The Download: AI for debates, and what to know about the Oropouche virus
—Rich Heley, chief designer of Worldcoin, details the company’s plans to roll out even more eye-scanning orbs to capture people’s biometric data, CoinDesk reports.
The big story
How a tiny Pacific Island became the global capital of cybercrime
November 2023
Tokelau, a string of three isolated atolls strung out across the Pacific, is so remote that it was the last place on Earth to be connected to the telephone—only in 1997. Just three years later, the islands received a fax with an unlikely business proposal that would change everything.
It was from an early internet entrepreneur from Amsterdam, named Joost Zuurbier. He wanted to manage Tokelau’s country-code top-level domain, or ccTLD—the short string of characters that is tacked onto the end of a URL—in exchange for money.
In the succeeding years, tiny Tokelau became an unlikely internet giant—but not in the way it may have hoped. Until recently, its .tk domain had more users than any other country’s: a staggering 25 million—but the vast majority were spammers, phishers, and cybercriminals.
