Fire Marshal

What A trust-based VPN's no-logs promise is actually worth. A no-logs promise didn't protect a LulzSec suspect in 2011. Here's what a VPN actually sees, and why vp.net was built so that link never exists. Published on October 20, 2026 * In 2011, HideMyAss answered a court order with connection logs, the real IP and timestamps, and investigators used them to identify a LulzSec suspect. * Any conventional VPN sees who connects and when, so a no-logs policy is only a promise that courts, gag orders and new owners can override. * vp.net splits your identity from your traffic inside Intel SGX enclaves, and remote attestation lets your device verify the code itself. On September 22, 2011, the FBI arrested Cody Kretsinger, a 23-year-old from Phoenix. Authorities said he was "recursion," a member of the hacking group LulzSec, and that he took part in the breach of Sony Pictures earlier that year. He had used HideMyAss, a UK-based VPN and proxy service, to mask his IP address. It didn't work. HideMyAss said it received a court order for information tied to the LulzSec attacks, and it complied. Days after the arrest, the company published a blog post defending the decision: its terms banned illegal use, and as a legitimate business it would cooperate with a court order. Nothing here is a defense of hacking Sony. The case matters for a different reason. HideMyAss never needed to record what Kretsinger did online. It only needed to know who connected, and when. The logs that weren't "activity logs" HideMyAss kept connection logs: the real IP address behind each session and the time it happened. Investigators already knew when the attacks took place and which VPN address they came from. Match those timestamps against the connection logs, and an anonymous handle becomes a name and a home address. That's the part most people miss when a VPN says it doesn't log your activity. Nobody needs your browsing history to identify you. Your real IP and a timestamp are enough, and a conventional VPN sees both every time you connect. What a traditional VPN can see. A VPN hides your traffic from your internet provider by routing it through the VPN's servers. That moves the trust from your ISP to the VPN. On a conventional VPN server, the operator's infrastructure can see: * your real IP address * when you connect, for how long, and to which server * where your traffic goes * the link between all three A VPN can promise not to write any of this down, and plenty of them mean it. But a promise is a policy, and policies have three weak points. Courts can order logging to start. A provider with nothing on disk today can be told to record a specific user going forward. Email saw its own version of this in 2021, when Swiss authorities ordered ProtonMail to log a French climate activist's IP address. ProtonMail complied, and the activist was identified. Gag orders can keep users from finding out. A provider ordered to log may be legally barred from telling anyone. None of this requires a bad company. It only requires a server that can see who you are and where you're going. How vp.net handles the same court order. vp.net starts from a different question: what if the server couldn't see that link at all? vp.net runs its privacy-sensitive operations inside Intel SGX secure enclaves. An enclave is a region of memory the CPU keeps encrypted, even in RAM. The operating system can't read it. Administrators with root access can't read it. vp.net's own engineers can't read it, even with physical access to the server. The architecture splits the work in two. The host process handles network connections, so it knows a user connected, but it never sees where that user's traffic goes. Inside the enclave, your identity maps to a temporary session ID, sessions map to ephemeral route IDs, and destination requests are batched and mixed across many users before they leave. No single component holds enough to tie a person to their activity. Run the 2011 scenario against that design. Investigators arrive with a timestamp and an exit IP and ask who it was. The record that would answer them was never written, and the mapping that could have produced it existed only inside encrypted enclave memory. vp.net has nothing to hand over. Don't trust the promise. Check the code. Any VPN can say all of this. The difference is that you can verify it. When your device connects to vp.net, it can request remote attestation: a statement signed by the Intel CPU confirming that the exact, unmodified, published code is running inside a genuine SGX enclave. If that code were changed to add logging, whether by choice or under a court order, the measurement would change and your device would see it. That closes the gap a policy can't. A gag order can stop a company from talking. It can't make the CPU vouch for code that isn't running. You can also pay with cryptocurrency, so the account itself doesn't have to carry your name. The lesson from 2011. HideMyAss didn't hand over a browsing history. It handed over the one thing every conventional VPN has to see: who connected, and when. Fifteen years later, most VPNs still run on that same model and ask you to trust the policy layered on top. Sources Used In Article + Video

Sony might have found its next big live-action anime movie. October 19, 2026, 11:48am It seems like Sony Pictures might have found their next big live-action anime and manga movie adaptation according to a new report, and it's literally going to have some of the biggest characters yet. Sony Pictures has been quietly in the works on several different live-action anime adaptations over the last few years, and now that it's further integrating with Crunchyroll, there's been an increase in the amount of projects that are moving forward in various ways. Especially now that live-action adaptations have been such a hit lately. According to a new report from reliable leaker DanielRPK, Sony is now developing a live-action feature film adaptation of Naoya Matsumoto's Kaiju No. 8 series. This franchise has made a big splash in the last few years as while the manga release is only a few years old, the anime adaptation has gotten a worldwide simultaneous release for its first two seasons thus far with even more on the way. This would be yet another massive project in the pipeline. Kaiju No. 8 live-action movie rumored to be in development. Unfortunately this first report doesn't come with any concrete details outside of just noting that Sony Pictures Entertainment is developing a live-action Kaiju No. 8 feature film. There are no director or writers attached, nor does it seem to be far enough in development to warrant such an update. This joins a line up of other anime projects that Sony has been working with the last few years like One-Punch Man, Made in Abyss, and even cancelled attempts at adaptations such as with the recently scrapped Astro Boy film project. There's a chance that this Kaiju No. 8 feature film project makes it further in development than the others, and it's likely because it's been such a recent modern hit. The franchise broke ground with its anime adaptation as it debuted its episodes across the entire world all at once with social media platform X, and kept up that release through its second season. It's more worldwide of a franchise than many other anime franchises, and its central premise of an older man using Kaiju powers to fight giant monsters seems perfect for a big screen movie. What's next for Kaiju No. 8? Kaiju No. 8 was the top selling manga on Bookwalker this Summer (July 1-September 30), and that's even more impressive given that Naoya Matsumoto brought the manga to its end last year. But with the manga ended, there is thankfully going to be more of the franchise on the way as Kaiju No. 8 has also announced a final anime release is now in the works. It's yet to be revealed if this will be a full season or movie, but it will be tackling the final arc from the original manga release when it hits. If you wanted to check out more of the series right now, you can find Kaiju No. 8's first two seasons now streaming with Crunchyroll with both Japanese and English language audio in the meantime. There's also a special miniseries all about Narumi now streaming for free with its official YouTube channel that has brand new story beats not seen in the manga either. There's quite a lot to check out for Kaiju No. 8, but what do you think? Would you want to see a new Kaiju No. 8 live-action movie? Let Comicbook know all of your thoughts about it in the comments!