Category: MIL-OSI

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Lillian Hingley, Postdoctoral Researcher in English Literature, University of Oxford

When the album dropped at the stroke of midnight on February 13, I found myself lying in the dark listening to Charli XCX’s album, Wuthering Heights. As her second soundtrack album (after Bottoms in 2023), this record was made for Emerald Fennell’s 2026 film adaptation of Wuthering Heights. But this collection of songs also stands as a musical adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel in its own right.

The opening track, House, struck me with its ability to succinctly get to the heart of what Wuthering Heights is. It is not just the title of Brontë’s book and Fennell’s film, but also the name of a house, the story’s main setting.

Rather than offering a typical three-act structure of beginning, middle and end, Brontë’s novel is an experimental, strange form. I conceive the novel as structured largely by the movement of the characters between the titular Wuthering Heights and neighbouring property Thrushcross Grange. There is a constant movement, a haunting, between poles rather than a clear linear progression from point A to point B.

I was pleased, therefore, to see that Charli’s part-film soundtrack, part-book adaptation has adopted this impetus towards formal experimentation – albeit in her own distinct way.

Brontë’s story utilises the technique of frame narrative – the layering of several stories within a wider narrative – in a complex web of flashbacks, unreliable narrators and perspective shifts. Charli’s fourth track, Always Everywhere reflects this narrative multiplicity on a sonic level, particularly by evoking the elemental setting of Heathcliff and Cathy’s story.

The grand scale and layers of the sound allow me to visualise and hear the Yorkshire moors. Just as Charli’s lyric “your laughter tearing through the rain” suggests, Always Everywhere has a wide, spatial quality. This song is a vast space through which the wind blows, or where a ghostly voice travels through the sound until it reaches the listener’s ears.

Boundaries of the self

This dispersed, abstracted narrative offered by Brontë and Charli reflect their shared interest in the boundaries of the self. Brontë fans are well-acquainted with Cathy’s famous line: “Nelly, I am Heathcliff.” The album is similarly concerned with interrogating the conception of the self as a sealed entity, instead seeing the individual as spilling out into something other than itself.

In the song Out of Myself, we are attacked by aggressive strings, in a way that feels romantic in the poetic sense. Here, we have the pain and the pleasure of the sublime (an overwhelming aesthetic experience of awe and even terror that writers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge wished to capture in their poetry) – a quasi-religious experience. This is why the sado-masochistic imagery in the song’s lyrics – the imperatives to “put the rope between my teeth”, “push my cheek into the stone” and “please rub the salt into my wounds” – offer more than just shock value. The navigation and testing of boundaries contained in these images reflect the novel’s status as a gothic romance.

The central metaphor of the track Chains of Love reflects the ambivalent character of love in the original text. Following Cathy’s declaration that she is Heathcliff, she adds: “He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure […] but as my own being”. The “chains” in Charli’s song act like the star-crossed destiny of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, a symbol of an enduring yet tragic partnership – a partnership that the character of Isabella directly mentions in Fennell’s film.

This ambivalence is matched by the use of the strings on the album. In Always Everywhere, the strings represent a cinematic romanticism. In House, Charli uses creepy strings and screams of demonic possession, borrowed directly from the soundscape of horror films. The marriage of strings and electronic sounds represents a similarly complex relationship. At one point in Funny Mouth (specifically, at 1 minute 17), the strings sound like they could be an instrument setting on a keyboard. In My Reminder, choppy vocal effects and intermissions of discordant strings fight for their position on the track.

Sonic melancholia

Charli’s album does not shy from outlining the complexities and, indeed, the problems of Cathy and Heathcliff’s love. The psychoanalytic theorists Maria Torok and Nicolas Abraham have explained how the act of mourning can turn into its excessive and neurotic counterpart: melancholia, in which a person “incorporates” or preserves a beloved dead object instead of accepting the reality that the object has gone.

Think of, for example, Heathcliff’s desire to dig up Cathy’s remains on two occasions in the book. Charli’s song Altars reflects the double meaning of Heathcliff’s obsession with Cathy. “Your altar” could be interpreted as a symbol of betrayal; for example, when Cathy stood at the wedding altar with the man she married, Edgar Linton, instead of with her true love, Heathcliff. This phrase could also be interpreted as Heathcliff worshipping at Cathy’s altar even, or perhaps especially, in death. In response to this excessive mourning, Eyes of the World, a feature with Sky Ferreira, offers a plea in its final line: “Set me free”.

Perhaps, then, this is a useful way to navigate what some see as the aberration of adapting English Literary classics into other forms, whether songs or films. Charli XCX’s Wuthering Heights is a reminder that adaptation need not be understood as a detraction of the original novel. To take Charli’s language of nature v nurture in her penultimate track My Reminder, while the album may have emerged from the “same four walls” of Wuthering Heights, it is “different”. This album is not a negation of Brontë’s novel, but a productive, imaginative, beautiful haunting.

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Lillian Hingley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Charli XCX turned Wuthering Heights into a sonic gothic masterpiece – https://theconversation.com/charli-xcx-turned-wuthering-heights-into-a-sonic-gothic-masterpiece-276218

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Abdul Jabbar, Dean of Internationalisation, Associate Professor Data Strategy and Analytics, University of Leicester

The kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie – the mother of US news anchor Savannah Guthrie – is the latest in a string of crimes where ransoms have been demanded in Bitcoin.

The 84-year-old was kidnapped from her home in Tucson, Arizona, in the middle of the night. A ransom of US$6 million (£4.4 million) has been demanded by the kidnappers.

The scale of the ransom demand, combined with the use of cryptocurrency as the payment mechanism, raises a critical question: although Bitcoin is not inherently untraceable, can the perpetrators ultimately profit without being identified?

Bitcoin is a decentralised digital currency, commonly referred to as a cryptocurrency, and is often believed to be anonymous, private and untraceable.

This perception has made Bitcoin attractive to some criminals, who view it as a convenient mechanism for receiving, transferring and storing payments.

As a result, Bitcoin has become increasingly associated with criminal activity, including extortion, kidnapping, fraud, ransomware and even murder.

The Guthrie case has once again drawn attention to the darker associations surrounding Bitcoin and reinforced public anxiety about cryptocurrency and its use for nefarious purposes.

At the same time, a number of high profile kidnappings around the world in 2025, involving people known to hold cryptocurrency, has intensified these concerns.

A common perception is that, because Bitcoin is digital, tracking transactions is difficult. Bitcoin does not exist in a physical form; it is represented as entries on the Bitcoin blockchain – a decentralised ledger used to record transactions across a network of computers. So Bitcoin is not inherently untraceable; its blockchain is transparent and permanently recorded.

Transactions do not explicitly list names, but each transaction is publicly visible and traceable between wallet addresses. Ownership is controlled through private keys and managed via a “digital wallet”, which functions conceptually like a traditional wallet in that it stores and enables the transfer of value. Thus, Bitcoin is more accurately, pseudonymous, not anonymous.

Currency conversion

In the Guthrie case, the immediate practical challenge for the kidnappers would be converting US$6 million into Bitcoin and transferring the cryptocurrency to a digital wallet. From there, the funds would need to be sent to a wallet address specified by the perpetrators – assuming the kidnappers provide such an address.

Transactions conducted through regulated cryptocurrency exchanges that impose know-your-customer checks may expose participants. These checks are mandatory processes to confirm user identities with official IDs, proof of address, and facial recognition.

Even before the funds reach the kidnappers, the transaction through a cryptocurrency exchange may itself create identifiable records. However, there is no guarantee of this, as there are many unregulated exchanges that operate in jurisdictions with lenient legislation.

While Bitcoin transactions are traceable between wallet addresses, the kidnappers in this case may attempt to enhance anonymity through layered technical measures. These may include generating a new wallet address for each transaction, operating multiple wallets, and repeatedly transferring funds from a primary wallet through successive intermediary wallets to obscure transaction links.

Maintaining anonymity also requires avoiding any association between wallet addresses and personal information, refraining from interacting with other identifiable people, and using privacy-enhancing tools such as Tor/VPNs – software that masks a user’s location – and coin-mixing services, which enhance privacy by scrambling cryptocurrency funds with others to obscure links between senders and receivers.

Achieving this level of operational security demands significant technical knowledge and strict discipline from the kidnappers. Any human error, whether through identity exposure, exchange interaction, IP logging, or conversion into hard cash may compromise anonymity.

Ultimately, the critical issue is not merely tracing funds but determining how recipients convert or use the Bitcoin without triggering identification through regulatory checkpoints, forensic analysis, or operational mistakes.

Even if the US$6 million could be traced between wallet addresses, anonymity hinges on whether those addresses can be linked to real-world identities. Where wallet holders remain unidentified and operate outside regulated exchanges, investigative challenges increase.

Additional complications arise if the perpetrators operate outside the US. Cross-border enforcement faces limitations including variation in crypto-related legislation and regulation, uneven training in tracing and confiscation, and limited international coordination.

Whether perpetrators can ultimately be reached by law enforcement depends significantly on their jurisdiction and the degree of international cooperation.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Nancy Guthrie kidnapping: can Bitcoin ransom demand be used to track down the criminals? – https://theconversation.com/nancy-guthrie-kidnapping-can-bitcoin-ransom-demand-be-used-to-track-down-the-criminals-276213

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Stephanie Dennison, Professor in Brazilian Studies, University of Leeds

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent (O Agente Secreto, 2025) marks a moment of consolidation in one of contemporary Brazilian cinema’s most consistent careers.

Since his early short films such as Cold Tropics (Recife Frio, 2009), the filmmaker has developed a unique style packed with movie references that tantalisingly falls somewhere between arthouse and genre film. These traits reach new heights of self-awareness and formal freedom in The Secret Agent, which has been nominated for four Academy Awards, including best picture, and best actor for Wagner Moura.

The film belongs to a recent wave of Brazilian productions revisiting the military dictatorship (1964-1985), including Walter Salles’s Oscar-winning I’m Still Here (Ainda Estou Aqui, 2024), and actor/director Wagner Moura’s Marighella (2019). Yet these films do more than reconstruct historical episodes: they process, through cinema, an unresolved trauma whose reverberations continue to shape Brazil’s political present.

One of the features that makes The Secret Agent, set predominantly in 1977, particularly compelling in this regard is its treatment of universities, as battlegrounds where memory, power and democracy collide.

The film’s main character Armando, played by Oscar-nominated Moura, is not, in fact, a secret agent and has no obvious links to opposition movements. He is an academic forced into hiding after clashing with big business interests aligned with the authoritarian regime who want to get their hands on his research.

Brazilian philosopher Marilena Chauí has spoken of her personal experience of these dark days in Brazil portrayed in Mendonça Filho’s film. Chauí returned from France in 1969 with her PhD in hand, just after the Brazilian military suspended most civil rights in the country, leading to a state hunt for “communists” and the intensification of torture and censorship.

Chauí describes the presence on campus of mysterious military figures with the power to hire and fire and “disappear” staff and students who were hostile to the regime. The presence of secret agents disguised as students to monitor professors and students in classrooms in public universities was commonplace.

In The Secret Agent, Armando has recently returned from the University of Leeds in Britain. He and the international research team he has set up at the Federal University of Pernambuco in Brazil’s north-east fall under the scrutiny of Henrique Ghirotti, an industrialist from Sao Paulo.

Armando openly questions Ghirotti’s ethics and points to a conflict of interest: how can a wealthy industrialist justify taking government funding destined for universities for his own private interests? Armando’s bitter reaction to such an open show of corruption is enough for him to become a marked man. Much of the film portrays Armando’s attempt to hide from Ghirotti and the corrupt law enforcement and paid assassins he has at his disposal.

This dramatic situation illuminates not only the surveillance and repression universities endured under the dictatorship, but also broader patterns of corruption. The spider’s web connecting military interests with big business that drained Brazil’s economic momentum throughout the 1970s, is a history that is only now fully coming to light.

The film’s focus on academic freedom carries contemporary resonance. Mendonça Filho wrote The Secret Agent during the presidency of far-right Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022), whose long list of hostile measures included attacks on public education. Between 2019 and 2022, federal universities lost 14.4% of their budget, and by 2022 funding had fallen below 2013 levels.

Universities reported severe difficulties maintaining basic operations and scholarship programmes, with accumulated cuts exceeding R$100 billion (£14 billion) over four years. Bolsonaro and his followers encouraged the reporting (and “outing” on social media) of teaching staff deemed to be “ideological”. Following Lula’s victory in the 2022 elections, modest relief arrived and, with the renewal of funding lines, the reconstruction of this ravaged terrain is slowly getting underway.

Archives of repression

The Secret Agent also speaks to renewed global debates around the privatisation of research, intellectual property, and the political vulnerability of universities, increasingly viewed as hotbeds of leftist sedition. Mendonça Filho’s film suggests that authoritarianism attacks society not only through violence but through the destruction, privatisation, or silencing of knowledge production itself.

The industrialist Ghirotti takes delight in informing Armando that he’ll be recommending that his research team is shut down and the work transferred to the University of São Paulo, with whom Ghirotti has dubious links. Ghirotti questions the usefulness of any research being carried out in the north-east that speaks to national interests, particularly when Canadians are working on the same tech and Brazil can pay for foreign science and technology.

Mendonça Filho, who is from Recife, the capital of Pernambuco, has been very vocal about the ingrained prejudice of many from the wealthier and whiter southern states in relation to the north, which is dismissed as backward. It is telling that in The Secret Agent Armando’s international research team first took shape in Leeds, given similar prejudices are often held about the north of England.

In a subplot set in the present day, a group of students work on an oral history project involving tape recordings made by dissidents during the dictatorship, including Armando. One of them, Flávia, travels to Pernambuco to visit Armando’s now middle-aged son.

A young black mother with family in the north-east, living in the periphery of São Paulo, Flávia, typifies the new, more diverse university student body, made possible by hard-won affirmative action initiatives and the expansion of the public university network.

In The Secret Agent, it is Flávia and students like her who have inherited not only the archives of repression, but also the possibility of transforming knowledge into a form of democratic repair.

Anchored by Wagner Moura’s compelling performance, Mendonça Filho’s film connects the struggles of the past to the curiosity and courage of a new generation. In so doing, The Secret Agent powerfully underscores cinema’s ability not only to entertain, but also to illuminate, question and inspire.

Alfredo Luiz Paes de Oliveira Suppia receives funding from CNPq (Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico) as a researcher level 1C.

Stephanie Dennison does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. The Secret Agent: gripping thriller reminds us why academic freedom needs protecting – https://theconversation.com/the-secret-agent-gripping-thriller-reminds-us-why-academic-freedom-needs-protecting-275598

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Anna Monnereau, PhD Candidate in Music Copyright, Bangor University

A little-known American lawsuit could end up reshaping popular music. A US federal court is preparing to rule on a landmark copyright dispute. At its centre is an interesting question: can a short rhythmic pattern – one that appears in thousands of reggaeton tracks – be owned?

The case, known as the Fish Market dispute, asks whether a looping beat widely associated with reggaeton can be protected by copyright. More than 150 artists and producers have been named as defendants, and around 3,600 songs are implicated.

But the consequences stretch far beyond potential damages. If the claim succeeds, a rhythm that underpins an entire genre could become private property. The lawsuit exposes a long-standing weakness in copyright law, which is its inability to clearly define what makes a piece of music “original”.

Copyright is meant to be straightforward. Original musical works receive legal protection but copies do not. In practice though, music rarely fits this neat, binary logic.

Songs are built from shared elements like rhythms, chord progressions and harmonic patterns. Musicians can reuse, adapt and transform them. These building blocks are how music communicates. But copyright law offers little guidance on which musical elements can be protected, and which belong to everyone.

Unlike literature or visual art, music lacks clear legal definitions for its basic components. There is no settled guidance on whether courts should compare melody, rhythm, harmony, tempo, timbre or pitch, or indeed how much similarity is too much. As a result, judges and juries are left to decide these questions case by case, often without musical expertise.

That uncertainty has made music copyright litigation expensive and unpredictable. Jury trials are particularly risky, and damages can be eye-watering. Two recent American cases show just how inconsistent the system has become.

When courts can’t agree what counts as copying

In 2018, a US jury found that musicians Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams had infringed Marvin Gaye’s work with their song Blurred Lines, not because of a shared melody or lyrics, but because of a similar “feel” or “vibe”. The decision marked a dramatic expansion of copyright protection, suggesting that a musical mood could be owned. Critics warned this risked allowing artists to monopolise styles rather than specific creative expressions.

By contrast, a 2024 US court ruling in a case involving singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran took the opposite view. The court held that copyright does not protect the basic building blocks of music. Shared rhythms, chord sequences or stylistic elements, it ruled, are part of musical language itself. Protection applies only to concrete expressions such as specific melodies or lyrics.

The Fish Market case magnifies this contradiction and raises the stakes considerably.

The plaintiffs – Steely & Clevie Productions, which represent the musical catalogue of the influential Jamaican dancehall duo Wycliffe “Steely” Johnson and Cleveland Browne – claim that their 1989 instrumental track, Fish Market, introduced the so-called “dem bow” rhythm. This is a distinctive beat, they argue, which forms the backbone of reggaeton. They are seeking copyright protection for that rhythmic pattern.

If successful, the ruling would grant two rightsholders control over a core musical feature used across a global genre. Unsurprisingly, many musicians and scholars see this as an attempt to claim ownership of reggaeton itself.

They argue that the rhythm predates Fish Market, drawing on long-established Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Cuban traditions such as the habanera beat. Reggaeton, they say, emerged through cultural exchange: from Jamaican dancehall, through Puerto Rico and out into the world. According to this perspective, the plaintiffs are not protecting originality but attempting to privatise a shared cultural inheritance.

Why rhythm is so hard to copyright

Rhythm sits at the heart of the legal problem. It is abstract yet fundamental, short in duration but repeated across a song and deeply tied to cultural identity. Copyright law, designed to compare fixed and discrete works, struggles to evaluate such elements. When courts attempt to isolate rhythm from its musical and cultural context, they risk mistaking convention for originality.

Copyright once played a limited role in musical life. Over time, as recorded music became a major commercial industry, songs increasingly came to be treated as economic assets. Ownership and control moved to the foreground, often at the expense of recognising music as an intellectual and cultural practice rooted in borrowing, influence and exchange.

The dispute around the “dem bow” rhythm lays bare the clash between subjective creativity, economic regulation and the law’s demand for objective rules. That clash is becoming harder to ignore as AI-generated music floods the market, trained on existing works and capable of producing endless stylistic variations. If copyright cannot clearly define originality now, its limits will soon be tested even further.

The reggaeton rhythm on trial is not just a fight over a beat. It reveals a fundamental mismatch between copyright law’s rigid standards and the reality of how music is made.

The Fish Market case offers judges an opportunity to clarify where protection should end, and to recognise the dangers of stretching originality so far that creativity itself becomes collateral damage.

Anna Monnereau does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Can a rhythm be owned? What a reggaeton lawsuit reveals about how copyright misunderstands music – https://theconversation.com/can-a-rhythm-be-owned-what-a-reggaeton-lawsuit-reveals-about-how-copyright-misunderstands-music-273624

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Gemma Ware, Host, The Conversation Weekly Podcast, The Conversation

As the 21st century dawned, a newly elected Vladmir Putin was making friends on the world stage. He smiled for photo ops at G8 meetings, and was the first foreign leader to call George W. Bush after the attacks of 9/11, offering his support against terrorism.

So what changed? To understand Russia’s view of the world now – and its continued aggression towards Ukraine – it helps to know more about the psyche of the country and its leader.

In today’s episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we talk to James Rodgers, a reader in international journalism at City St George’s, University of London, about how a festering sense of national humiliation after the collapse of the Soviet Union hardened Putin’s tough man regime and led Russia to turn its back on the west.

In 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, many in the west believed liberal democracy and free markets had won in Russia. The cold war was over and Russia would join the community of democratic nations. But that’s not what happened.  Instead, Russians experienced economic freefall, large-scale poverty and a sense of national humiliation.

“People felt this great loss of status,” says Rodgers, who has just written a new book called The Return of Russia about why it came into confrontation with the west.

“With the coming of new western ideas of the free market, a lot of people lost their jobs and the status that went with them,” says Rodgers. “Russia also lost the standing on the world stage that the Soviet Union had enjoyed.”

Putin became president on the eve of the new millennium. Rodgers says, Putin had not forgotten the economic pain and humiliation of the 1990s, and understood its importance to his constituency in Russia. “He understood the political potential of that humiliation in a way that I think some western policymakers did not understand the possible political consequences of it.”

Soon after, the 9/11 attacks in 2001 pushed the US to war in the Middle East. Whatever support Putin had pledged western governments began to crumble, particularly over the invasion of Iraq. Through interviews with former top western officials, Rodgers pinpoints that Russian foreign intelligence knew Iraq’s leader Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, and they were certain that the CIA and other western intelligence agencies knew that.

“Russia determined that the west was acting in bad faith about the reason that they’d given for going to war in Iraq, and this was actually about regime change and not at all about weapons of mass destruction,” says Rodgers. He says the invasion made Putin deeply suspicious of western motives in foreign relations, who began to think: “If they can do this to Saddam Hussein, then maybe one day the west will try to decide to do it for me.”

Listen to the interview with James Rodgers on The Conversation Weekly podcast. This episode was written and produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware with editing help from Ashlynne McGhee. Mixing by Eleanor Brezzi and theme music by Neeta Sarl. Gemma Ware is the executive producer.

Newsclips in this episode from BBC News, AP Archive, ABC News, C-Span, CNN, The Phoenix ReNasCor, DW News and
Voice of America.

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here. A transcript of this episode is available via the Apple Podcasts or Spotify apps.

James Rodgers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. How Putin turned Russia’s post-Soviet ‘national humiliation’ into military aggression in Ukraine – https://theconversation.com/how-putin-turned-russias-post-soviet-national-humiliation-into-military-aggression-in-ukraine-276292