The first-ever criminal case involving AI-assisted music streaming fraud has concluded, with an American citizen getting 18 months behind bars and an $8M fine. North Carolina resident Michael Smith, 54, was charged in September 2024, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud in March 2026, and was sentenced earlier this week. The lengthy case, investigated by the FBI, involves some extraordinary numbers. In one example cited by the DOJ, in April 2023, Smith earned royalties from 80.9 million streams of his AI-generated songs by bots with family accounts. That’s nearly 9x more than Taylor Swift’s entire music catalog earned in the same period.

“By flooding music streaming platforms with automated bots in the place of consumers, and fake songs in the place of creativity, Smith robbed millions in royalty payments from genuine artists and their fans,” said U.S. Attorney Jamie McDonald. “This Office is committed to ensuring the integrity of all markets, and protecting the public from those who use super intelligence for fraud.”

Smith’s operation scaled massively between 2017 and 2024. He created thousands of fake streaming accounts on services like Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music, and Amazon Music. At the same time, he used AI to generate music to host on these services. The idea was to get his army of bots to continuously stream his own AI songs, and thus profit from royalty payments.

As mentioned in the intro, the scale of Smith’s fraudulent operation would become huge. As many as 10,000 bots would continuously consume streams of his AI-generated music. He created “hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs” to make sure it wasn’t just a few tracks on repeat, and make the music appreciation seem legitimate. During the fraud’s lifetime, Smith’s AI-generated music tracks were streamed billions of times, says the court report. Most importantly, in terms of results, prosecutors say Smith managed to net more than $8 million in fraudulent royalty payments.

The Taylor Swift streaming success comparison sheds some light on the audaciousness of Smith’s scheme. According to the U.S. Attorney's Office, Southern District of New York PR, “in April 2023, the entire catalogue of Taylor Swift received 9.3 million streams on YouTube Music from family plan streams, while in the same month, Smith’s Bot Accounts used family plans to fraudulently stream his AI-generated music 80.9 million times.”

Likely emboldened by the rapid flow of royalty cash willingly forwarded by the streaming giants, Smith certainly wasn’t flying under the radar when caught. Now Smith faces 18 months behind bars, then two years of supervised release, and an order to pay $8,091,843.64 in forfeiture.

Nvidia has increased the price of the Shield TV Pro from its original $199.99 launch price to $299.99. This makes the long-running Android TV streaming device $100 more expensive despite receiving no major hardware refresh. The new price is listed on Nvidia’s website, and the company blames rising component costs driven by AI for the increase.

An Nvidia spokesperson told Ars Technica, “Starting October 2, SHIELD Pro will be priced at $299. The cost of components, including memory, has increased substantially across the industry.” The price increase for the Shield TV Pro also comes alongside the discontinuation of the standard Nvidia Shield TV. Nvidia has reportedly stopped producing the base model, leaving the Shield TV Pro as the only Shield-branded streaming device the company offers.

Despite being seven years old, the Shield TV Pro remains somewhat relevant, as it serves as more than a basic TV streaming box. Powered by the company’s Tegra X1+ processor, 3GB of RAM, and 16GB of internal storage, the device includes two USB 3.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, and support for external storage drives, making it particularly useful for users with local media libraries and Plex setups.

It also offers support for 4K HDR playback at 60 FPS and a wide range of advanced video technologies including 4K HDR, Dolby Vision HDR/HDR10, and AI-enhanced upscaling. It also supports high-res audio, including Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby Atmos, DTS-X surround sound, and a wide range of audio formats.

For gamers, Nvidia’s GeForce Now cloud gaming service and support for Android games give the Shield TV Pro a slight edge over conventional streaming TV boxes. It is also one of the few Android-based TV streaming devices that still receives software updates, despite being on the market for nearly seven years.

With that said, it appears to be increasingly difficult to find, with the device out of stock at most retailers. We spotted a Best Buy listing for the 16GB model at $249.21, about $50 less than Nvidia’s revised pricing. The listing is currently out of stock, so it's unclear whether the lower price is a temporary discount or the retailer’s standard pricing.

There was good news for the U.S. recorded music industry this week, as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) announced revenues outpaced inflation in H1 2026. “U.S. recorded music revenue reached $6B in the first half of 2026, up 6.9%,” noted the association. Probably more interesting, though, is that consumers have been seriously splashing cash on retro or legacy physical audio formats. A strong resurgence in CD and vinyl music sales saw both up double figures in the latest figures. “Physical revenues jumped 25.9%, powered by 17.7% vinyl growth and a 58.6% increase in CDs,” reported the RIAA.

With the extremely strong headline growth in ‘retro’ formats, one could be excused for thinking consumers are pulling back from digital music distributors like Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, and so on. However, the RIAA underlines that “every major revenue category grew, reflecting a healthy and increasingly diversified marketplace.” While we focus on streaming, this digital segment generated $4.9B in H1 2026, up 4.7% and remaining the largest source of recorded music industry revenue. Other digital stats worth highlighting are the 6.4% growth in paid subscriptions, reaching $3.4B, and the 3.7% growth in free streaming, reaching $900M.

Returning to physical music media, the RIAA characterizes this resurgence as “continued fan excitement with different ways to experience music across an increasingly varied marketplace.” Indeed, I have seen more and more tempting special edition re-releases and remasters on CD and vinyl, for bands I enjoy listening to.

Overall, the numbers do seem to suggest that the boom in physical music distribution isn’t conclusive evidence that consumers are rejecting how the music streaming industry is changing its offerings (pricing, catalogs, etc). However, there may indeed be some backlash here, as we have seen in the TV/movie streaming business. Some consumers are increasingly frustrated with video streaming offerings and are building up home media catalogs by purchasing DVDs, Blu-rays, etc. We’ve started to see a bit of this in video gaming, too, as the high-profile case regarding Sony PlayStation digital game ownership has stirred some gamers into action.

Nvidia's GeForce NOW cloud gaming service has been a popular way to access your games on the go without worrying about hardware. It has a free tier with titles like Fortnite, not even requiring a purchase, but the paid subscription enjoys much better specs and rate limits. As such, using the "Ultimate" tier, modder Zortos was able to gain full access to the Windows desktop inside GeForce NOW, allowing him to use it as a normal computer that can (ironically) run local AI models on it.

For context, GeForce NOW is only meant for gaming; Nvidia does not advertise it as a general, all-purpose cloud streamer like Shadow PC, for instance. Hence, doing all this is certainly against the terms of service, and you run the risk of your account getting banned. With that being said, ethically, you are paying for renting hardware, so trying to gain desktop access is predicated on how far your own moral scruples allow you to go.

Anyhow, the exploit begins with an I2P (Install-to-Play) game that you download from Steam — Zortos uses Trove. You click on the publisher's name to open the built-in browser, from where you go to your C: drive through the address bar and essentially hijack the index. You open the steamapps folder that was just created for Trove and copy the path of the main executable from the contents.

This file is replaced with a decoy that deceives Steam into thinking you're actually starting Trove when you click on the "Play" button. In reality, it's a modified executable developed by another modder, dpadGuy, that just opens the desktop instead. Once inside, it really is the full Windows environment with no apparent restrictions. The video below even shows Zortos installing Wallpaper Engine and customizing the taskbar.

However, users have reported some discrepancies between their experiences, such as GeForce NOW simply closing the session when it sees the File Explorer open, or the service blocking file downloads, which is a necessary step to replace the executable. Zortos insists that the exploit is still working on his X account, and he even says that if you have persistent storage, the exploit will remain active between different sessions.

Keep in mind that you need a paid tier of GeForce NOW to be able to pull this off, and even if you do, it's against Nvidia's ToS as you're not allowed to venture beyond games. Running local AI models on a setup like this doesn't make sense because of the session rate limits, but the Ultimate tier Zortos used does give you access to 48GB of VRAM (thanks to an RTX Pro 6000D) so it might be worthwhile for some.

The U.S. Department of Justice has announced the seizure of nearly 400 domains that were illegally streaming live matches from the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Running under “Operation Offsides,” the effort is being led by the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center alongside Homeland Security Investigations, with a seizure warrant filed in the Eastern District of Virginia. The total number of domains taken down to date is roughly five times the amount taken down during the 2022 Qatar tournament, and HSI has warned that the streams can expose viewers to malware and connections capable of stealing financial data.

The 2026 tournament is being co-hosted by the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, giving U.S. authorities firmer jurisdiction than they held when the event was held in Qatar. Investigators traced the streaming infrastructure to servers in Peru and Bulgaria, with supporting takedowns in Croatia, Romania, Poland, and Colombia. FIFA identified the offending domains, and beIN Media Group, NBCUniversal, the Motion Picture Association's Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, UFC, and Warner Bros. all helped supply further information.

Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva of the Justice Department's Criminal Division said the seizures reflected the country's duty “as a host nation to protect the FIFA World Cup from criminals.” Domain seizures are a limited tool against operations that rotate addresses and fall back to redundant copies, hence why enforcement bodies suddenly pounce on hundreds of domains at once rather than one at a time.

Authorities have increasingly gone after the people running the streams and, in some cases, their customers. U.S. courts have separately tested the limits of piracy liability, with the Supreme Court ruling that ISPs aren’t liable for their subscribers’ infringement in March. Meanwhile, a Greek court jailed a torrent-site operator for five years last year, and an Irish court ordered Revolut to unmask more than 300 subscribers of a pirate IPTV service in March.

A 2021 Webroot analysis of illegal sports-streaming sites found that 92% carried some form of malicious content, typically delivered through the ad networks that fund the operations. Following the 2024 World Cup, Microsoft Threat Intelligence traced a December 2024 maladvertising campaign that reached nearly 1 million devices back to illegal streaming sites, where redirectors embedded in video frames funneled users through several hops to information stealers such as Lumma and Doenerium hosted on GitHub. Microsoft found the campaign hit both consumer and enterprise machines.

Infections like these often need nothing more than a simple click on a play or unmute button to start the redirect chain, with no download prompt and no need to enter any credentials. Operation Offsides remains active, and the Justice Department said it will continue to pursue the operators behind the seized sites.