The Gmail trap
TL;DR The Jeffrey Epstein files have been made public, and several members of the Norwegian elite have surfaced – including Crown Princess Mette-Marit, Terje Rød-Larsen and Torbjørn Jagland. The case is a brutal reminder that digital footprints never disappear, and that even the most privileged can be brought down by an old Gmail account. Past indiscretions come at a cost.
We'd barely caught our breath after the Greenland turmoil before the Jeffrey Epstein files were made public. Over three million documents, data files, images and emails have been released for searching.
"The Epstein case" has popped up on various Reddit forums, often paired with wild conspiracy theories. So I've mostly stuck to editor-led media whenever the case has been covered, to avoid falling into a rabbit hole.
But what we're seeing now reminds me a lot of those obscure forum threads.
Are we actually living in a Reddit world?
The princess that let us all down
In 2024, I watched the Netflix film Scoop. It was about the journalists who landed the interview with (then) Prince Andrew about his involvement in the Epstein case. He has since been stripped of his title and is called Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.
I sat, shaking my head at his claims about being unable to sweat. Or rather, he could sweat now, he corrected himself, but he couldn't sweat at the precise time the alleged assault on 17-year-old Virginia Giuffre took place.
2026 has had a surreal start, I wrote last week. It hasn't become any less surreal, now that our own Crown Princess Mette-Marit has also got herself mixed up with Jeffrey Epstein. We knew this, mind you. As early as 2019, when the Norwegian business news outlet, Dagens Næringsliv, reported that the Crown Princess had met Epstein on several occasions.
– I should have looked more closely into Jeffrey Epstein's background, and I'm sorry I didn't. - Crown Princess Mette-Marit to Dagens Næringsliv in 2019.
Diplomats in freefall
But the Crown Princess has company. Top diplomat Terje Rød-Larsen and his wife – the ambassador – Mona Juul.
And let's not forget former Prime Minister Torbjørn Jagland in all of this!
Or CEO of World Economic Forum, Børge Brende, of course.
It would be wrong to speculate about motives and what actually happened, but my gut feeling says it's unlikely to be anything good.
Have we really been so naive when it comes to technology and the tools we surround ourselves with? The people mentioned in the Epstein documents can only be described as the very topmost elite in Norway. Some of them are among the most privileged people in the world. Yet Gmail looks to be their downfall. How is this even possible?
The whole Epstein-case is ugly. And I think it's only going to get uglier. But the case is also a reminder to all of us about how we used to use the internet, without a thought for how digital footprints remain for eternity. Five and a half years after the abuser and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein died, some of Norway's most privileged people have discovered that past indiscretions come at a cost.
Everything can be retrieved. Everything can be dug up. And it was bloody well about time.
Want to think about something other than Epstein files and royal scandals? Here are three exciting tech news stories!
Sleep on it
Researchers at Northwestern University in the US have been looking at how lucid dreaming can be used to solve problems.
The researchers recruited 20 people with experience of lucid dreaming and gave them various brain-teaser tasks to solve. While the participants solved the tasks, the researchers played distinctive sounds for each task.
When the test subjects went to sleep, the researchers measured their brain activity. REM sleep is the sleep phase associated with the most "vivid" dreams, and when the guinea pigs reached this part of their sleep, the researchers played the same sounds.
75 per cent of participants had dreamt or remembered images connected to the tasks they were meant to solve. What's more, they had a much greater chance of actually solving them.
[Could dream engineering help you solve problems while you sleep? The sleeping brain could be gently steered to revisit complex puzzles, improving the chance of solving them in the morning, research has suggested.
Rhys Blakely, Science Editor
So now we know that sleeping on it actually can help!
Burnout has competition
For a long time, burnout was what workers feared most. Now the fear of AI taking our jobs has climbed to first place.
But when something becomes feared, there are of course courses to help you avoid it! Everyone on LinkedIn has become an AI expert, and there's no shortage of sharing about vibecoding and "prompt engineering". Callum Borchers from the Wall Street Journal writes about how you can best prepare for the AI era – without having to shell out for a load of courses that don't actually help you on your way.
Want to make money? Give Trump a statue
That's the hope for a group of crypto speculators who've spent nearly two years completing a statue of Donald Trump.
Memecoins are a speculative type of crypto, meant for gambling your money. The currencies are usually rooted in humour, or a specific type of meme that's gone viral.
The purpose of a memecoin is to get the value as high as possible, and ride the wave as long as possible before you sell everything and rack up a tidy profit.
A group of - they call themselves investors - have paid $300,000 to create a giant statue of Donald Trump. The statue, named "Don Colossus", is to be given as a gift to the president, and their hope is that the statue will be placed on Trump's golf course in Florida.
At the same time, they've documented the process and launched a cryptocurrency called $PATRIOT. But the gang might end up holding the short straw. The cryptocurrency's value has plummeted by 90 per cent since January last year and is unlikely to become the path to riches the "investors" had hoped for.
Unless Donald Trump uses his own social media platform to encourage people to buy the digital coin, that is. The statue is gilded, after all – and we've all understood that Mr DJT is keen on gold.