News

X To Sell Rare Usernames For Up To Seven Figures

The platform’s new handle marketplace lets paid users claim dormant usernames, with some priced in the millions.

Published

1 year ago

October 21, 2025

x to sell rare usernames for up to seven figures

X has opened a marketplace for inactive usernames, turning what was once a common but very “grey” trade into an official channel. Paying subscribers can now buy or request dormant handles — and the most coveted may cost more than a million dollars.

Two categories are on offer. “Priority” handles cover full names or phrases such as @PizzaEater or @GabrielJones. These are tied to Premium+ and Business subscriptions, which must stay active or the handle can be revoked. “Rare” handles — short or generic names like @one or @fly — will be sold through invitation-only sales or public drops. Some may be given away “based on merit,” a term X links to user engagement and past contributions.

Prices for rare handles start around $2,500 and can rise into seven figures, depending on demand and cultural value. Buyers must hold a paid tier to apply but can keep the handle without renewing once it’s assigned.

X calls the project “an evolving initiative” and says it wants to set “a new standard for social media handles,” comparing it to how Community Notes reshaped transparency on the platform.

Andrew Allemann, publisher of Domain Name Wire, said the plan mirrors the expired domain market. “People have been buying and selling handles off X for a long time, and X hasn’t been getting a cut of that,” he said. “This will get some of the better handles back into use”.

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Allemann was, however, keen to point out that even if someone purchases a username on a social media platform, they don’t own any of the content they publish. “If you create your website, you control it, and people can always come to it. On social media, the single billionaire owner of it could decide they don’t like you, and it’s pretty much within their rights to kick you off”.

This latest move by X follows a string of contested reassignments — including the @X, @Music and @America handles — and shows how the company is treating usernames less as personal identifiers and more as tradable assets within its paid ecosystem.

News

ESET Bets On Specialized Security AI At 0.5% The Training Cost

ESET says NeoCortex can estimate an attacker’s next move, with a kill switch and human oversight built in to keep it from going rogue.

Published

5 days ago

November 4, 2026

Dana Saadeh

eset bets on specialized security ai at 0.5% the training cost

A sign-in anomaly, a suspicious process launch and an unusual connection may look harmless alone. Together, they can describe an intrusion that is hard for security to teams to piece together.

To solve that problem, ESET announced ESET NeoCortex on November 4, 2026: a specialized foundational AI model for cybersecurity. It powers ESET LiveCortex, available within the ESET PROTECT Platform, which connects fragmented security signals and turns them into actionable incidents.

Filtering is the main selling point, with LiveCortex processing billions of raw telemetry events daily, and just 0.00111% of them contributing to incidents presented to customers. The aim is less alert fatigue and more analyst time spent on threats that matter.

NeoCortex is built on world-model architecture, learning how digital environments behave and how events relate. ESET says that lets it reconstruct missing incident context, recognize similar past cases and estimate an attacker’s likely next step – what the company calls “minus-one-day defense,” a chance to intervene before the next stage unfolds. ESET points to Black October, the week leading up to October 25, 2026, when critical security issues affecting PHP, Linux, GitLab and other key systems demanded rapid, prioritized responses, as the kind of moment where that context matters.

ESET’s internal research also suggests a specialized model like NeoCortex can be trained at up to 200 times lower cost than a large general reasoning model, while delivering more accurate, defense-focused results. The company credits optimized training, a focus on cybersecurity vocabulary, lower computing requirements and privately owned hardware.

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“AI is accelerating both cyberattacks and cyberdefenses. With ESET NeoCortex, we are applying our AI investment to develop specialized foundational cybersecurity intelligence that remains under our control and strengthens, rather than replaces, human expertise,” said Juraj Malcho, Chief Technology Officer at ESET.

As part of the design, NeoCortex forms part of a layered architecture combining specialized models, deterministic controls, correlation logic, validation, auditability and expert human oversight. Safeguards include restricted sandboxes, read-only tools, continuous monitoring, defined usage and token limits, a kill switch and human oversight of critical response decisions. The model is also developed and self-hosted on ESET’s own infrastructure, which the company says reduces exposure to shifts among third-party AI providers, including commercial and geopolitical ones.