SoylentNews

upstart writes:

Tree species face unprecedented climate shifts across their ranges:

Trees may seem like quiet bystanders, but they're vital to the health of ecosystems, the stability of our climate, and even our own survival. As the planet heats up, these ancient organisms are being pushed to their limits – and the impacts reach far beyond the forest.

A new study has shed light on the future of trees under climate change. The research team modeled how more than 32,000 tree species might respond to changing temperatures.

The findings are stark. If greenhouse gas emissions remain high, most trees on Earth could find themselves living in climates they have never known.

The study reveals a major upheaval for the world's trees. According to study lead author Dr. Coline Boonman from Wageningen University, the team found that nearly 70% of tree species will see significant climate shifts in at least part of their range by the end of this century.

"For some species, over half of their habitat could be affected under an extreme 4°C warming scenario," said Dr. Boonman.

This means trees in these regions will face temperatures, rainfall, and seasonal patterns outside their historical experience. For organisms adapted to specific conditions, these shifts may prove overwhelming. Some species may fail to reproduce.

Others may suffer from drought, disease, or increased competition. Trees cannot quickly move. They grow slowly, with some species taking decades to mature. As the climate shifts fast, many may be left behind.

The study does not just warn of future risks. It shows where those risks are most concentrated. The researchers mapped "exposure hotspots" – regions where tree diversity is most likely to face serious disruption.

These include large parts of Eurasia, northwestern North America, northern Chile, and the Amazon Delta. In these areas, the changes in climate could be so extreme that native species may not survive without human intervention.

"This research provides a global map of where trees are most vulnerable to climate change," explained Dr. Boonman. "It's a crucial tool for conservation planning and ecosystem resilience."

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/08/adult-sites-use-malicious-svg-files-to-rack-up-likes-on-facebook/
https://archive.ph/lzs6b

Running JavaScript from inside an image? What could possibly go wrong?

Dozens of porn sites are turning to a familiar source to generate likes on Facebook—malware that causes browsers to surreptitiously endorse the sites. This time, the sites are using a newer vehicle for sowing this malware—.svg image files.

The Scalable Vector Graphics format is an open standard for rendering two-dimensional graphics. Unlike more common formats such as .jpg or .png, .svg uses XML-based text to specify how the image should appear, allowing files to be resized without losing quality due to pixelation. But therein lies the rub: The text in these files can incorporate HTML and JavaScript, and that, in turn, opens the risk of them being abused for a range of attacks, including cross-site scripting, HTML injection, and denial of service.

Security firm Malwarebytes on Friday said it recently discovered that porn sites have been seeding boobytrapped .svg files to select visitors. When one of these people clicks on the image, it causes browsers to surreptitiously register a like for Facebook posts promoting the site.

Unpacking the attack took work because much of the JavaScript in the .svg images was heavily obscured using a custom version of "JSFuck," a technique that uses only a handful of character types to encode JavaScript into a camouflaged wall of text.

Once decoded, the script causes the browser to download a chain of additional obfuscated JavaScript. The final payload, a known malicious script called Trojan.JS.Likejack, induces the browser to like a specified Facebook post as long as a user has their account open.

"This Trojan, also written in Javascript, silently clicks a 'Like' button for a Facebook page without the user's knowledge or consent, in this case the adult posts we found above," Malwarebytes researcher Pieter Arntz wrote. "The user will have to be logged in on Facebook for this to work, but we know many people keep Facebook open for easy access."

Related: Trojans Embedded in .svg Files

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Teenagers are choosing to study STEM subjects:

A-level results in 2025 show the increasing popularity of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) among students. For students taking three A-levels—the majority—the most popular combination of subjects was biology, chemistry and math.

The subject with the greatest rise in entries from 2024 is further math, followed by economics, math, physics and chemistry. Math remains the most popular subject, with entries making up 12.7% of all A-level entries.

Conversely, subjects such as French, drama, history and English literature are falling in exam entry numbers.

There is considerable incentive for young people who may be looking beyond school and university to the job market to study STEM. Research has found that STEM undergraduate degrees bring higher financial benefits to people and to the public purse than non-STEM subjects.

Many of the world's fastest-growing jobs need STEM skills. These include data analysts, AI specialists, renewable energy engineers, app developers, cybersecurity experts and financial technology experts.

[...] What's more, math, engineering and the sciences are now vital parts of careers that might have once seemed unrelated. It was once the case that the division between arts and science was seen as unbridgeable: you were firmly on one side or the other. Today this is far less evident.

Artists, in their many manifestations, are almost by default material scientists. Architects, photographers, musicians, video-makers, sound and lighting technicians are (arguably) technical engineers. Landscape gardeners are environmentalists, chefs are food scientists.

[...] One important factor here is imbuing students with a positive STEM identity. When young people think they are good at STEM subjects and are able to be successful, they are much more likely to choose a STEM career.

The upshot here is that, as the world changes, and changes quickly, so does the realization that STEM is an essential and invaluable dimension of life and that career prospects are varied and available at many, many levels. It seems little wonder that students have to come to see this and are enrolling in study and employment in greater numbers than before.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

VW introduces monthly subscription to increase car power:

VW introduces monthly subscription to increase car power

German car making giant Volkswagen (VW) has introduced a subscription for UK customers wanting to increase the power of some of its electric cars.

Those who buy an eligible car in its ID.3 range can choose to pay extra if they want to unlock the full power of the engine inside the vehicle.

VW says the "optional power upgrade" will cost £16.50 per month or £165 annually - or people can choose to pay £649 for a lifetime subscription.

The firm said it was "offering customers choice" with the feature.

Auto Express, who first reported the story, said a lifetime subscription would be for the car rather than the individual - meaning the upgrade would remain on the car if it was sold on.

A VW spokesperson told the BBC they believed giving people the option to purchase more power for their car is "nothing new".

"Historically many petrol and diesel vehicles have been offered with engines of the same size, but with the possibility of choosing one with more potency," they said.

They added that the power upgrades would allow customers to opt for a "sportier" driving experience at any time, "rather than committing from the outset with a higher initial purchase price".

Such offers have proved controversial for some customers in the past, who are displeased they may have to pay to access features which - in some cases - are already present inside the car they own.

Other vehicle manufacturers such as BMW have introduced similar subscription-based add-ons in the past, such as for heated seats and steering wheels.

And Mercedes introduced an online subscription service in the US in 2022 which allowed customers to pay to make its electric cars speed up quicker.

According to a survey from S&P Global, some customers may be put off by the cost of in-car subscriptions for features such as connectivity, or by basic functions being split into paid tiers.

It said the number of respondents who said they would pay for connected services had fallen from 86% in 2024 to 68% in 2025.

This is despite a wider embrace of subscriptions in general, with market research firm Juniper Research estimating in 2024 the global subscription economy would reach nearly $1tn (£740bn) in value by 2028.

Original Submission

liar writes:

I read this whole article and found it interesting, thought others might too...
https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/20/billionaireism/#surveillance-infantalism

from 1 part:
"...the ultra-rich (and the states they have suborned) have a fundamental understanding that the more unfair a society is, the less stable it is. The more unstable a state is, the more its ruling class have to expend on private security. No captain of industry wants to arise from his sarcophagus of a morning, only to discover a mob of hoi polloi building a guillotine on his lawn.

As Thomas Piketty argues, there comes a point where it's cheaper to make society more fair – say, by building hospitals and schools – than it is to pay for all the gaiter-wearing gun-thugs you'll need to weed out the guillotine-building projects that spontaneously erupt under conditions of gross unfairness:

https://memex.craphound.com/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-the-21st-century/

Mass surveillance shifts the guillotine equilibrium in favor of being greedier, by making it cheaper to identify and neutralize incipient guillotine-builders, which means that you can raise the greediness floor without seeing a concomitant rise in your guard labor bill."

From another part of the article:
"...But there's another way in which surveillance abets rampant billionaireism: when companies spy on us, they can change the rules of their services to increase how much we pay them, and decrease how much they pay us. When companies do this to their customers, they call it 'personalized pricing' – but everyone else calls it what it is, surveillance pricing:

When a company charges you more than someone else for the same service (say, Uber jacking up the price of a ride because your phone battery is about to die, or an airline charging you extra because they know you have a funeral to attend), they're effectively re-valuing the dollars in your bank account. The fact that the cab-ride that costs you $20 and costs someone else $15 means that your dollar is only worth $0.75."

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/24/price-discrimination/#algorithmic-pricing

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Uncovering the fraudsters and their schemes responsible for polluting the scientific literature:

The extent of fraudulent papers in the scientific literature is growing exponentially and goes far beyond isolated events, new research has revealed. 'You can see a scenario in a decade or less where you could have more than half of [studies being published] each year being fraudulent,' says Reese Richardson, one of the study's key researchers at Northwestern University, US.

Scientific integrity and honesty are key pillars of science and research, yet in recent years large organisations – known as paper mills – have been threatening these ideals by facilitating systemic scientific fraud.

Each year, paper mills produce and sell thousands of often poor-quality or fake scientific studies, sometimes using entirely made-up or doctored data and images. Growing pressure for researchers to 'publish or perish' has contributed to an increasingly competitive scientific community, leading some to turn to these businesses to pad their publication record. 'It becomes sort of a snowball situation where the optimum strategy is you have to start to cheat in order to win out,' says Richardson.

Previous studies have exposed paper mills using specific cases, rather than looking at the issue systematically. To gain a sense of the scale of the problem, the team, led by Luís Nunes Amaral, analysed a collection of paper-milled manuscripts discovered by science sleuths and found that the problem is even worse and more widespread than thought. 'There are networks of individuals and entities that are producing scientific fraud at scale,' says Amaral.

Analysis of 2213 articles flagged for image duplication – a hallmark of fraudulent science – revealed that such articles are published in large batches. The researchers also suggest that paper mills cooperate with brokers, a small number of dishonest editors who control some of the publishing decisions at select journals. Even a small number of brokers can lead to the publication of huge numbers of counterfeit articles, with publisher Frontiers recently announcing that they are retracting a batch of 122 articles.

Despite efforts to curb paper mills, Amaral and his team found that suspected paper-milled articles are growing exponentially, doubling every 1.5 years. In comparison, the total number of all publications is only doubling every 15 years.

'I'm not sure that [the researchers] are being clear enough why this is happening. It's about money and the need for publications. [But] in scientific research those shouldn't be the key factors,' says Jana Christopher, an expert in image integrity who works for the publisher FEBS Press.

The team's analysis of articles published by Plos One – a peer-reviewed open-access mega-journal that discloses the handling editor – identified 45 editors who accepted articles that were more likely to be retracted or receive post-publication comments on PubPeer than chance would predict. These individuals comprised just 0.25% of the journal's editors, handling 1.3% of Plos One articles published in 2024, yet they oversaw 30.2% of the journal's retracted articles.

Network analysis revealed that these editors send most of their submissions to one another over other editors. The team found the same trend when analysing data from 10 Hindawi journals – another open-access publisher – and the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers' (IEEE) conference proceedings.

These paper mills continue to churn out fraudulent papers and few fraudsters are ever caught and shut down. As a result, the scientific community has become increasingly concerned by paper mills, leading to efforts to curb their influence. Consequentially, paper mills must now adapt to guarantee publication for their clients, 'hopping' between journals as they become de-indexed or fall out of favour with customers.

upstart writes:

Physics of badminton's new killer spin serve:

Serious badminton players are constantly exploring different techniques to give them an edge over opponents. One of the latest innovations is the spin serve, a devastatingly effective method in which a player adds a pre-spin just before the racket contacts the shuttlecock (aka the birdie). It's so effective—some have called it "impossible to return" [YouTube 4:15 --JE] —that the Badminton World Federation (BWF) banned the spin serve in 2023, at least until after the 2024 Paralympic Games in Paris.

The sanction wasn't meant to quash innovation but to address players' concerns about the possible unfair advantages the spin serve conferred. The BWF thought that international tournaments shouldn't become the test bed for the technique, which is markedly similar to the previously banned "Sidek serve." The BWF permanently banned the spin serve earlier this year. Chinese physicists have now teased out the complex fundamental physics of the spin serve, publishing their findings in the journal Physics of Fluids.

Shuttlecocks are unique among the various projectiles used in different sports due to their open conical shape. Sixteen overlapping feathers protrude from a rounded cork base that is usually covered in thin leather. The birdies one uses for leisurely backyard play might be synthetic nylon, but serious players prefer actual feathers.

Those overlapping feathers give rise to quite a bit of drag, such that the shuttlecock will rapidly decelerate as it travels and its parabolic trajectory will fall at a steeper angle than its rise. The extra drag also means that players must exert quite a bit of force to hit a shuttlecock the full length of a badminton court. Still, shuttlecocks can achieve top speeds of more than 300 mph. The feathers also give the birdie a slight natural spin around its axis, and this can affect different strokes. For instance, slicing from right to left, rather than vice versa, will produce a better tumbling net shot.

The cork base makes the birdie aerodynamically stable: No matter how one orients the birdie, once airborne, it will turn so that it is traveling cork-first and will maintain that orientation throughout its trajectory. A 2015 study examined the physics of this trademark flip, recording flips with high-speed video and conducting free-fall experiments in a water tank to study how its geometry affects the behavior. The latter confirmed that shuttlecock feather geometry hits a sweet spot in terms of an opening inclination angle that is neither too small nor too large. And they found that feather shuttlecocks are indeed better than synthetic ones, deforming more when hit to produce a more triangular trajectory.

Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/legal/mozilla-warns-germany-could-soon-declare-ad-blockers-illegal/

A recent ruling from Germany's Federal Supreme Court (BGH) has revived a legal battle over whether browser-based ad blockers infringe copyright, raising fears about a potential ban of the tools in the country.

The case stems from online media company Axel Springer's lawsuit against Eyeo - the maker of the popular Adblock Plus browser extension.

Axel Springer says that ad blockers threaten its revenue generation model and frames website execution inside web browsers as a copyright violation.

This is grounded in the assertion that a website's HTML/CSS is a protected computer program that an ad blocker intervenes in the in-memory execution structures (DOM, CSSOM, rendering tree), this constituting unlawful reproduction and modification.

Previously, this claim was rejected by a lower-level court in Hamburg, but a new ruling by the BGH found the earlier dismissal flawed and overturned part of the appeal, sending the case back for examination.

Mozilla's Senior IP & Product Counsel, Daniel Nazer, delivered a warning last week, noting that due to the underlying technical background of the legal dispute, the ban could also impact other browser extensions and hinder users' choices.

"There are many reasons, in addition to ad blocking, that users might want their browser or a browser extension to alter a webpage," Nazer says, explaining that some causes could stem from the need "to improve accessibility, to evaluate accessibility, or to protect privacy."

As per BGH's ruling, Springer's argument needs to be re-examined to determine if DOM, CSS, and bytecode count as a protected computer program and whether the ad blocker's modifications are lawful.

"It cannot be excluded that the bytecode, or the code generated from it, is protected as a computer program, and that the ad blocker, through modification or modifying reproduction, infringed the exclusive right thereto," reads BGH's statement (automated translation).

While ad blockers haven't been outlawed, Springer's case has been revived now, and there's a real possibility that things may take a different turn this time.

Mozilla noted that the new proceedings could take up to a couple of years to reach a final conclusion. As the core issue is not settled, there is a future risk of extension developers to be held liable for financial losses.

Mozilla explains that, in the meantime, the situation could cause a chilling effect on browser users' freedom, with browser developers locking down their apps further, and extension developers limiting the functionality of their tools to avoid legal troubles.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

If AI takes most of our jobs, money as we know it will be over. What then?:

[Disclosure statement: Ben Spies-Butcher is co-director of the Australian Basic Income Lab, a research collaboration between Macquarie University, University of Sydney and Australian National University.]

It's the defining technology of an era. But just how artificial intelligence (AI) will end up shaping our future remains a controversial question.

For techno-optimists, who see the technology improving our lives, it heralds a future of material abundance.

That outcome is far from guaranteed. But even if AI's technical promise is realised – and with it, once intractable problems are solved – how will that abundance be used?

We can already see this tension on a smaller scale in Australia's food economy. According to the Australian government, we collectively waste around 7.6 million tonnes of food a year. That's about 312 kilograms per person.

At the same time, as many as one in eight Australians are food-insecure, mostly because they do not have enough money to pay for the food they need.

What does that say about our ability to fairly distribute the promised abundance from the AI revolution?

canopic jug writes:

Designer, anthropologist, and developer, Maggie Appleton has written a treatise on how chatbot sycophancy and passivity undermine the Enlightenment by undermining the original values of active intellectual engagement, skeptical inquiry, and challenging received wisdom.

As an expert on the Enlightenment, he's clearly been roped into developing an opinion on whether we're in an AI-fuelled "second Enlightenment."

Remember the first Enlightenment? That ~150 year period between 1650-1800 that we retroactively constructed and labelled as a unified historical event? The age of reason. Post-scientific revolution. The main characters are a bunch of moody philosophers like Locke, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot, and Voltaire. The vibe is reading pamphlets by candlelight, penning treatises, sporting powdered wigs and silk waistcoats, circulating ideas in Parisian salons and London coffee houses, sipping laudanum, and retreating to the seaside when you contracted tuberculosis. Everyone is big on ditching tradition, questioning political and religious authority, embracing scepticism, and educating the masses.

Anyway, Professor Bell's thesis is that our current AI chatbots contradict and undermine the original Enlightenment values. Values that are implicitly sacred in our modern culture; active intellectual engagement, sceptical inquiry, and challenging received wisdom.

Previously:
(2025) Book Documents the Rise and Fall of the Concept of the Private Life

Original Submission

JoeMerchant writes:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-august-security-updates-break-windows-recovery-reset/

Microsoft has confirmed that the August 2025 Windows security updates are breaking reset and recovery operations on systems running Windows 10 and older versions of Windows 11.

"After installing the August 2025 Windows security update [..] on any of the client versions mentioned below in the 'Affected platforms' section, attempts to reset or recover the device might fail," the company said in a new Windows release health update.

Installing this month's security updates will cause issues for users who want to reinstall their system while keeping their files using the Reset my PC feature, or reinstall it and keep their files, apps, and settings using the Fix problems using Windows Update tool.

The known issue may also impact users who want to remotely reset devices using the RemoteWipe configuration service provider (RemoteWipe CSP).

According to Redmond, the bug only impacts client platforms after installing the following updates, including:

• Windows 11 23H2 and Windows 11 22H2 (KB5063875),
• Windows 10 22H2, Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021, Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021 (KB5063709),
• Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2019, Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2019 (KB5063877).

The company is currently working on a fix for this known issue, which will be delivered via out-of-band updates for all impacted platforms over the coming days.

Original Submission

looorg writes:

SlowTV. When they need to move a 600-tonne church to the other side of town.

As interesting as it was I still prefer 'The Great Moose Migration' (x) they have on TV instead. It's more relaxing.

This is just unnerving.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cde3xp4xlw9o
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidnikel/2025/08/19/swedens-kiruna-church-is-on-the-move-after-more-than-100-years/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/19/world/europe/sweden-church-kiruna-move.html
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2025-08-19/this-swedish-church-is-moving-3-miles-down-the-road-its-relocating-before-a-mine-swallows-the-town

https://lkab.com/en/events/the-moving-of-kiruna-church/
https://www.svtplay.se/video/KnDgQ9G/den-stora-kyrkflytten/forsta-dagen?position=4104 [in Swedish]
https://player.vimeo.com/video/1108407438?h=11c3a1f23e&dnt=1&app_id=122963
https://www.byggnadsarbetaren.se/600-ton-och-k-markt-sa-ska-kiruna-kyrka-flyttas/ [in Swedish]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiruna_Church

(x) https://apnews.com/article/sweden-great-moose-migration-slow-tv-7c13e3b13a6b5bec01dfc3bb7465506d

Original Submission

upstart writes:

How Chefs and Scientists Are Using Kombucha and Kimchi to Study Microbiology:

Scientists and chefs have collaborated on a new study that demonstrates how fermented foods can be used to drive participatory science projects that both engage the public and advance our understanding of microbial ecology. The study focused on working with food experts and the public to examine the microbial communities associated with kombucha, kimchi and chow chow.

"One of the things we demonstrated here is that this approach works, it's relatively inexpensive, and it is easy to scale," says Erin McKenney, co-lead author of a paper on the work and an assistant professor of applied ecology at North Carolina State University.

"This proof-of-concept study focused on questions that have been answered using conventional approaches, allowing us to determine that the findings from our approach are consistent with established findings," McKenney says. "But now that we have that proof of concept, we can begin using this technique to address additional questions."

For the study, the researchers hosted three participatory science workshops at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in which scientists and chefs instructed K-12 teachers and members of the public on how to make fermented foods. Each workshop focused on a specific fermented food: kimchi, chow chow and kombucha.

While workshop participation varied, the researchers ended up with 18-23 samples of each fermented product.

Liquid samples were taken from each of the fermented foods at different points, to see how the microbial communities in each sample changed as the fermentation progressed. Samples were taken from chow chow and kimchi on days 3 and 10; kombucha samples were taken on days 4 and 8.

The researchers conducted DNA sequencing of each sample to get a snapshot of both the diversity and overall abundance of microbes in the sample.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Sni5Gect research crew targets sweet spot during device / network handshake pause

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/18/sni5gect/
https://archive.ph/buKXp

Security [scientists] have released an open source tool for poking holes in 5G mobile networks, claiming it can do up- and downlink sniffing and a novel connection downgrade attack - plus "other serious exploits" they're keeping under wraps, for now.

"Sni5Gect [is] a framework that sniffs messages from pre-authentication 5G communication in real-time," the researchers from the Singapore University of Technology and Design explained of their work, presented this week at the 34th USENIX security bash, "and injects targeted attack payload in downlink communication towards the UE [User Equipment, i.e. a phone]."

Designed to take advantage of the period just after a device connects to a 5G network and is still in the process of handshaking and authentication - which, the team points out, can occur when entering or leaving a lift, disembarking a plane and turning aeroplane mode off, or even passing through a tunnel or parking garage - Sni5Gect takes advantage of unencrypted messaging between the base station and a target handset.

"Since messages exchanged between the gNB [Next-Generation Node B, the base station] and the UE are not encrypted before the security context is established (pre-authentication state)," the researchers wrote, "an attacker does not require knowledge of the UE's credentials to sniff uplink/downlink [traffic] nor to inject messages without integrity protection throughout the UE connection procedure."

That's a flaw, and one the framework is designed to exploit. The team's testing showed it capable of sniffing both uplink and downlink traffic with more than 80 percent accuracy, at ranges of up to 20 meters between an off-the-shelf software-defined radio and the target mobile. For packet injection, the success rate varied between 70-90 percent - and delivered, among other things, proof of a novel downgrade attack by which a ne'er-do-well equipped with Sni5Gect could downgrade a connection from 5G to 4G to reduce its security and carry out further surveillance and attacks.

As Sni5Gect works in real-time, its creators have claimed, and can inject attack payloads, including multi-stage attacks, based on protocol state, it's suited to fingerprinting, denial-of-service attacks, and downgrading.

jelizondo writes:

The Guardian recently published a couple of articles about digital streaming services and piracy. The first one reads:

With a trip to Florence booked, all I want is to rewatch Medici. The 2016 historical drama series tells of the rise of the powerful Florentine banking dynasty, and with it, the story of the Renaissance. Until recently, I could simply have gone to Netflix and found it there, alongside a wide array of award-winning and obscure titles. But when I Google the show in 2025, the Netflix link only takes me to a blank page. I don't see it on HBO Max, Disney+, Apple TV+, or any of the smaller streaming platforms. On Amazon Prime I am required to buy each of the three seasons or 24 episodes separately, whereupon they would be stored in a library subject to overnight deletion. Raised in the land of The Pirate Bay, the Swedish torrent index, I feel, for the first time in a decade, a nostalgia for the high seas of digital piracy. And I am not alone.

For my teenage self in the 00s, torrenting was the norm. Need the new Coldplay album on your iPod? The Pirate Bay. The 1968 adaptation of Romeo and Juliet? The Pirate Bay. Whatever you needed was accessible with just a couple of clicks. But as smartphones proliferated, so did Spotify, the music streaming platform that is also headquartered in Sweden. The same Scandinavian country had become a hub of illegal torrenting and simultaneously conjured forth its solution.

"Spotify would never have seen the light of day without The Pirate Bay," Per Sundin, the then managing director of Universal Music Sweden, reflected in 2011 [in Swedish]. But music torrenting died out as we all either listened with ads or paid for the subscription. And when Netflix launched in Sweden in late 2012, open talk of torrenting moving images also stopped. Most of the big shows and a great collection of award-winning films could all be found for just 79 SEK (£6) a month. Meanwhile, the three founders of The Pirate Bay were arrested and eventually jailed. Pirating faded into the history books as far as I was concerned.

A decade and a half on from the Pirate Bay trial, the winds have begun to shift. On an unusually warm summer's day, I sit with fellow film critics by the old city harbour, once a haven for merchants and, rumour has it, smugglers. Cold bigstrongs in hand (that's what they call pints up here), they start venting about the "enshittification" of streaming – enshittification being the process by which platforms degrade their services and ultimately die in the pursuit of profit. Netflix now costs upwards of 199 SEK (£15), and you need more and more subscriptions to watch the same shows you used to find in one place.

A fellow film critic confides anonymously: "I never stopped pirating, and my partner also does it if he doesn't find the precise edition he is looking for on DVD." While some people never abandoned piracy, others admit they have recently returned – this time turning to unofficial streaming platforms. One commonly used app is legal but can, through community add-ons, channel illicit streams. "Downloading is too difficult. I don't know where to start," says one film viewer. "The shady streams might bombard me with ads, but at least I don't have to worry about getting hacked or caught."

According to London‑based piracy monitoring and content‑protection firm MUSO, unlicensed streaming is the predominant source of TV and film piracy, accounting for 96% [PDF] in 2023. Piracy reached a low in 2020, with 130bn website visits. But by 2024 that number had risen to 216bn. In Sweden, 25% of people [PDF] surveyed reported pirating in 2024, a trend mostly driven by those aged 15 to 24. Piracy is back, just sailing under a different flag.

"Piracy is not a pricing issue," Gabe Newell, the co-founder of Valve, the company behind the world's largest PC gaming platform, Steam, observed in 2011. "It's a service issue." Today, the crisis in streaming makes this clearer than ever. With titles scattered, prices on the rise, and bitrates throttled depending on your browser, it is little wonder some viewers are raising the jolly roger again. Studios carve out fiefdoms, build walls and levy tolls for those who wish to visit. The result is artificial scarcity in a digital world that promised abundance.

Whether piracy today is rebellion or resignation is almost irrelevant; the sails are hoisted either way.