Only users who have already registered and completed age verification will be able to access the world's largest porn site. Pornhub is blocking itself in the United Kingdom on February 2, arguing that the country's age verification laws are ineffective, the company announced on Tuesday. As of February 2, only users who have already registered with Pornhub and completed age verification will be able to access the site. New users will not be able to register. The move comes after a new set of provisions aimed at keeping minors from viewing porn kicked in last July, requiring adults to submit to age-estimating face scans, ID document uploads, credit card checks, and more, in order to verify that they are not minors.

Plus: Cisco discloses a zero-day with no available patch, Venezuela accuses the US of a cyberattack, and more. Federal contracting records reviewed by WIRED this week show that United States Customs and Border Protection is transitioning from testing small drones to using them as standard surveillance tools, a move that will further expand CBP's already extensive dragnet that in some cases extends far beyond US land borders. Meanwhile, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement is planning to incorporate a broad cybersecurity contract that will include expanding employee surveillance and monitoring . The move comes as the US government is escalating leak investigations and condemning internal dissent. The Chinese-language artificial intelligence app Haotian can be used to create "nearly perfect" face swaps during live video chats, and it is a favorite tool of Southeast Asian scammers.

There was an insistent knock at the door. This in itself was startling – it was the winter of 2020 and we hadn't yet returned to socialising indoors after lockdown. When I answered, I was surprised to see a male acquaintance of mine. He said he needed to speak to me. I knew it was something unprecedented because he asked to come in. He told me to sit down. That's when the adrenaline started coursing through me – people only suggest that when they're about to deliver bad news.

In the ad, a woman in a white lace dress makes suggestive faces at the camera, and then kneels. But if you saw the video in the wild, you might not know that it's a deepfake fabrication. It would just look like a video, like the opening shots of some cheesy, low-budget internet porn. In top right corner, as the video loops, there is a still image of the actress Emma Watson, taken when she was a teenager, from a promotional shoot for the Harry Potter movies. It's her face that has been pasted on to the porn performer's.

A red-headed woman stands on the moon, her face obscured. Her naked body looks like it belongs on a poster you'd find on a hormonal teenager's bedroom wall -- that is, until you reach her torso, where three arms spit out of her shoulders. AI-powered systems like Stable Diffusion, which translate text prompts into pictures, have been used by brands and artists to create concept images, award-winning (albeit controversial) prints and full-blown marketing campaigns. But some users, intent on exploring the systems' murkier side, have been testing them for a different sort of use case: porn. AI porn is about as unsettling and imperfect as you'd expect (that red-head on the moon was likely not generated by someone with an extra arm fetish).

At less than 10 days old, Blizzard Entertainment's "Overwatch League" (OWL) is already making an impact on online entertainment. According to statistics shared Thursday by YouPorn, one of the biggest porn sites in the world, the inaugural day of "OWL" on Jan. 11 saw the website experiencing a rather sudden 9 percent dip in its traffic from around the world, just about the time the eSports league began. The 9 percent drop in the portal's traffic sustained till the end of the third OWL game; the porn site experienced lower traffic levels than normal for the entire first week of the league's broadcasts. OWL, on the other hand, experienced 415,000 concurrent viewers on the opening night on its English, Korean and French streams combined. It managed over 10 million viewers in its opening week.

Artificial intelligence has proven to be a dab hand at recognizing what's going on in photos and videos, but the datasets it's usually trained on are pretty genteel. Not so for Pornhub, which announced today that it's using machine learning to automatically catalog its videos. The site is starting small, deploying facial recognition software that will detect 10,000 individual porn stars and tag them in footage. It plans to scan all 5 million of its videos "within the next year," and then move onto more complicated territory: using the software to identify the specific categories videos belong to, like "public" and "blonde." In a press statement, Pornhub VP Corey Price said the company was joining the trend of firms using AI to "expedite antiquated processes."