­tity of all five peo­ple and their at­tire and the dog must stay con­sis­tent through­out but they can and should be seen from dif­fer­ent an­gles and dis­tances in [sic] as is most nat­ural and suit­able to the scene. Make the colour and light­ing look nat­ural on them all, they look like they nat­u­rally fit into this fash­ion show.

Studio-quality cre­ative con­trols: With Nano Banana Pro’s new ca­pa­bil­i­ties we are putting ad­vanced cre­ative con­trols di­rectly into your hands. Select, re­fine and trans­form any part of an im­age with im­proved lo­cal­ized edit­ing. Adjust cam­era an­gles, change the fo­cus and ap­ply so­phis­ti­cated color grad­ing, or even trans­form scene light­ing (e.g. chang­ing day to night or cre­at­ing a bokeh ef­fect). Your cre­ations are ready for any plat­form, from so­cial me­dia to print, thanks to a range of avail­able as­pect ra­tios and avail­able 2K and 4K res­o­lu­tion

Change the look and feel of an im­age for a range of plat­forms by adapt­ing the as­pect ra­tio.Prompt: change as­pect ra­tio to 1:1 by re­duc­ing back­ground. The char­ac­ter, re­mains ex­actly locked in its cur­rent po­si­tion

Lighting and fo­cus con­trols ap­plied to trans­form a scene from day to night.

Obscure or en­lighten a sec­tion of your im­age with light­ing con­trols to achieve spe­cific dra­matic ef­fects.

Prompt: Generate an im­age with an in­tense chiaroscuro ef­fect. The man should re­tain his orig­i­nal fea­tures and ex­pres­sion. Introduce harsh, di­rec­tional light, ap­pear­ing to come from above and slightly to the left, cast­ing deep, de­fined shad­ows across the face. Only sliv­ers of light il­lu­mi­nat­ing his eyes and cheek­bones, the rest of the face is in deep shadow.

Bring out the de­tails of your com­po­si­tion by ad­just­ing the depth of field or fo­cal point (e.g., fo­cus­ing on the flow­ers).

How you can try Nano Banana Pro to­day­Across our prod­ucts and ser­vices, you now have a choice: the orig­i­nal Nano Banana for fast, fun edit­ing, or Nano Banana Pro for com­plex com­po­si­tions re­quir­ing the high­est qual­ity and vi­su­ally so­phis­ti­cated re­sults.Con­sumers and stu­dents: Rolling out glob­ally in the Gemini app when you se­lect ‘Create im­ages’ with the ‘Thinking’ model. Our free-tier users will re­ceive lim­ited free quo­tas, af­ter which they will re­vert to the orig­i­nal Nano Banana model. Google AI Plus, Pro and Ultra sub­scribers re­ceive higher quo­tas. For AI Mode in Search, Nano Banana Pro is avail­able in the U.S. for Google AI Pro and Ultra sub­scribers. For NotebookLM, Nano Banana Pro is also avail­able for sub­scribers glob­ally.Pro­fes­sion­als: We’re up­grad­ing im­age gen­er­a­tion in Google Ads to Nano Banana Pro to put cut­ting-edge cre­ative and edit­ing power di­rectly into the hands of ad­ver­tis­ers glob­ally. It’s also rolling out start­ing to­day to Workspace cus­tomers in Google Slides and Vids.Developers and en­ter­prise: Starting to roll out in the Gemini API and Google AI Studio, and in Google Antigravity to cre­ate rich UX lay­outs & mock­ups; en­ter­prises can start build­ing in Vertex AI for scaled cre­ation to­day and it’s com­ing soon to Gemini Enterprise.Creatives: Starting to roll out to Google AI Ultra sub­scribers in Flow, our AI film­mak­ing tool, to give cre­atives, film­mak­ers and mar­keters even more pre­ci­sion and con­trol over their frames and scenes.

How to iden­tify AI-generated im­ages in the Gemini ap­pWe be­lieve it’s crit­i­cal to know when an im­age is AI-generated. This is why all me­dia gen­er­ated by Google’s tools are em­bed­ded with our im­per­cep­ti­ble SynthID dig­i­tal wa­ter­mark.To­day, we are putting a pow­er­ful ver­i­fi­ca­tion tool di­rectly in con­sumers’ hands: you can now up­load an im­age into the Gemini app and sim­ply ask if it was gen­er­ated by Google AI, thanks to SynthID tech­nol­ogy. We are start­ing with im­ages, but will ex­pand to au­dio and video soon.

In ad­di­tion to SynthID, we will main­tain a vis­i­ble wa­ter­mark (the Gemini sparkle) on im­ages gen­er­ated by free and Google AI Pro tier users, to make im­ages even more easy to de­tect as Google AI-generated.Recognizing the need for a clean vi­sual can­vas for pro­fes­sional work, we will re­move the vis­i­ble wa­ter­mark from im­ages gen­er­ated by Google AI Ultra sub­scribers and within the Google AI Studio de­vel­oper tool.You can find out more about how we’re in­creas­ing trans­parency in AI con­tent with SynthID in our blog post.

Game de­vel­oper Rebecca Heineman has died af­ter be­ing di­ag­nosed with can­cer last month. The news was shared to Bluesky by Heineman’s friend, Heidi McDonald, while the most re­cent post on Heineman’s GoFundMe is a good­bye mes­sage stat­ing that her health was rapidly de­te­ri­o­rat­ing, and she was en­ter­ing pal­lia­tive care. Heineman was 62, and the GoFundMe will re­main live to help her fam­ily make fi­nal arrange­ments.

Born in 1963, Heineman ini­tially made a mark on the in­dus­try by win­ning a na­tional Space Invaders tour­na­ment in 1980 in New York, be­com­ing the first for­mally rec­og­nized US cham­pion of any videogame. She went on to have a far-reach­ing ca­reer, be­ing cred­ited on 67 games ac­cord­ing to MobyGames.

Heineman co-founded Interplay in 1983 along­side Brian Fargo, Jay Patel, and Troy Worrell. The de­vel­oper and pub­lisher was the source of many foun­da­tional PC games, in­clud­ing Wasteland, Fallout, and Baldur’s Gate. Heineman de­signed and pro­grammed a num­ber of games at Interplay, with her most promi­nent de­sign credit be­ing The Bard’s Tale 3: Thief of Fate.

Heineman’s friend and col­league from Interplay, Brian Fargo, shared a re­mem­brance of the de­vel­oper on X. “Rebecca Heineman sadly passed away,” Fargo wrote. “Known her since the 80s when I’d drive her to work, one of the most bril­liant pro­gram­mers around. A real gut punch ear­lier to­day when she mes­saged me: ‘We have gone on so many ad­ven­tures to­gether! But, into the great un­known! I go first!!!’”

Later, in the ’90s and 2000s, Heineman made a name pri­mar­ily as a pro­gram­mer, par­tic­u­larly on ports like the Macintosh ver­sions of Wolfenstein 3D, Baldur’s Gate, and Icewind Dale. The saga of Heineman over­com­ing a de­ranged busi­ness­man to solo pro­gram the ill-fated 3DO port of Doom in mere weeks has be­come a bit of an in­ter­net leg­end: Here’s Digital Foundry and Heineman her­self re­count­ing the tale.

Heineman pub­licly came out as trans­gen­der in the 2000s, and was mar­ried to fel­low games in­dus­try leg­end Jennell Jaquays. Heineman was the re­cip­i­ent of Gayming’s 2025 Gayming Icon award, with the site writ­ing that “her ad­vo­cacy for LGBTQ+ in­clu­sion, ac­ces­si­bil­ity, and di­ver­sity in tech has in­spired count­less de­vel­op­ers and play­ers.”

Jaquays died of com­pli­ca­tions from Guillain–Barré syn­drome in January 2024, and Heineman was blind­sided last month by an ag­gres­sive can­cer di­ag­no­sis. She turned to GoFundMe to help with the costs of treat­ment, where fans, friends, and in­dus­try peers showed up to sup­port the de­vel­oper.

Heineman shared the mes­sage last night that her health was rapidly de­clin­ing.

“It’s time. According to my doc­tors. All fur­ther treat­ments are point­less,” Heineman wrote. “So, please do­nate so my kids can cre­ate a fu­neral wor­thy of my key­board, Pixelbreaker! So I can make a wor­thy en­trance for re­unit­ing with my one true love, Jennell Jaquays.”

Game de­vel­op­ers have be­gun shar­ing their own con­do­lences and re­mem­brances in the wake of Heineman’s death.

Rebecca was one of the founders of Interplay and pro­grammed & de­signed for some of the most in­flu­en­tial games of my youth, no­tably Bard’s Tale I & III and Wasteland. She will be missed.— @jesawyer.bsky.social (@jesawyer.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-11-18T00:17:03.191Z

What a re­mark­able hu­man, and what a re­mark­able thing to know that she passed be­mused at read­ing her own eu­lo­gies. Rest in peace, Rebecca. Thank you for every­thing.— @ramiismail.com (@ramiismail.com.bsky.social) 2025-11-18T00:15:53.662Z

Rebecca was in my life be­cause she reached out to me, a stranger, be­cause she’d caught wind of a lay­off I was im­pacted by. Her achieve­ments were great, and so too was her kind­ness.— @jyoungman.bsky.social (@jyoungman.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-11-18T00:15:53.699Z

Rest well, you leg­end, you pi­o­neer, you won­der­ful soul. I’m lucky to have known you, though briefly. Please share her legacy by re­post­ing Heidi’s mes­sage. 💖— @caseymongillo.bsky.social (@caseymongillo.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-11-18T00:15:53.712Z

in the early 2000s Rebecca took the time to chat over IRC with a teenaged and gen­der-con­fused Me on the prac­ti­cal­i­ties of tran­si­tion - in a time where be­ing out as trans on­line was some­thing that could get you so­cially os­tra­cized. I owe her a lot for that and only hope I can pay it for­ward.— @moomanibe.bsky.social (@moomanibe.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-11-18T00:15:53.675Z