Numlock News: August 11, 2025 • Library Fines, Tea, Freethrows
By Adam Bumas
Walt is out on vacation, and filling in today is Adam Bumas, a researcher and writer at the wonderful newsletter Garbage Day. Today’s issue will be a roundup of disagreements on (and about) the internet. Have a good week!
Library Fines
Anthropic pirated roughly seven million ebooks from online libraries to train AI models like its chatbot Claude. The company is currently facing a class-action suit from a group that could include anyone who wrote a book that Anthropic pirated, according to the judge’s specifications. Now, the company is trying to shut the case down on the grounds that the company would owe somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.05 trillion if every possible author joined the suit and was awarded the maximum damages.
VFraudsters
There are influencers, there are streamers and then there are VTubers — streamers who use a motion-controlled virtual avatar instead of their real faces. VTubers are a multi-billion-dollar business, but the biggest companies in that industry have been dealing with accusations of unfairness and misconduct. Now, one of those companies has completely dissolved; the VShojo agency shut down after its most popular member revealed that the company kept the $500,000 she raised for charity. Since this is the world of VTubers, that star turned whistleblower is a pink-haired woman with “demon queen” horns, known only as Ironmouse.
Send the Bots
It isn’t much easier being a flesh-and-blood streamer. Some of Twitch’s most popular users have spent the past few months trading accusations of “viewbotting” — paying for thousands of fake accounts to watch their streams, boosting visibility and revenue. Twitch recently announced it would be taking steps to curb the practice, which has been hard since it’s difficult to assign blame. One Twitch streamer gained 130,000 viewers in a few minutes and claimed their fans were responsible for viewbotting them.
Ryan Broderick and Adam Bumas, Sherwood News
Tea…
The Tea app, which has been topping download charts for a month, isn’t quite the safe space for women to discuss the men they date that its creators promise. Since it became popular, the app has faced multiple serious data breaches. The first, which has already led to a class-action suit, included over 720,000 images that were leaked to 4chan. Over 130,000 of those images included selfies and photo IDs that the app requires all users to upload to prove they’re women.
Emmanuel Maiberg and Joseph Cox, 404 Media
…For Two
The public reaction to all this seems to have been “Hey, how can we get in on that?” However, Tea continues to sit near the top of Apple’s charts. Meanwhile, a version of the app for men instead of women, called TeaOnHer, launched last week. In a huge win for gender equity, TeaOnHer also seems to have major security problems. Each of its 53,000 users (as of last week) is vulnerable to an exploit that makes their identification documents visible to the public.
Amanda Silberling and Zack Whittaker, TechCrunch
Clear Skies
If neither gendered Tea app looks private enough, how about a social media service that feels like no one is listening? After a flurry of interest in the wake of Trump’s reelection, Bluesky’s growth has slowed to 1.6 million users a month. That’s a small fraction of its numbers from earlier this year, leaving it unclear whether the app can survive in an increasingly uncertain digital landscape.
Andrew Hutchinson, Social Media Today
Freethrows
Since late last month, WNBA games have been plagued by green dildos thrown onto the court. It has happened at six games within a matter of weeks, all thanks to a cryptocurrency project called “Green Dildo Coin”. Meanwhile, the crypto vendors aren’t the only ones making money off the uproar, since these incidents are related enough to sports to become fair game for betting. Prediction market Polymarket is offering odds of up to 38% that another throw will happen sometime this week — though the odds are, of course, subject to change.
John Herrmann, New York Magazine
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I think I need a language app to understand over half of what was written here…
That’s some defense Anthropic has cooked up: “the case needs to be shut down because we stole SOOOO much stuff that the damages would be too high”