The Obtain: cybercriminals’ Pacific paradise, and the carbon offset crash

Tokelau, a string of three remoted atolls strung out throughout the Pacific, is so distant that it was the final place on Earth to be related to the phone—solely in 1997. Simply three years later, the islands acquired a fax with an unlikely enterprise proposal that might change every little thing.

It was from an early web entrepreneur from Amsterdam, named Joost Zuurbier. He needed to handle Tokelau’s country-code top-level area, or ccTLD—the quick string of characters that’s tacked onto the top of a URL—in alternate for cash.

Within the succeeding years, tiny Tokelau turned an unlikely web large—however not in the best way it might have hoped. Till just lately, its .tk area had extra customers than another nation’s: a staggering 25 million—however the overwhelming majority have been spammers, phishers, and cybercriminals.

Now the territory is desperately making an attempt to wash up .tk. Its worldwide standing, and even its sovereignty, might depend upon it. Learn the total story.

—Jacob Judah

The rising indicators of hassle for international carbon markets

There are rising indicators of hassle for the multibillion-dollar international carbon market, as investigative tales and research proceed to erode the credibility of the enterprise world’s go-to software for cleansing up local weather emissions.

The promise of offsets is that corporations or people can steadiness out their greenhouse-gas air pollution by paying different events to stop emissions or take away carbon dioxide from the air. However the proof is mounting that, relatively than producing much-needed local weather progress, these schemes are largely an enormous waste of cash. Learn the total story.