Do you know who Jessica Foster is? Neither did I until last week, which is surprising because (1) she has amassed 1 million followers on Instagram after starting her account just a few months ago, (2) she is a U.S. Army soldier with a look as wholesome and American as apple pie, and (3) she is a huge Trump supporter.

With that trifecta, you could assume she would be a star on Fox News, Newsmax, or The Joe Rogan Experience. But no, she is nowhere to be found on those platforms—or any major U.S. media outlet, for that matter. And that’s because she is a computer-generated mirage designed by an anonymous operator to funnel conservative men toward an OnlyFans page where “she” sells foot fetish pics.

I came across Foster while reading the Spanish sports media, which covered the AI character after her account posted fake images of her attending a White House reception for the MLS championship-winning Inter Miami soccer team, alongside Donald Trump and Lionel Messi. (She also has appeared in the Oval Office alongside Cristiano Ronaldo.) The stunt triggered a massive wave of coverage across sports outlets in “fútbol”-obsessed Spain and Latin America, which then expanded to TV, other online publications, and national newspapers with huge readerships like 20 Minutos.

Who, or what, is Jessica Foster?

The Instagram profile @jessicaa.foster went live on December 14, 2025. In just three months, the account has more than a million followers. The recipe for this success was fairly simple: The puppet master behind the screen pumped out a constant stream of content around this fictitious, Trump-loving female soldier and built an entire digital lore by letting followers peek into her daily life.

We see Jessica posing in army bunks, frolicking with female soldiers, shoeless at the office, and behind an F-22 Raptor fighter jet. The feed is packed with high-resolution, completely forged photos of her posing with Trump and politicians like Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy; in one, she’s speaking at the Board of Peace Conference—Donald Trump’s international body created to mediate the Gaza conflict. She even invaded Greenland, because of course, all it takes to conquer a country is a Colgate smile.

But all this is just bait to pick up right-leaning men straight into adult subscription sites. Under the username @jessicanextdoor, her OnlyFans bio unironically reads: “public servant by day, troublemaker by night 🤍 i’m new to this, don’t be rude please 😭👉🏼👈🏼 btw i respond to every message, but be patient since I’m not a robot haha.” The account pulls in cash primarily by peddling fetish content, specifically foot photography, while farming direct tips from subscribers that can hit over $100 on a single post.

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This entire grift operates in direct violation of OnlyFans’ terms of service. The platform’s rules demand that every account must be linked to a verified human being. Any AI-generated content, it says, must actually resemble that specific real person and be explicitly tagged with a #AI label. Because of these restrictions, many of these faceless operators are packing up their fake influencers and moving to looser competitor sites like Fanvue. (We sent a request for comment to OnlyFans and will update this article if we hear back.)

Over on Instagram, Meta’s policies require that any paid political advertisements prominently disclose the use of AI. For unpaid, organic posts like Foster’s grid, Meta outsources the problem to third-party fact-checkers who can blur, label, or yank the content if they consider it deceptive misinformation. It appears that filtering is not working.

Despite successfully duping thousands of users who seemingly left genuine comments of support and affection in her post, the digital illusion wasn’t flawless. Military veterans and commenters in conservative forums like Free Republic spotted the glitches in the rendering. The smoking gun used to debunk her was the name tape on her combat uniform, which displayed her first name (“JESSICA”) instead of the standard military last name. 

“She acts as a military advisor to the Trump administration on Instagram, but she operates as a foot model on OnlyFans,” says journalist Kat Tenbarge on the left-leaning Courier Youtube channel. “[She is] pushing sort of propaganda, not just in support of Trump, not just in support of the US military, but it’s also objectifying women in the military.”

Tenbarge believes that the Foster account “softens and glamorizes and sexualizes this vision of the U.S. military.” On the other side of the political spectrum, conservative commentator Ara Rubyan seems to basically agree with Tenbarge. “She was every MAGA bumper sticker rendered in human form, and for her audience, the ‘human’ part was entirely optional. … The Soldier of the Lord was, in the end, just a clever way to sell foot content.”

Both are correct in their diagnostic, but they miss the most important point about Jessica Foster. She marks the last national election as the end of reality-anchored campaign news cycles, if such a thing ever existed.

Foster’s one-million-follower army is the ultimate demonstration that we have reached a predicted and very dangerous era, as the latest generative photo and video AIs have finally shattered our ground truths with perfect synthetic reality indistinguishable from real life.

You can argue that, even without those, we are cooked: Jessica had visible imperfections that were caught by some, but her army of followers didn’t really care much. As Rubyan puts it: “The most dangerous thing about Jessica Foster isn’t that she’s fake; it’s how badly a million people needed her to be real.”

Indeed. We are not in the post-truth era anymore. This is the “I want to believe” era, and anything that satisfies humans’ existing beliefs and desires will automatically get our brains’ stamp of approval, even after learning it is not real. Good night, and good luck, everyone.

My new favorite creator on TikTok is Apple. Yes, that Apple.

On March 4, Apple launched its newest product, the head-turningly affordable $599 MacBook Neo. That same day, the company also deleted all of the content that once populated its TikTok page and started over. Its new videos—on view there are now 15—run the gamut from a clip inspired by Steve Jobs’s original introduction of the 1984 Macintosh to a cutesy animation of the Mac finder icon giggling and blushing. The videos have consistently debuted in batches of three, each corresponding to one of the brand colors associated with the Neo.

This TikTok refresh is a clear play to cater to the audience that Apple knows is most interested in the Neo: Gen Z. The new laptop model, powered by the same architecture inside your iPhone, is targeting a younger user base with its unprecedentedly low price point and aesthetic color options, which tap into Gen Z’s long-demonstrated obsession with retro-tech.

So far, the new TikTok strategy seems to be working. Based on a Wayback Machine capture from February 28, Apple was sitting at 7 million followers and 21.9 million likes before the change; figures that have now jumped to 7.8 million and 31.6 million, respectively. Apple also recently debuted a secondary Instagram account called @helloapple, which will be dedicated to news, product marketing, and customer stories. This account has a decidedly more corporate feel than the brand’s TikTok, but demonstrates the company’s broader desire to expand its presence on socials.

Apple’s new TikTok page works because it takes an amalgamation of trending aesthetics and blends them with Apple’s high design point of view, turning every silly video into a loopable work of art.

Why Apple’s new TikTok is genius

Plenty of brands have experimented with how to best capture Gen Z on TikTok, and Apple’s team has evidently taken notes out of multiple playbooks. The company is experimenting with everything from brain rot content to y2k nostalgia, ASMR, goofy branded songs, and creepy edits. Ordinarily, such a wide range of aesthetics might make a brand seem cringeworthy and pandering. For Apple, though, the meticulous creative execution of the launch ties everything together.

Take, for example, one 14-second clip of a woman opening and swatching a pink blush, referencing the “Blush”-hued Neo. The concept is simple, but every detail of the video has been optimized to tap into Gen Z’s love for y2k aesthetics—from the model’s striped top and the pink shag rug to the custom blush container, featuring Apple’s logo, that appears to be an allusion to the colorful plastic shell of the ‘90s iMac G3 computer. 

This mash-up of nostalgiacore with a direct reference to a recognizable Apple product of the era makes the video feel authentic, not forced. The post’s engagement reflects that: as of this writing, it’s notched more than 64 million views and nearly 35,000 comments, most of which are begging for Apple to bring back some of its beloved colorful hardware. In a similar vein, other clips cleverly pair Apple’s signature sonic design with eye-catching visuals, like a 3-second video of the sun rising to the Mac startup chime, or a juicy mash-up of citrus fruits choreographed to an edit of various notification sounds. 

The account is also testing some videos that brush into brain-rot territory, a social trend we’ve described as a form of digital marketing that “embraces head-turning, often nonsensical choices, like fried visuals, abrasive design, and unsettling storylines.” These include clips like a slightly unnerving compilation of people with their hands dyed blue (presumably as a reference to the “Indigo” Neo), a custom brand song dedicated to Apple’s fingerprint recognition software, and a silly clip of a lemon facetiming a lime (mimicking the colors of the Neo’s default background screen). 

While other brands like Duolingo, Nutter Butter, and Brita have taken similar brain-rot strategies to the extreme on their accounts, Apple’s twist on brain-rot demonstrates that it understands what makes this content resonate—a combination of irreverence and unexpectedness—yet also knows to keep its approach restrained and aesthetically pleasing, giving it a distinctly Apple feel.

It’s Steve Jobs-meets-brain-rot, in the best way possible.

If you’ve enjoyed the egg bites at Starbucks, here’s how to make them at home! These egg bites have become a staple recipe in my kitchen. Sure, they’re not the prettiest egg recipe, but they’re wonderfully flavorful and silky tender. They’re a protein-rich snack or ready-made breakfast to keep in your refrigerator (they freeze and defrost well, too).

These egg bites are a fun cooking project with a few twists along the way. I was surprised to find cottage cheese in Starbucks’ ingredient list. It’s the secret ingredient that offers a lovely tang and extra protein. Once blended, the lumpy texture disappears, which explains why I’d never guess it was there.

Instead of Starbucks’ sous vide cooking method, we’ll bake the muffin tray on a rimmed baking sheet filled with a small amount of hot water. The steam from the water bath gives these bites a luscious, smooth texture. Without it, the eggs would brown at the bottom and taste more like frittata muffins. It’s a small detail that makes a big difference!

Continue to the recipe...

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Researchers say they have uncovered a takedown-resistant botnet of 14,000 routers and other network devices—primarily made by Asus—that have been conscripted into a proxy network that anonymously carries traffic used for cybercrime.

The malware—dubbed KadNap—takes hold by exploiting vulnerabilities that have gone unpatched by their owners, Chris Formosa, a researcher at security firm Lumen’s Black Lotus Labs, told Ars. The high concentration of Asus routers is likely due to botnet operators acquiring a reliable exploit for vulnerabilities affecting those models. He said it’s unlikely that the attackers are using any zero-days in the operation.

A botnet that stands out among others

The number of infected routers averages about 14,000 per day, up from 10,000 last August, when Black Lotus discovered the botnet. Compromised devices are overwhelmingly located in the US, with smaller populations in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Russia. One of the most salient features of KadNap is a sophisticated peer-to-peer design based on Kademlia, a network structure that uses distributed hash tables to conceal the IP addresses of command-and-control servers. The design makes the botnet resistant to detection and takedowns through traditional methods.

“The KadNap botnet stands out among others that support anonymous proxies in its use of a peer-to-peer network for decentralized control,” Formosa and fellow Black Lotus researcher Steve Rudd wrote Wednesday. “Their intention is clear: avoid detection and make it difficult for defenders to protect against.”

Distributed hash tables have long been used to create hardened peer-to-peer networks, most notably BitTorrent and the Inter-Planetary File System. Rather than having one or more centralized servers that directly control nodes and provide them with the IP addresses of other nodes, DHTs allow any node to poll other nodes for the device or server it's looking for. The decentralized structure and the substitution of IP addresses with hashes give the network resilience against takedowns or denial of service attacks.

The concept of DHTs can be hard to grasp. At a simplified level, they are data structures stored on multiple network peers, as described here. This design makes the network scalable. The more network nodes, the better the distribution of elements is. DHTs also make networks fault-tolerant. When one node leaves the network, nodes go elsewhere for location lookups. In theory, the only way to take the network down is to sever all connected nodes.

Kademlia uses a 160-bit space to designate (1) keys—which are unique bitstrings derived by hashing a chunk of data—and (2) node IDs, both of which are assigned to each node. Nodes then store the keys of other nodes. The stored keys are organized by their similarity to the ID of the node storing them. Proximity is measured by XOR distance, a mathematical means of mapping a network. When a node polls another node, it uses this metric to locate other nodes with the closest distance to the key it’s looking for until it finally finds a match. KadNap, a variant of Kademlia, obtains the key to be searched through a BitTorrent node.

Formosa explained:

DHT helps you get closer and closer to a target. You first reach out to some entry bittorrent nodes and basically say “hey I have this secret passphrase. I’m looking for who to give it to.” So you give it to a couple of nearby “neighbors” and they say “ah ok I don’t fully understand this passphrase but it’s kind of familiar and here are some people who may know what that means. So now you go to those neighbors and the process continues. Eventually you reach someone who says “Yes! This is my passphrase, welcome in.” In our case, when we reach this person they say here is a file to firewall port 22 and then here is a second file containing the C2 address you want to connect to.

Despite the resistance to normal takedown methods, Black Lotus says it has devised a means to block all network traffic to or from the control infrastructure.” The lab is also distributing the indicators of compromise to public feeds to help other parties block access.

Infected devices are being used to carry traffic for Doppelganger, a fee-based proxy service that tunnels customers’ Internet traffic through the Internet connections—primarily residential—of unsuspecting people. With high bandwidth and IP addresses with clean reputations, the service provides customers with a reliable way to efficiently and anonymously visit sites that might otherwise not be accessible.

People who are concerned their devices are infected can check this page for IP addresses and a file hash found in device logs. To disinfect devices, they must be factory reset. Because KadNap stores a shell script that runs when an infected router reboots, simply restarting the device will result in it being compromised all over again. Device owners should also ensure all available firmware updates have been installed, that administrative passwords are strong, and that remote access has been disabled unless needed.

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IVALO, Finland—In 1987, fictional superspy James Bond careened around a frozen lake in an Aston Martin in the movie The Living Daylights. Bond’s tires were carrying a secret—retractable tire studs that operated with the touch of a button. After cutting a circle in the ice with a wheel to sink the bad guys, Bond deployed his outriggers for balance and his on-demand studs for an impressive getaway.

Nokian Tires played with that idea, presenting a concept in 2014 with similar functionality. However, as Nokian development manager Mikko Liukkula remembers wryly, each tire was so complex that a production set would have cost more than the vehicle itself. Fast-forward to 2026, and Nokian has debuted a giant step forward in studded-tire engineering: a studded winter tire that automatically adjusts to changes in temperature and surface pressure.

I put these new Hakkapeliitta 01 tires through the wringer in and around a frozen-over Lake Tammijärvi at Nokian’s 1,700-acre testing center. After drifting, slaloming, hard braking, and swooshing along snowy trails, I can attest to the quality of the gripping power.

Testing the studs at White Hell

Roughly 150 miles north of the Arctic Circle in Finnish Lapland, the trees and ground are blanketed with bluish-white snow roughly 180 days per year. Santa lives nearby, apparently. What better place to test winter tires? That’s what Nokian Tires figured when it established its testing center in this white wonderland, hundreds of miles north of its headquarters in Nokia.

It's not just supercars that use frozen lakes in Lapland, tire companies like testing here too. Credit: Kristin Shaw

The tire manufacturer opened this facility—called White Hell, a nod to the Nürburgring (nicknamed Green Hell) track in Germany—in 1986. At the time, a few employees from the testing department trailered dozens of Nokian tires to the outpost on a frozen lake to test them in extreme conditions. That was two years before it split from parent company Nokia. Today, it’s the site where Nokian launched its newest creation, the Hakkapeliitta 01.

The new tire is built on the success of Nokian’s already-established Hakkapeliitta line, which originated 90 years ago in 1936. Before the 01, the Hakkapeliitta 10 set the standard for winter tires and is still highly regarded. Since this is such a significant leap for Nokian, it’s starting over again at 01, a practice that has happened only two other times in nearly a century in business.

Here's how it works

Three layers of the Hakkapeliitta 01 work together to enable the stud movement. The rubber tread (made partly of renewable materials like natural rubber, plus bio resin and bio-based oils partially derived from pine resin and canola oil) meets the road, cushioning a thin lock compound layer and an adaptive base that holds the studs in place. The adaptive base layer is the key to the system, as it stiffens in cold temperatures and becomes softer and stickier as the air and surface temperatures rise. Roughly 220 studs dot each, hitting the road 14 times per second at 62 mph (100 km/h). Nokian’s 2,300-foot (700 m) ice runway—which is smoothed out with water and a custom machine with wide wings, like a crop harvester—has been used thousands of times to prove the adaptive base transitions quickly from the ice to the air outside the covered runway and vice versa.

While the adaptive base is new, the studs themselves are not.

“If you look at the stud itself, the pin is the same as that we used in the Hakkapeliitta 10,” says Nokian director of marketing Hans Dyhrman. “We took a little bit of a change on the collar to increase the biting edge that comes with each one of those studs.”

One thing that makes the tires unique, Dyhrman says, is that a robot inserts each stud to ensure it's optimally oriented for each position. Center studs offer strong support and performance, while the shoulder studs are rotated horizontally for better biting edges and steering precision.

“After each one of these studs is installed, each one is then scanned and recorded in our database so that we can make sure that each Nokian Tires Hakkapeliitta 01 that comes off the assembly line has just the right amount of stud protrusion, measured through and through,” Dyhrman says.

Climate change requires changing tires

As the climate shifts, Nokian says, road surfaces are different from those of 10 or 20 years ago. Sudden freeze and thaw cycles replace longer, more consistent winter weather patterns. Studded tires are still the most effective option for driving on ice. However, studs present two issues: road noise and road wear. The studs chip into the asphalt when snow and ice are absent, causing holes in the road.

In Texas, where I live, studded tires are prohibited. That’s no big deal, since we see ice maybe once a year. It’s the same story for other Southern states like Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida. Even in Michigan, perhaps surprisingly, the state says “in practical terms, no” when asked if studded tires are legal. Most other states in the US allow studded tires during specified months of the year.

Next thing you know, someone will make a car invisible, too. Credit: Nokian

Nokian says its new winter tires represent up to a 30 percent reduction in road wear, as the ice grip improved by as much as 10 percent. On top of that, the Hakkapeliitta 01 represents noise levels reduced by as much as 1 decibel from the Hakkapeliitta 10. Some, but not all, of the new tires include another layer, called SilentDrive technology, that reduces interior noise even further.

The new Hakkapeliitta 01 tires will be available to consumers in autumn 2026, in the Nordic countries and North America.

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Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, left, moderator Judge Paul L. Friedman, center, and Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh on Monday, where the two justices differed over how the court is handling emergency requests.