"When residents of Equatorial Guinea's Annobón island wrote to the government in Malabo in July last year complaining about the dynamite explosions by a Moroccan construction company, they didn't expect the swift end to their internet access..." reports the Associated Press.

"Residents and activists said the company's dynamite explosions in open quarries and construction activities have been polluting their farmlands and water supply..." Dozens of the signatories and residents were imprisoned for nearly a year, while internet access to the small island has been cut off since then, according to several residents and rights groups. Local residents interviewed by The Associated Press left the island in the past months, citing fear for their lives and the difficulty of life without internet. Banking services have shut down, hospital services for emergencies have been brought to a halt and residents say they rack up phone bills they can't afford because cellphone calls are the only way to communicate...

The company's work on the island continues. Residents hoped to pressure authorities to improve the situation with their complaint in July last year. Instead, [the country's president] then deployed a repressive tactic now common in Africa to cut off access to internet to clamp down on protests and criticisms.

In 2015 Kim Dotcom answered questions from Slashdot's readers.

Now CBS News reports on "the latest chapter in a protracted 13-year battle by the U.S. government" to extradite Finnish-German millionaire Kim Dotcom from New Zealand: A New Zealand court has rejected the latest bid by internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom to halt his deportation to the U.S. on charges related to his file-sharing website Megaupload. Dotcom had asked the High Court to review the legality of an official's August 2024 decision that he should be surrendered to the U.S. to face trial on charges of copyright infringement, money laundering and racketeering... The Megaupload founder had applied for what in New Zealand is called a judicial review, in which a judge is asked to evaluate whether an official's decision was lawful. A judge on Wednesday dismissed Dotcom's arguments that the decision to deport him was politically motivated and that he would face grossly disproportionate treatment in the U.S...

New Zealand's government hasn't disclosed what will happen next in the extradition process or divulged an expected timeline for Dotcom to be surrendered to the United States
Dotcom "has been free on bail in New Zealand since February 2012," the article points out — and "One of his lawyers, Ron Mansfield, told Radio New Zealand that Dotcom's team had 'much fight left in us as we seek to secure a fair outcome,' but he didn't elaborate..."

The article notes that the latest decision "could be challenged in the Court of Appeal, where a deadline for filing is October 8."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from France24: Fueled in part by anger over flashy lifestyles flaunted by elites, young anti-corruption demonstrators mainly in their 20s rallied on Monday. The loose grouping, largely viewed as members of "Gen Z", flooded the capital Kathmandu to demand an end to a ban on Facebook, YouTube and other popular sites. The rallies ended in chaos and tragedy, with at least 19 protesters killed in a police crackdown on Monday. The apps were restored, but protests widened in anger.

On Tuesday, other Nepalis joined the crowds. Parliament was set ablaze, KP Sharma Oli resigned as prime minister, and the army took charge of the streets. Now, many activists are taking to the US group-chat app Discord to talk over their next steps. One server with more than 145,000 members has hosted feverish debate about who could be an interim leader, with many pushing 73-year-old former chief justice Sushila Karki. It is just one example of how social media has driven demands for change. [...]

More than half of Nepal's 30 million people are online, according to the World Bank. Days before the protests, many had rushed to VPN services — or virtual private networks — to evade blocks on platforms. Fears of a wider internet shutdown also drove a surge in downloads for Bluetooth messaging app Bitchat, created by tech billionaire Jack Dorsey. "Tech played... an almost decisive role," journalist Pranaya Rana told AFP. "The whole thing started with young people posting on social media about corruption, and the lavish lives that the children of political leaders were leading."

Hashtags such as #NepoKids, short for nepotism, compared the designer clothing and luxury holidays shown off in their Instagram posts to the difficulties faced by ordinary Nepalis. One post liked 13,000 times accused politicians' children of "living like millionaires," asking: "Where is the tax money going?" "NepoKids was trending all the time," including in rural areas where Facebook is popular, said rights activist Sanjib Chaudhary. "This fuelled the fire" of anger that "has been growing for a long time," he said. [...] Chaudhary said the government "seriously underestimated the power of social media." Nepal's first female prime minister was sworn in Friday as interim leader after protesters held an informal vote on Discord. "Former chief justice Sushila Karki, 73, was the unlikely choice of the 'Gen Z' protesters behind the movement that started out as a social media demonstration against the lavish lifestyles of 'Nepo Kids' but spilled out onto the streets and into the deadliest social unrest Nepal has seen in years," reports CNN World.

"Karki has spent much of her career within the very establishment the youth are protesting against, yet her reputation as a fearless and incorruptible jurist has appealed to many young people in the country of 30 million."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For millions of Spotify users, the "Wrapped" feature -- which crunches the numbers on their annual listening habits -- is a highlight of every year's end, ever since it debuted in 2015. NPR once broke down exactly why our brains find the feature so "irresistible," while Cosmopolitan last year declared that sharing Wrapped screenshots of top artists and songs had by now become "the ultimate status symbol" for tens of millions of music fans. It's no surprise then that, after a decade, some Spotify users who are especially eager to see Wrapped evolve are no longer willing to wait to see if Spotify will ever deliver the more creative streaming insights they crave.

With the help of AI, these users expect that their data can be more quickly analyzed to potentially uncover overlooked or never-considered patterns that could offer even more insights into what their listening habits say about them. Imagine, for example, accessing a music recap that encapsulates a user's full listening history -- not just their top songs and artists. With that unlocked, users could track emotional patterns, analyzing how their music tastes reflected their moods over time and perhaps helping them adjust their listening habits to better cope with stress or major life events. And for users particularly intrigued by their own data, there's even the potential to use AI to cross data streams from different platforms and perhaps understand even more about how their music choices impact their lives and tastes more broadly.

Likely just as appealing as gleaning deeper personal insights, though, users could also potentially build AI tools to compare listening habits with their friends. That could lead to nearly endless fun for the most invested music fans, where AI could be tapped to assess all kinds of random data points, like whose breakup playlists are more intense or who really spends the most time listening to a shared favorite artist. In pursuit of supporting developers offering novel insights like these, more than 18,000 Spotify users have joined "Unwrapped," a collective launched in February that allows them to pool and monetize their data.

Voting as a group through the decentralized data platform Vana -- which Wired profiled earlier this year -- these users can elect to sell their dataset to developers who are building AI tools offering fresh ways for users to analyze streaming data in ways that Spotify likely couldn't or wouldn't. In June, the group made its first sale, with 99.5 percent of members voting yes. Vana co-founder Anna Kazlauskas told Ars that the collective -- at the time about 10,000 members strong -- sold a "small portion" of its data (users' artist preferences) for $55,000 to Solo AI. While each Spotify user only earned about $5 in cryptocurrency tokens -- which Kazlauskas suggested was not "ideal," wishing the users had earned about "a hundred times" more -- she said the deal was "meaningful" in showing Spotify users that their data "is actually worth something." Spotify responded to the collective by citing both trademark and policy violations. The company sent a letter to Unwrapped developers, warning that the project's name may infringe on Spotify's Wrapped branding, and that Unwrapped breaches developer terms. Specifically, Spotify objects to Unwrapped's use of platform data for AI/ML training and facilitating user data sales.

"Spotify honors our users' privacy rights, including the right of portability," Spotify's spokesperson said. "All of our users can receive a copy of their personal data to use as they see fit. That said, UnwrappedData.org is in violation of our Developer Terms which prohibit the collection, aggregation, and sale of Spotify user data to third parties."

Unwrapped says it plans to defend users' right to "access, control, and benefit from their own data," while providing reassurances that it will "respect Spotify's position as a global music leader."

California's legislature this week approved a bill to let renters opt out of bulk-billing arrangements that force them to pay for Internet service from a specific provider. ArsTechnica: The bill says that by January 1, a landlord must "allow the tenant to opt out of paying for any subscription from a third-party Internet service provider, such as through a bulk-billing arrangement, to provide service for wired Internet, cellular, or satellite service that is offered in connection with the tenancy." If a landlord fails to do so, the tenant "may deduct the cost of the subscription to the third-party Internet service provider from the rent," and the landlord would be prohibited from retaliating.

The bill passed the state Senate in a 30-7 vote on Wednesday but needs Gov. Gavin Newsom's signature to become law. It was approved by the state Assembly in a 75-0 vote in April. Assemblymember Rhodesia Ransom, a Democratic lawmaker who authored the bill, told Ars today that lobby groups for Internet providers and real estate companies have been "working really hard" to defeat it. But she expects Newsom will approve. "I strongly believe that the governor is going to look at what this bill provides as far as protections for tenants and sign it into law," Ransom said in a phone interview.

"President Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act may have quietly changed the economics of the creator economy," reports the Hollywood Reporter. The Treasury Department has ruled this past week that digital creators, including podcasters, influencers, and streamers, qualify for the U.S. "no tax on tips" policy, allowing them to deduct tipped income up to $25,000. From the report: The change could cause digital creators to rethink how they seek income. Platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Twitch and Snapchat all offer a variety of ways for creators to generate income, be it a share of advertising revenue or creator funding programs, or options to launch subscription tiers for their channels or profiles. But they also give creators the option to turn on tips or gifts. If revenue from user tips or gifts is eligible, while recurring subscription revenue is not, it could shift how streamers, podcasters or influencers ask their followers to support them.

To be sure, there are limitations: The tax deduction is capped at $25,000 per year, and it begins to phase out at $150,000 in income for single filers and $300,000 for married joint filers. The act also provides that tips do not qualify for the deduction if they are received "in the course of certain specified trades or businesses -- including the fields of health, performing arts, and athletics," Treasury says, further limiting the deduction opportunity for some in entertainment-adjacent lines of work.

But by making influencers, Twitch streamers and podcasters eligible, the administration has nonetheless changed the incentive structure for digital creators, and the ramifications could be felt across the creator economy in the name of tax efficiency (Don't be surprised if users are asked to like, subscribe, and tip). Platforms may also develop more ways to more prominently feature tips and gifts, pushing creators to add more opportunities for that income. But the inclusion of digital creators is also a recognition of how the power dynamics have shifted in media.

Perplexity AI is the latest AI startup to be hit with a lawsuit by copyright holders, accused by Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster of misusing their content in its "answer engine" for internet searches. From a report: The reference companies alleged in New York federal court on Wednesday that Perplexity unlawfully copied their material and diminished their revenue by redirecting their web traffic to its AI-generated summaries.

A group led by RSS co-creator Eckart Walther has launched a new protocol designed to standardize and scale licensing of online content for AI training. Backed by publishers like Reddit, Quora, Yahoo, and Medium, Real Simple Licensing (RSL) combines machine-readable terms in robots.txt with a collective rights organization, aiming to do for AI training data what ASCAP did for music royalties. However, it remains to be seen whether AI labs will agree to adopt it. TechCrunch reports: According to RSL co-founder Eckart Walther, who also co-created the RSS standard, the goal was to create a training-data licensing system that could scale across the internet. "We need to have machine-readable licensing agreements for the internet," Walther told TechCrunch. "That's really what RSL solves."

For years, groups like the Dataset Providers Alliance have been pushing for clearer collection practices, but RSL is the first attempt at a technical and legal infrastructure that could make it work in practice. On the technical side, the RSL Protocol lays out specific licensing terms a publisher can set for their content, whether that means AI companies need a custom license or to adopt Creative Commons provisions. Participating websites will include the terms as part of their "robots.txt" file in a prearranged format, making it straightforward to identify which data falls under which terms.

On the legal side, the RSL team has established a collective licensing organization, the RSL Collective, that can negotiate terms and collect royalties, similar to ASCAP for musicians or MPLC for films. As in music and film, the goal is to give licensors a single point of contact for paying royalties and provide rights holders a way to set terms with dozens of potential licensors at once. A host of web publishers have already joined the collective, including Yahoo, Reddit, Medium, O'Reilly Media, Ziff Davis (owner of Mashable and Cnet), Internet Brands (owner of WebMD), People Inc., and The Daily Beast. Others, like Fastly, Quora, and Adweek, are supporting the standard without joining the collective.

Notably, the RSL Collective includes some publishers that already have licensing deals -- most notably Reddit, which receives an estimated $60 million a year from Google for use of its training data. There's nothing stopping companies from cutting their own deals within the RSL system, just as Taylor Swift can set special terms for licensing while still collecting royalties through ASCAP. But for publishers too small to draw their own deals, RSL's collective terms are likely to be the only option.

Cindy Cohn, who has led the Electronic Frontier Foundation as Executive Director for the past decade and has been with the organization for over 25 years, will step down by mid-2026. The digital rights group is launching a search for her successor. From a press release: "It's been the honor of my life to help EFF grow and become the strong, effective organization it is today, but it's time to make space for new leadership. I also want to get back into the fight for civil liberties more directly than I can as the executive director of a thriving 125-person organization," Cohn said. "I'm incredibly proud of all that we've built and accomplished. One of our former interns once called EFF the joyful warriors for internet freedom and I have always loved that characterization." "I know EFF's lawyers, activists and technologists will continue standing up for freedom, justice and innovation whether we're fighting trolls, bullies, corporate oligarchs, clueless legislators or outright dictators," she added. [...]

Cohn said she made the decision to step down more than a year ago, and later informed EFF's Board of Directors and executive staff. The Board of Directors has assembled a search committee, which in turn has engaged leadership advisory firm Russell Reynolds Associates to conduct a search for EFF's new executive director. Inquiries about the search can be directed to EFF@russellreynolds.com. The search committee hopes to hire someone next spring, with Cohn planning to remain at EFF for a transition period through early summer.

Pakistan has built surveillance systems that it is actively using to spy on millions of its citizens and to block millions of internet sessions, according to Amnesty International. The Asian nation's Lawful Intercept Management System enables intelligence agencies to tap calls and texts across all four major mobile operators.

A Chinese-built firewall, WMS 2.0, currently blocks approximately 650,000 web links and restricts platforms including YouTube, Facebook, and X. The surveillance infrastructure combines technology from Chinese company Geedge Networks, U.S.-based Niagara Networks, France's Thales DIS, Germany's Utimaco, and UAE-based Datafusion. Balochistan province has experienced years-long internet blackouts under the system.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Last year, we reported on the efforts of classic iPod fans to preserve playable copies of the downloadable clickwheel games that Apple sold for a brief period in the late '00s. The community was working to get around Apple's onerous FairPlay DRM by having people who still owned original copies of those (now unavailable) games sync their accounts to a single iTunes installation via a coordinated Virtual Machine. That "master library" would then be able to provide playable copies of those games to any number of iPods in perpetuity.

At the time, the community was still searching for iPod owners with syncable copies of the last few titles needed for their library. With today's addition of Real Soccer 2009 to the project, though, all 54 official iPod clickwheel games are now available together in an easily accessible format for what is likely the first time.

[...] Now that the consolidated clickwheel game collection is complete, though, owners of any iPod 5G+ or iPod Nano 3G+ should be able to sync the complete library to their personal device completely offline, without worrying about any server checks from Apple. They can do that by setting up a Virtual Machine using these GitHub instructions or by downloading this torrented Internet Archive collection and creating their own Virtual Machine from the files contained therein. The effort was made possible by GitHub user Olsro, with help from other iPod enthusiasts. To Olsro, completing the project "means this whole part from the early 2000s will remain with us forever."

He also expressed hope that "this Virtual Machine can also be useful towards any security [or] archeologist researcher who want to understand how the DRM worked."

An anonymous reader shared this report from the BBC: Microsoft's Azure cloud services have been disrupted by undersea cable cuts in the Red Sea, the US tech giant says.

Users of Azure — one of the world's leading cloud computing platforms — would experience delays because of problems with internet traffic moving through the Middle East, the company said. Microsoft did not explain what might have caused the damage to the undersea cables, but added that it had been able to reroute traffic through other paths.

Over the weekend, there were reports suggesting that undersea cable cuts had affected the United Arab Emirates and some countries in Asia.... On Saturday, NetBlocks, an organisation that monitors internet access, said a series of undersea cable cuts in the Red Sea had affected internet services in several countries, including India and Pakistan.
"We do expect higher latency on some traffic that previously traversed through the Middle East," Microsoft said in their status announcement — while stressing that traffic "that does not traverse through the Middle East is not impacted".

"Roku is celebrating a milestone that says a lot about where entertainment is heading," notes a new article at NERDS.xyz.

"For the third month in a row, people in the United States spent more time streaming on Roku-powered devices than they did watching traditional broadcast television." Nielsen's latest data shows Roku-powered devices accounted for 21.4 percent of all TV viewing in July. Broadcast came in at 18.4 percent. That gap may not seem huge, but it marks a steady trend from May and June where streaming also came out ahead. Roku says its share of TV viewing is up 14 percent year-over-year, which suggests people are not just trying streaming, they're sticking with it...

Roku powers streaming on smart TVs and devices in over half of internet-enabled U.S. households. By its own numbers, it sells more TV units than the next two operating systems combined. It's a reminder that Roku has positioned itself as more than just a box or an app. It clearly wants to be the place where television happens.
Thanks to Slashdot reader BrianFagioli for sharing the news.

Mozilla announced today that they will end 32-bit Linux support for Firefox in 2026, with version 144 being the last release and ESR 140 as the fallback option. Phoronix reports: Firefox has continued providing 32-bit Linux binaries even with most other web browsers and operating systems going all-in on x86_64 support. But given that 32-bit Linux support is waning by distributions and the vast majority of distributions aren't even shipping i686 install images anymore, they will be removing 32-bit Linux builds in 2026.

Amazon's Project Kuiper has landed its first airline deal with JetBlue and plans to offer satellite-powered in-flight Wi-Fi starting in 2027. The Verge reports: Yesterday, Amazon's Panos Panay showed off a speed test using an "enterprise-grade customer terminal" (aka, dish) to achieve a download speed of just over a gigabit. Fine, but we'll have to wait to see how it performs once individuals using consumer dishes at scale. Amazon says the first customers will start using the service this year, ahead of a broader rollout in 2026.

Project Kuiper-powered Wi-Fi will be available on "select" aircraft initially. Amazon says its satellites will provide lower latency and "more reliable service" for passengers, as they orbit between 367 and 391 miles above Earth -- far closer than the geostationary satellites that orbit around 22,369 miles above the planet. Amazon has also struck a deal with Airbus to build Project Kuiper's satellite internet service into its aircraft.

Warner Bros. Discovery has filed a major copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, accusing the AI image generator of exploiting its movies and TV shows to train models and generate near-identical reproductions of iconic characters like Batman, Bugs Bunny, and Rick and Morty. From The Hollywood Reporter: The company "brazenly dispenses Warner Bros. Discovery's intellectual property" by letting subscribers produce images and videos of iconic copyrighted characters, alleges the complaint, filed on Thursday in California federal court. "The heart of what we do is develop stories and characters to entertain our audiences, bringing to life the vision and passion of our creative partners," said a Warner Bros. Discovery spokesperson in a statement. "Midjourney is blatantly and purposefully infringing copyrighted works, and we filed this suit to protect our content, our partners, and our investments."

For years, AI companies have been training their technology on data scraped across the internet without compensating creators. It's led to lawsuits from authors, record labels, news organizations, artists and studios, which contend that some AI tools erode demand for their content. Warner Bros. Discovery joins Disney and Universal, which earlier this year teamed up to sue Midjourney. By their thinking, the AI company is a free-rider plagiarizing their movies and TV shows. In the lawsuit, Warner Bros. Discovery points to Midjourney generating images of iconic copyrighted characters. At the forefront are heroes who're at the center of DC Studios' movies and TV shows, like Superman, Wonder Woman and The Joker; others are Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry and Scooby-Doo characters who've become ubiquitous household names; more are Cartoon Network characters, including those from Rick and Morty, who've emerged as something of cultural touchstones in recent years. [...]

The lawsuit argues Midjourney's ability to return copyrighted characters is a "clear draw for subscribers," diverting consumers away from purchasing Warner Bros. Discovery-approved posters, wall art and prints, among other products that must now compete against the service. [...] Warner Bros. Discovery seeks Midjourney's profits attributable to the alleged infringement or, alternatively, $150,000 per infringed work, which could leave the AI company on the hook for massive damages. The thrust of the studios' lawsuits will likely be decided by one question: Are AI companies covered by fair use, the legal doctrine in intellectual property law that allows creators to build upon copyrighted works without a license? The lawsuit can be found here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Over the Labor Day weekend, Cloudflare says it successfully stopped a record-breaking distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that peaked at 11.5 terabits per second (Tbps). This came only a few months after Cloudflare blocked a then all-time high DDoS attack of 7.3 Tbps. This latest attack was almost 60% larger.

According to Cloudflare, the assault was the result of a hyper-volumetric User Datagram Protocol (UDP) flood attack that lasted about 35 seconds. During that just more than half-minute attack, it delivered over 5.1 billion packets per second. This attack, Cloudflare reported, came from a combination of several IoT and cloud providers. Although compromised accounts on Google Cloud were a major source, the bulk of the attack originated from other sources.

The specific target of this attack has not been publicly disclosed, but we can be sure the intent was to overwhelm the victim's network and render online services inoperative. Cloudflare says its globally distributed, fully autonomous DDoS mitigation network detected and neutralized the threat in real time, without notable impact on customer services or requiring manual intervention. This operation highlights both the rising sophistication of attack methods and the resilience of modern internet infrastructure defenses, especially Cloudflare's use of real-time packet analysis, fingerprinting, and rapid threat intelligence sharing across its network.

Chrome has extended its dominance in the browser wars, surpassing 70% market share on desktops while Edge, Safari, Firefox, and Opera trail far behind. Neowin reports: According to [Statcounter], in August 2025, Chrome kept on increasing its overwhelming market share, which is now above the 70% mark (70.25%, to be precise) in the desktop browser market. The gap between Chrome and its closest competitor, Microsoft Edge, is immense, with Edge holding just 11.8% (+0.01 points over the previous month). Apple's Safari is third with 6.34% (+1.04 points); Firefox has 4.94% (-0.36 points); and Opera is fifth with a modest 2.06% market share (-0.13 points).

Things look similar on the mobile side of the market, with Google Chrome having 69.15% (+1.92 points) and Safari being second with 20.32% (-2.2 points). Samsung Internet is third with 3.33% (-0.17 points). As for Microsoft Edge, its mobile share is only 0.59% (+0.06 points). The findings can be found here.

Americans are having a record low amount of sex -- even less than they did during the Covid-19 pandemic -- according to a new study led by researchers at the Institute for Family Studies. WSJ: This continues the downward shift in sexual activity that has been worrying sociologists and psychologists for decades. For the report, called "The Sex Recession," researchers at the IFS analyzed the data on sex and intimacy in the latest General Social Survey produced by NORC at the University of Chicago, which was collected in 2024 and released in May. They found that just 37% of people age 18-64 reported having sex at least once a week, down from 55% in 1990. The decline is even more striking for young adults: Almost a quarter of people age 18-29, or 24%, said they had not had sex in the past year; this is twice as many as in 2010.

Much has been written in recent years about the trend of young people having less sex, attributed to everything from stunted social skills to a rise in internet pornography. Yet the IFS study shows that the same trend holds true for people up to the age of 64, of all sexual orientations, both married and single. (After age 64, there was no significant change in the amount of sex people have, largely because this group reports having sex less frequently to begin with, the researchers said.)

"Nearly 400 students, many of them entrepreneurs, have so far made the journey to Forest City to study everything from coding to unconventional theories on statehood," reports Bloomberg.

"They're building crypto projects, fine-tuning their physiques and testing whether a shared ideology — rather than just shared territory — can bind a community." They have descended on Forest City to attend Network School, the brainchild of former Coinbase Inc. executive and "The Network State" author Balaji Srinivasan. In this troubled megaproject once envisaged to house some 50 times its current population, they're conducting a real-life experiment of sorts with Srinivasan's vision of "startup societies" defined less by historical territory than shared beliefs in technology, cryptocurrency and light regulation... Mornings are spent in product sprints and coding sessions; afternoons in seminars exploring topics from the Meiji Restoration to Singapore's statecraft and the mechanics of decentralized governance. Guest lectures double as both technological deep dives and ideological sermons, according to half a dozen students interviewed by Bloomberg. The campus also mirrors Silicon Valley's infatuation with longevity and health, right down to a commercial-grade gym and specially designed workout routines. Students follow a protein-heavy diet...

After co-founding DNA testing startup Counsyl in 2008 and serving as its chief technology officer, Srinivasan spent five years at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, first as general partner and then as board partner. He joined Coinbase as CTO in 2018 when the crypto exchange bought a portfolio company he oversaw and left after a little over a year, according to his LinkedIn profile. In a 2013 speech at Y Combinator's Startup School, Srinivasan brought his ideas about what he saw as a fundamental conflict between some modern nation-states and innovation to a wider audience. In the address, he advocated for Silicon Valley's "ultimate exit" from the U.S., which he argued was obsolete and hostile to innovators. In essence: If the society you live in is broken, why not just "opt out" and create a new one?

"The Network State: How To Start a New Country," published in 2022, expanded on Srinivasan's "exit" concept to outline how online, ideologically aligned communities can use crypto and digital tools to form new, decentralized states. A network state can be geographically dispersed and bound together by the internet and blockchains, he says, and the aim is to gain diplomatic recognition... On the Moment of Zen podcast in September 2023, he outlined how the "Gray Tribe" — entrepreneurs, innovators and thinkers — can retake control of San Francisco from the Blues using a variety of tactics, like allying with local police. The effort would involve gaining control of territory, according to Srinivasan, who didn't advocate for violence. "Elections are just the cherry on the cake," he said. "Elections are just a reflection of your total control of the streets."
The cost of attending Network School "starts at $1,500 per month, including lodging and food, for those who opt for a shared room."