For the past decade, Hotel Hubertus has made headlines for its bold, architecturally adventurous amenities. Now, the 75-key resort has turned its attention to the rest of its wellness spaces, applying the same design language to a reimagined lobby, bar, and panoramic sauna. Earlier additions include the dramatic 82-foot-long cantilevered Sky Pool, introduced in 2016, and the equally “diabolical” Heaven & Hell sauna and cold plunge facility from 2022. Both suspended structures embrace a pared-back aesthetic while subtly referencing the alpine architecture of the Dolomites.

A panoramic sauna at Hotel Hubertus. Photography by Markus Ranalter.

Jutting out over the valley, the heated infinity pool is supported by timber beams sourced from the region. Also constructed from locally sourced timber, the sauna features a gabled roof shape mirrored upside down on its lower level.

The pristine, sparsely populated region of northeastern Italy is known for its tall, jagged limestone peaks and clear blue lakes. Above all, these wellness spaces are designed to take full advantage of the striking vista that Hotel Hubertus frames from its eastern-facing mountainside perch. Overlooking the resort is Kronplatz, one of the region’s premier ski destinations, whose slopes become an extensive network of hiking and mountain biking trails during the warmer months.

The Sky Pool was revealed at Hotel Hubertus in 2016. Photography by Nicho di Biasi.

When it came time to reimagine the rest of Hotel Hubertus’s spa and social spaces, it made sense to do so with the same distilled site-responsivity, without skimping on the effect of grandeur. A reimagined lobby includes a bar and a brand-new panoramic sauna, tucked beneath a green roof that extends from a sprawling grass terrace.

The reimagined Hotel Huberto lobby. Photography by Markus Ranalter.

Replacing a set of small cabins, the new sauna is wrapped in a striking herringbone-patterned wood paneling. It plays host to guided infusion rituals at 180 degrees, bio-based treatments at a much more restorative 131 degrees, and steam baths at 112 degrees. Regardless of what guests choose, they’ll always have sweeping vistas in front of them.

This is a far cry from most resorts, even those nearby, that tend to bury their wellness facilities in basements or away from the most captivating views. Here, every space—including all categories of accommodation—looks out over the valley and soaring mountains in the distance. The minimalist design language keeps the surrounding landscape front and center. The underlying intent is for Hotel Hubertus to integrate more fully into its natural setting.

Photography by Manuel Kottersteger

“It looks like one piece of architecture now,” says Markus Gasser, the resort’s second-generation co-proprietor. “We made sure these enhancements stayed true to the surroundings but have a contemporary look and feel.”

Rather than relying on traditional chalet motifs, the redesign lets the landscape remain the focal point.

Hotel Hubertus’s Heaven & Hell sauna and cold plunge experience. Photography by Davide Anzimani & Rebecca Paviola.

“Hotel Hubertus began as a place for my grandfather to gather with friends after a day of hunting,” Gasser explains. “Over the past five decades, we’ve slowly but surely expanded it into what it is now. The focus has always been on providing our guests with the best amenities possible, doing everything to help them enjoy the area, not necessarily maximizing our profit margins.”

Photography by Manuel Kottersteger

Many of the significant changes he and his family have introduced could only have been made because the operation remains so small. Unlike a larger hotel chain, Gasser doesn’t have to run these projects by a supervisory board or a group of outside investors.

“While we’ve expanded over the years, we’ve kept the room number below 75,” he explains. “The idea is to have our most loyal customers come back time and time again and have something new for them to discover each time.”

Photography by Manuel Kottersteger

Patreon laid off 93 employees, totaling 20 percent of its workforce on Thursday morning, according to an email to creators and staff from CEO Jack Conte.

In a message sent to everyone on the platform signed up as a creator, and posted to the site, with the subject line “A Painful Update about our Team,” Conte wrote that the business is “healthy and strong” and that the core business of Patreon is not changing. 

Conte included the email sent to Patreon employees in the message. In the email, he wrote that the company is undergoing both a “workforce reduction” and is “changing our organizational structure and how we work.” Specifically, he wrote, this means “we’re flattening the organization, refocusing teams on our top priorities, and evolving key aspects of our operations to make us faster at adapting to change.”

Conte is careful in this email to both express that he doesn’t view AI as a replacement for the human creativity the platform is built on and profits from — devoting a section of the email to saying as much — and also that AI is fundamentally “transforming” the tech industry, noting that it has an impact on how the company operates. 

“To be clear about the impact of AI on today’s decision: we are not making the above changes because we believe AI replaces humans,” Conte wrote. “The more we have learned to use these new tools, the clearer it has become that they are not substitutes for the creativity, judgment, detail orientation, or craftsmanship that our teammates have in spades, nor do they replace the desire for human connection that all of us cherish so deeply. That’s my personal opinion, but more importantly, it’s the foundation of Patreon’s strategy: our product vision and business are both predicated on the value of human creativity and human connection. AI has fundamentally transformed the tech industry, though, including how we work, how we build products, how we communicate, and more. That does have an impact on how we operate and organize.”

Earlier this month, Patreon announced that it’s partnering with Cloudflare to block crawlers from stealing creators’ work to train AI models. “I HAVE A KICKASS PRODUCT UPDATE FOR YOU ALL!” Conte wrote in a post on Instagram. “This is live and happening at the network level on all posts published on Patreon.” The company later elaborated on the partnership in a blog post.

Included in the internal email shared publicly are severance details for laid-off workers, including 16 weeks of pay, remaining on payroll through the company’s August 20 vesting date, one additional week of pay for every full year worked at the company, additional cash payments for recent hires who haven’t reached their one-year cliff, healthcare coverage through the end of the year for eligible employees and families, and a $1,500 stipend to replace their company laptops.

As AI companies search for more training data to improve their models, one company is offering old, printed books as an ideal source because they are guaranteed to be free of the very AI slop AI companies are producing. 

“The world's best AI training data is sitting on a shelf,” ISBNdb, a company that produces what it claims is “the world’s largest book database,” and that offers high-volume book acquisition services for AI companies, says on its site. “Books represent curated, peer-reviewed, domain-specific human knowledge, structured in a way no web crawl can replicate. Dense, edited, authoritative.” 

In one article on its site, ISBNdb explains that printed books published before 2022 are ideal for AI training data because they don’t include AI generated text. As the article correctly notes, much of the data that AI companies can scrape from the internet today is likely to include AI generated text, which could result in “model collapse,” a process by which AI models that are trained on AI generated data results in worse models that are more prone to errors. The article also notes that book authors who object to their writing being scraped for training purposes can now easily poison AI models by producing writing designed to manipulate and sabotage the resulting AI models. 

“Print books from the pre-LLM era are structurally guaranteed to be free of this contamination. That alone is a significant advantage [...]  “Physical books published before this date [pre-2022] are structurally clean of modern poisoning tools.”

ISBN stands for International Standard Book Number, the numerical commercial book identifier and barcode on the back of most books. For years, ISBNdb helped book sellers, libraries, and distributors manage their inventory and find and sell books, but the generative AI boom has made it valuable to AI companies. In addition to selling access to book metadata, ISBNdb now helps AI labs source bulk printed book purchases of between 1,000 to 1 million books per order. ISBNdb’s data makes it easier for AI companies to methodically acquire, scan, and turn printed books into training data while avoiding duplication. 

AI companies’ attempts to hoover up printed books for training data got wide attention in January after a copyright lawsuit from book authors against Anthropic revealed internal documents detailing its plan to obtain and scan millions of printed books, and destroy them in the process. The Washington Post article found that Anthropic was buying books from one company called Better World Books, one of several marketplaces where libraries, retailers, and individuals can sell their books. Google was recently sued by book publishers for similarly training Google Gemini on copyrighted books.  

ISBNdb advertises that it can keep the identity of AI companies secret. 

“Strict NDA [non-disclosure agreement] on every engagement,” ISBNdb’s site says. “Every project begins with a legally binding non-disclosure agreement. Your identity, strategy, and acquisition targets are never disclosed.”

ISBNdb notes that AI companies may not want to be caught destroying printed books during the scanning process. 

“The optics problem is real,” ISBNdb’s site says. “‘AI company destroys two million books’ is not a headline that generates sympathy.”

One professional bookseller who specializes in selling foreign language books on these marketplaces told me that, starting in April, he and other booksellers noticed a historic spike in sales. This bookseller asked to remain anonymous so he can continue to do business on these platforms. 

“I personally have mixed feelings about all of this,” the bookseller, who suspects he’s sold hundreds of books to AI companies for training data, told me. “It benefits me financially as well as by clearing out old inventory that is otherwise unlikely to sell. I’ve been well-suited for these sales with inventory from overseas and foreign language books. On the other hand, I don’t like the end-use, and I don’t like that uncommon books are being pulped.”

This bookseller said his inventory is full of rare, foreign language, and low circulation books, meaning that if they are destroyed in the process of becoming training data, they’ll be even harder to obtain. 

The seller told me that, normally, on a good week, he’d sell about 20 books. Since April, he has regularly sold hundreds of books a week. While the seller didn’t have clear evidence that the purchases were being made by AI companies, the purchases made him suspect that they were. First of all, he said, the kind of books he sells are specialized and are usually bought by schools and libraries. Purchases from these organizations have been trending downward because of reduced funding, he said. Bulk purchases also usually reflect interest in a specific topic, whereas the recent, very large purchases were of books that had little in common, except for the fact that they all had ISBNs. This seller also sells rare books that do not have ISBNs, and none of those were part of the bulk purchases. I have not seen any evidence that this bookseller’s recent sales were facilitated by ISBNdb or that the client was an Anthropic or another AI company.  

“It's not just the quantity, but the weirdness of the orders,” the bookseller told me. “I've had library orders before, and usually they're mostly confined to a single subject or maybe a slightly broader range of subjects. But basically, almost every library in the world has lost their budget. I know all the U.S. college libraries don't buy much anymore. The Australian libraries don't buy much anymore. The type of books [...] there's no rhyme or reason to it. Also, there's a total disregard for the price of the book. I've had some books that sold through this way that were [...] greatly overpriced. That's kind of a tell for AI because they have just so much money.” 

“Is it just me, or has there been an uptick in the number of AutoBuy orders since the tail end of last year?” one bookseller wrote on the forums for Alibris, another marketplace for selling books, in February. The AutoBuy function allows a customer to flag books they want to automatically purchase once they become available for sale on Alibris. “Any comment on what is happening? Is an AI going to read every single book? Any insight into how the selections are made? They seem to vary quite a bit in condition, format (hardcover and softcover), price and so on.”

“We have a couple of new bulk buyers that are scooping up trade books so lots of sellers are getting lots of orders,” Mike Feldman, director of client services at Alibris, responded. 

One bookseller told me that similarly large orders of books were coming through another marketplace called Biblio. Customers can provide Biblio with a spreadsheet of ISBNs they want to purchase and the company takes it from there. 

In June, a publication in the Netherlands talked to several rare booksellers who reported similar large bulk purchases they assumed were coming from AI companies. 

It’s hard to say for a fact that the books are being bought for training data and possibly being destroyed by AI companies because ISBNdb and book marketplaces like Biblio and Alibris keep the identity of the buyer hidden. Large bulk purchases of books are first sent to distribution centers where, for example, Alibris checks the quality of the books before sending them off to the client.  

Internal Anthropic documents about its plan to scan millions of books, revealed in the copyright lawsuit, don’t make clear why the company wanted to destroy the books in the process. A deposition of Tom Harvey, who Anthropic hired to lead the project and who previously helped create Google Books, shows that one company Anthropic contracted to scan the books was Datamation, which offers both “high volume destructive and non-destructive book scanning” services. In a destructive book scanning process, the spine of the book is cut so the pages can be fed into a scanning machine, which is faster and cheaper than non-destructive book scanning.

Regardless of its original intentions, the federal judge in the copyright lawsuit from authors against Anthropic, William Alsup, found that Anthropic’s creation of digital copies of the books was legal specifically because the books were destroyed. 

“Here, every purchased print copy was copied in order to save storage space and to enable searchability as a digital copy,” Alsup wrote in his ruling. “The print original was destroyed. One replaced the other. And, there is no evidence that the new, digital copy was shown, shared, or sold outside the company.” 

This, Alsup said, was “clearly transformative” and therefore qualified as fair use under Section 107 of the Copyright Act. 

ISBNdb’s site advertises this legal argument to AI companies as well. 

“Purchasing paper books at scale from the secondary market does not deprive any creator of income they would otherwise have received,” ISBNdb’s site says. “These are books that have already fully discharged their financial obligation to their creators.”

“Responsible physical sourcing is not book burning,” ISBNdb’s site in a section about why it’s crucial to recycle the destroyed books. “It is the completion of a book’s lifecycle: from tree to knowledge to tree again.”

ISBNdb and Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment.

Apple says it has fixed a vulnerability in its Hide My Email feature which let essentially anyone figure out a user’s real email address which was supposed to be protected by the feature. Apple only fixed the vulnerability after 404 Media wrote about it at the start of July, despite Apple knowing about the issue for more than a year.

The news also follows the filing of a class action lawsuit against Apple over the vulnerability.

On Wednesday Apple told 404 Media it deployed a patch for the issue on July 3, which the company says has fully resolved the issue. 

Hide My Email is part of Apple’s paid iCloud+ product. It lets customers quickly create a new, anonymous email address they can then use to sign up to websites, services, or email people with. The generated email addresses typically contain two random words followed by a number and the @icloud.com domain. I use it heavily so hackers may have a harder time cross-referencing my activity and accounts across data breaches, for example. 

Tyler Murphy, co-founder of EasyOptOuts, discovered he was able to find the real email address of Hide My Email users. At the time, Murphy said, “We don't know the full scope of the issue, but in our limited tests with volunteers, 100% of Hide My Email addresses were exploitable.” That included mine, which we tested.

Murphy first reported the issue to Apple in June 2025. Over the subsequent months, Apple said it was looking into the issue and said it had fixed it; Murphy found it was still exploitable; and Apple again said it was looking into it. Murphy, thinking Apple may not fix the issue at all, then contacted 404 Media, around a year after Apple learned of the vulnerability.

When 404 Media first covered the issue several weeks ago, we did not include any details on how it worked because Apple had not fixed it. Meaning, if we published more specifics, third parties might figure out how to exploit it and reveal peoples’ real email addresses.

Now Apple says it has been fixed, we can add that, in simple terms, it required sending a target Hide My Email user a message that got rejected as spam. “We don't know how often hidden email addresses were leaked in email logs. For many major email hosts, the leak was triggered simply by an email being automatically rejected as spam, even if it was a legitimate message. Such emails probably didn't make it to your inbox, so you can’t review your spam folder to learn whether you were affected,” Murphy and EasyOptOut co-founder Ben Weiner said in a new statement.

“The bug that caused Apple's Hide My Email to leak hidden email addresses to senders has been fixed. However, we don't think the risk to Hide My Email users has been eliminated. Because non-malicious emails could bounce, revealing your hidden email address, and because mail transfer logs are often retained, we'd assume that any hidden email address linked to a Hide My Email address created before July 7, 2026, may have been exposed and could still be in third-party logs,” they added.

The class action lawsuit against Apple seeks full recovery of the subscription costs customers paid for the feature and an injunction against Apple for its “deceptive conduct,” PCMag reported.