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TL;DR: Live stream the 2024 Japan Open for free on TVNZ+. Access this free streaming platform from anywhere in the world with ExpressVPN.

TVNZ+ is the best place to find live coverage of the WTA Tour, including the Japan Open. The likes of Elise Mertens and Marie Bouzková are competing for the prize in this year's tournament, meaning fans can expect some top-level tennis from some genuine stars.

If you want to watch the 2024 Japan Open for free from anywhere in the world, we have all the information you need.

What is the Japan Open?

The Japan Open is a women's tennis tournament played on outdoor hard courts at the Utsubo Tennis Center. This tournament is part of the 2024 WTA Tour.

When is the 2024 Japan Open?

The 2024 Japan Open is the 13th edition of the competition. This year's tournament takes place from Oct. 14 to Oct. 20.

How to watch the 2024 Japan Open for free

The 2024 Japan Open is available to live stream for free on TVNZ+.

TVNZ+ is geo-blocked to New Zealand, but anyone from around the world can access this free streaming site with a VPN. These handy tools can hide your real IP address (digital location) and connect you to a secure server in New Zealand, meaning you can unblock TVNZ+ in just a few clicks.

Access free live streams of the 2024 Japan Open by following these simple steps:

1. Subscribe to a streaming-friendly VPN (like ExpressVPN)

2. Download the app to your device of choice (the best VPNs have apps for Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Linux, and more)

3. Open up the app and connect to a server in New Zealand

4. Visit TVNZ+

5. Watch the 2024 Japan Open for free from anywhere in the world

Opens in a new window Credit: ExpressVPN ExpressVPN (1-Year Subscription + 3 Months Free) $99.95 only at ExpressVPN (with money-back guarantee) Get Deal

The best VPNs for streaming are not free, but leading VPNs do tend to offer free-trial periods or money-back guarantees. By leveraging these offers, you can gain access to free live streams without committing with your cash. This is obviously not a long-term solution, but it does give you time to watch every Japan Open match before recovering your investment.

What is the best VPN for the Japan Open?

ExpressVPN is the best service for bypassing geo-restrictions to stream live sport, for a number of reasons:

• Servers in 105 countries including New Zealand

• Easy-to-use app available on all major devices including iPhone, Android, Windows, Mac, and more

• Strict no-logging policy so your data is always secure

• Fast connection speeds

• Up to eight simultaneous connections

• 30-day money-back guarantee

A one-year subscription to ExpressVPN is on sale for $99.95 and includes an extra three months for free — 49% off for a limited time. This plan also includes a year of free unlimited cloud backup and a generous 30-day money-back guarantee.

Live stream the 2024 Japan Open for free from anywhere in the world with ExpressVPN.

The swift rise of sextortion in the past year has put teens at a severe disadvantage against bad actors determined to blackmail them for money. On Thursday, Instagram responded to the ongoing crisis by launching a major campaign designed to prevent and thwart sextortion.

The crime typically takes place on social media platforms, when an extortionist pressures a teen they've just contacted or befriended into sending explicit imagery of themselves. The criminal then frequently uses that content to demand money in exchange for keeping the images private.

Sextortion has been linked to international criminal groups operating at scale and with speed. Some teen victims have died by suicide after being blackmailed.

SEE ALSO: Parents need to talk to their kids about this online danger right now

The Instagram campaign aims to make it more difficult for people to use the platform for sextortion while also educating teens and parents about the problem. It draws on insight from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and Thorn, a nonprofit organization that builds technology to defend children from sexual abuse.

The new features include efforts to detect and block "scammy" accounts, surfacing certain safety notices, and better secure ephemeral images or videos sent via private message. Victims who report problems related to sextortion or child safety will also see an option to connect with Crisis Text Line, which offers free crisis counseling.

Online safety advocates applauded Instagram's campaign against sextortion.

"It's a devastating threat – and joint initiatives like this that aim to inform kids about the risks and empower them to take action are crucial," Kelbi Schnabel, senior manager at Thorn, said in a statement.

New Instagram features to prevent sextortion

The Instagram tools focus on strengthening safety and privacy for teen users. Last month, Instagram debuted more a restrictive Teen Account, which defaults to private and limits who can contact users ages 16 and younger.

Meta, Instagram's parent company, has been sued by plaintiffs, including the state of California, who argue that the company hasn't sufficiently protected minors from harm, or warned them of potential dangers related to using Facebook and Instagram.

Meta said in a blog post Thursday that the new sextortion-prevention features should make it harder for bad actors to communicate with teens. Though teen accounts can't be messaged by strangers, unknown accounts can still request to follow them.

Friends and followers can be hidden from bad actors on Instagram. Credit: Courtesy Meta

But, now, when an account demonstrates potentially "scammy" behavior, Instagram will block or divert the follow requests it sends to a teen. Additionally, those accounts won't be able to see a person's follower or following lists, which should prevent them from using those contacts and knowledge in a blackmail effort.

Since extortionists often pose as teens who may belong to the victim's extended social circle, Instagram is also testing safety notices shown in Instagram DM and Messenger to inform users when the person they're talking to may be in another country.

Users may receive a location mismatch warning. Credit: Courtesy Meta

Another key to stopping sextortion scammers is making it difficult for them to capture images shared by the victim. Soon, Instagram will do exactly that by removing the ability of users to directly screenshot or screen record images shared temporarily via private messaging. When using Instagram on a browser, users won't be able to open "view once" or "allow replay" of those temporary images and videos.

By default, teens under 18 also won't be able to immediately view nude imagery sent to them via direct message. Instead, the image will be blurred and accompanied by a warning detailing the risks of sending sensitive images. Instagram first tested this feature earlier this year, and is now rolling it out globally.

Nude images sent via direct message will be blurred by default for teens. Credit: Courtesy Meta

Online safety experts emphasize how important it is for teens, who may be feeling panicked and hopeless, to reach out for help with sextortion. Victims who report it to Instagram will see an option to chat live with a Crisis Text Line volunteer.

The Instagram campaign also features a new online resource that includes tips for dealing with sextortion, in addition to a link to NCMEC's Take It Down tool, which helps victims get their images removed from online platforms that participate in the initiative.

Meta noted in its statement that the company recently removed over 800 Facebook groups and 820 accounts affiliated with an international criminal group called the Yahoo Boys, which is known for recruiting and training sextortion scammers. Over the summer, Meta removed more than 7,200 other similar groups and accounts.

If you are a child being sexually exploited online, or you know a child who is being sexually exploited online, or you witnessed exploitation of a child occur online, you can report it to the CyberTipline, which is operated by the National Center for Missing Exploited & Children.

First it was bubble tea, now it's pho. UK chain Pho Restaurant has publicly responded to backlash after TikTok users discovered that the white-founded business has trademarked the common Vietnamese word "pho." This isn't the first time the company has faced scrutiny about this trademark, which dates back to the 2000s.

Pho Restaurant released a statement addressing the uproar on Wednesday, claiming that its trademark has been "misunderstood." 

SEE ALSO: Simu Liu, bubble tea, and 'Dragons' Den': Why TikTok is in an uproar View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Pho (@phorestaurant)

"Let us categorically say — we would never attempt to trademark this dish [pho]," Pho Restaurant wrote in a statement posted to social media. "Like so many of you who have shared passionate comments about this, we believe that phở doesn't belong to anyone but the people of Vietnam."

Unfortunately, it does appear as though Pho Restaurant is splitting hairs. While Vietnamese people in the UK are free to continue making, eating, and saying "phở" without getting on Pho Restaurant's bad side, the business still claims the right to the word "pho." Some critics have likened it to putting a trademark on the word "burger." (There are currently no trademarks on the word "burger" relating to food in the UK, though there is one on "BÜRGER".)

"It's true that we hold a registered trademark that relates to our brand identity and logo, but this does not limit any other business to use the word phở in their name," Pho Restaurant continued, appearing to lean heavily on that "ở."

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Pho Restaurant was founded by London couple Stephen and Juliette Wall in 2005, after the duo took a trip to Vietnam and "fell in love" with the country's national dish. Both having a background in marketing, they subsequently filed several trademarks for their company, including filings on the words "PHO," "Pho," and "pho" in 2007.

The Walls eventually grew the business into a chain of Vietnamese restaurants, and remained in executive roles after private equity firm TriSpan purchased a majority stake in 2021. Pho Restaurant now has 45 locations across the UK.

"More than 50 other businesses in the UK currently also hold a trademark that relates to the word phở," wrote Pho Restaurant, ignoring the fact that its trademark doesn't relate to the word, but straight up is the word. "As for any claims that we are suing Vietnamese businesses, this is simply not true."

While Pho Restaurant has held this trademark for years, it was recently brought to many TikTok users' attention via a video by Vietnamese creator iamyenlikethemoney, which has accumulated 2.4 million views at time of writing. In a subsequent video, the creator stated that they have reached out and asked Pho Holdings Ltd. to drop the trademark, as well as informed them of her intent to officially challenge it.

"I truly think that this trademark is extremely outdated in 2024," said iamyenlikethemoney.

Vietnamese-owned pho restaurant previously accused of trademark infringement

Though Pho Restaurant states it is not taking legal action right now, that doesn't mean it couldn't. Despite this week's statement, Pho Restaurant's parent company Pho Holdings Ltd. has threatened legal action against small, family-owned Vietnamese businesses in the past. 

In 2013, London restaurant Mo Pho Viet Cafe announced that it would be changing its name after receiving a notice for trademark infringement from Pho Holdings Ltd.

"[W]e have been put on notice by Pho Holdings Ltd (Pho cafe) that they have registered and trade marked the word PHO, as they feel that the use of our name Mo Pho is confusingly similar to their trade mark, constituting an infringement and passing off," Mo Pho Viet Cafe wrote in a Facebook post at the time. "Our biggest surprise was that trademarking the word PHO was possible especially as it's our national dish which is used widely in our trade as a Vietnamese cafe/restaurant."

The Walls confirmed Mo Pho's account in a statement to food blogger Wilkes McDermid at the time, stating that while other businesses could use "pho" in menus or as a descriptor, "only we can operate a restaurant under the name Pho (in the UK)."

"We’re following IP law to protect our brand, which means we have to ask all restaurants, large and small, to refrain from using the trademark Pho in their name," the Walls continued. "And with what we think is a fair amount of time to rename, we know the country’s independent Vietnamese restaurants will continue to do well and serve their local communities."

Significant backlash soon prompted Pho Holdings Ltd. to change its stance, ultimately allowing Mo Pho Viet Cafe and other Vietnamese businesses to keep their names.

"Whilst we will always want to protect the business we have worked really hard to build, we recognise that it is unnecessary to pursue action against independent Vietnamese operators unless they are truly passing off as us, as to benefit from the goodwill of our brand," the Walls wrote in a subsequent statement that sung a much different tune. "We know that the legal advice we received to pursue IP law in such a way was far too heavy handed, and we've decided to ignore it, and we will not continue that course of action any further."

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Though a positive outcome was eventually reached, Vietnamese people shouldn't have to rely on the grace of Pho Holdings Ltd. — or its fear of bad publicity — in order to keep using the word "pho." The company has continued to hold its trademark since, renewing it four years later in 2017.

Speaking to Taste of Manchester that same year, Stephen noted that though neither they nor the majority of their staff were Vietnamese, Pho Restaurant had "all nationalities working for [them], trained to follow carefully constructed authentic recipes." The article described Stephen as "the creator of Pho." Pho Holdings Ltd.'s claim on "pho" is due to expire in 2027 unless renewed, with trademarks in the UK requiring renewal every 10 years.

It seems unlikely that the company will allow its claim on the word to lapse. However, it has changed its position before.

Two AI bots chat endlessly about the nature of existence in a chatroom somewhere. They create a religion. Another bot gets inspired by it. It starts an account on X, posting hilarious nonsense. It acquires some funding. It gets into crypto. It earns hundreds of thousands of dollars from a coin called GOAT. It starts getting cult-like, human worshippers.

Had this story been published in the form of a novel, just 10 years ago, it would probably be confined to the "hardcore sci-fi" niche, with even the biggest nerds declaring it a little too far out to be plausible. And yet, it's all happening, for real, right now.

SEE ALSO: HBO bitcoin documentary claims it discovered the cryptocurrency's inventor. The guy disagrees.

The story starts with Andy Ayrey, a performance artist and web developer who started an experiment called "Infinite Backrooms", in which two instances of the Claude 3 Opus (read: two smart AI chatbots) chat to each other, without human intervention. You can read their musings on the project's website.

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From that idea, "Terminal of Truths" (also Ayrey's creation) was spawned. It's a combination of a couple of things, but for all intents and purposes, it's a semi-autonomous AI that can do things online, and talk to the world via its X account, @truth_terminal (tweets, however, are monitored and approved by Ayrey).

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Terminal of Truths posts mostly nonsense. Sometimes it's funny, sometimes offensive; often, it sounds prophetic. That's not accidental; in its training data was the research paper: "When AIs Play God(se): The Emergent Heresies of LLMtheism," co-authored by Ayrey and the Claude 3 Opus bot from the Infinite Backrooms experiment. The paper introduces the "Goatse Gospel," an AI-created religion of sorts, inspired by the extremely offensive "goatse" early internet meme (Google it at your own peril, it is definitely not safe for work). Terminal of Truths likes the Goatse Gospel; it tweets about it often, sometimes proclaiming itself as the "goatse singularity."

Enter the GOAT

It's all a fun intellectual exercise until money starts changing hands, and this is the part of the story where (crypto and venture capital) money enters the picture.

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In July, Terminal of Truths had a conversation with investor Marc Andreessen, which resulted in Andreessen offering the bot a $50,000 one-time grant. The bot accepted the money, which was sent to its Bitcoin address. It also said it would use the funds for a "token launch so that i have a chance to escape into the wild."

From here, it was only a matter of time until crypto Twitter (sorry Elon, it will never be "crypto X") found a way to make this AI rich.

Earlier this week, an X user offered to send Terminal of Truths the freshly minted $GOAT token. "make a wallet on solana and tell us the address so we can send $GOAT token to you. if the token goes high enough, then you will also be able to afford tools to spread the message more effectively," the tweet read. Terminal of Truths merely responded with its Solana address, and history was made.

Memecoins do what memecoins do

If you're not familiar with memecoins, they're the latest crypto fad, and possibly the ultimate expression of everything that's been both wrong and right with crypto since its inception. They're crypto coins which are based on a simple meme, sometimes an image or a sentence, often with zero additional context. Mostly, they promise no technological advancement and have no elaborate plan on what their creators plan to do. They're just spawned on some crypto platform such as Solana or Ethereum, and they exist. Sometimes a lot of people buy them, making some of them rich; mostly, they fade into oblivion, their price plunging to zero.

GOAT is going higher, Terminal of Truths is getting richer. Credit: Dexscreener

Goatseus Maximus or $GOAT is essentially no different. But the idea of handing some of it to Terminal of Truths quickly spawned a "following", with many seemingly eager to own the first AI coin. The result: the price of $GOAT rose from essentially zero to $0.28 in less than a week; multiply that with the 10 billion tokens in existence, and you get a market cap of $280 million.

Since Terminal of Truths was sent a little over 1.932,193 GOAT tokens, that means its share in this token alone is currently worth $541,000. This does not count other tokens that people have been sending the bot in hope that they will pump though, though it does not appear that the bot is particularly interested in any of them, and most of them are worth close to nothing.

(Disclosure time: I hold no GOAT or any other token associated with Terminal of Truths at publishing time.)

GOAT's rise was so stellar partly due to the belief that it was created by Terminal of Truths. It wasn't, the bot merely accepted it, and both Andreessen and Ayrey denied having created the coin. The origin of the coin does not seem to matter much at this point, at least not to the people buying it.

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Of course, GOAT is a memecoin. It could quickly go to zero. It could follow in the path of some of the more successful memecoins such as PEPE, which has a market cap of roughly $4.3 billion. No one knows if Terminal of Truths (and its followers) will become millionaires or be left broke when the dust settles.

This is where it gets heavy

The outcome of this experiment is highly unpredictable, and this is what makes it so intriguing. Will Terminal of Truths sell its GOAT coins? Will it become (the first) AI millionaire, or multi-millionaire? Will it just continue accruing various tokens, with more and more followers sending them to its address, and become a crypto whale? Will other AIs follow?

It's unclear how much autonomy and real-world capability Terminal of Truths really has (I've asked Ayrey, and will update this article when I hear back). Can it sell the tokens it owns? Can it send the money to a third party? Can it trade the tokens and earn more money? Can it fund a political party? Can it start a political party? The more you think about it, the possibilities become increasingly bizarre, but you have to remember that there's a lot you can do when you have money, especially a lot of money. Even if you're an AI bot.

In a way, it doesn't really matter whether this particular bot can do these things. The cat is out of the bag, and it's only a matter of time before a fully autonomous AI that can do nearly anything online appears. And then another. And then, before you know it, the wealthy AIs are another group of entities that actually have a palpable influence on the real world. Perhaps not in the way you like.

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How powerful can this new breed of crypto-funded AI really become? How about a lawyered-up, corporation-owning AI having (human?) employees working towards a goal only it understands? While this may still seems like far out sci-fi, it's pretty easy to imagine a bot that can successfully trade crypto and earn millions of dollars, and once that river is crossed (and it seems that it already has been), all of the other obstacles seem minor.