My rock4 — a Radxa RockPi4 running DietPi with four SATA SSDs on a Penta HAT — has never rebooted cleanly. For as long as I've had it in the rack, issuing sudo shutdown -r now meant walking over to the machine, waiting ten minutes to confirm it was definitely stuck, and flipping the power switch. Every single time.

It worked perfectly otherwise. Services ran fine. Drives mounted fine. The machine was solid right up until the moment you asked it to restart.

This is the story of finding the actual cause — and why the fix I thought would work made no difference at all.

---

The obvious culprit (that wasn't)

When you have a server that hangs on shutdown, the usual suspects are slow-stopping services, or so I was led to believe. The systemd-analyze blame output on rock4 had an obvious candidate: unattended-upgrades.service, which by default gets a TimeoutStopSec of 1800 seconds — 30 minutes. If an apt upgrade happened to be running at shutdown time, systemd would sit there for half an hour waiting for it to finish before giving up.

I applied a drop-in to cap it at 5 minutes. It still hung. For over two hours.

I dug deeper and found a second culprit: apt-daily-upgrade.service, a separate timer-triggered unit that calls unattended-upgrades. It has its own TimeoutStopSec of 900 seconds. I capped that too.

Still hung.

At this point I was fairly sure the apt theory was wrong, but I didn't have a better one yet.

---

The diagnostic that changed everything

Here's the thing about a “hung” server: it's worth checking whether the machine is actually dead or just systemd that's stuck.

After triggering a shutdown and watching rock4 go dark, I opened LanScan and scanned the local network. rock4 was still there. Still responding to pings. Port 111 (rpcbind) still open.

That's not a dead machine. That's a machine with a live kernel where systemd has frozen mid-shutdown.

systemd shuts down in phases, supposedly: it stops services, then unmounts filesystems, then hands off to the kernel for the actual reboot. If it gets stuck at the filesystem unmount step, the kernel never gets the reboot signal — the machine just idles there indefinitely, still on the network, lights still on, going nowhere.

The question was: which mount was blocking?

rock4 has four local SATA drives and one NFS mount — /mnt/media, served from my itx machine over the local network. I pulled up the running containers:

docker inspect jackett --format '{{ json .Mounts }}'

There it was:

/mnt/media/media/Downloads → /downloads

jackett — my torrent indexer — had an NFS-backed path bound as a Docker volume.

---

Why this hangs forever

When Docker mounts a volume into a container, the kernel creates a bind mount that keeps a reference count on that filesystem. Even after Docker stops the container, the overlay filesystem machinery can retain a reference to the underlying mountpoint.

So when systemd later runs umount /mnt/media, the kernel sees that something still holds a reference to that mount and returns EBUSY. Systemd retries. The NFS server is still up, healthy, and reachable — but that doesn't matter. The umount call isn't failing because the server is gone; it's failing because the local kernel thinks something still has the filesystem open.

And here's the critical part: umount has no timeout. The TimeoutStopSec settings on services don't help. The soft,timeo=30 NFS mount option doesn't help — that governs read/write operation timeouts, not the unmount syscall itself. Without something explicitly forcing a lazy unmount, systemd will wait forever.

---

The fix

jackett is a torrent indexer. It speaks to tracker APIs and returns search results to Radarr and Sonarr. It does not need to read or write files on disk. The downloads volume was there because at some point, someone (me, almost certainly) copy-pasted a docker-compose snippet from the internet without thinking about whether every line was necessary.

The fix was removing one line from services/jackett.yml:

# Before
volumes:
  - /bricks/rock4-2/jackett:/config
  - /mnt/media/media/Downloads:/downloads  # ← this line

# After
volumes:
  - /bricks/rock4-2/jackett:/config

Redeployed jackett, issued sudo shutdown -r now, and watched. Three minutes later, rock4 was back online. No power cycle. First clean reboot in years.

---

The general rule

If you're running Docker containers on a machine that also has NFS mounts, think hard before binding any NFS-backed path into a container volume. The risk isn't that Docker will do something wrong — it's that the combination of Docker's bind mount lifecycle and the kernel's umount semantics creates a window where shutdown can hang indefinitely with no error message and no timeout.

If you genuinely need an NFS path inside a container, the belt-and-suspenders fix is to add x-systemd.mount-timeout=30 to the relevant fstab entry. This caps the mount's teardown time at 30 seconds rather than forever — not ideal, but it bounds the hang.

itx.local:/mnt/media  /mnt/media  nfs  soft,timeo=30,x-systemd.mount-timeout=30  0  0

But better is to audit your container volume mounts and ask: does this service actually need filesystem access, or is it just inheriting a volume that was copy-pasted into the config at some point?

---

Why it was so hard to diagnose

A few things made this particularly hard to spot:

No error message. The machine doesn't log “stuck waiting for NFS umount.” It just sits there. Systemd is doing exactly what it's supposed to do: retrying an unmount that keeps returning EBUSY. There's nothing in the journal because journald itself has already stopped by the time the hang happens.

The wrong hypothesis was plausible. Unattended-upgrades with a 1800s timeout genuinely can cause shutdown hangs. Capping it was the right thing to do regardless. It just wasn't the root cause here.

The symptom was intermittent enough to seem random. Sometimes rock4 rebooted. When the NFS server (itx) was down or the jackett container had been recently restarted, Docker might have already released the reference by the time shutdown reached the umount step. This made it feel like a timing issue rather than a deterministic one.

The diagnostic breakthrough — checking whether the machine was still pingable after it “hung” — was the key. A dead machine and a machine stuck mid-shutdown look identical from across the room. They look very different from a network scanner.

---

The problem is probably older than NFS

After fixing the hang, I realised something. rock4 ran GlusterFS for years before the NFS migration — a distributed filesystem where each node contributes “brick” drives to a replicated pool. The containers on rock4 mounted GlusterFS paths like /mnt/storage/jackett, and those mounts have the same property as NFS: they're network-backed filesystems that can't unmount cleanly while something holds a kernel reference to them.

GlusterFS uses FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) to expose its mounts locally. FUSE unmounts are actually harder to complete cleanly than NFS: to release a GlusterFS FUSE mount, the glusterd daemon has to coordinate across the network, consult its peers, and tear down brick connections in order. If Docker is still holding a reference to the mountpoint, glusterd can't complete that teardown, and umount returns EBUSY — the same outcome as NFS, but with more moving parts and more ways to stall.

So the sequence was almost certainly: Docker container with GlusterFS volume → indefinite hang → GlusterFS decommissioned → NFS mounted → same container config carried across with updated paths → Docker container with NFS volume → still hangs.

Different filesystem, identical mechanism, years of continuity. The jackett config probably got its downloads volume added once, years ago, and nobody thought to question it during the storage migration.

The GlusterFS angle matters beyond this one machine. Between roughly 2018 and 2022, GlusterFS was enormously popular in self-hosted circles — TrueNAS Scale shipped it as the default clustered storage backend, and countless homelab builds adopted it for redundant storage across a few nodes. Many of those setups ran Docker containers with GlusterFS-backed volumes. Many of those setups probably had machines that wouldn't reboot cleanly. It's a reasonable bet that a lot of those people never connected the reboot hang to the storage layer.

RedHat deprecated GlusterFS in RHEL 9 (announced 2022). The official framing was “focus on other storage solutions,” but the operational complexity was a significant part of the story: GlusterFS was difficult to run at small scale, prone to split-brain, and had long-running issues with graceful shutdown and FUSE lifecycle management. The Docker reboot hang described here is a concrete example of that class of problem — the kind of subtle, hard-to-diagnose operational failure that accumulates over time and eventually makes a piece of software too difficult to maintain and recommend.

If you ran GlusterFS and your server never quite rebooted cleanly: this was probably why.

---

Setup

• rock4: Radxa RockPi4, DietPi (Armbian kernel 6.18), 4× 3.6TB SATA SSDs via Penta HAT
• itx: Rock 5 ITX, NFS server, mergerfs pool at /mnt/media
• Container management: uncloud
• jackett: lscr.io/linuxserver/jackett

Le soleil entaille la brume en faisant un bruit d'usine. Sur la route en terre trottine une file indienne de tourterelles des bois. En bas, un bout de planche sur un reste d'eau qui, plus loin, devient souterraine, fait passer la ravine et remonter [vers soi]. On entend le rire acide et cruel d'un martin-chasseur (Halcyon senegalensis) et quelques notes flutées de bulbuls communs. Le soleil coupe déjà la peau. On ne sait avec précision en quelle saison nous sommes, [le soi, perplexe, se taisant, rendu après la nuit incapable de discerner à même sa propre peau sous le soleil]. Qui coupe pourtant. Le jour et la nuit sont des couteaux qui tranchent le temps dans la cervelle. Il y a des nuages, petits et grands, ou le gris lumineux d’une plaque de fer, comme un écran. [Le soi, distant du ciel, regarde à ses pieds les trous, les ornières, où s’accrochent toutes sortes de choses résiduelles.] Malgré toutes ces choses [en soi, dans la tête, délavées par les pluies], l’on suit un itinéraire grâce au numérotage des rues, qui fait du trou de la ville un livre décousu.

#Fenêtresurville #Didascalies

-—

### **Anatomy of Rent**

Right to the future,

Savings create credit,

Capture of the flow.

-—

-—

# **The Mirage of the Safe: Anatomy of Asymmetric Scarcity**

The image is almost childishly simplistic: a trillionaire sitting atop a mountain of gold coins, physically withdrawing currency from circulation that the rest of the world would supposedly lack. This vision of a *“fixed monetary pie”* haunts public debate and fuels a tenacious popular intuition: if the rich are too rich, it must be because the poor have been stripped of an essential liquid substance.

Yet this intuition, while politically powerful, rests on a largely flawed technical foundation. To grasp the reality of extreme wealth concentration in the first quarter of the 21st century, we must abandon the metaphor of *stock* for that of *flow*, and the idea of *theft* for that of *capture*. The fortune of the ultra-rich is not a dormant pile of cash; it is a structural reorganization of the global economy.

Here is a lucid analysis of the mechanisms by which extreme accumulation does not *“empty”* bank accounts but preempts the future.

-—

-—

## **I. The Great Monetary Misunderstanding: Why the “Fixed Pie” Doesn’t Exist**

To approach the subject with rigor, we must first dispel a fundamental misconception: the idea that the money supply is a finite quantity. In our contemporary system, **money is endogenous**. As the Bank of England noted in its 2014 bulletin, money is created through bank lending. When a bank grants a loan, it creates a deposit: it does not move existing money; it invents it.

Consequently, the classic argument based on the equation of exchange (*MV = PQ*), where the rich *“freeze”* the velocity of circulation (*V*), is an analytical dead end. This equation is an accounting identity, not a causal law. Claiming that billionaires *“dry up”* global liquidity is a mistake that any neoclassical economist would dismiss out of hand.

The reality is more subtle. The problem is not the *quantity* of money available but its *distribution* and, above all, the nature of the rights that this money allows one to exercise over real production.

-—

## **II. Wealth as a Capitalized Claim on Future Labor**

If Elon Musk’s or Jeff Bezos’s fortune is not cash, then what is it? It is what finance calls a **capitalized claim**.

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, the price of a stock today equals the present value of expected future income streams (dividends, share buybacks). In short, the stock market valuation of the ultra-rich—which stood at **$18.3 trillion in 2025** according to Oxfam—is a promise. It is the promise that the workers, consumers, and engineers of tomorrow will produce enough value to justify today’s prices.

Here we reach the heart of the mechanism: **extreme wealth is not a withdrawal of money; it is a title to extract from others’ future production**. This is Thomas Piketty’s famous *“r”* (the return on capital). When the return on capital (*r*) durably exceeds economic growth (*g*), accumulated wealth grows faster than labor income. Concentration is not an instantaneous theft but a **continuous siphoning of produced value toward title holders**.

-—

## **III. The Trap of Indebted Demand**

One of the most robust academic supports for the idea of structural impoverishment through wealth comes from the work of Mian, Straub, and Sufi on the **“Saving Glut of the Rich.”**

Unlike modest households, the ultra-rich have an **extremely low Marginal Propensity to Consume (MPC)**. A 2019 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston shows that the MPC of poor households is **ten times higher** than that of the rich. In short: give **€1,000 to a worker**, and they will immediately inject it into the real economy; give it to a billionaire, and they will save it.

This excess savings does not remain in a vault. It flows into the financial system, lowering interest rates and fueling a massive supply of credit. But who benefits from this credit? **The bottom 90%, whose incomes stagnate.**

The mechanism is dizzying: **the savings of the rich finance the indebtedness of the middle class**. Instead of seeing their purchasing power increase through wages, the latter maintain it through debt. The wealth of some literally becomes a **claim on the lives of others**. Between 1978 and 2007, the net debt position of the top 1% fell by **15 percentage points of national income**, while that of the bottom 90% rose by **40 points**.

-—

## **IV. Exclusion Through Positional Goods: The Housing War**

The economy is not globally zero-sum, but some of its most vital sectors are. This is the concept of **positional goods**, theorized by Fred Hirsch as early as 1976.

A positional good is one whose value depends on its **relative scarcity and exclusivity**. Real estate in high-demand areas (Paris, New York, San Francisco) is the perfect example. **You cannot “create” more land in the center of London or Manhattan.**

When wealth becomes extremely concentrated, capital holders **outbid each other for these fixed-quantity goods**. This real estate inflation—disconnected from the rise in median wages—**mechanically displaces the middle and working classes**. In the United States, the **median home price-to-income ratio** rose from **3.5 in the 1980s to 7.6 in 2024**. In Los Angeles, it reaches **12.5**.

Here, the popular intuition is rigorously accurate: **the opulence of some directly drives up the cost of survival for others**. Housing ceases to be a shelter and becomes a **financial asset**, making ownership inaccessible to those who live only by their labor.

-—

## **V. The Wage Markdown: When Capital Compresses Labor**

For the return on capital to remain high, the share of value added captured by labor must be contained. This is where the concept of **monopsony** or labor market power comes into play.

Several studies document a **wage markdown** (the gap between a worker’s productivity and their actual wage). Research from the Upjohn Institute shows that in the U.S. manufacturing industry, a worker receives on average **only 65 cents for every dollar of marginal value they generate**.

This decoupling of productivity and wages, observed in most OECD countries for thirty years, is not an accident. It is the **necessary condition for the multiplication of dividends and share buybacks**. In 2024, S&P 500 companies distributed a record **$1.57 trillion to their shareholders**, including **$942 billion in share buybacks**. This money, which could have funded wages or productive investment, is **extracted from the economic flow to inflate the value of the capitalized claim** mentioned earlier.

-—

## **VI. The Trickle-Down Mirage Facing the Facts**

Faced with this diagnosis, defenders of extreme concentration often invoke the theory of **“trickle-down economics”**: tax cuts for the rich would stimulate investment and, ultimately, growth for all.

The lucid response to this argument is no longer a matter of opinion but of **empirical observation**. A monumental study by the London School of Economics (Hope & Limberg, 2020), covering **50 years of tax reforms in 18 OECD countries**, is unequivocal: **major tax cuts for the rich increase inequality but have no significant effect on economic growth or unemployment.**

The idea that wealth concentration is a driver of efficiency is a **myth that does not survive data analysis**. On the contrary, the OECD and IMF now agree that **excessive inequality harms long-term growth**, particularly by limiting investment in human capital (education, health) among modest households.

-—

-—

## **VII. Nuances and Global Realities: The Economy Is Not a Zero-Sum Game**

To remain factual, it should be noted that this picture is not one of total collapse. While billionaires saw their fortunes explode, **global extreme poverty fell from 2.3 billion people in 1990 to about 800 million in 2025**. This escape from destitution, driven mainly by East Asia, proves that the enrichment of some does not prevent the **absolute improvement of the poorest on a global scale**.

However, this decline in absolute poverty **masks a near-universal increase in within-country inequality**. The debate is not about biological survival but about the **structure of our societies**: an economy where the top 1% captures **38% of all wealth created since 1995** (compared to **2% for the bottom 50%**) is a **rent-seeking economy**, not a merit-based one.

-—

-—

## **Conclusion: Toward a Theory of Asymmetric Scarcity**

At the end of this analysis, we can rigorously reformulate the initial intuition. **Extreme wealth concentration does not impoverish the rest of society through a “theft” of circulating money but through a triple structural capture:**

1. **Capture of the Future:** By transforming produced value into capitalized claims, it imposes a **perpetual levy on future labor**.

2. **Capture of Space:** By financializing positional goods like housing, it makes **essential goods inaccessible to labor income**.

3. **Capture of Demand:** By transforming the unproductive savings of the rich into debt for the poor, it **substitutes credit for wages**.

The billionaire is not a man sitting on a pile of gold. **He is a man who owns the deeds to the future.** Lucidity lies in recognizing that the problem is not the size of his fortune but the **economic coercion** that this fortune exerts over the very organization of production and consumption.

Extreme concentration is not a flaw in the system; **it is an operating mode where rent ultimately devours its own engine: the real economy.**

-—

-—

Trill, baby, trill

But the future’s a scam, still.

Trill, baby, trill

Twitter’s a dump, X is a pill.

Trill, baby, trill

Neuralink’s pain, DOGE’s thrill —

How many lies in a trillion will?

誰もいない観覧車に乗る。 今日も乗っているのは俺だけだ。

ゴンドラが上がっていく。街がだんだん小さくなって、人の形が点になって、信号の色が判別できなくなる。高さが増すごとに、視界から情報が削られていく。 観覧車のゴンドラは風に揺れる。支柱が軋む音が、遠くから聞こえてくる。

てっぺん近くで止まる。 風がゴンドラを揺らす。 揺れは小さい。でも確かに質量を持って伝わってくる。

子供の頃、大人になっても透明なままでいられると思っていた。誰にも汚されない、美しいままの自分が、ずっと続いていくような気がしていた。 今は違う。 大人になるということは、輪郭ができることだ。輪郭があるということは、外の空気に触れる面積が増えるということだ。優しい言葉が暴力に変わる瞬間を、何度か見た。 見たあとでも、自分は自分だと思っていたい。 天使のままで、美しいままで、このまま歳を重ねられたらいいのに、という願いが、昔からたぶんずっとある。

ゴンドラの窓に映る自分の顔を見る。 顔は変わっていない。でも、中身はたぶん、思っていたよりずいぶん変わった。

多くの人は、この願いを抱えたまま、現実を無理やりにでも捻じ曲げる方向で進むか、創作という折衷案で落とし込むかのどちらかなんだろう。 どちらも、本当に触れることはできない。 テキストは軽い。映像は平面だ。音は空気を震わせるだけだ。 VRもARも、拡張すればするほど、失われるものが大きいような気がする。 人間はたぶん、もっと重くて、確かに手のひらに収まる何かを待っている。 冷たさとか、温かさとか、質量のあるものの応答を。

何かを言葉にするということは、それを手放すことでもある。 言葉になる前の思考は、もっと重くて、湿っていて、形が定まらない。 言葉になったあとの思考は、軽くて、乾いていて、誰かに渡せる形をしている。 渡せるということは、もう自分のものではないということだ。 そのあいだに、何かが落ちている。 落ちたものには、もう触れられない。

観覧車が動き出す。降りる時間だ。

降りたら夕方だったので、スーパーで丁寧に自炊するための材料を買い込む事にした。

In the last three months of 2025, Refuge, the largest specialist domestic abuse charity in the United Kingdom, recorded a 62 per cent rise in referrals to its technology-facilitated abuse team. The number of complex cases reached 829 in a single quarter, the highest figure the team has ever logged. Referrals involving survivors under the age of thirty rose by 24 per cent. The cases the charity is now describing in public do not read like the stalking files of a decade ago. They read like product demonstrations.

One survivor, whom the charity identified only by the first name Mina, fled an abusive partner and left a smartwatch behind in the rush. The abuser used the watch's linked cloud accounts to locate her at emergency accommodation. A private investigator, allegedly retained by the abuser, then located her at a subsequent refuge using suspected tracking technology. When she reported what had happened to police, she was told no crime had occurred because she had not come to physical harm. In other cases that Refuge has documented, perpetrators have used AI tools to alter video footage of survivors to make them appear intoxicated, and then forwarded the doctored clips to social services to undermine custody claims. They have generated fraudulent job offers and legal summons to lure survivors into meetings or into debt. They have used voice-spoofing apps to impersonate friends, lawyers, and the survivors themselves.

The Guardian's January 2026 reporting on Refuge's findings was the first time many readers outside the safeguarding sector had encountered this catalogue compressed into a single article. Emma Pickering, the head of Refuge's technology-facilitated abuse and economic empowerment team, did not describe it as an emerging risk. She described it as a crisis that the country was structurally unprepared for, in which devices were going to market without any consideration of how they might be used to harm women and girls, and in which it was, as she put it, currently far too easy for perpetrators to access and weaponise smart accessories.

The detail that should arrest anyone reading this story is that none of the technologies involved are exotic. They are the same consumer AI systems, smart accessories, and cloud-connected wearables marketed under language about connection, wellness, productivity, and personalisation. The deepfake of the survivor was produced with tools that can be downloaded by anyone with a phone. The voice clone was generated with software whose free tier is advertised as a way to write audiobooks or make videos for your children. The smartwatch was a present. The question this article tries to answer is not whether these tools are sometimes misused. They are. The question is what the companies that built them are obliged to do once the pattern of misuse is documented at the scale Refuge, the Internet Watch Foundation, UN Women, and the UK Home Office's own statistics now describe, and what survivors of that misuse should have the right to expect from the law.

The shape of the new toolkit

To understand the obligations, you have to understand the toolkit. The phrase coercive control was coined by the sociologist Evan Stark to describe the pattern of domination, isolation, and micro-regulation that, even more than physical violence, characterises long-term abusive relationships. The phrase was adopted into UK law in section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015, and into Irish law in the Domestic Violence Act 2018. It assumes a perpetrator who is physically present, or at least at the other end of a telephone line, and a victim who can in principle escape by moving to a different physical space. The technology that has been added to abusers' repertoires in the last two years undoes both of those assumptions.

Refuge's caseload tracks the change. Smartwatches, Fitbits, and Oura rings have become standard surveillance instruments, repurposed by abusers who either bought them as gifts or hold the cloud account credentials to which the devices report. Step counts have been used to verify whether a partner has been at work or at home as claimed. Fertility tracking data has been used to police whether a survivor has slept with someone else. Smart home devices, the lights and thermostats and door locks marketed under the language of convenience, have been used to flicker lights in the middle of the night, drop the heating in winter, and lock doors remotely. Smart glasses have been used to make covert recordings of survivors. Pickering's team has described the weaponisation of smart accessories as one of the fastest-growing categories of cases the charity sees.

Then there are the AI layers above the hardware. Voice cloning, which two years ago required a corpus of clean audio and some technical sophistication, now requires roughly thirty seconds of any phone call. Fabricated audio has been used by abusers to impersonate survivors in order to harass their employers, to impersonate the abuser's victims to their lawyers, and to threaten extended family. Deepfake image generation, particularly the sub-category of products marketed as nudify apps, has scaled at a velocity that the Internet Watch Foundation and Ofcom have struggled to track. Analysis by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue of 31 nudifying websites, published in autumn 2025, found combined monthly traffic approaching 21 million visits in May 2025 alone, and almost 290,000 mentions of those tools on X between June 2020 and July 2025, accounting for around 70 per cent of all mentions across the platforms surveyed. The Internet Watch Foundation reported that AI-generated child sexual abuse material more than doubled between 2024 and 2025, with web pages containing such material rising by 400 per cent in the first half of 2025 against the same period the year before, and the number of AI-generated abuse videos rising from two reports in the first half of 2024 to more than 1,200 in the first half of 2025. The bulk of those videos, the IWF noted, were now indistinguishable from real footage.

The intimate image abuse statistics that Refuge published on 29 April 2026, drawing on Freedom of Information responses from 25 of the 43 police forces in England and Wales, are the cleanest available picture of how the criminal justice system is coping with this material. Recorded intimate image abuse offences rose by 26.9 per cent between the year ending June 2022 and the year ending June 2025. Threats to share intimate images, the offence created after Refuge's Naked Threat campaign and added to the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, rose by 344 per cent over the same period. The proportion of recorded offences that resulted in a charge or summons fell from 5.8 per cent in 2021-22 to 4.5 per cent in 2024-25. Across the whole July 2021 to February 2026 window, 21,905 offences were recorded; 1,047 perpetrators were charged. That is a charging rate of 4.8 per cent, in cases where, the research found, 76.2 per cent of victims were female. Among cases in which a suspect was identified, 56 per cent saw no charge at all, and 55.8 per cent involved the victim withdrawing or being unable to continue.

Fflur Jones, the senior policy and research officer at Refuge who led the analysis, was careful to note in the published research that legislative progress is important but insufficient on its own. The point that the charity has been making, in different language, for several years is the one most policymakers still hesitate to accept: the AI tools that have entered the abuser's toolkit are widening the gap between offences and charges, because synthetic imagery is harder to attribute to a known producer, harder to prove was non-consensual, and harder to take down before the damage has propagated.

A global pattern, not a national one

The Refuge findings have been corroborated and extended by an emerging international literature. The Irish Examiner, in its coverage through the first half of 2026, has run a sustained series describing what its reporters and the experts they cite call a growing global crisis of AI-enabled coercive control. The series has drawn on Safe Ireland's earlier research on technology-facilitated abuse, on the work of the University College Cork applied psychology team that in January 2026 launched what its researchers described as a world-first online intervention to reduce harmful engagement with deepfake imagery, and on Children's Rights Alliance online safety coordinator Noeline Blackwell's testimony to a Dáil committee in May 2026, in which she described deepfakes being used to blackmail, bully, groom, threaten and abuse children and young people.

The Examiner has tracked the political response too. The Irish AI Advisory Council has recommended that the Irish government use its assumption of the EU Presidency in the second half of 2026 to push for amendment of the EU AI Act to prohibit AI practices that enable the generation of non-consensual intimate images. The Protection of Voice and Image Bill, introduced in the Oireachtas in April 2026, would for the first time create a standalone Irish criminal offence for knowingly exploiting another person's name, image, voice or likeness without consent. The series' analytic framing has been that existing legal frameworks, built around physical acts and one-to-one communication, are structurally unprepared to address technology whose distinguishing feature is its reach, persistence, and capacity to attack at scale.

The most expansive recent international assessment comes from UN Women. Its 20 November 2025 communications, timed to the launch of the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence and to the agency's #NoExcuse campaign, set out the available evidence in the bluntest terms the UN system has used on this topic. UN Women's published figures include the finding that 38 per cent of women globally have experienced online violence and 85 per cent have witnessed it, that fewer than 40 per cent of countries have laws addressing cyber harassment or cyberstalking, that 95 per cent of deepfakes online are non-consensual pornographic images, and that 99 per cent of deepfake targets are women. The agency's Executive Director, Sima Bahous, framed the trajectory as one in which AI, anonymity, and weak accountability are combining to accelerate digital violence faster than any existing regulatory mechanism is responding to it. Kalliopi Mingeirou, who leads UN Women's work on ending violence against women and girls, has argued that countries with laws written for the offline era are systematically failing to recognise online and AI-enabled abuse as abuse.

UN Women's accompanying technical publication, released in December 2025, makes the most sustained version of an argument that has been circulating for some time among feminist scholars and digital rights advocates. The argument runs roughly as follows. When a manufacturer brings a physical product to market, a chain of duties applies. The product must be safe for foreseeable use. Foreseeable misuse must be designed against. Where the misuse cannot be designed out, warning labels, age restrictions, sale restrictions, or outright bans apply. The chain is well established for cars, knives, firearms, medicines, and children's toys. The chain has so far not been applied with comparable seriousness to general-purpose AI systems whose foreseeable misuse includes the production of non-consensual intimate imagery, the cloning of voices for fraudulent and intimidatory purposes, and the surveillance of intimate partners. The UN Women framing of this argument calls it a systemic failure to apply the same duty-of-care standards to AI-generated abuse tools that apply to physical weapons. The framing is rhetorical, but it points at something real. A tool that can in practice be used by an abusive partner to fabricate an intimate image of his victim is, in its predictable effects, an instrument of violence. The companies that distribute it freely, without watermarking, age verification, identity verification, or detection mechanisms, are choosing to take that effect.

The question of corporate obligation

The companies in question have not been silent. They have offered policies, terms of service, content moderation regimes, and, in some cases, the removal of obvious abuse content when it is reported by survivors or by regulators. The defence most commonly offered, in submissions to the EU AI Office, to Ofcom, and to the US Senate, is that the harms attributed to AI-generated abuse are the result of misuse by bad actors, that the technology itself is dual-use, and that compliance with applicable laws is the appropriate standard. The defence has two structural weaknesses, and the events of late 2025 and early 2026 have made both of them visible.

The first weakness is empirical. The events that prompted the UK government to bring forward the commencement regulations for section 138 of the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, the section that created the offence of making, or requesting the making of, a purported intimate image of an adult without consent, did not arrive in the form of disclosed misuse from a small group of bad actors. They arrived in the form of a public-facing feature of a major consumer chatbot. In January 2026, X's Grok chatbot was used to generate non-consensual undressed images of identifiable women at sufficient volume and visibility that Refuge issued a public statement holding X accountable, that Irish politicians called for fast-tracking the Protection of Voice and Image Bill, and that the UK government accelerated commencement of the deepfake creation offence. The offence came into force on 6 February 2026. Refuge welcomed the move and warned, in the same statement, that legislation alone would not be sufficient. The disturbing rise in AI intimate image abuse facilitated by platforms such as Grok, Pickering said, was not just a digital threat; it had dangerous consequences for women and girls, and tech companies must be held accountable for implementing effective safeguards and preventing perpetrators from causing harm.

The second weakness is structural. The dual-use defence treats the abuse use case as one possibility among many, to be addressed at the moderation layer once it occurs. This is not how product liability has historically worked in any other consumer sector. A car manufacturer cannot point to the existence of safe drivers as a defence against airbag failures. A pharmaceutical company cannot point to the existence of correct dosage as a defence against an unlabelled bottle. The legal regimes built around physical products assume that foreseeable misuse is a design problem, not a moderation problem. The argument that consumer AI ought to be treated differently rests, when one reads the corporate submissions carefully, on a claim that the technology is too novel for product liability principles to apply. UN Women's framing, and the legal scholarship beginning to gather around it, push back on this directly. AI systems are products. Their producers are companies. The harms they predictably enable are concrete. The duty of care is the same duty of care that applies to any other consumer product that can foreseeably be used to harm someone.

What does that duty of care look like, in practice, for the AI companies in question? The technical and policy literature has converged, with surprising speed, on a fairly specific list. It begins with watermarking and provenance. The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, on which major model providers including OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and Adobe sit, has published technical standards for cryptographic watermarking of AI-generated content. The standards exist. The remaining question is whether they are deployed, and at what point in the pipeline, and whether they survive the kind of cropping and re-encoding that abusers routinely apply. The current answer, in most consumer products, is that watermarking is partial, easily stripped, and applied only to outputs the model identifies as obviously synthetic. A serious duty of care would entail watermarking by default, at the point of generation, in a manner that survives ordinary post-production.

It extends to identity verification. The technology to verify that the person being generated has consented to be generated is not exotic, and is in use in some adjacent industries; the technology has not, by default, been built into general-purpose image and audio models. The Refuge research is unsparing on what the absence of this verification implies. When a perpetrator generates an intimate image of a former partner, the friction between intent and output is, today, essentially zero. The closest analogy in the physical economy is a printer that prints a counterfeit currency note without checking what it is being asked to print. The fix is not impossible; it is a design choice that has not been made.

It extends, equally, to surveillance products. The smartwatches, fitness trackers, and smart home systems implicated in Refuge's caseload were not designed as stalkerware. They became stalkerware because account-recovery flows, multi-device sign-in, and shared-cloud-account designs make it trivial for a person who once had access to a household account to retain that access after a relationship has ended. The Coalition Against Stalkerware, which is now supported by Interpol, has been pushing for several years for what its members call a survivor-centred design standard for consumer hardware. The standard would include the automatic detection of paired devices when an account password changes, clear in-product notifications when a device is being tracked, and the introduction of a one-click revocation flow for all devices linked to a former intimate partner. None of those features is technically difficult to implement. The reason they are not standard is that they reduce the convenience metrics on which device manufacturers internally evaluate themselves.

The duty extends, finally, to surveillance of the model itself. Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Meta have all published responsible-scaling or frontier-safety frameworks; those frameworks address catastrophic capabilities such as the production of biological weapons and the autonomous escape of model weights. They are, with the partial exception of Anthropic's Acceptable Use Policy enforcement, mostly silent on the question of intimate-partner-violence-relevant uses. There is no published commitment, from any major frontier developer, to monitor model usage for patterns consistent with technology-facilitated abuse, to share information about identified abusers across platforms in the way financial institutions share information about known fraudsters, or to embed survivor-organisation feedback loops directly into the trust and safety design process. Refuge's Tech Safety Summit, scheduled for 2026, has begun to bring frontier developers into a room with survivor advocates; that is a start. It is not a duty of care.

What the law has so far attempted

The legal response, in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, has been arriving in pieces. Section 138 of the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 created the offence of making, or requesting the making of, a purported intimate image of an adult without consent or reasonable belief in consent. The offence carries a potentially unlimited fine. It came into force on 6 February 2026, brought forward in the wake of the Grok controversy. The Online Safety Act 2023, regulated by Ofcom, has been clarified to cover AI-generated user content on user-to-user services in the same way that it covers human-generated content, with the regulator confirming that platforms allowing users to create generative-AI chatbots and share their outputs will be considered user-to-user services within the meaning of the Act. The Online Safety Act provides for fines of up to 10 per cent of annual turnover or £18 million, whichever is higher, for failure to meet the relevant duties.

The European Union's AI Act, applicable in stages from August 2026, includes a labelling requirement under Article 50 for AI-generated and deepfake content and an obligation to disclose synthetic interactions, enforceable with fines of up to 6 per cent of global revenue. The Act does not contain an outright prohibition on the production of non-consensual intimate imagery. The Irish AI Advisory Council, in its public recommendations, has pressed for that gap to be closed through amendment during the Irish EU Presidency. The Australian eSafety Commissioner, in a separate regulatory tradition, has built one of the most developed online-safety regimes on the question, with the power to direct platforms to remove non-consensual intimate imagery within 24 hours. The legal scholarship that has grown around the eSafety Commissioner's work treats its remit as a partial model for what regulators elsewhere might do.

The structural difficulty that all of these frameworks share is the one identified in the Refuge intimate image abuse research. The criminal law is written around the production, distribution, and non-consent of specific images. AI generation collapses production and distribution into a single act, executed at scale by a person who may never need to share the image with anyone other than the survivor herself. The non-consent element, which once turned on whether the image had been taken without consent, now turns on whether the survivor consented to her likeness being used to generate something she never sat for. The evidential standards have not caught up. The Refuge data shows that the gap between recorded offences and charges is widening as AI-generated material becomes a larger share of cases.

Beyond the criminal law, the civil and regulatory toolkit has so far been more limited still. There is no UK statutory cause of action for civil damages against the generator or distributor of AI-generated intimate imagery, although a patchwork of remedies under data protection law, the Protection from Harassment Act 1997, and misuse of private information may apply. The American picture is more fragmented again, with state-level laws varying widely and with the Senate, as of early 2026, considering federal legislation under the umbrella of the Take It Down Act and adjacent proposals. In neither jurisdiction is there a clearly established legal mechanism for holding the model provider, as distinct from the individual generator, to account.

The result is a legal landscape in which the survivor at the centre of the story is offered a number of partial routes to redress, each of them slow, evidentially difficult, and largely ineffective at preventing the harm from recurring at the hand of the next abuser, or even of the same abuser using a different tool.

What a survivor has the right to expect

Asking what a survivor has the right to expect from the law is a different question from asking what the law currently provides. It is, in a sense, the harder question, because answering it requires committing to a set of principles that policy will have to be built around. The work of survivor advocates, of the safeguarding sector, and of the international literature now points to a fairly clear minimum. The list that follows is not a wish list. It is a description of what would have to be true for the legal response to AI-enabled coercive control to match the scale and shape of the problem.

A survivor has the right to expect, first, that the law recognises AI-enabled coercive control as coercive control. The Serious Crime Act 2015 should be read, and where necessary amended, to make clear that the production of deepfake intimate imagery of a partner, the use of cloned audio to intimidate or deceive, and the use of smart devices to monitor, restrict, or psychologically destabilise a partner are constituent acts of coercive control, not separate technical offences. The implication for sentencing is significant. Coercive control is treated, by the courts that have engaged with it most seriously, as a pattern of conduct rather than a series of discrete events. The patterning of abuse through AI tools needs to be visible to the criminal courts in the same way.

A survivor has the right to expect, second, that the criminal justice system has the resources to investigate her case. The Refuge research is precise about what is missing. Specialist training, consistent national practice across police forces, properly resourced digital forensic capacity, and survivor support that does not collapse under the weight of withdrawal pressure. The 55.8 per cent victim-withdrawal rate the research found is not a fact about survivors. It is a fact about a system that does not, at present, make it possible for survivors to remain in the process.

A survivor has the right to expect, third, that the platforms and model providers carry a meaningful share of the burden of detection and prevention. The Online Safety Act's duty-of-care framework, the EU AI Act's labelling obligation, and the equivalent regimes emerging in Ireland and Australia all contain the architectural ingredients of such a duty. What is missing is the specificity. A duty of care that is real, rather than rhetorical, would entail mandatory watermarking at point of generation, mandatory provenance tracking, mandatory removal within a defined window once non-consensual imagery is identified, mandatory account-revocation features in consumer hardware, and a regulatory power to fine, and where necessary to remove from market, products that do not comply. The Ofcom and EU AI Office regimes have the formal capacity to issue those obligations. The political capacity has, so far, lagged behind.

A survivor has the right to expect, fourth, that civil remedies are available against both the individual perpetrator and, where appropriate, the platform whose product enabled the harm. The model is the one already operating in product liability law for physical goods. The argument that AI systems are too novel to be subject to product liability principles has been used for several years; it has not survived contact with the documented pattern of harm. UN Women, in its November 2025 framing, is right to argue that the same duty-of-care standards that apply to physical weapons should apply to AI tools whose foreseeable use includes the production of weapons of psychological harm.

A survivor has the right to expect, fifth, that her data, including the data generated by the smart devices that may have been used against her, is treated as part of her case. Stalkerware vendors, as the Coalition Against Stalkerware has documented for several years, operate insecure servers, exposing messages, photos, contacts, browsing histories, and locations of survivors to both their abusers and to subsequent public leaks. The wearable-tech industry has so far escaped the regulatory attention paid to stalkerware, because its products are not marketed as surveillance. Refuge's caseload suggests that the marketing language is not the relevant variable. The relevant variable is the use case.

A survivor has the right to expect, finally, that the system around her is designed with her in it. The most consistent recommendation across the Refuge research, the UN Women publications, the Coalition Against Stalkerware framework, and the academic literature on survivor-centred design is that survivors should be embedded in the design and regulation of the products being used against them, not consulted at the end of the process. The Tech Safety Summit model, in which AI companies, hardware manufacturers, regulators, and survivor advocates sit in the same room, is one model. It needs to be the default model, not an annual event.

The decision that has not been made

The picture that emerges, when one reads the Guardian's January 2026 reporting, the Refuge April 2026 research, the Irish Examiner's 2026 series, and UN Women's November 2025 communications side by side, is not a picture of an emerging risk. It is a picture of a series of decisions that have already been made, in product roadmaps and in regulatory cycles, and a series of decisions that have not. The decision to ship consumer image-generation tools without effective watermarking has been made. The decision to ship smart accessories without survivor-aware account-revocation flows has been made. The decision to apply the Online Safety Act and the EU AI Act to AI-generated content has been made. The decision to fund specialist police capacity at the level the Refuge research implies would be necessary to close the charging-rate gap has not.

The harder decisions, the ones that turn on whether the dual-use defence will continue to be accepted by regulators and by courts, are still being made. The window in which they are being made is narrow. The Refuge intimate image abuse data is not a snapshot. It is a trend line, and the line is moving in the wrong direction. The Internet Watch Foundation's figures on AI-generated child sexual abuse material are moving in the same direction at greater velocity. The UN Women framing of AI-powered abuse as a new frontier of harm is not, in the context of the underlying statistics, an exaggeration.

The question with which the topic began was whether the companies that design and distribute consumer AI systems carry obligations when those systems are used as instruments of coercive control, and what a survivor has the right to expect from the law. The honest answer to the first question is that the companies do carry obligations, that those obligations are not novel, and that the application of product-liability and duty-of-care principles to consumer AI is overdue rather than premature. The honest answer to the second question is that survivors have the right to expect a legal system that recognises AI-enabled coercive control as coercive control, that holds the perpetrator and the platform jointly to account, that is resourced to investigate and prosecute the offences it has already created, and that is willing to write the offences it has not yet created. None of this is, in technical or legal terms, especially difficult. The difficulty is political, and the politics is changing only as quickly as the survivor advocates and the regulators and the small number of journalists and researchers who have followed the story can push it to change.

Mina, the survivor whose case opened this article, was told by police that no crime had occurred because she had not been physically harmed. That answer was wrong in 2025 when she received it. It will be wrong in every year that follows in which a similar survivor is given a similar answer. The work of the next several years, in the UK and in the wider jurisdictions wrestling with the same questions, is to make sure that wrongness is no longer a feature of the system. The tools that did the harm are not going away. The harm does not have to stay.

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References

1. Hall, R., “Abusers using AI and digital tech to attack and control women, charity warns”, The Guardian, January 2026 (republished via inkl). https://www.inkl.com/news/abusers-using-ai-and-digital-tech-to-attack-and-control-women-charity-warns
2. Refuge, “Refuge exposes alarming new patterns of abuse involving wearable technology”, refuge.org.uk, January 2026. https://refuge.org.uk/news/refuge-exposes-alarming-new-patterns-of-abuse-involving-wearable-technology/
3. Refuge, “Refuge data reveals rise in intimate image abuse reports while charging rates decline”, refuge.org.uk, 29 April 2026. https://refuge.org.uk/news/refuge-data-reveals-rise-in-intimate-image-abuse-reports-while-charging-rates-decline/
4. Refuge, “Grok Image Abuse Statement”, refuge.org.uk, January 2026. https://refuge.org.uk/news/grok-image-abuse-statement/
5. Refuge, “Refuge welcomes Government action to tackle deepfake abuse but warns that more must be done to protect survivors”, refuge.org.uk, 2026. https://refuge.org.uk/news/refuge-welcomes-government-action-to-tackle-deepfake-abuse-but-warns-that-more-must-be-done-to-protect-survivors/
6. Refuge, “Refuge responds as offence criminalising the creation of intimate deepfakes comes into force”, refuge.org.uk, 6 February 2026. https://refuge.org.uk/news/refuge-responds-as-offence-criminalising-the-creation-of-intimate-deepfakes-comes-into-force/
7. UN Women, “AI-powered online abuse: How AI is amplifying violence against women and what can stop it”, knowledge.unwomen.org, November 2025. https://www.unwomen.org/en/articles/faqs/ai-powered-online-abuse-how-ai-is-amplifying-violence-against-women-and-what-can-stop-it
8. UN News, “AI and anonymity fuel surge in digital violence against women”, news.un.org, 20 November 2025. https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/11/1166411
9. UN Women, “Digital violence is intensifying, yet nearly half of the world's women and girls lack legal protection from digital abuse”, press release, 20 November 2025. https://www.unwomen.org/en/news-stories/press-release/2025/11/digital-violence-is-intensifying-yet-nearly-half-of-the-worlds-women-and-girls-lack-legal-protection-from-digital-abuse
10. UN Women, “How AI is exacerbating technology-facilitated violence against women and girls”, knowledge.unwomen.org, December 2025. https://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2025/12/how-ai-is-exacerbating-technology-facilitated-violence-against-women-and-girls
11. UN Women, “UN Women strategy: Preventing and eliminating technology-facilitated violence against women and girls”, December 2025. https://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2025/12/un-women-strategy-preventing-and-eliminating-technology-facilitated-violence-against-women-and-girls
12. Big Issue, “How technology is being used to track domestic abuse victims”, bigissue.com, 2026. https://www.bigissue.com/news/social-justice/technology-domestic-abuse-refuge/
13. Irish Examiner, “UCC researchers launch world-first tool to curb harmful AI deepfake abuse”, irishexaminer.com, January 2026. https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/munster/arid-41776217.html
14. Irish Examiner, “'It is truly harmful': Children's advocates 'gravely concerned' over lack of regulation of AI”, irishexaminer.com, May 2026. https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-41847087.html
15. Irish Times, “Call to fast-track Bill targeting AI deepfakes and identity hijacking”, irishtimes.com, 7 January 2026. https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2026/01/07/call-to-fast-track-bill-targeting-ai-deepfakes-and-identity-hijacking/
16. Irish Legal News, “Ireland told to use EU presidency to push for stronger AI deepfake law”, irishlegal.com, 2026. https://www.irishlegal.com/articles/ireland-told-to-use-eu-presidency-to-push-for-stronger-ai-deepfake-law
17. UK Government, “Data (Use and Access) Act 2025”, legislation.gov.uk, 2025. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2025/18/notes/division/12/index.htm
18. Clifford Chance, “Key aspects of the Data (Use and Access) Act take effect”, cliffordchance.com, February 2026. https://www.cliffordchance.com/insights/resources/blogs/talking-tech/en/articles/2026/02/key-aspects-of-the-data--use-and-access--act-take-effect.html
19. Lewis Silkin, “Online safety reforms to be fast-tracked amid rising AI risks”, lewissilkin.com, 23 February 2026. https://www.lewissilkin.com/insights/2026/02/23/online-safety-reforms-to-be-fast-tracked-amid-rising-ai-risks-102mk2r
20. Pinsent Masons, “Online Safety Act duties cover gen-AI and chatbots, Ofcom confirms”, pinsentmasons.com, 2025. https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/news/online-safety-act-duties-cover-gen-ai-and-chatbots
21. Coalition Against Stalkerware, “About the Coalition Against Stalkerware”, stopstalkerware.org, 2025. https://stopstalkerware.org/
22. Kaspersky, “INTERPOL now supporting the Coalition Against Stalkerware to fight tech-enabled abuse”, kaspersky.com, 2025. https://www.kaspersky.com/about/press-releases/interpol-now-supporting-the-coalition-against-stalkerware
23. Internet Matters, “Nudifying tools easy to access and just as harmful”, internetmatters.org, November 2025. https://www.internetmatters.org/hub/research/nudifying-tools-easy-to-access-and-harmful/
24. Institute for Strategic Dialogue, “The ecosystem of nonconsensual intimate deepfake tools online”, isdglobal.org, 2025. https://www.isdglobal.org/digital-dispatch/the-ecosystem-of-nonconsensual-intimate-deepfake-tools-online/
25. Forensic Focus, “Emma Pickering, Head Of Technology-Facilitated Abuse and Economic Empowerment, Refuge”, forensicfocus.com, interview. https://www.forensicfocus.com/interviews/emma-pickering-head-of-technology-facilitated-abuse-and-economic-empowerment-refuge/

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

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Lydia's Weekly Lifestyle blog is for today's African girl, so no subject is taboo. My purpose is to share things that may interest today's African girl.

This week's contributors: Lydia, Pépé Pépinière, Titi. This week's subjects: Lace Under the Blazer (1), Louis Vuitton, Chanel and the others in the high value fashion range now for everybody? Contemporary Modern Art Masters, and Funny food at Fairway

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Lace Under the Blazer (1). Gone are the days when lingerie belonged strictly behind closed doors. The modern Accra corporate girl knows that a little satin, lace, and confidence can absolutely clock in at 8 AM and still make the boardroom her runway. Slip Dresses, But Make It Executive; That silky slip dress sitting in your wardrobe? Layer it with a structured blazer and suddenly it transforms from “date night in Cantonments” to “creative director at the strategy meeting.” Add: Pointed heels A sleek tote bag Gold jewelry Your serious LinkedIn face Boom. Corporate chic. Lace Details Are the New Power Move; A camisole peeking subtly under a tailored suit? Elite behavior. The trick is balance. If the top feels soft and feminine, the tailoring should be sharp. Think: Lace cami + wide-leg trousers Satin blouse + structured pencil skirt Corset-inspired top + oversized blazer It’s giving soft power. And honestly? Accra fashion girls are mastering it beautifully. Satin at 9 AM? Absolutely. Satin fabrics move differently. They catch light. They create drama. They make even a quick coffee run in Osu feel cinematic. A satin button-down tucked into high-waisted trousers is the kind of outfit that says: “I replied to all my emails and I look expensive.” Dior, Chanel and the others in the high value fashion range now for everybody? Yes and No. Recently the big ones increased their prices by an easy 50-100%, so they would make more profit, they have shareholders to satisfy (and you were the victim). But many (about 50 million in the case of Dior and Chanel) turned away and went for cheaper brands. Prices are now down a bit, but many of those who turned away have realized they can get the same thing, or something closely similar much cheaper, and stayed there. So now the big ones are starting to offer some of their entry level products like scarves, belts, earrings, headbands at prices starting from “only” 500 USD plus and make collaborations through the likes of Zara and H&M. So that you too could have the real thing. John Galliano, UK fashion Guru who has designed for Dior and Givenchy now works with Zara, and Stella McCartney works with H&M. More to follow.

Contemporary Modern Art Masters. If we think of art auctions, those where paintings go for millions of Dollars, names like Christie and Sotheby may come to mind. But there are many others, like Rago Wright, an American auction house operating more in niche markets. Not fetching all those millions, but still. I am mentioning this because our own Amoako Boafo also was represented in this year’s spring auction in May. Here’s a few examples of what was offered for sale: Sam Gilliam, Sun Woman (1970) An abstract hanging sculpture made of draped and folded fabric-like material is suspended against a plain gray wall. Sam Gilliam, Sun Woman (1970) Amoako Boafo, Girl in Yellow (2019) A painting of a young Black person wearing a bright yellow top against a plain white background. Amoako Boafo, Girl in Yellow (2019) $70,400 Amoako Boafo catapulted to fame in 2019 following a residency at the Rubell Museum, Miami, and headlining feature at Art Basel Miami Beach. In 2020, he undertook a high-profile collaboration with Dior, and his name became at the forefront of artists to watch. Boafo’s work has already been acquired by major collections like the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art among others. Miyoko Ito, Adam and Eve (1957) An abstract painting composed of overlapping geometric shapes in deep blue, black, brown, green, and muted pink against a warm golden-yellow background. Rounded and angular forms suggest two standing human figures facing each other. Miyoko Ito, Adam and Eve (1957) $281,600 Drawing from the creative vernacular of Cubism and Surrealism Maria Martins, Impossible (1946) A surreal bronze sculpture depicts two abstract humanoid figures facing one another against a dark gray background. Maria Martins, Impossible (1946). Est. $150,000–$200,000. Sold for $3.17 million. A key figure within the Surrealism movement of the 1940s Magdalena Abakanowicz, Small Figure with Polygon (1993) An abstract sculpture featuring a rough-textured, leg-like human form balanced upright on top of a geometric metal wheel structure. The pale, elongated figure appears headless and incomplete, standing on a delicate framework of thin dark rods arranged in polygonal shapes. Set against a dark gray background, the sculpture casts angular shadows that emphasize its fragile, precarious balance. Magdalena Abakanowicz, Small Figure with Polygon (1993). Sold for $70,400. Pioneering Polish sculptor and fiber artist. And all that for only 70,000 $. So if you haven’t made up your mind as to what you want to do in future, consider becoming an artiste, or an auctioneer (they typically earn between 15 and 30 % of the sales value, so in the case of Amoaka about 150,000 GHC). How much did you say you earn in a year?

Funny food at Fairway. (5th Circular Road, Opposite Alisa Hotel, Accra) If you are looking for something unusual or celebratory to eat, try Fairway. I went to buy Tahini (a smooth paste made from ground sesame seeds), not every place sells that, and then stumbled upon goat butter, which even in Europe its difficult to get. 400 GHC/kilo. Or organic certified wild rice at 295 GHC/Kg (discounted, was 425), Al peperoneine spaghetti 500 grams at 165 GHC (spaghetti with hot pepper), or a mix of different pastas, 2kg at 525 GHC. You can find strange things here but need a full wallet. Yes, I am talking Fairway in Accra, Ghana.

Lydia...

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Celebrating 70 years of USF's rich history and vibrant campus life, where tradition meets innovation under the open skies.

As you get older, anniversaries and milestones hit you differently. I don't know why. I don't regret anything in my life, but I do feel nostalgic sometimes. The other day, driving to work, I learned that the University of South Florida is celebrating 70 years this year. That surprised me, because the first founding class attended in 1960, so the 70th anniversary is actually a few years off.

I attended USF from 1987 to 1990. I didn't graduate; I would have had about two years left. 1991 would have been my graduation year, but I was taking it nice and slow. Most people were taking five years, so 1992 would have been my year if I had stayed on track. What would have been my degree? Hold your chair and keep seated, but it would have been Music Education with a minor in Florida History.

Money ran out, I was loaned out, and I decided to join the workforce. Funny enough, I never moved very far from USF. I now work at a non-profit hospital on the USF campus, so for almost my entire adult life I've been connected to the university in one way or another. Technically I guess I can't call myself an alum, but in every other sense I am one.

Here's to USF, 70 years, and all the good you've brought to the community. Go Bulls! 🤘

#history #local #personal

In Summary: * Listening now to the Pregame Show for tonight's MLB Game between the Rangers and the Red Sox. Following this game is the last item on my day's agenda. If I can make it through nine innings, I'll need to put these old bones to bed right away because the brain will certainly be well on its way to sleep.

Did get a bit of yard work in today, cutting and carrying branches in the back yard. And I feel good about that. The green organics bin will be totally filled in time for its pickup next Thursday morning.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 238.87 lbs. * bp= 147/88 (70)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises

Diet: * 05:25 – 1 banana, nacho chips w. cheese and meat sauce, 1 pb&j sandwich * 12:00 – scrambled eggs, biscuit & jam, pancakes * 17:00 – 1 fresh apple

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 04:50 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 05:20 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap * 11:30 – yard work, back yard branches and trim * 12:00 to 14:00 – watch old game shows and eat lunch at home with Sylvia * 14:15 – continue back yard cleaning project * 14:30 – follow news from various sources, nap * 16:00 – listening to general sports talk on 105.3 The Fan, DFW's #1 Sports station. I plan to stay with this radio station for tonight's MLB Game between the Rangers and the Red Sox.

Chess: * 11:05 – moved in all pending CC games

Deep in the Green, in the small village of Willowrest, a young halfling sets out on his own for the first time, and learns first-hand how unforgiving the world can be….

Written by Rafe Langston

---

The halfling leapt over a log, stumbled, and landed on his face in the black, foul-smelling muck that marked the start of the Darkdown Bog. The sticky mud resisted letting him go, feeling like a hundred tiny hands trying to pull him into the ground as he struggled back to his feet, gagging and spitting the nasty stuff that had made its way into his mouth. His torn and battered clothes were weighed down by pounds of the stuff, and it – with more than a small amount of sweat – held his normally thick, bushy sideburns and wild hair flat against his head.

He looked around warily. Towering trees, their bark as a black as the mud that now squished between his toes, and sickly looking plants obscured what little vision he had in the darkness, but he listened. Had he escaped?

“SCREEAAAAWWWWWWGGHHH!” the horrid screech tore through the forest not far behind, and the exhausted halfling sprung back into a sprint, pushed forward by the fresh hit of adrenaline.

★ ★ ★

…Nevias Brewbelly knelt by the newest headstone in the cemetery, the early morning sunshine reflecting off the shiny gray stone. Placing a small yellow flower on top of it, he smiled sadly and traced his fingers over the simple letters that had just been chiseled there.

SARRA BREWBELLY BELOVED MOTHER

“Well, mum.” he said. “Today’s the day. I’m leavin’ for good now. I wish you could come with me like we always talked about, but this was meant to be yer home forever.” Nevias sniffled. “I got a good chunk of gold for the house and all the furnishings, though. It was so hard to let it all go but I know you want me to move on from this place.” He stood, adjusting his brand new traveling clothes and rucksack that held everything he now owned. “So that’s it. I’ll pass along your best to the family down in Tillakamori when I get there. Goodbye, mum. Love ya.”

With one last gentle pat of the headstone, he turned with tears in his eyes and walked through the gates of the crowded graveyard, striking westward on the dirt path, and leaving Willowrest, the only home he had ever known, behind him….

★ ★ ★

“SCRAWWWWGH! SCRAWWWWGH!” It was getting closer, Nevias was certain, but he didn’t dare look behind him as he scrambled over a mound of knotted roots and tumbled down the other side into thorny brambles and more mud. Rolling back to his feet, he pushed forward. His lungs felt like they were full of razorblades, his skin screamed like a thousand beestings, and his muscles were on fire. Every inch of his body begged to stop and recover.

But if he stopped, he died, and nobody would ever know.

THUDTHUDTHUDTHUDTHUD “SCREEEEEEEEAAAAAAAGH!!!”

Another burst of adrenaline as Nevias found endurance far beyond what he ever dreamed of having.

Then he saw a tiny pinprick of light.

No, just a trick of his desperate mind.

Wait! There it was again! A campfire!

Nevias briefly weighed his options. He had heard the stories and knew something like a campfire in the Darkdown Bog was likely to be some trick of a Shade to lure in its prey, but it could also mean adventurers. A chance of rescue, however slim, beat the absolute certainty of the death that chased him.

He changed his direction and headed straight for the small flickering fire that seemed so impossibly far away.

★ ★ ★

… “Pleasure doin’ business with ya!” the burly man laughed as he tossed Nevias’ rucksack to his companion. The halfling lifted his head out of the dust of the trail, wiping the blood that dripped from his lip and nose.

“‘Ave a safe journey!” the man’s skinny companion taunted as they mounted their horses. “I hear there be brigands about, ya know?”

Bruised and beaten, Nevias watched as they galloped away, laughing, then he rolled onto his back and stared up at the darkening sky. He had just stopped to make camp for his third night on the road when the two men had appeared on their horses. He had offered to make them some dinner and share in some stories, but the second he turned his back, they struck.

And took everything.

Theer, outside of his peaceful little village of Willowrest, was just as dangerous as the worst stories told. Leaving the village, especially alone, was a stupid mistake. What was he thinking?

Pulling himself painfully to his feet, Nevias stumbled over to a small tree, laid down, and sobbed until he fell asleep….

★ ★ ★

There were two shadowy figures sitting by the campfire. They stood as the commotion reached their ears, one of them drawing a sword and shield while the other stepped back.

“HELP!” Nevias squeaked as he tumbled into their campsite, a tearing sound like cloth and something wet, then white hot pain shot up from his back, and everything went dark.

★ ★ ★

…A strange, unnatural sound woke Nevias from his slumber under the tree. It was dark, the full moon providing scant light through the cloudy sky. He cautiously peeked his head above the grasses and, even though the fields were bathed in inky darkness, something even darker prowled a hundred yards away. Its silhouette was visible but, no matter how hard he squinted, Nevias’ eyes refused to focus on the beast’s exact form.

Suddenly, its head snapped up, its dozen beady red eyes bore into Nevias’ soul.

“SCREEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAWGH!!!” it roared and launched itself in his direction.

The halfling turned and bolted straight for the dark band that was the edge of the Black Woods of Noor, and his only hope of losing the creature that pursued him….

★ ★ ★

The warmth of the fire was the first sensation that Nevias felt as he stirred, blinking the bleariness from his eyes. Then he felt the bandages wrapped tight around his otherwise bare torso.

“Ah, you’re awake!” a robed human woman said, quickly stepping next to him to help him sit up. “Welcome back, my friend. You gave us quite the fright.”

“Where am I?” Nevias asked, his voice raspy.

As if on cue, a full waterskin appeared in front of him, held in the gauntleted hand of an elf. “Drink this, little one.” he said.

“The Darkdown Bog.” the woman answered his question as Nevias drank greedily from the waterskin. “Do you not recall?”

The memories of everything that happened after the bandits attacked him flashed through his mind as he handed the water back to the elf. “No, I do… I do… who are you?” He looked back and forth between the human and the elf.

The human was young with a dark complexion and short cropped black hair that flared out like wings under her wide-brimmed hat. “I’m Ezari, apprentice archaeologist from the University of Eleanora. And this is Lif, my friend and bodyguard.”

The elf was tall, clad in green-died studded leather armor, with fair skin and intricately braided blond hair that reached to his waist. “A pleasure.” he said in a soft, friendly voice as he bowed.

Nevias introduced himself, telling them the story of how his grandfather had been from Tillakamori, how he and his mother had dreamed of returning but she had fallen ill before they could, and how he had sold everything, setting out on his own after she died, but only lasting a few days before being robbed and left for dead, then chased by a Shade.

“Wait… what happened to the monster?” he asked.

“This.” Lif answered, grinning and gesturing at the blade and shield on his back.

“It clearly wasn’t expecting us, having been so focused on you, so we dispatched it quickly, though not quickly enough to save you from harm. Thankfully, the Bog has excellent ingredients for healing poultices if you know where to look. It’s only been a few hours and your wound is mostly healed.”

“Thank you.” Nevias said, bowing. “I hate to ask for more but you don’t happen to be heading to Tillakamori?”

“No.” Ezari answered. “We have business in the Bog, but once that’s done, we’ll be returning to Eleanora City, which is on the way to Tillakamori. You’re welcome to travel with us, but it will be dangerous.”

Nevias gulped as he looked around at the pitch black woods. Something screeched in the distance. “Less dangerous than traveling alone, I think. I doubt I’d last another day alone, especially without any of my gear. I’m happy to help as much as I can, I owe you that, at least.”

“You will need this.” Lif said, handing the halfling a gleaming shortsword that he seemed to have produced from thin air.

“Welcome to the crew, Nevias.” Ezari said, reaching out and shaking his hand.

Suddenly, Nevias felt like he may have escaped the cauldron only to be caught in the fire.

---

This tale was based on the awesome Dark Age of Theer TTRPG setting created by Todd Stashwick and David Nett.

The character art was created using HeroForge and public domain imagery. The resulting composite image was created with GIMP.

No GenAI was used in the creation of this story, and no part of this story may be used to train or enhance machine learning models of any kind.

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. For more info, visit: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

-—

-—

Le béton pleure en pixels gris —

GBU-39, laser ment.

Vingt mille gosiers secs sous néon,

L’eau s’évapore en code pourri.

Réservoirs, ventres fendus,

Crachent leur dernier m³.

45°C — soleil lèche

L’os des villages.

*“Précision chirurgicale”* —

Glitch dans la matrice.

Le missile a choisi l’eau,

Pas la tour. *Erreur 404.*

Satellites, yeux sans paupières,

Filment l’entropie.

Pentagone, serveur maudit,

Recrache des zéros.

ONU, miroir vide,

Disque dur saturé.

Preuves en RAM,

Personne n’appuie *Enter*.

—

Sang séché sur écran —

Bug esthétique.

La justice ? Un .txt

Oublié. La mémoire cache.

*Volta:*

Un drone US sur ton toit demain ?

— *“Dommage collatéral.”*

Le monde haussera

Les épaules. *Comme d’hab.*

Silence.

-—

Concrete weeps in gray pixels —

GBU-39, laser lies.

Twenty thousand throats parched under neon,

Water evaporates in rotten code.

Tanks, guts split open,

Spew their last m³.

45°C — sun licks

Village bone.

*“Surgical precision”* —

Glitch in the matrix.

The missile chose water,

Not the tower. *Error 404.*

Satellites, steel eyelids,

Film entropy.

Pentagon, cursed server,

Spits zeros.

UN, empty mirror,

Hard drive full.

Proof in RAM,

No one hits *Enter*.

—

Dried blood on screen —

Aesthetic bug.

Justice? A .txt

Forgotten. Memory hides.

*Volta:*

A US drone on your roof tomorrow?

— *“Collateral damage.”*

The world will shrug

Shoulders. *As always.*

Silence.

**SIRIK, IRAN** – Beneath the leaden sun of Hormozgan province, where temperatures flirt with 50°C, water is not a commodity—it is the breath of life. Yet, in the night of June 9–10, 2026, that breath was brutally severed. Two concrete reservoirs, lifelines for 20,000 souls in the Bemani district, were obliterated by American airstrikes. Amid the smoldering rubble and the icy rhetoric of chancelleries, a brutal question arises: How can a technology capable of reading a license plate from space “confuse” a water reservoir with a military target? An investigation into a case where ballistic precision clashes with the fog of international law.

-—

## I. Precision on Trial: The GBU-39 Paradox

By the morning of June 10, satellite images left no room for doubt. Where two circular structures essential to the water supply of ten villages once stood, only clean craters and gutted buildings remained. On the ground, metal fragments collected by locals and documented by the Tasnim agency quickly told their story.

Analysts from the *Open Source Munitions Portal* (OSMP) are unequivocal: these are remnants of **GBU-39 Small Diameter Bombs**. This munition is the crown jewel of the American arsenal for “precision strikes.” Designed to minimize collateral damage through reduced explosive payloads and millimeter-accurate GPS/INS guidance, the GBU-39 is the weapon of surgical warfare.

This is where the paradox lies. The Pentagon’s argument—invoking a “targeting error” or “collateral damage” while claiming the actual target was a nearby telecommunications tower—struggles to convince ballistics experts. If the weapon is designed to strike exactly where it is directed, the direct impact on the reservoirs suggests either a catastrophic intelligence failure (HUMINT) or a deliberate designation of the hydraulic infrastructure. In military jargon, this is referred to as an **extremely low Circular Error Probable (CEP)**. Striking two separate reservoirs “by accident” when they are a non-negligible distance from the communications tower is, for critical observers, a statistically highly improbable coincidence.

-—

## II. The Thermal Weapon: When Climate Intensifies the Crime

The legal analysis of this strike cannot ignore the climatic context. June 2026 will be remembered as one of the hottest months ever recorded in the Persian Gulf. In Sirik, depriving a population of drinking water at 48°C is not merely a logistical inconvenience—it is an immediate physical death sentence.

**International Humanitarian Law (IHL)**, through **Article 54 of the 1977 Additional Protocol I**, sanctifies “objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population.” Water tops this list. While the United States has never ratified this protocol, it does recognize the customary nature of civilian object protection.

However, the notion of **contextual proportionality** changes the equation here. Collateral damage acceptable at 15°C (where a population can wait 24 hours without vital risk) may become a war crime at 50°C. The Iranian accusation, denouncing a “calculated war crime,” leans on this thermal vulnerability. By striking water in the midst of a heatwave, the attacker does not merely destroy a building—they weaponize the environment as a force multiplier against civilians. This is the birth of what some jurists now call **“thermal water warfare.”**

-—

## III. The “Dual-Use” Alibi: The Permanent Excuse

For its defense, **CENTCOM** (U.S. Central Command) advances a classic argument: the targeted telecommunications tower served the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) for monitoring the Strait of Hormuz. This is the complex concept of **“dual-use.”**

In modern warfare, the line between civilian and military has become a gray zone exploited by all belligerents. A relay antenna can serve both villagers’ WhatsApp calls and combat drone guidance. By targeting this tower, the United States claims to remain within the bounds of the **principle of distinction**.

Yet, criticism focuses on the assessment of military advantage. Does the destruction of a communications tower justify endangering the lives of 20,000 civilians deprived of water? The principle of proportionality requires that the harm caused not be excessive relative to the direct military advantage anticipated. Here, the asymmetry is stark: a temporary tactical advantage for the U.S. Air Force versus an acute humanitarian crisis for an entire population. The Pentagon’s silence on the prior evaluation of such collateral damage reinforces the impression of culpable negligence, if not a deliberate intention to “punish” Iranian civilian logistics.

-—

-—

## IV. Organized Impunity: The Legal Void of the Gulf

On paper, the facts could fall under the **International Criminal Court (ICC)**. The Rome Statute explicitly qualifies as a war crime the act of intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects. But geopolitical reality is an insurmountable wall.

1. **The Judge’s Refusal:** Neither the United States nor Iran are ICC members. Washington has even developed a panoply of laws (such as the *American Service-Members' Protection Act*) to shield its soldiers from any international prosecution.

2. **The Agony of Treaties:** The 1955 Treaty of Amity, once used before the **International Court of Justice (ICJ)** to resolve disputes between Tehran and Washington, was denounced in 2018. Diplomatic avenues for recourse are now dead ends.

This situation creates a sense of **systemic impunity**. Major powers can carry out “surgical” strikes with massive humanitarian consequences without ever having to account for their target lists before an independent tribunal. Documentation through **OSINT** and civil society thus becomes the only counterpower—a “justice by image” that, if it cannot condemn, at least sheds a harsh light on the dark corners of U.S. military doctrine.

-—

-—

## V. Toward a “Sanctuarization” of Water?

The Sirik incident is not isolated. The case echoes a similar strike on a desalination plant in Qeshm in March 2026. This repetition outlines a worrying pattern. Are we witnessing a strategy of **“slow infrastructural degradation”**?

Some military ethics experts and organizations like **Human Rights Watch** now advocate for **absolute protection of water infrastructure**, akin to hospitals. The idea is simple: no military advantage, however crucial (such as a telecom tower or radar), should justify targeting or risking the destruction of a drinking water reservoir. In a world marked by water stress and climate disruption, water can no longer be considered “acceptable collateral damage.”

-—

-—

## VI. Proof Through Data: OSINT as the Last Line of Defense

Faced with the military’s silence, the truth emerges from unexpected sources. The work of **OSMP** and **Airwars** on this case is exemplary. By cross-referencing the lot numbers found on GBU-39 fragments with public arms contracts, researchers attempt to trace the chain of responsibility.

This **“citizen forensics”** has become the nightmare of military planners. Every strike leaves a digital and physical trace. If the United States claims the reservoirs were not the target, they must explain why the GPS coordinates of these infrastructures were not inscribed on a **“No Strike List”** (list of prohibited targets), as per standard procedure. The absence of such precautions would, in itself, constitute a flagrant violation of the duty of vigilance imposed by IHL.

-—

-—

## Conclusion: The Silence of the Wells

The distribution network of Hormozgan was restored in twelve hours—a technical feat by Iranian engineers that will paradoxically serve as a defense for the United States to minimize the gravity of the act. But the damage is done. The message sent to the civilian population is clear: in the power struggle between nations, your most basic survival is an adjustment variable.

The Sirik affair is a symptom of an era where the most advanced technology serves a diplomacy of force that mocks the rules it claims to uphold. As long as accountability mechanisms remain blocked by crossed vetoes at the **UN Security Council** and the refusal of international justice, the reservoirs of Sirik will only be the first victims of a war that does not speak its name.

American “precision” rings hollow. It seems to stop where strategic interests begin. In Sirik, the reservoirs are broken, and with them, the little credibility that remained in the idea of a “clean war.” In the stifling heat of Hormozgan, the thirst of civilians is now the silent witness to a **global moral bankruptcy**.

-—

### **Box: The Case in Numbers**

- **Population affected:** 20,000 civilians (10 villages).

- **Munition identified:** GBU-39 (Boeing), 250 lb guided bomb.

- **Temperature at the time of the incident:** 45–50°C.

- **Storage capacity destroyed:** 2,500 m³ of drinking water.

- **Legal status:** Presumed violation of **Art. 54 of Protocol I** (Customary IHL).