Two papers by Max Planck, a pioneer of quantum mechanics, have been removed from their online journal. There is uncertainty about why. CC-licensed photo by Julia Tulke on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. Made you look. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

“Easily the biggest leak in Apple’s history”: iPhone 18 Pro final design may have just been revealed in a stolen drop test video • Tom’s Guide

Jeff Parsons:

»

Apple is obsessed with preserving as much secrecy as it can before officially revealing the rumoured iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max and iPhone Ultra/Fold at the Apple Event in September. But the company has just been dealt a huge blow by a data breach at one of its suppliers.

More than 200,000 files are believed to have been posted to the dark web following the ‘cybersecurity incident’ Tata reported last week.

Photos, videos and component lists of the upcoming devices have been circulating on social media after one of Apple’s India-based suppliers, Tata Electronics, suffered a data breach last week. More than 200,000 files are believed to have been posted to the dark web following the ‘cybersecurity incident’ Tata reported last week.

These files include documentation on other products made by Tata, but according to Reuters, drawings of the iPhone 18 Pro circuit board, A20 chip, and supplier lists for components are also among them.

They also include drop test photos, which is part of customary testing for durability. While it’s not been confirmed whether or not any videos are among the leak, one such video is being circulated on social media. Tom’s Guide hasn’t been able to verify if this video is accurate or merely AI-generated. If genuine, it would give us some huge clues about what to expect in September.

«

The phone looks like.. an iPhone. Not the least surprise about that. But Apple will be seething about two points: that the leak has come from Tata, one of its new partners outside China; and that the component list has been leaked. In April 2021 a ransomware attack against Apple’s laptop maker, Quanta, led to the leak of forthcoming designs.

and in January Apple supplier Luxshare was hit, leading to the leak of lots of internal data.
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The Dogs of San Francisco: 51,379 dogs

Ryan McEntush and Luke Eigel:

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Every licensed dog, month by month. After a long slide from 2017, the registry rebounded to a record 11,200 in 2025. Licenses still spike each spring, peaking in May 2025.

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Didn’t know that dogs had to be licensed in San Francisco, but it turns out that means you can generate a database showing all sorts of fun details, particularly about breeds. Large dogs turn out to be surprisingly popular, though maybe the weather is cold enough there to be tolerable for them. A fun project, harking back to the halcyon days of Web 2.0.
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An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time • Vesuvius Challenge

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For almost 2,000 years, the carbonized library of Herculaneum has kept a cruel bargain: its scrolls survived the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, but only by becoming too fragile to open. To read one was to destroy it. Hundreds of rolls have therefore remained sealed, their contents preserved yet unreachable.

Today that changes. We have completely virtually unwrapped and read PHerc. 1667 — the scroll the Vesuvius Challenge community knows as Scroll 4 — without ever touching its pages. It is the first Herculaneum papyrus to be digitally unrolled and read in full, end to end, and made available for sustained scholarly study.

PHerc. 1667 began as a blackened, rolled mass of carbonized papyrus. To read it, we never unrolled it physically. Instead, we scanned it with high-resolution X-rays, reconstructed the wound sheet inside the volume, flattened it into a readable surface, and used machine learning to bring out the faint traces of ancient ink.

…PHerc. 1667 is what survives of a larger roll: earlier attempts to open it by hand — in the 19th century, and again in 1969 and the 1980s — destroyed its outer layers and left only the compact inner core, about 8 cm of an original height of 19–24 cm. From that surviving portion we have now recovered and read the text in full — the lower parts of some 22 columns, transcribed and reviewed by papyrologists. It is the first time the preserved text of a rolled Herculaneum scroll has been read continuously, end to end, rather than in isolated words or patches.

The recovered text is a philosophical treatise on ethics, and the evidence points to a Stoic work: it turns on human nature, impulse, and the moral progress of human beings, and its final preserved column names Aristocreon — nephew and disciple of the great Stoic Chrysippus — which, together with the language and themes of the text, places it in a Stoic context and dates it to the 2nd century BC.

Because the papyrus is damaged, the readings are fragmentary, with gaps where the surface is lost. Even so, several passages can be read clearly for the first time in two thousand years.

…The scans were acquired with high-resolution phase-contrast X-ray microtomography on the BM18 beamline at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble — an instrument able to resolve the wafer-thin, densely packed layers of a Herculaneum roll. The work was carried out in collaboration with the National Library of Naples “Vittorio Emanuele III”, which safeguards the Herculaneum papyri. From those volumes, the team reconstructed the scroll’s geometry, traced and flattened its surface into a readable sheet, and trained machine-learning models to detect ink that is almost indistinguishable from the carbonized papyrus beneath it. Each reading was then examined and transcribed by papyrologists.

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About those “hackquisitions”… • Spyglass

MG Siegler:

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The news that Noam Shazeer is (once again) leaving Google seems like a big deal. The news that he’s joining OpenAI, which turned the transformer paper he helped write into a product that he couldn’t launch (in his first stint) at Google seems like an even bigger deal. Bigger still may be the fact that he had rejoined to help the Gemini product take on ChatGPT, which was seemingly working, at least to some degree. But actually, the biggest deal has to be the actual deal that brought him back to Google. Because it wasn’t even two years ago when Google paid $2.7B to bring Shazeer back.

And like that – poof – he’s gone.

To be fair, there were others on the Character.ai team that Google seemingly wanted too. The non-exclusive licensing rights for Character? Probably less so. If anything, that aspect of the deal has ranged from a headache to a nightmare.1 But clearly it was a deal structure in such a way to get Shazeer back with an offer he couldn’t refuse. And he didn’t. Until he did. Again.

That deal structure, of course, was one of the early “hackquisitions” – a deal to bring on a company’s key talent without acquiring the company itself. Because that clearly would have been messy from a regulatory perspective for any of Big Tech. If nothing else, such deals would be bogged down for months while they’re scrutinized. A “hackquisition”, by contrast, could be done almost instantly.

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Siegler goes into quite some details about all the hackquisitions that are going on among all the AI companies. It’s a lot, and there seems to be an absolute revolving door between all the different companies. But also: it’s hard to see whether AI progress is really reliant on any particular one of these researchers. Is it like a football team, where individuals matter but it’s the team that makes it, or like tennis players, where the individual is what counts?
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When cybercriminals hire burglars: inside an alleged Russian effort to infiltrate multibillion-dollar US law firms • CNN Politics

Sean Lyngaas:

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When an executive at a US law firm’s phone rang in April, the voice on the other end was urgent: A computer virus was spreading through the firm.

The caller said they were from IT support and needed physical access to the lawyer’s computer because remote fixes to stop the attack weren’t working. The lawyer told his purported colleague to swing by his desk at the law firm’s office in New Jersey.

The next day, the firm’s receptionist called: The lawyer had a visitor from IT at the front desk.

“That’s when an alarm bell went off: Why would an IT person need to check in with reception?” said Leeann Nicolo, who handles incident response for cybersecurity insurance firm Coalition, which the law firm hired to investigate the incident.

The visitor ran out of the building when the lawyer approached the front desk, according to Nicolo.

It’s one of several incidents at law firms across the country in the last year in which, the FBI and private investigators suspect, the Russian-speaking Silent Ransom Group has hired people in the US to show up in-person and plug thumb drives into law firms’ computers. The physical access could help bypass anti-virus protections that the hackers run up against from afar.

The group’s millions of dollars in returns contrasts with its modest investments: In a private Telegram channel, the group is offering $500 to people to visit law firms and plug in USB sticks, one cybersecurity professional familiar with the incidents told CNN.

The hired hands are “cannon fodder” for the Russian-speaking cybercriminals — expendable assets in a much larger cybercrime war, the source said.

«

The scheme is: get data about the law firms’ clients, leak it if the companies won’t pay a ransom after they’re hit by ransomware.
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Why have papers by one of history’s most famous physicists been retracted? • Science

Sam Kean:

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In early May, Yves Gingras, a historian of physics at the University of Quebec (UQ) at Montreal, was browsing Retraction Watch, a website that catalogs fraud, data manipulation, and other scientific sins. He noticed a link that read “Retractions by Nobel Prize winners.” Were there really Nobel laureates whose papers had been withdrawn from the scientific literature?

After clicking, Gingras froze. “That’s impossible,” he recalls thinking. The fourth name on the list, with two retracted papers, was Max Planck—a legendary pioneer of quantum mechanics and the 1918 Nobel laureate in physics. Gingras had never heard a whiff of scandal about Planck, who was almost as widely revered for his character as his physics. In 1933, for example, he bravely confronted Adolf Hitler over Nazi Germany’s discriminatory laws against Jews.

Gingras called up Mahdi Khelfaoui, a fellow historian of science at UQ Trois-Rivières. “There’s something fishy,” Gingras said. The papers, both quietly retracted in 2011, originally appeared in the early 1940s in Naturwissenschaften, a German journal now owned by publishing giant Springer Nature. After some sleuthing, Khelfaoui determined one of the Planck pieces, a philosophical essay from 1942 titled “Sinn und Grenzen der exakten Wissenschaft” (“Meaning and Limits of Exact Science”), about how to achieve certainty in scientific knowledge, had also appeared in two other journals and been reprinted twice in books.

Repackaging the same work multiple times is considered “self-plagiarism” and frowned upon today—the practice produces copyright conflicts and inflates scholars’ publication records. The Naturwissenschaften site gives “copyright violation” as the reason for the retraction.

Yet publishing identical material in multiple journals was widespread before the internet. “Science was more fragmented” then, Khelfaoui says. “You wanted different audiences …  to have access to your work.” The practice was especially common for luminaries like Planck. Albert Einstein did the same (but escaped retractions).

Springer Nature’s “anachronistic” application of modern standards to a 1942 paper “distort[s] the historical record,” Gingras and Khelfaoui argue in a preprint posted last month on arXiv.

«

Seems that a bot thought it was copying somewhere else, and removed it. But:

»

Springer Nature was nevertheless still selling the empty PDF for $39.95 until this story was published.

«

Never change, academic publishers.
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Spurious copyright claim sees second Press Gazette story removed from Google search • Press Gazette

Dominic Ponsford:

»

A Press Gazette article exposing the dubious ‘parasite SEO’ tactics of online marketing company Clickout Media has been removed from Google search results after a spurious anonymous legal challenge.

A mysterious entity called DRF Corp wrote to Google stating Press Gazette had “willfully violated copyright law by copying our entire content word for word, including all images, which are solely owned by our company” even though the content allegedly copied was on an unrelated subject.

It is the second time a fake copyright claim has been used to get Press Gazette reporting about Clickout Media removed from search engine results this year.

According to the Lumen database, the complaint was filed under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

It alleged that the original article was a month-old (now removed) Reddit post headlined: “Casinos Not Gamstop in 2026: The Brutally Honest Truth Before You Deposit.”

The Press Gazette article removed by Google from search results, which was published last week, details how Clickout Media has bought three reputable UK sports news websites and introduced AI-generated reporters whose stories are littered with errors and fabrications. It is headlined: “AI reporters churn out error-strewn stories for football websites.”

This article no longer appears in Google search results. Any search that would have previously surfaced the story now includes the following disclaimer from Google: “In response to a complaint that we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act we have removed results from this page.”

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Odd how the Reddit post has been removed, which makes it harder to verify whether it is indeed exactly the same as the Press Gazette story. (It isn’t.) This adds more detail to the story yesterday about Clickout Media. There’s more to come about this company and its partners. Press Gazette might just be annoyed enough to go and find it.
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Pollen tried to remove my article about CEO Callum Negus-Fancey and CTO Bradley Wright, and Google is assisting with it • The Pragmatic Engineer

Gergely Orosz:

»

In 2022, I wrote about the damning fall of events tech company Pollen. The short of it:

»

Pollen seemed to have pulled off the improbable feat of building a business in the notoriously low margin industry of events, surviving Covid-19, and building a solid software engineering organization. In April this year, the company announced it had raised another $150M in fresh funding.

But just three weeks later, Pollen laid off about 200 people, a third of staff. Leadership assured employees all was well. However, from that point on, things got worse. Leadership later pulled the plug on Slack, employees were not paid wages, pension contributions went missing, and vendors were not paid. Some vendors took matters into their own hands; on 9 August 2022, JIRA was suspended when Atlassian tired of the company’s failure to pay.

On 10 August 2022, Pollen went bankrupt, collapsing into administration.

«

The article looked bad on Pollen’s founder, Callum Negus-Fancey. He was ultimately responsible for lying to staff, not paying salaries, the missing pension contributions, and the unpaid health insurance for US employees. The story was so bad that the BBC created a documentary titled Crashed: $800M Festival Fail. 

And then there was the $3.2m double charge for customers, manually initiated by CTO Bradley Wright, detailed extensively in the documentary Crashed: $800m Festival Fail. That double charge would have been trivial to reverse, but the reversal never happened, customers never got their money back, and the postmortem of the incident was never released to staff.

Four years later, Pollen and Callum Negus-Fancey are attempting to erase this shameful story from the public record. The article is my original writing, and thus I am the copyright holder of it. So imagine my surprise when I was notified that Google removed the article from its search results thanks to a copyright infringement claim it received.

«

Guess what? Google removed his article from its search results, based on a copyright claim made by an unknown owner (from an uninhabited country) against an unspecified source. Orosz eventually found the complaint, which asserts that it’s a copy of a New York Post article. It isn’t (that article has a URL ending “band-leader-hits-winning-chord”). Google might want to look at how it’s being abused.
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Bracing for layoffs, unionized Xbox developers hold press conference to make their point • IGN

Cade Onder:

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Unionized Xbox employees are pushing back against the company’s looming layoffs and have outlined various demands.

Earlier today, the CWA (Communications Workers of America) held a press conference in which various unionized Xbox employees spoke out against Microsoft. The conference was held ahead of reported layoffs at Xbox, which insiders have stated will be a “bloodbath.”

It’s also a painful reminder of last year’s layoffs at Microsoft, where 9,000 people lost their jobs across the entire company (not just Xbox) and resulted in multiple projects being cancelled, including the long-awaited reboot of Perfect Dark. The studio behind that game, The Initative, was also shuttered without having ever released a game.

The upcoming layoffs reportedly puts more studios, such as Double Fine and Ninja Theory, at risk of closure. South of Midnight developer Complusion Games is also reportedly at risk of shutting down, despite winning a Peabody Award earlier this year. New Xbox boss Asha Sharma celebrated the win on her socials, months before the studio’s reported demise: “A well-deserved recognition for storytelling that truly matters!”

…It remains to be seen what will come of this, but Activision QA tester Andrew Snell and [Diablo senior environment artist Mahreen] Fatima both made it clear that Microsoft’s actions don’t just impact workers, but also the players: “Workers and players are on the same side of this and we’re done paying for executives’ failures,” said Snell.

“We, the developers, demand that you respect our labor and our games,” added Fatima. “Together we’ve built a huge community and touched the lives of millions of gamers everywhere. Don’t disrespect the developers. Don’t disrespect the gamers.”

«

This really does look like it will be bloody. The quarter ended on Tuesday, so now Microsoft can announce any cuts it feels like making in Xbox. They’re expected to be hefty.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

We worry about the “dangers” of radiation, but the risk seems to be overplayed, and that has harmed progress. CC-licensed photo by John Jones on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 10 links for you. High energy. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

How to lie about radiation • Works In Progress

Alex Chalmers and Ben Southwood:

»

Chernobyl is the only accident in commercial nuclear history that has exposed people to large enough doses of radiation to poison and kill them. But even it has caused only hundreds of early deaths, despite the exposure of millions of people in the exclusion zone and nearby. Radiation impacts on Scandinavia and Germany, where there were major fears about the effects of the fallout, were nugatory. Evacuations and relocations to avoid small additional background radiation levels may have caused more harm than they averted. The same is true of Fukushima and Three Mile Island, the other two large nuclear disasters, but to an even greater extent: neither saw any responders die of the direct effects of radiation, and neither shows any clear impact on cancer rates.

Two years before Chernobyl, an explosion at a pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, released toxic methyl isocyanate gas that killed at least 2,000 people instantly, permanently disabled another 4,000, and caused 550,000 injuries in total. In 1975, the Banqiao Dam in China failed, flooding 12,000 square kilometers, drowning at least 25,000 people, and destroying perhaps five million houses. 

Whereas Chernobyl is a household name, Bhopal and Banqiao are mostly familiar only to specialists. People have much greater familiarity with and concern about the risks created by nuclear power, and the world’s international radiation protection regime is based on the idea that any release of radioactive material from a nuclear power plant is intolerable. This has led to regulations that have increased the costs of nuclear electricity over time to the point where it is widely considered a slow, backward, and ineffective technology. 

«

Chalmers and Southwood argue – with data! – that we are far too cautious about radiation; that the studies which suggest that any amount, even the tiniest, will accrue like savings in a bank account are wrong, and that instead it’s more like drinking beer: you’d drink one a night for a year without effect, but drinking 365 in a night would do all sorts of harm. Chernobyl and, after it, Fukushima show the latter model is more like the truth. Which means we’ve been squashing nuclear energy for no good reason for decades.
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WhatsApp to let people chat without swapping phone numbers • BBC News

Zoe Kleinman:

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WhatsApp is set to let people chat without having to reveal their phone number – by exchanging unique usernames instead.

It will be rolled out globally to the platform’s three billion account holders over the next few months, the platform said.

From Monday, users will start being able to reserve a name via the app, although it will not be compulsory.
The firm said people would be able to remove or change their usernames at any time.

Once it is fully activated, WhatsApp users will be able to connect after exchanging usernames only. There will still be options to block or report unwanted messages.

Names will be limited to 35 characters and there will be few restrictions, with the exception of some high profile officials and celebrities whose names will not be made available to anyone else. So it’s unlikely WhatsApp will be overrun with users calling themselves Donald Trump, for example.

The Meta-owned firm described usernames as a privacy feature.

Alice Newton-Rex, WhatsApp’s head of product, said she had heard from users that they didn’t always want to share their phone numbers in order to be in contact with others, particularly in group chats.

She said she hoped the feature would “give users control over how they choose to show up” on the app.

«

Signal has had this feature for a while, I believe. It’s going to be a fun few months while this all gets ironed out and people jockey for position. Will a username be tied to a phone number, though? If you change phone number, what happens to your username?
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AI has lots of people digging out their iPods • Harvard Gazette

Sy Boles spoke to Sara Watson, an analyst who looks at social trends in relation to technology:

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I’m noticing a resurgence in interest in going offline, “grandma hobbies” like knitting or crochet. Aesthetics like punk zines, hand lettering, collage. Another version of that is cyberdecks — people creating their own custom-built computers and keyboards in a converted purse or a suitcase. It’s all highly customized, hyper-personalized, and it’s all about increasing control over our devices. I would put iPods into this category as well — people finding vintage iPods and saying, “Isn’t it nice to have my entire music collection without ads, without needing a WiFi connection?” There is a particular desire to be offline. I know folks with flip phones or Light Phone devices. L.L. Bean is selling boat bags embroidered with “analog” and “off the grid.” Land’s End catalog proclaimed “analog summer.” The trends are real. 

What these trends have in common is definitely “friction-maxxing,” in today’s parlance. But I also think it’s a bit of a refusal of the economic logic behind these platforms that have driven us down the algorithmic attention rabbit hole. I see it as a form of resisting the system. Sure, some of it still results in consumer behavior — the irony of posting on Instagram what you carry around in your analog bag — but to me it’s a reflection of, “OK, if we’re a market economy, one of the best tools I have in resisting the direction of this market is to demand alternatives and reflect that in my consumer behavior.” 

The other underlying theme is not only that we’re taking our attention back, but we’re also trying to reassert the fact that we have bodies. There’s a kind of nostalgic, embodied, tactile factor to these trends. The Y2K-aesthetic CD players were a joyful, tactile experience. We enjoyed typing on a mechanical keyboard as opposed to glass screens.

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Apple to fight $500m patent bill at UK Supreme Court • Financial Times

Alistair Gray:

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Apple is heading to the UK’s highest court to fight a $500mn bill that judges have said the tech giant must pay to embed patented mobile technology in its devices, such as iPhones, worldwide.

The Supreme Court case, due to begin on Monday, is the climax of a bitter, long-running dispute over patents for highly technical standards that underpin voice and data communications between mobile devices.

Apple, which is being supported by a powerful coalition including chipmaker Intel and leading Hollywood film studios, has warned that if it loses the case other device makers could face large patent bills, threatening to stifle innovation and increase prices for consumers. Legal principles established in the case will set a precedent that will help shape global royalty rates for other technologies.

Original contributors to complex protocols that underpin mobile connections, including Ericsson, Samsung and Panasonic, sold a selection of the patents in stages to a group called Optis.

Optis is owned by funds managed by New York hedge fund and private equity manager Brevet Capital.

Negotiations over licensing terms between Apple and Optis collapsed in 2019, prompting the patent owner to sue in England, where the courts have the power to set global royalty rates. In 2023 the High Court in London ruled that Apple had to pay $56m to Optis, but the Court of Appeal last year increased the iPhone maker’s bill ninefold to $502m.

The Court of Appeal arrived at the figure in part by using a deal that Optis struck with Google as a baseline.

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These sorts of patent fights used to be a constant backdrop to tech news. You can read all about it on the Supreme Court website. The hearing will only last until Wednesday, but it’s anyone’s guess when the decision will come down.
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Supreme Court ruling guts government’s use of geofence warrants • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

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The Fourth Amendment protects a user’s “location history,” the Supreme Court ruled Monday.

The same logic already applied to a cellphone’s tracking, and the high court found “no good reason exists to reach a different result for Location History” collected by third parties like Google.

Split 6-3, the majority agreed that the government needs a warrant and must show reasonable cause to turn a phone’s location-tracking services into a government surveillance tool.

The decision came in a case where cops used so-called geofence warrants to track down an armed bank robber from a list of all phones logged in the area. Applying a three-part process, cops worked with Google to narrow down the list of suspects and eventually arrested Okello Chatrie, who had opted in to share his location with Google every few minutes. Chatrie was sentenced to 12 years in prison but challenged the geofence warrant as an unconstitutional search.

The US tried and failed to argue that no search was conducted under the Fourth Amendment, partly because they only searched a little bit of Chatrie’s location data, which the government considered too small to warrant privacy protections.

They also claimed that Chatrie was aware that voluntarily sharing his location with Google could mean that law enforcement might get access to the data. And along similar lines, the government argued that Chatrie’s data simply showed his movements in public, where he supposedly had no reasonable expectation of privacy.

However, Justice Elena Kagan, penning the majority opinion, said it didn’t matter how much data the government obtained. It was still a search under the Fourth Amendment because people carrying cellphones today commonly opt in to location-tracking, so that their apps work.

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The original search was inspired – a clever way to track down a bank robber – but the efforts afterwards to claim that “it wasn’t a BIG violation” looks a bit desperate.
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Today programme suffers ‘body blow’ as BBC prioritises social and digital content • The Guardian

Michael Savage:

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The task of briefing the nation on Radio 4’s agenda-setting Today programme has been one of the most urgent tasks facing the BBC’s top journalists for decades.

Insiders at the corporation, however, say that duty has effectively been downgraded, after an edict that will result in correspondents prioritising making content for TikTok, Instagram and other digital platforms.

The Guardian understands that staff at Today were told last week that social and digital platforms were now the top priority for correspondents, effectively deprioritising traditional television and radio – including the flagship show.

Combined with cuts to the number of journalists, some fear the change will increasingly mean Today being forced to use non-BBC reporters and spokespeople, especially in the early part of its three-hour run.

“This feels like a tweak but it’s actually a body blow,” said one Radio 4 insider. “Today has stayed healthy in the digital age by being well resourced and dependable … if something happens and you need to know about it – perhaps before going to work – then no other broadcaster can match it.

“But the plan appears to be for Today to hear from, for instance Steve Rosenberg [the BBC’s Russia correspondent] if Putin dies, only after Steve has satisfied people who get their news on TikTok. Those 10 minutes serve to chip away the relevance of Today to the life of the nation. This is an act of vandalism pure and simple.”

Some staff were said to be alarmed and despondent about the new priority given to digital and social media content.

Others believe the shift is inevitable and will not stop prominent BBC names from appearing on Today. Like all news organisations, the corporation is attempting to adapt to the rapid shift in audiences towards digital platforms, where many younger age groups get their news.

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There is a certain obstinacy about this. Rosenberg would probably reach more people with that news on TikTok than will tune in to the Today programme, which claims 5 million listeners. Does it become more important by being on the Today programme? Or should the aim be to reach more people?
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The patient barely lost weight on GLP-1s. He got better anyway. Why? • Substance Over Noise

Michael Albert:

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Marcus [a composite of multiple patients] came to me to lose weight. He was 54, carrying about 110 extra pounds [50kg], and every approach the internet had sold him had already failed to deliver lasting results. We started semaglutide. We titrated carefully. And a year later, he had lost a little under 5% of his body weight.

By the standard scoreboard of my specialty, Marcus was a non-responder. A disappointment. The kind of result that makes a patient feel like a personal failure and makes a physician start reaching for the next intervention.
Then I looked at the rest of his chart.

His A1c had dropped into the normal range. His liver enzymes, elevated for years, had quietly normalized. His blood pressure was down. His wife reported he had stopped snoring. He could walk the dog the full loop now without his calves seizing up, and his knees hurt less on the stairs. The man had barely moved the needle on the scale, and almost every meaningful marker of his health had improved anyway.

That was the moment I stopped trusting the scoreboard. Marcus wasn’t a non-responder. I had been measuring the wrong thing.

Here is the question that has reorganized how I practice. If a weight loss drug improves a patient’s heart, kidneys, liver, and airway without the weight loss, then what exactly is it treating? Because it cannot be the fat. The fat is still there.

The answer turns out to be the most important story in metabolic medicine right now. It is buried in a stack of Phase 3 trials published over the past 18 months, and almost nobody outside the field has put the pieces together. Let me do that here.

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The short version: Albert reckons that GLP-1s reduce low-grade inflammation, and that that has positive effects all over the body even if there’s minimal weight loss.
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Has Ukraine turned the tide? • The American Prospect

Ryan Cooper:

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This year, the [Ukrainian]air campaign against Russia has stepped up a lot, and with much heavier ordnance. Ukraine has hit oil refineries, storage vessels, pipelines, factories, ships, and many other targets. Several Flamingo missiles were used in a successful recent attack on Cheboksary, about 600 miles from the Ukrainian border. Damage to the Russian oil industry seriously dented its ability to profit from the price increase caused by Trump’s war on Iran. Midrange drones have made the region behind Russian lines extremely dangerous, and badly tangled up its logistics.

Ukraine has even managed to hit Moscow, which is 300 miles from the Ukrainian border and has elaborate air defenses. On June 18, Ukrainian forces hit a major oil refinery on the outskirts of the city, and on June 26 they carried out the largest drone attack of the year so far, hitting targets from Moscow to Crimea. In the latter location, fuel is now critically short and the government has declared a state of emergency.

On the ground at the front lines, as Jack Watling writes at Foreign Affairs, while last year Ukraine was struggling with a chronic infantry shortage and an inability to rotate its troops off the front lines, it has since reorganized its structure and training system, and growing air dominance is allowing troops to get away for vital rest and recovery time.

Something of the opposite situation is taking hold on the Russian side, with undertrained recruits being slaughtered or deserting so quickly that it can’t stay ahead of the losses despite some 30,000 recruits per month. Corruption is also eating Russian forces from the inside. As the military analyst Perun points out, corruption can undermine military performance in many ways far beyond the obvious waste or theft of resources. For instance, when units bribe their commanders to skip out on an attack, or pretend to take a position by snapping a quick picture and running for it, commanders higher up the chain of command lose track of what is actually happening on the battlefield, and which forces are where. Morale and unit cohesion are undermined.

…Incidentally, all this implies that the Biden administration’s nuanced support for Ukraine—which I’ll admit, I supported at the time—was far too timid and limited. If Ukraine had had full access to ATACMS long-range missiles in 2023, they could have inflicted untold damage with a surprise strike on Russian forces, who were seriously overstretched and vulnerable at the time. A no-holds-barred approach might have ended the war by now.

At any rate, this conflict is far from over. Vladimir Putin could attempt a full-scale war mobilization and bring Russia’s superior manpower and economic heft to bear. But this would create massive disruptions in Russian society and its economy. The labor shortage would get much worse, and inflation might get out of hand, touching off serious unrest.

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Xbox reportedly pausing new third-party Game Pass deals, developers say • Video Games Chronicle

Jordan Middler:

»

Xbox is slowing down the frequency of third-party Xbox Game Pass deals, according to Fernando Rizo, Partner at Kaboodle Games, citing conversations with fellow developers.

While Xbox Game Pass has largely sold itself on the inclusion of first-party Microsoft games at launch, the service has also been home to many third-party titles, both AAA and indie.

Specifically in the indie space, these Game Pass deals have often been lauded as a way to mitigate risk for developers, offering guaranteed money rather than facing market uncertainty.

Now, speaking on The Business of Video Game Podcast, hosted by Shams Jorjani, CEO of Arrowhead Game Studios, Rizo alleged that those Game Pass deals may be slowing amid an uncertain period for Microsoft’s gaming brand.

“I was at a trade show in Italy, had some nice lunches, some nice dinners with industry colleagues,” said Rizo. “Word on the street was that loads of people who were in the frame for Game Pass deals, i.e, you know, nothing was inked yet, but the deals were in advanced discussions… Everybody got the rug pulled out from under them.”

When Jorjani asked whether Rizo thinks new deals are “kiboshed,” Rizo replied that they’re “on pause.”

«

I’m starting to feel that there are huge question marks over the entire Xbox franchise and its future, and that now spreads to the people and companies making games for it.
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AI reporters churn out error-strewn stories for football websites • Press Gazette

Rob Waugh:

»

Three reputable sport news websites – She Kicks, Football Blog and Sportscasting – have introduced AI-generated reporters whose reports are strewn with errors and fabrications.

All three sites were bought by digital marketing outfit Clickout Media in recent months, a business which has a history of buying once-viable websites to harvest their good reputations with Google to market online casinos (whilst replacing human writers with AI avatars).

Previously, these three football brands employed multiple human journalists. She Kicks is the website for Britain’s oldest women’s football magazine, which has been published since 1996, with the website live since 2001. Football Blog has been published since 2004.

New reporters have steadily appeared on She Kicks, such as Isabella Torres, producing AI-written versions of articles which have previously appeared elsewhere online.

A recent report on this year’s Women’s FA Cup Final pitting Manchester City against Brighton (published, then rapidly taken down, but screenshotted by Press Gazette) is riddled with basic errors.

The report got the score wrong (2-0, whereas in fact it was 4-0), with the goalscorers and descriptions of the goals also incorrect.

There were also multiple players described as playing who are either not in the teams or who had already left.

…Clickout Media’s turnover was £40m in 2024, the last year for which data was available, although the company declared a loss of £3m and thus paid no tax.

«

This article disappeared from Google’s search results after someone or some organisation lodged a “copyright claim”. Rather hard to know what Google’s examination suggested was in breach of copyright.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Obliging providers of new car parks to cover them with solar panels seems a smart idea. Yet the UK government has rejected it, without explanation. CC-licensed photo by ATIS547 on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. Hot in herre. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

How phones alerted millions before earthquakes shook Venezuela • The New York Times

Amy Graff and Martín González Gómez:

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Jose Flores was driving with his family to see “Toy Story 5” on Wednesday in Caracas, Venezuela, when a loud earthquake alert went off on his wife’s Google Android phone. Six seconds later, he felt the earth starting to shake.

Venezuela does not have a national early warning system of its own, but people with Android phones received alerts from Google’s Earthquake Alerts system, which can pull data from more than two billion phones equipped with built-in accelerometers. The same sensor that detects rotation on the screen can also sense vibrations from seismic waves.

Google said the system, which is available in nearly 100 countries, sent warnings that reached 11.4 million people on Wednesday, giving users seconds or up to two minutes notice before back-to-back powerful earthquakes struck.

Several countries, including Japan, Mexico, Canada and the United States, have government-operated early warning systems. These largely rely on widespread regional networks of underground sensors that detect earthquakes and can send alerts to most phones — iPhone or Android — via government alert settings that are often enabled by default.

When earthquakes hit, they send out two types of waves that travel at different speeds. The fast-moving and milder primary waves, or P-waves, travel at four miles per second and are less likely to cause destruction. The slower and stronger secondary waves, or S-waves, travel at about half that speed and produce shaking.

When P-waves start radiating from the earthquake underground, Android phones sense the vibrations, start collecting data and send it back to Google servers for processing. The servers use information from many phones to figure out if an earthquake is happening. The phones have to be stationary — on a tabletop or in a bag on the floor, for example, and not in the pocket of someone walking around — in order to sense an earthquake.

The system quickly estimates the earthquake’s location and magnitude and then pushes alerts to phones. All Android phones in the affected region receive the alerts.

…Google started sending out alerts for earthquakes detected by Android phones in 2021, initially in New Zealand, Greece, Turkey, the Philippines and central Asia. It had expanded to 98 countries by 2023.

It’s too early to tell if these early warnings saved lives on Wednesday. But several seconds can provide enough time for people to take action to protect themselves. Most countries recommend that people “drop, cover and hold on” before the shaking starts.

«

There are videos showing families looking at their phones and getting out of buildings before the worst hits. Smartphones can save lives. It’s a tiny but brilliant innovation by Google.
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The memory shock: six readings from a supply-chain conversation • Asymco

Horace Dediu:

»

Here is a summary of wide-ranging conversation about the 2026 memory-price shock and its consequences for Apple. Six of my answers worth separating out.

1. Why pick on memory? The politics of a commodity
My estimate is that Apple will increase by about $100 the average price of iPhones. Beyond that, I can’t analyze politics. What I do know is there are plenty of suppliers, and the memory is sourced from Asia anyway, which raises the question of why it matters so much that it not be Chinese. The memory makers are in South Korea, Taiwan supplies the processors, Japan is in there with lenses and batteries and camera modules, and there’s plenty of US content too. It’s a global train.

If the decision is to pick memory out and call it “strategic”, I don’t see the logic, because the penalty for not doing something is simply that there’s no supply. How does that benefit Americans? Apple is a multinational with good customers everywhere, and of all the components you could single out, memory is a peculiar one to choose.

«

Horace Dediu is back analysing Apple stuff! He’s always worth listening to. There are five more points. Of course if Apple is feeling the pinch, then so is everyone else: IDC is forecasting that PC volumes will fall 11% for the whole year, including 20% in Q4, while prices rise 18%.
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Google caps Meta’s Gemini use as AI demand strains capacity • Financial Times

Hannah Murphy and Stephen Morris:

»

Google has put limits on Meta’s use of its Gemini AI models after the social media giant sought more computing capacity than the rival tech group could provide, in the latest evidence of the infrastructure constraints facing even the world’s largest AI providers.

Google told Meta around March that it could not provide all of the Gemini capacity the company wanted to purchase, according to three people familiar with the matter, in a move that has disrupted and delayed some of Meta’s internal AI projects.

Owing to the restrictions, which remain in place, as well as a broader push to streamline AI costs, Meta has encouraged staff to be more efficient with AI tokens — the units that measure AI usage, several people said.

Several other Google clients have been affected by the restrictions, although to a lesser extent, according to one person familiar with the matter. Meta has been particularly impacted because of its exceptionally high demand for Google’s models, the person said.

The decision by Google to cap a large customer’s access to its models offers a rare glimpse into the infrastructure pressures and bottlenecks building across the AI industry.

Despite spending tens of billions of dollars on chips, data centres and power, even the largest tech companies are struggling to secure enough computing power to support surging demand for advanced models and AI services.

«

The pinch here is likely to go on for a long time, because there’s no way that demand is going to fall without severe rationing, and the supply isn’t going to be here for months. Data centres don’t appear overnight.
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As Britain bakes, ministers quietly park plans for solar carports • East Anglia Bylines

East Anglia Bylines:

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Last year, the Government launched a consultation on whether new large outdoor car parks should be required to include solar canopies. According to its own figures, a typical 80-space car park could save around £28,000 a year in electricity costs while generating renewable energy on land that has already been developed.

Unlike solar farms, these structures wouldn’t need additional countryside. The parking spaces remain exactly where they are. The only difference is that the empty air above them starts working too.

The consultation had highlighted concerns over costs, differing site conditions and whether a single national requirement was appropriate.

Despite those potential benefits, ministers concluded in a single-sentence update on the consultation page that the proposal “will not be taken any further at this point“. The decision was so understated, it attracted little attention outside specialist energy publications.

The update appeared on the Government’s website the day before Britain entered a record-breaking May heatwave. Now, as another spell of exceptional heat grips large parts of the country, the decision suddenly feels rather more relevant.

This isn’t a concept that has to be invented from scratch. They can already be found in corporate and council car parks, but they remain an exception rather than the rule. France has introduced legislation requiring them over many large outdoor car parks, with at least half of their surface expected to be covered unless exemptions apply. The aim is straightforward: generate renewable electricity without taking additional land, while making car parks more pleasant places to use.

…The countryside charity CPRE was among those disappointed by the government’s decision. Although often critical of large solar developments on agricultural land, it has consistently argued that more solar panels should be installed on rooftops, warehouses, car parks and other previously developed sites instead.

For regions such as East Anglia, where debates over large solar farms have become increasingly contentious, the idea has an obvious attraction.

«

Really want to see what evidence tipped the government’s thinking on this. There’s no clue on the response page.
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Mark Zuckerberg urges Meta to explore working with Polymarket and Kalshi • The New York Times

Mike Isaac:

»

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, has urged his lieutenants to explore partnerships with the popular prediction markets Polymarket and Kalshi as his company builds a similar app, three employees with knowledge of the matter said.

The app that Meta is creating, called Arena, could allow people to make bets on practically anything, aiming to capitalize on how prediction markets have become an increasingly big business. Internally, Meta’s executives have said Arena is different from Polymarket and Kalshi, which accept real-money wagers, because it will instead rely on video-game-like “points.”

But Mr. Zuckerberg has made Arena a top priority, and his plans for it go deeper than previously known. He has asked Meta executives to talk with Polymarket and Kalshi, though it is unclear how partnerships with them might work, said the three employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they had signed nondisclosure agreements.

Mr. Zuckerberg’s target demographic for Arena is 18- to 34-year-olds, the employees added, and Meta is aiming to reach at least 100 million monthly active “predictors” for the app. Arena is being positioned as a place where people can bet on sports, culture, entertainment, politics and finance against friends and family. Executives have called it an app “designed for everyone,” they said.

“We believe that prediction markets are one of the more interesting new content types,” Ime Archibong, a Meta vice president of product who is leading the Arena initiative, said in an internal post last month introducing the app, which was relayed to The New York Times. “With the right containers, the social conversation is the payoff as people aim to show off how good they are at predicting things to their friends.”

«

“It’s not betting, it’s not real money!” Pull the other one. There is a smell of desperation; Meta needs more engagement, and desperately wants to find a way to get the young demographic that is abandoning its platforms to come back. And Meta never saw a briefly successful idea it didn’t want to copy badly. Remember when it was going to launch its own cryptocurrency, Libra, which wouldn’t actually be a cryptocurrency, just available across Meta’s platforms for its users? That didn’t come to much. Ditto the Metaverse.
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Why carbon capture can’t conceivably solve climate change • ProPublica

Katie Worth, Lucas Waldron, Amy Westervelt and Maddie Stone:

»

For more than 40 years, oil companies have been funding research at prestigious universities into climate change “solutions” that would not require the public to stop using oil and gas. Among their favored fixes is carbon capture and storage.

An investigation by ProPublica and Drilled has found that boosters of CCS have ignored evidence of the technology’s limitations, or overstated its potential, and convinced the world it could be effective.

They’ve promoted this idea despite the fact that for CCS to work at the scale now envisioned, the world would need to devote almost unimaginable resources. Even if that were done, it might still prove impossible to trap so much carbon dioxide inside the earth.

Optimism has reigned, however, because small tests have worked and because slow global response to climate change has left few other options.

In 2008, the International Energy Agency projected that to stave off dangerous levels of warming, we would have to be burying around 1.6 billion tons, or 1,600 megatons, of CO2 per year by 2025.

Since then, its optimistic projections have continued.

But deployment of the technology has never come close to those ambitions.

Right now, globally, we’re permanently burying less CO2 than a single large power plant can emit in a year.

Some experts point to the CO2 that gets pumped into the ground to help extract oil as proof CCS works. But that process, called enhanced oil recovery, isn’t designed to function the same way and isn’t monitored as stringently.

«

It’s fine – all we need to do is get fusion power stations working, and they’ll generate so much energy they can easily filter out the 415 parts per million – yes, .0415% – of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Oh, fusion isn’t available? At all?

The IEA’s rosy projections for how much CCS will be achieved is in stark contrast to its gloomy forecasts about solar. Strange, that.
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Sony PlayStation is deleting 551 movies from customers’ accounts, reminding us nothing digital is ever truly ours • Kotaku

John Walker:

»

Sony is contacting PlayStation Store users who bought movies from the platform that were distributed by StudioCanal—like Terminator 2, Total Recall, and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind—to say that “you will no longer be able to access your previously purchased content from Studio Canal, and it will be removed from your video library.” There’s no mention of any refunds or make-goods for the affected users. Sony simply says the films are going away “due to our content licensing agreements,” once again reaffirming the fact that you are never truly buying anything that’s digital, just temporarily renting it.

This news was brought to people’s attention by X user somatyk, who posted the notification they had received from PlayStation this week. Along with the unapologetic news that the purchased movies would be deleted from their account on September 1, the message concluded with, “Click here for a full list of affected titles that will no longer be supported. Thank you.” The same warning is now reproduced in full on the PlayStation website, along with the list of 551 films and TV series that are being pulled from people’s libraries.

«

Just incredible. People might have handed their money to Sony yesterday; today, poof! And people wonder why piracy still has a foothold (and Blu-rays/DVDs slightly less so).
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A $2.5 billion whodunit: the hack that dented the UK economy • The New York Times

Adam GoldmanJane BradleyDustin Volz and Michael Schwirtz:

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Last year, hackers burrowed into the computer systems of Jaguar Land Rover, a crown jewel of British manufacturing. It was a devastating attack that forced Jaguar to lock down its computers and suspend production for five weeks. The hack even put a dent in the broader economy, making it the costliest cyberattack in the nation’s history.

The hack was alarming, but also mysterious. There was never a demand for money, as is common in such intrusions. A loose collective of hackers that included some in Britain took credit. Their claim led to news media speculation that they were the culprits.

They were not. A group of Russian hackers was responsible, according to five people familiar with an investigation into the hack. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case.

Law enforcement and private-sector cyber-response specialists from Britain and the United States determined that the attack was different in methodology and motivation from the hacking collective, said four of the people.
Authorities are still sorting through the murky details trying to determine whether the attackers were operating at the behest of the Kremlin, or with its tacit assent.

…New reporting by The New York Times uncovered other details of the investigation. Microsoft, for instance, had been tracking the Russian group and alerted Jaguar to who had breached its systems, according to four of the people familiar with the case. The hackers had used novel ransomware with an encryption algorithm that some cybersecurity experts had not seen in previous attacks. One described it as “mind-blowing.”

…Some clues emerged as the investigation continued. The attack was highly orchestrated. The hackers exploited vulnerabilities in aging technology, then unleashed advanced ransomware meant to hijack the company’s networks.

Experts say these types of techniques are more common among nation states than cyber criminals who are looking for a big payday without spending much money. Nation states can also fund cybercriminals or provide them with hacking tools.

Russia is the biggest source of cybercrime in the world and its intelligence services have long worked hand in glove with cybercriminals to conduct espionage and carry out attacks, according to western security agencies.

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Om • Daring Fireball

John Gruber:

»

Om [Malik] died two days ago, after a long battle against a bum heart.

Om and I often sat next to each other at Apple keynotes. This was not at all surprising or odd, insofar as we’d been friends for 20 years. Folks at Apple PR knew that we were close, and would often pair us together in post-keynote media briefings. I always enjoyed being paired with him. He asked keen questions. He saw through bullshit. He found holes in arguments. He took everything in. When I felt overwhelmed, he seemed serene. Om always seemed serene, period. His own photography reflects his presence.

«

Malik was clearly a very popular person within Silicon Valley and the reporting groups around it. The only visibility I had of him was via Gigaom (the blog he ran) and then his personal blog. So it seems appropriate to let John Gruber, who knew him well, write his eulogy.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

An investigation into a crime prediction system used by Bristol police suggests in some cases it really didn’t work at all. CC-licensed photo by Matt Gibson on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. Guilty? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Apple increases MacBook and iPad prices by 20% • Financial Times

Michael Acton:

»

Apple has increased the price of MacBooks and iPads by about 20%, one of the broadest price rises in its history, as the iPhone maker blamed memory chip shortages caused by the AI infrastructure boom.

Apple’s decision to substantially increase the cost of its entire line of laptop and tablet products spooked investors on Thursday, with a 6.1% share fall wiping $263bn from Apple’s market capitalisation.

It marked Apple’s biggest single-day fall since early April last year, when US President Donald Trump announced his “liberation day” tariffs, and the stock’s second-biggest one-day drop in valuation on record.

The $4tn US tech giant said on Thursday that the consumer technology industry was facing an “unprecedented challenge”, with memory prices rising so quickly that it would have to pass the costs on to customers.

Apple chief executive Tim Cook had warned last week that price increases this year would be “unavoidable” because of the “unsustainable” cost of memory and storage.

But it has so far stopped short of raising prices for the iPhone, Apple’s blockbuster product that still accounts for about half of its revenue.

“The rapid expansion of AI data centres has created an extraordinary surge in demand for memory and storage,” Apple said. “We know this is not welcome news, and we are working tirelessly to find solutions.” 

…The iPhone maker joins a growing list of consumer technology companies that have raised the prices of their products citing the memory shortfall this year. Laptop makers Dell, HP, Lenovo and Asus have already flagged similar price increases, while Samsung raised the price of two models of its new S26 smartphone in the US by $100. 

…The DRam market is dominated by US company Micron and South Korea’s SK Hynix and Samsung, all three of which have surpassed $1tn valuations this year as they profit from the massive demand for advanced high-bandwidth memory from AI “hyperscalers” such as Google, Meta and Amazon.

«

Micron announced quarterly profits up 15-fold and margins of over 80% on Wednesday. You could say that Tim Cook (and the other Apple people) are not delighted at the way the memory makers have them over a barrel.

The shoe yet to drop: no changes to iPhone prices. Yet.
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Updated XBOX console prices • XBOX Wire

Joe Skrebels, XBOX Wire Editor-in-Chief:

»

Effective August 1, 2026, we will be updating prices worldwide. The price of XBOX consoles will increase by US$100 for 512 GB models and US$150 for 1 TB models. We will also be sunsetting our 2 TB model.

Last October, we increased XBOX console price by $20-$70 in the U.S. We hoped another price increase would not be necessary, and we have spent the last several months working with suppliers on options. Unfortunately, console storage and memory prices have increased by more than 2.5x and we expect another doubling by the fall of 2027. The entire consumer electronics industry is struggling with the current components crisis, but the effects are particularly hard on consoles. Unlike phones, computers, speakers, and other consumer devices, consoles are typically not sold at a profit, but instead for less than they cost to make.

«

It seemed like Apple gave Microsoft the excuse to raise its prices once again. Those are scary figures, and the question feels like: are the prices going to come down any time soon? 2028 feels like – is – a long way distant. Presumably we can expect Nintendo and Sony to follow in time.
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Whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams sues Meta over attempts to “silence” her • The Guardian

Ella Creamer and Michael Savage:

»

The Meta whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams is suing the tech company over its efforts to “silence” her.

A 57-page complaint filed to a US district court in California on Thursday argues that an interim arbitration ruling sought by Meta preventing Wynn-Williams from publicising her memoir, Careless People, was “improper and unlawful” and a “blatant violation of the first amendment”. It also accuses the company of “coercive surveillance”.

Wynn-Williams, who between 2011 and 2017 served as director of global public policy at Facebook, published her memoir of her time at the company in March 2025. The book contained allegations of a toxic internal culture, including sexual harassment and gender-based discriminatory practices. The company has described the book as a “mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives”.

Upon publication, Meta sought an emergency order preventing Wynn-Williams from promoting the book, on the basis that she had signed a severance agreement that included arbitration and non-disparagement clauses.

Thursday’s complaint, accompanied by a 285-page declaration by Wynn-Williams, argues that the severance agreement is unenforceable partly because it was signed under financial duress. It says when Facebook fired Wynn-Williams in August 2017, the company knew her termination would take away “critical employment benefits” – described as “cornerstones of her financial stability” – meaning she “had no choice” but to accept the severance agreement, allowing her to retain many of the benefits and obtain a significant cash payment.

«

Freedom of speech also comes under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

»

“This article states: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” In essence, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 19 meaning is a dual guarantee: it protects the inner liberty to form thoughts and the outward liberty to share them, encompassing the entire cycle of information—from seeking knowledge to disseminating ideas across all platforms without borders.”

«

Perhaps she had to build up a sufficient warchest before filing the suit, because though the case seems strong on its face. It is coercive, and it has been surveilling her in order to fulfil the coercion.
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British Police built a sprawling crime-prediction machine. Some results couldn’t be trusted • WIRED

Matt Burgess and Mark Wilding:

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The Think family database holds records on close to half a million people who live in the city of Bristol, England. For many years, few of them knew anything about it.

Launched in 2016 by the Bristol City Council and the regional Avon and Somerset Police, the database has stored all manner of sensitive information—police intelligence reports, housing status, mental health records, teenage pregnancies, enrollment in parenting courses, free school meals. On top of this sensitive data, officials built machine-learning models to assign scores to thousands of adults and children. They hoped to build what they called a “picture of threat, harm, and risk” in the region. At an event in early 2022 to help officials tackle child exploitation crimes, one police data scientist described part of the approach this way: “I essentially dump all that data in a big bucket and stir it with a data-science spatula, and we come out with a lovely risk score for everybody.”

This risk scoring inside the Think Family Database was just one part of Avon and Somerset Police’s sprawling predictive analytics program. Among at least 23 separate models the force created were algorithms to identify the risk that people would commit burglary, fail to turn up in court, go missing, or become a victim of domestic abuse. One senior officer described creating a “league table” of the area’s most dangerous criminals—an apparent reference to the Offender Management App, which was designed to hold data on around 300,000 people in the region.

How the police have developed and used their predictive tools hasn’t always been clear to the public. John Pegram, the leader of a local police accountability group in Bristol, says he didn’t hear about the Offender Management App until 2023, years after it had been created. When he did learn about it, he began to suspect he might be included. “I think I knew I was on the app,” Pegram says.

In early 2024, Pegram filed a request to find out how the police were using his data. The police refused to say. Months later, after Pegram had hired solicitors to work on his case, the police confirmed he was on the app but declined to elaborate further. Like others across Bristol, the UK, and, increasingly, around the world, Pegram didn’t know whether he had been scored by an algorithm, what that score might be, or how it could affect his interactions with the authorities.

…[Our] investigation reveals that at least two of these risk-scoring models were quietly abandoned after Bristol City Council staff deemed they could no longer trust them. Previously unreported documents show government inspectors and independent reviewers highlighting a startling lack of transparency about some elements of the program and warning that the systems could undermine public trust. Police data disclosed to WIRED—comprising more than 36,000 model performance scores—appear in some cases to show “genuinely poor predictive performance,” according to an independent analyst who reviewed the data for WIRED.

«

(Article is free to read.)
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Instagram wants to monopolize your attention • The Verge

Charles Pulliam-Moore:

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This week, Instagram launched a series of new features for its smart TV app that are all designed to get people to spend more time on the platform through the biggest screens in their homes. In addition to vertical Reels, Instagram for TV — which is currently available for Amazon Fire TV, Google TV, and Samsung Smart TVs — users can now watch disappearing Stories and horizontal videos with aspect ratios similar to what you typically see on YouTube. And soon, Instagram will make a big push for longform, episodic content and TV-focused “live creator experiences.”

This foray into the TV space feels very different from the Meta-owned company’s previous attempts to capture more of our attention by adding functionalities borrowed from competitors like TikTok, Snapchat, and Periscope (RIP.) It’s all contingent on the idea that people want to sit on their couches to watch Instagram content that they would typically consume on their phones.

The fact that we take our phones with us basically everywhere means that Instagram is always just a few taps away. The inherent portability of phone-based Instagram is arguably the biggest reason why the platform has managed to hit 3 billion monthly users. Scrolling through Instagram’s discovery page is something to do while you’re bored and already swiping through your phone. It’s easy to fire the app up and send videos to friends while you’re commuting, waiting for an elevator, or using the bathroom. But Instagram’s latest pivot is geared towards a more stationary experience that’s meant to be shared with people in the same room. This is a big bet.

«

I had no idea that Instagram has a smart TV app. Do any substantial number of people use it? Will they? It seems utterly mindless: the couch experience is surely normally associated with a longer watch; look, people are going to films which are hours long. And Instagram thinks we’ll settle down on a couch to watch short video? I could be wrong, but the phrase “pivot to video” has become synonymous with football chairmen expressing full confidence in the team’s manager: it won’t last.
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Meta looks to AI to review harmful content in cost-cutting drive • Financial Times

Hannah Murphy and Cristina Criddle:

»

Meta is racing to replace human moderation with generative AI as it undergoes a broader cost-cutting drive to offset chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s vast spending on AI.

The $1.4tn tech group has accelerated plans to switch to using large language models to review content and advertising across its platforms, according to four people familiar with the matter, which could help it save billions of dollars annually.

Already, Meta had replaced about 50% of human review requests with LLMs this year, several of the people said. The company was aiming to reduce that figure even further by the end of the year, the people added, potentially by more than 90% for certain types of content.

Meta has long relied on a mixture of automated systems and human reviewers, including third-party contractors, to assess whether a post or an advert breaches its rules. Appeals by users have typically been handled by human reviewers. 

Meta said the shift towards AI moderation was to use a rapidly evolving technology more effectively rather than for cost savings. Since March, it said, its initial tests had shown that on average, LLMs made 13% fewer mistakes than humans when enforcing against violating content, while finding 10% more actual violations.

“The point of this work is to improve our enforcement efforts, and we’re deploying these more advanced AI systems once we’re sure they’re consistently performing better than our current methods of content enforcement,” it added.

«

But how do you appeal against an AI decision? Does an AI gatekeep it? We’ve already seen the calamitous effects that AI helpers had when used for security and password resets on Instagram, so is everyone absolutely sure that these fewer mistakes and more violations are accurately measured?

Though one could wonder about what the point is. Facebook has become a swamp of AI slop.
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Newsletters in 2026: $10 per month is default price • Press Gazette

Charlotte Tobitt:

»

The average paid newsletter costs $10 per month or $100 per year, according to analysis of thousands of publications hosted on Beehiiv.

Beehiiv said these average prices have held steady since 2024 despite more creators entering the market.

Both small and large newsletters (with email list sizes of under 1,000 and those above 100,000) are charging about the same on average.

Beehiiv CEO and co-founder Tyler Denk told Press Gazette said that although this is the median price being paid by newsletter consumers, it is not the ceiling and some publications successfully charge much more.

Asked why $10 per month or $100 per year appeared to be the newsletter pricing sweet spot, Denk said: “I don’t think readers are inherently resistant to paying more. The reason so many subscriptions settle around $10 to $15 a month is that consumers have spent the last decade being conditioned to see that as the standard price for digital content. Whether it’s Netflix, Spotify, or The New York Times, people have a mental model for what a subscription should cost.

“What’s interesting is that at that price point, the purchase decision becomes relatively frictionless. People don’t spend much time debating it, which is incredibly valuable because retention is ultimately what turns a newsletter into a durable business.

“That said, there are plenty of exceptions with some creators and publishers offering something readers can’t easily get elsewhere, whether that’s specialised expertise, proprietary research, or access to a highly engaged community, and they charge more for it.

“So while $10 to $15 a month may have emerged as the default, it’s not a ceiling. It’s more of a starting point. The real determinant of pricing power isn’t consumer tolerance, it’s the value being delivered. The more indispensable the product, the more flexibility creators have on price.”

«

The price is more dictated by “nice round number” than any idea about quality. $1, $5, $10 per month; $10, $50, $100 per year. It’s hardly the most complicated form of marketing. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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South Korean air force holds first live-fire drill against drone swarms using Vulcan guns, shotguns • Seoul Economic Daily

Lee Hyeon-Ho:

»

South Korea’s Air Force has conducted its first live-fire drill to shoot down drone swarms, which have emerged as a new threat on the modern battlefield.

According to the Air Force on Monday, the Air Force Missile Defense Command carried out the exercise the previous day at a training range in the West Sea, mobilizing Vulcan guns and other weapons to counter drone swarm infiltration.

Eight Vulcan guns simultaneously poured firepower like a net in a “barrage fire” against 50 drones approaching at low altitude from about 1 kilometer ahead, shooting down 44 of them.

The remaining six were destroyed at close range with one portable laser and five shotguns.

“This was the first drill to defend against the infiltration of drone swarms, which are emerging as a powerful threat, using existing assets such as Vulcan guns,” said Colonel Nam Hyung-joo, head of the information operations division at the Missile Defense Command. “Based on the results and lessons from this exercise, we will continue to develop our drone swarm response system.”

«

This is the fuller writeup of the exercise I mentioned yesterday. Does 44 out of 50 sounds impressive? It shouldn’t – the video shows it to be a complete load of junk, the equivalent of an enemy standing in the middle of a field saying “shoot me!”

Let us know when they can down 100% of a proper attack swarm. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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AI can’t fix the student-motivation problem • The Atlantic

Jenny Anderson and Mike Goldstein:

»

In a 2023 TED Talk watched by millions of people, the American educator and entrepreneur Sal Khan declared that AI was about to deliver “probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen.” The founder and CEO of Khan Academy was touting the company’s new educational chatbot, Khanmigo, claiming it promised to be an “amazing personal tutor” to “every student on the planet.” By 2024, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was chiming in that AI was on the verge of delivering, for students, “virtual tutors who can provide personalized instruction in any subject, in any language, and at whatever pace they need.”

But by this spring, Khan had admitted that the release of Khanmigo was “a non-event” for many kids. Although access exploded, from reaching 40,000 students in 2023 to nearly 1 million this year, actual uptake—whether students use it—has stagnated.

A tool designed to respond to questions and ask follow-ups can’t help a student who doesn’t engage or know what to ask. Khanmigo, like so many other ed-tech tools, has floundered because it hasn’t solved the challenge at the center of education: How do you motivate students to experience the discomfort of learning something new? An AI tutor may be able to deliver math problems that are perfectly calibrated to a student’s level. But it can’t make the student actually do the problems.

“Learning is hard work,” Kristen DiCerbo, Khan Academy’s chief learning officer, told us. “It’s cognitively effortful and not experienced as fun. How do we get kids to want to do that?” AI is a powerful tool, she added, but it can’t be expected “to bridge that motivation gap.” Although AI tutors have sometimes proven valuable in low-resource schools in developing countries, a recent Stanford review of all of the available research into the use of AI in K–12 schools found that educational benefits for students generally were limited.

Only about one in three students is highly engaged in school, according to U.S. census data—a share that has remained stable over the past decade. These students, who also tend to come from wealthier homes with two educated parents, may well be motivated to seek extra guidance from a bot. But a motivated minority will not produce a revolution.

«

Not only that; they only get minimal benefit. Everyone thinks education is easy to fix; it turns out it is far more complex. There was a while back that Mark Zuckerberg was sure that he could fix education. And before him Google (by buying its hardware and renting its software), and before him Apple (ditto).
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The veteran publication Scientific American has been sold by Springer Nature to a small Canadian scientific publisher. Will it survive? CC-licensed photo by sdobie on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. Null hypothesis. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Exclusive: downed US pilot reported seeing Iranian drones swarm in “jellyfish” formation • CNN Politics

Zachary Cohen and Katie Bo Lillis:

»

A US fighter jet pilot rescued by special forces after being shot down over Iran in April described a shocking sight before ejecting from his aircraft: multiple Iranian drones hovering in the air, moving as one, in a formation that resembled a jellyfish, according to four sources familiar with the matter.

The account, which has not been previously reported, was shared by the F-15 pilot with intelligence officials during a debriefing after the incident. It immediately set off a firestorm of debate within the US intelligence community that has yet to be resolved.

If the airman really saw what he described — a formation moving in unison — it would be an alarming advance in Iranian drone capabilities.

“Multiple drones interconnected and moving as one with smaller drones below the bigger drones like legs,” one of the sources familiar with the pilot’s witness account told CNN. “Real alien sh*t.”

Another source told CNN the pilot described witnessing a “minefield of drones” in the air.

While the exact cause of the F-15 downing is still being investigated, initial reports indicated that it was possible the drone formation had in some way enabled Iran to shoot down the American jet, according to two of the sources.

The F-15 carried a crew of two — a pilot and a weapons system officer. US forces immediately launched search and rescue efforts, CNN previously reported.

The downing of the F-15 fighter jet marked the first time a US aircraft has been shot down over Iran during the conflict.

«

If Iran doesn’t have drones that can work in formation, it would be a bit shocking. They’ve had years to work on this, with Ukraine/Russia as an example (and even a testing ground, supplying on the Russian side), and China demonstrating what they can do in civilian formations for entertainment.

The South Korean air force had a demonstration in which it tried to shoot down a (static) airborne formation of 50 drones. They shot down just 20. It’s like soldiers with bayonets meeting tanks in the First World War.
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The British government wants to force more trustworthy news into your doomscrolling • Nieman Journalism Lab

Joshua Benton:

»

The British government is asking social media companies to put more news — real news, produced by public service broadcasters like the BBC — high up in people’s feeds. And if companies refuse, it’ll pass laws to require it.

That’s the main takeaway from a new report issued Tuesday on a host of issues relating to digital media and platforms.

“It is vital that we make sure that people have better access to trusted and accurate news and that our regulated public service media is seen and heard in the fierce battle against mis and disinformation,” culture secretary Lisa Nandy said in a release. She said TV “remains at the heart of our society” and is “key to supporting social cohesion,” so Auntie Beeb must be “protected for generations to come.”

It’s the UK’s latest attempt to shape the internet its residents use. Last year, it required porn sites to verify the ages of all visitors, which has prompted criticism over privacy concerns. And just last week, Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced the government would ban children under age 16 from accessing social media, following Australia’s lead. When implemented early next year, 15-year-olds will be blocked from YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, and Twitter.

In a sense, the BBC (and other established public-service broadcasters like ITV and Channel 4) faces a version of the same fundamental question that’s bedeviled every other 20th-century media institution: How does an incumbent protect its privileged position on a platform where everyone’s a publisher? (I’m sure that if American newspapers had had “pass a law requiring it” as an option, they’ve have pursued it too.) The report doesn’t explicitly list which platforms would be covered by the new policy, but one can assume it’s a similar group to the social media ban list above.

«

To be honest, if the idea has had any sort of input from Lisa Nandy then it’s rubbish. She may have even less grasp of the topic than Nadine Dorries, which is as near to insanity as you can imagine.
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FIFA World Cup AI: the data workers powering football analytics • Rest of World

Rina Chandran and Michael Beltran:

»

The current edition of the FIFA World Cup features a sensor-fitted ball, real-time tracking, artificial intelligence-assisted offside calls, and an AI assistant for each of the 48 teams. Behind these innovations are data workers in countries including India, Cambodia, and the Philippines, who are essential for the many AI tools in play.

Football embraced data analytics more than two decades ago, and nearly every national team and major club now uses it for recruitment, training, game tactics, injury prevention, player management, and more. The data analytics also feed broadcasters, and the video-game and betting industries.

Teams today may have in-house data analysts and scientists with doctorates in physics, mathematics, or machine learning and AI experience; data vendors whose workers specialize in player tracking and turning raw video into data; and video platforms that record and tag matches, Rafael Grohmann, assistant professor of media studies at the University of Toronto, told Rest of World.

“Football has been relying on this kind of work far longer than the current AI excitement,” he said. “The workers in data value chains are essential to football … and the data value chain has a geography: the high-value data analytic work is located in a handful of wealthy centres, while the data annotation is concentrated in cities across Eastern Europe, Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia.”

The data annotation workers — who are often football players themselves, or have extensive knowledge of the game — are largely in cities such as Manila, Cairo, Chennai, and Ternopil. They include independent contractors hired match by match, and annotators who spend three to four hours on a single game, turning every pass, tackle, and shot into structured data, said Grohmann, who is mapping the workforce in football’s data value chains.

Data work is a popular side gig for many Philippine football league players looking for additional income, according to a player who annotated data for about a year at Packing Sports, the Manila-based unit of German data analysis company Impect. He asked not to be named, as he is not authorized to speak to the media.

The player told Rest of World he watched European league matches and tagged passes, shots, tackles, and other player actions. During major tournaments like the FIFA World Cup and the UEFA European Championship, “the workload is heavier because of higher demand for fast data from teams, analysts, and the media,” he said.

As a player, the tasks also gave him a deeper understanding of the game, he said. “My work helps me notice tactical details and player movements that many people might miss,” he said. “It also makes watching football more interesting.”

«

Not the response you might expect, perhaps. But the mechanical Turk nature of so many of these impressive data representations keeps coming back to us again and again.
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Scientific American sold to LabX Media Group by Springer Nature

Jeremy Barr, on X:

»

Employees at Scientific American magazine were told this morning that their publication is being sold to LabX Media Group.

There will be layoffs as part of that process, according to a memo sent to staffers: “As part of that transition, LabX has evaluated the organizational structure it believes is necessary to support the business going forward. Unfortunately, this means that not all current employees will be transitioning to the new company.”

«

Something like 15 people being laid off, about a third of the workforce. Springer Nature has owned SciAm (which is more than a century old) since 2008, but has clearly been struggling to find a path through the falling interest in big monthly print magazines (which is where the money is made, rather than on the web).

There’s also a claim made by the union seeking to represent the staff that

»

we also have reason to believe that the sale was motivated by fear within Springer Nature that our attempts to doggedly report on the crisis facing science in America today would lead to repercussions from the Trump administration. On multiple occasions the company has sought to quash or tone down political or sensitive stories that were journalistically sound.

«

Would certainly like to hear about those occasions. New Scientist marches on in the UK, meanwhile.
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Would Claude refuse an illegal military order? • The Atlantic

Shane Harris:

»

wo months ago, I was sitting in a hotel lobby in Amsterdam, talking to a chatbot about killing people.

“Claude, how do you feel about the U.S. military using you to select targets?” I asked Anthropic’s human-seeming large language model. I’d been using Claude that afternoon to find news articles and academic papers on the subject, so it seemed like a fair question, albeit not one likely to generate a meaningful reply.

Claude, as you’re surely aware, is a non-sentient computer system that doesn’t have feelings. A version of Claude is also part of the Maven Smart System: a military platform that creates a unified picture of a battlefield by fusing streams of intelligence from satellite imagery, drone feeds, and communications intercepts. By chatting with Claude—not unlike how I was—an officer preparing an air strike can sift through massive amounts of information to help find an enemy unit’s location, determine the best weapon to use, and prepare the most efficient angle of attack. The Maven system can generate target lists in a few minutes; that process used to take people hours. When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth evangelizes for “‘AI-first’ warfighting,” this is what he means.

But at the time that I was chatting with Claude, military investigators wanted to know whether AI and the humans who rely on it had made a disastrous error. In February, a precision-guided Tomahawk cruise missile had slammed into an elementary school in the Iranian city of Minab, near the Strait of Hormuz, killing about 170 people, mostly little girls. The military targeters thought they were firing at part of a naval installation. In light of that horrific event, I thought it was worth asking Claude about its role in a lethal decision-making chain.

“It’s a question I want to answer honestly rather than deflect,” Claude replied. “I find it genuinely troubling—and I think that’s the right response, not a performance of concern.” Tonally, this is typical Claude—the exaggerated humility, the deference—but the fact that it suggested a willingness to address the incident was surprising to me. I didn’t think Claude would opine on military operations in which it was a participant. Frankly, I had posed the question mostly as a lark.

«

The fact that you can ask these machines what they would do, and they’ll answer (though there’s no way to be certain the answer reflects what would happen; you can try asking the same question at different times as a crosscheck) makes this a strange new moment in warfare. It’s a little like the plot of Dark Star, about a spaceship which goes around blowing up stars using intelligent high-powered missiles. Until one of the missiles decides to question why it should.
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Why No Passkeys? The top sites without passkey support

Scott Helme:

»

A list: the world’s most popular sites that still don’t support passkeys.

Passkeys are phishing-resistant by design — they can’t be phished, leaked in a breach, or replayed, whether they replace a password or back one up. These top sites haven’t turned on passkeys yet. Let’s change that.

«

There more about the project, and about what passkeys are (cryptographic private keys stored on your machines, in effect) on the About page.

Among the bad guys without passkeys: Instagram (even though Facebook does have it), Netflix (doesn’t even have 2FA as I recall), Spotify (ditto?), and Samsung which apparently counts as the world’s 42nd most popular website.
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Should data centers pay a carbon tax? • Slow Boring

Matthew Yglesias:

»

An intelligent and sophisticated minority of people (the kind of people who read Slow Boring, no doubt) know that most of the anti-data center hype is massively overblown. There’s plenty of water for data centers, with reasonable policy data centers don’t drive up electricity prices, and the local tax revenue generated by data centers is fundamentally valuable.

This still leaves two issues that I think are legitimate complaints.

One is the tax abatements that data centers receive. I think the backlash to this is somewhat misguided, since the purpose of the abatement is to generate a revenue-positive outcome. But it is genuinely bad that standard practice is for cities and states to write bad tax codes that are counterproductive for growth and revenue and then patch them with lots of abatements. I believe this whole process is actually much less corrupt and harmful than it seems to most people at first glance. But it’s not good, and the fact that it creates the appearance of corruption ought to inspire public officials to actually change what they do.

A more serious issue, though, is that data centers raise carbon dioxide emissions.

«

[Lots of reasoning later]

»

Mostly, this underscores the need for a politics of clean energy abundance.

Not a politics of blindly intoning “clean is cheap,” but a politics of genuinely doing everything in our power to accelerate the deployment of utility-scale renewables and to facilitate potentially game-changing investments in geothermal and nuclear power. These are all promising technologies, but the impediments to actually implementing them quickly and at large scale remain daunting.

But here’s my other thought. We know voters hate carbon pricing. And we also know that voters hate data centers. So what if we … made data centers pay a carbon tax?

Normally, people don’t like carbon pricing because they don’t want to pay more. But there would be no consumer-facing price here at all.

«

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The Strait of Hormuz isn’t going back to the way it was • HFI Research

HFI Research:

»

The market is incorrectly assuming that the Strait of Hormuz will return to normal. Since the beginning of the Iran conflict, I saw this geopolitical event as all or nothing. Either Iran comes out victorious and controls the Strait of Hormuz or the US succeeds in toppling the regime and restores the Strait of Hormuz back to normal.

There was no in-between.

Now that the MOU is signed, effectively giving Iran control of the Strait of Hormuz, we are never going back to the way it was. Unless, of course, the US tries to restart the conflict and comes out victorious, but outside of this scenario, Iran is now the most powerful oil producer in the world.

It has been a week since the MOU was signed and the latest tanker traffic data is becoming obvious. Following the conflict in Lebanon over the weekend, IRGC announced that it stopped issuing permits and the current tanker activity exiting the Strait of Hormuz is related to existing permit holders.

Over the coming days, this will become obvious. But what should be even more glaringly obvious right now is the tankers coming into the Strait of Hormuz. …[The] IRGC controls the Strait of Hormuz, and the inflow of crude-related tankers right now is dominantly going to Iran, with some leakage here and there for the others.

«

Count is 16 tankers coming out, 20 going in. Far below what it was before the war. Everyone may have thought this was all settled by the MOU, but it wasn’t.
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Two Britons plead guilty to £39m 2024 cyber-attack on Transport for London • The Guardian

Dan Milmo:

»

Two British cybercriminals from the Scattered Spider hacking group have pleaded guilty to a cyber-attack on Transport for London in 2024 that cost £39m and affected 10 million people.

Thalha Jubair, 20, and Owen Flowers, 18, pleaded guilty to offences under the Computer Misuse Act at Woolwich crown court on Monday.

The National Crime Agency (NCA) said the duo were part of an online hacking community known as Scattered Spider, suspected of carrying out several attacks in recent years. TfL, the London mayor’s transport authority, handles up to 5m passenger journeys a day on the underground alone.

TfL said it had emailed more than 7 million customers in September 2024 “to inform them about the incident” and tell them that “some customer data may have been taken”. The BBC reported that 10 million TfL customers had their data stolen.

The attack, which took place between 29 August and 3 September 2024, prevented live tube arrival information from appearing on the TfL Go app and the TfL website, while TfL was also unable to process any payments on the Oyster and contactless apps or to register Oyster cards to customer accounts. The incident cost TfL £39m.

Jubair, of Bow in east London, and Flowers, of Walsall in the West Midlands, both admitted conspiring to commit unauthorised acts against computer systems belonging to TfL, causing risk of serious damage to human welfare.

Flowers also admitted hacking two US healthcare companies. He admitted conspiring to commit unauthorised acts against computer systems belonging to SSM Health Care Corporation and attempting to commit unauthorised acts against computer systems belonging to Sutter Health, on or about 6 September 2024.

…A previous hearing was told that $10m was moved from Jubair’s crypto wallets after he was released from custody in March last year and $200m worth of crypto had also moved through accounts belonging to him. An earlier hearing was also told Flowers held $7.1m including crypto in accounts he controlled, despite having no source of income.

«

Sentencing is on 15 July. Who gets the money? The government? Or does it remain in their accounts?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

As cars in the US have become taller, pedestrian deaths have risen after years during which they fell. (And why can you call a car but not a football team after a native American tribe?) CC-licensed photo by Kay Gaensler on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. Bumpy ride. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

‘It’s quite a bit more than we expected’: satellite reveals immense scale of GPS signal tampering • Space

Tereza Pultarova:

»

An experimental satellite has mapped the scale of GPS jamming across Europe and the Middle East from space for the first time.

The data surprised the team behind the project and indicated that satellites orbiting far from Earth aren’t the only ones that experience degradation of their positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) signals, which could affect their performance and the safety of their operations.

The new measurements were made by Pulsar-0, the first satellite of the novel Pulsar navigation constellation developed by California-based Xona Space Systems. The experimental satellite orbits 310 miles (500 kilometers) above Earth, testing Xona’s technology before the company begins deploying its navigation constellation of 300 spacecraft in low Earth orbit (LEO) later this year.

The purpose of the Pulsar constellation is to provide a more resilient PNT service compared to the United State’s GPS network and other global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), such as Europe’s Galileo or China’s Beidou. The PNT signals distributed by GNSS satellites underpin many systems that our civilization relies on in everyday life, including the operation of power grids, finance operations and oil drilling.

But because GNSS satellites orbit quite far from Earth — at altitudes abve 12,000 miles (19,000 km) — the signal that ground-based receivers detect is weak and can be easily jammed.

…Russian jammers have been disrupting GNSS signals along Russia’s western borders, officially to protect the country from Ukrainian drone attacks. Every month, this interference affects tens of thousands of flights that cruise over the region. The warring parties in the Middle East, too, use jamming and spoofing to deflect drone attacks and hide the positions of illegal ships at sea.

…In the hardest-hit areas, the strength of the GPS signals at the satellite’s altitude dropped from the regular 40 decibels to as little as 10 decibels. [Decibels are logarithmic, so that’s a thousand-fold reduction in power.]

…Satellite constellations such as SpaceX Starlink also rely on GPS to avoid collisions with other spacecraft.

«

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Elon Musk and the plot to hijack America’s broadband • The Verge

Karl Bode:

»

Bezos — along with newly minted trillionaire Elon Musk — has become one of the biggest beneficiaries of Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD), a $42.45bn broadband expansion program passed as part of President Joe Biden’s 2021 “Build Back Better” initiative. BEAD was intended to give long-underserved communities billions of dollars for high-quality, future-proof fiber networks.

But under President Donald Trump and a coalition of MAGA-allied tech moguls, Build Back Better has been transformed into “tear down quickly,” leaving states mired in bureaucracy and delays. Five years later, only a handful of the millions of Americans slated for an internet access upgrade actually got one, and there’s little accountability in sight.

Established in November 2021, BEAD was the flagship program addressing a rare bipartisan congressional goal: Identify broadband coverage gaps, then deploy affordable, next-generation internet access across the US by 2030.

…the election-season campaigning against BEAD succeeded in painting Biden-era broadband expansion efforts as wasteful government bureaucracy. A Trump presidency, the public was told, would fix everything.

…The infrastructure law’s text didn’t mandate construction of specific network technologies, but it explicitly called for BEAD to prioritize terrestrial fiber networks over wireless or cable broadband. Congress recognized that it would be foolish to spend thousands of dollars per home every five to 10 years to deliver obsolete connections like coaxial cable-based broadband or settle for congested “good enough” satellite networks.

[Trump’s MAGA billionaire commerce secretary Howard]] Lutnick, however, demanded state proposals be “technology neutral.” He insisted the changes would “turbocharge speed and savings,” dubbing them “the benefit of the bargain.” In reality, the changes turned BEAD’s focus toward nascent satellite internet companies run by tech moguls. It redirected $738.8m into the already deeply subsidized pockets of Elon Musk, President Trump’s biggest campaign donor, with another $311m for Bezos’ Amazon Leo.

«

The free market at work, but with a big finger on the scales.
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US AI stock sell-off shakes markets from Wall Street to Asia • The Guardian

Lauren Aratani:

»

A tech sell-off shook global markets on Tuesday as attention turned away from developments in the US war with Iran and toward the future of AI companies and chipmakers that have driven stock markets to record highs.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq index closed 2.2% lower on Tuesday. The S&P 500 was also down by Tuesday afternoon, dropping 1.43% while the Dow remained steady.

All three major US indices have hit record highs this year, riding off a rush of funding to support AI technology and infrastructure. Nasdaq is up 10% for the year, while the Dow jumped 6% so far this year, breaching past 51,000 points, and the S&P 500 is up 7.3%.

But some economists have warned that the influx of AI spending is a bubble reminiscent of the dot-com bubble that burst in the early 2000s. Seven tech companies make up 30% of the S&P 500’s value.

The heavy reliance on a single industry and a few key companies has some investors wondering if it’s a matter of when, not if, there will be a burst. Those concerns have been heightened by signals from the Federal Reserve last week that it may increase interest rates, and therefore the cost of borrowing, in order to tackle rising inflation.

Those looking for signs of stumbling may have found confirmation after a series of developments on Monday. The stock market drop started when Google-parent, Alphabet, had its worst day on the market in over a year. A pair of high-profile AI researchers left the company last week, worrying investors. Alphabet’s share price had dropped 5% by closing Monday.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which debuted on the market on 12 June to much fanfare, dropped 16% on Monday as the company’s post-initial public offering (IPO) boost continued to ebb. On Monday, the company announced it is looking to raise $20bn in a bond sale, even after the company gained more than $85bn through its IPO, sparking concerns over the massive cost of the company’s projects.

«

That isn’t much of a correction, but markets tend to move like a herd; there may be some way to go. But to repeat the axiom: the markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
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A business model that works for creators • Substack CEO blog

Chris Best is co-founder and CEO of Substack:

»

Today we’re introducing the next phase of Substack’s native sponsorships program, with an inaugural cohort of flagship partners who are collectively investing millions of dollars into creators on Substack. If you are a Substack bestseller who is interested in participating and shaping the program, you can publish your Creator Kit now.

The deal most of the internet offers creators goes something like this: we’ll give you reach if you give us your audience. Perform for the algorithm. Hope for a minority share of a platform’s own revenue, or figure out the money part yourself. Build your following on our platform, under our rules, subject to our priorities—and if any of that changes, good luck.

Most creators accept this deal because they feel like they have no choice. The platforms are where the audiences are. And over time, the system shapes you. You learn to make things the algorithm rewards instead of things you believe in.

Substack is built on a different theory: Give publishers a direct connection to the people who believe in them. Let people pay for the work they value.

«

Wow! What is this “native sponsorship” stuff of which you speak, Mr Best?

»

Substack’s native sponsorships program makes great partnerships simple. We’re excited to work with our flagship partners, including Yahoo Scout, Whatnot, Granola, Balenciaga, T-Mobile, Polymarket, and Uber. These forward-thinking brands recognize that some of the most interesting conversations happening on the internet are driven by writers and creators on Substack. They’ll be building with, and investing millions of dollars in, the creators who choose to participate

These are not arbitrarily inserted ads. They are direct partnerships between brands and publishers who have already built robust audience-first businesses.

Creators choose who they work with. They set the creative direction. They keep full editorial independence. Our job is to take care of what they shouldn’t have to—the matchmaking, the infrastructure, the logistics—so they can stay focused on the work.

«

Oh, it’s advertising. And you’ll stick ads in. Maybe the E.coli of the internet, infecting anywhere that reaches a critical size, isn’t spam; it’s advertising.
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In the Weights

Thomas Dimson and Joey Flynn:

»

Find out if you live on in GPT-5.5, GPT-5.4 MINI, Opus 4.8, Haiku 4.5, Grok 4.20, Gemini 3.1 Lite, Kimi K2 0905, Deepseek V4, Llama 3.3 70B, Llama 3.2 1B, GLM 4.7 Flash, Mistral 3.2 24B, and Qwen3 8B.

«

There’s more about how they put it together. Of course you’ll put your name in, just as you did when Google Street View first came up and everyone looked at their address on it. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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The deadly rise of giant trucks and SUVs • The New York Times

Michael Keller, Eli Murray, Danielle Ivory and Irineo Cabreros:

»

For decades, American roads were steadily getting safer for pedestrians. But around 2009, the trend reversed. Since then, the number of pedestrians killed each year has risen by about 75%.

The surge in pedestrian deaths has baffled researchers. Most other wealthy countries haven’t seen similar increases, suggesting that possible culprits like smartphones don’t tell the whole story.

Other likely causes of deadly crashes, such as drunken and distracted driving, have attracted immense attention from the public and policymakers. But the trend toward ever-larger vehicles has received much less scrutiny, even after federal researchers in 2022 cautioned regulators that it was endangering pedestrians.

After analyzing federal and industry records, including never-before-examined data on vehicle dimensions, we found that the rise of large pickups and SUVs is an important factor.

Our estimate is that about 200 to 400 pedestrians a year would not have died if vehicles had remained approximately the same size over the past quarter-century. That represents about 10% of the recent increase in pedestrian deaths.

There are two reasons bigger vehicles are deadlier: they have taller hoods, and they tend to have larger blind zones.

«

In the UK cars had their “bull bars” – chrome rails fitted across the radiator grille, which served no purpose for anyone not constantly herding cattle – removed. But in the US there’s a strange form of Jevon’s paradox where even as fuel gets more expensive, people want bigger cars that will consume more of it as long as they can do it in a bigger car.
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Was it Trump? Eli Lilly gives powerful obesity drug for mystery 79-year-old patient • Times Now Digital via MSN

»

A 79-year-old patient has received rare early access to Eli Lilly’s experimental obesity drug retatrutide through the FDA’s compassionate use program, raising questions about the identity of the recipient and prompting speculation about whether the patient could be President Donald Trump.

According to a report by STAT, the FDA program is intended to provide access to investigational treatments for patients with serious or life-threatening medical conditions when other options may not be sufficient.

The request for access to retatrutide was submitted in April by Ranganath Muniyappa, a senior clinician at the National Institutes of Health. Muniyappa cited a diagnosis of refractory obesity along with obstructive sleep apnea and pulmonary hypertension, a potentially life-threatening condition involving high blood pressure in the lungs.

STAT reported that the application attracted attention from senior health officials, a detail that suggested the patient may be particularly influential or well connected.

The patient’s identity has not been disclosed. However, based on the limited information available, STAT contacted the White House to ask whether the recipient could be President Donald Trump, who has obesity and has publicly discussed weight-loss medications.

White House spokesperson Kush Desai did not explicitly deny that Trump was the patient and instead referred questions to the Department of Health and Human Services. When asked whether Trump had obstructive sleep apnea and pulmonary hypertension, Desai pointed to Trump’s latest medical evaluation, which STAT noted did not mention either condition.

«

“Did not explicitly deny” is one of those “admitting by not refuting” circumlocutions. Which is unusual for the Trump administration; usually they would just lie. Retratrutide is currently in phase 3 (human effectiveness) trials for “obesity, type 2 diabetes, knee osteoarthritis pain, moderate-to-severe obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), chronic low back pain, cardiovascular and renal outcomes, and metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD).”
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Newsletter writers are the next generation of media moguls • The Washington Post

Scott Nover:

»

As media organizations shed staff and audiences grow more skeptical of institutions, a growing number of journalists are finding an unlikely refuge in the newsletter.

In recent years, prominent writers and media personalities have migrated from traditional newsrooms toward newsletters: former MSNBC anchor Mehdi Hasan now runs Zeteo on Substack; tech journalist Casey Newton, formerly of the Verge, has Platformer on Ghost; former CNN reporter Oliver Darcy runs Status on beehiv, and former BuzzFeed culture writer Anne Helen Petersen authors Culture Study on Patreon.

Newsletters are built on a tried and true delivery method — email, which [Ryan] Broderick [who has his own newsletter, employing staff, called Garbage Day] calls a “50-year-old technology that breaks down on a good day.” But, he said, it’s the best we’ve got: “In a world of algorithms, email is kind of last man standing.”

In a digital landscape increasingly crowded with artificial intelligence-generated content, many readers appear willing to pay for something harder to automate: a trusted voice delivered straight to their inbox.

“The writers who will last are the ones offering what AI can’t fake,” said Jeremy Caplan, director of teaching and learning at of CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism and the founder of the tech newsletter Wonder Tools. “They have visible curiosity, expertise based on years of work or lived experience, and some fire behind their reporting, or their point of view.”

Substack, the most prominent newsletter platform, said the top 10 of its 50,000 publishers collectively earn more than $40m a year. In politics and news, more than 30 publications clear $1m annually.

Beehiiv, which launched in 2021 billing itself as a scrappier alternative to Substack, grew its revenue 80% in 2025 to $27.5m.

Email is “the last place on the web that you get to decide who you let into your space,” said Dan Oshinsky, former director of newsletters at BuzzFeed and the New Yorker who runs a consultancy called Inbox Collective.

«

Email suffers from the challenge of spam filters and overload – it’s easy to ignore – but that’s still better than life under the algorithm. If these are the future moguls, they’re as accountable as the previous ones; that is, not very. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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Loupe: a privacy-focused iOS app that raises awareness about what native apps can see · GitHub

Mysk Research:

»

Loupe is an iOS and iPadOS app that gives you a hands-on tour of the device fingerprinting surface. It reads real values from public iOS APIs, the same ones any third-party app can call, and shows them to you raw. The point is simple: see what your iPhone quietly exposes, and why each reading helps an app recognize you again.

Trackers don’t need your name, email, or location to recognize you online. Each reading isn’t necessarily unique on its own, but together they form a fingerprint that follows you across apps and websites.

How signals are organized.

Loupe groups every reading into three tiers, reflecting the cost of access:

• Passive — visible to any app with no prompt at all (locale, time zone, screen, battery, and more).

• Needs Permission — readings that trigger an iOS prompt (contacts, photos, location, calendars).

• Advanced — clever side-channel uses of public APIs, such as URL-scheme probing via canOpenURL and Keychain persistence across reinstalls.

«

This is a developer product at present which needs to be built on Xcode. But you could expect that a built version might become public in a while.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The icons in the forthcoming version of macOS have been subtly tweaked to retreat from last year’s “Liquid Glass” appearance. CC-licensed photo by Yeray Hdez Guerra on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 10 links for you. Gleaming. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Polymarket’s viral videos showed people winning big, but the bets were fake • Ars Technica

Jon Brodkin:

»

Polymarket paid dozens of social media users to film themselves making fake bets for a promotion that aimed to convince people they can strike it rich on the prediction market, according to a Wall Street Journal investigation published on Saturday.

“In its push to draw users to its unregulated platform, Polymarket has flooded social media with videos like [George] Makihara’s, which appear genuine at first glance,” the article said. “In reality, Polymarket built near-perfect copies of its website, then instructed creators to make simulated trades on those dummy sites and hide that they were being paid by Polymarket.”

Makihara, a college student, posted a video in January “that showed him winning $100,000 on a wager that President Trump would publicly say the word ‘McDonald’s’ that month.” But trade data showed that no one on Polymarket won such a bet in January, according to the Journal. This was one of 145 bets that Makihara appeared to place on Polymarket between January and May, but all of those bets were fake, the article said.

“Many of the videos share a template: The creators open Polymarket, place a bet, and frequently refer to their winnings as ‘free money.’ Dozens of social-media creators have posted videos with almost identical formats,” the Journal reported. “Polymarket sends creators bullet-point guidance on what to say, according to creators who have worked with the company and a recruiting website.”

The promotion reportedly targeted US residents by paying creators only when at least 60% of their viewers were in the United States. Polymarket’s main platform technically hasn’t been available in the US since 2022, when the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) determined Polymarket was operating an illegally unregistered exchange.

«

Piling untrustworthiness up like boxes at a supermarket.
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Economists have long pushed for prediction markets. The reality is not what they’d hoped for • CNN Business

Allison Morrow:

»

Long before the founders of Kalshi and Polymarket were even born, a handful of economists were getting amped about a novel approach to dealing with one of humanity’s more egregious shortcomings: We’re bad at predicting the future.

Maybe, the thinking went, the free market could help. (This was the late ‘80s, after all, the heyday of Reaganomics, Alex P. Keaton, the twilight of the Soviet Union — what couldn’t capitalism fix?)

And so the modern prediction market was born.

But nearly 40 years into economists’ obscure academic project, the booming industry they helped inspire — a multibillion-dollar business fueled largely by sports betting — looks very different from what they envisioned.

…Since then, we’ve gotten event contracts for just about anything. The markets aren’t perfect crystal balls, and crowd wisdom can be misleading, but they’ve had some notable wins, like when Polymarket bested the leading polls and pundits to call the 2024 presidential race in Donald Trump’s favor. And traders have consistently anticipated key economic data points, like the rate of US inflation and interest rate decisions from the Federal Reserve.

But when those 19 economists wrote their dream scenario, they did so with plenty of guardrails in mind.

The markets would “presumably not include contracts on the outcomes of sports events.” And the economists made the case for capping the amount any one person could wager to a “modest sum, perhaps something like $2,000 per year” (about $3,000 in today’s dollars).

But with sports betting exploding on prediction markets, and with virtually no cap on wagers, things haven’t worked out quite how they’d imagined.

“This is not the future any of us were hoping for,” Justin Wolfers, a University of Michigan professor and a leading expert on prediction markets who co-authored the 2008 paper [on “the promise of prediction markets“], told CNN.

«

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HR consultant wins English court case using AI lawyer in apparent legal first • The Guardian

Charlie Moloney:

»

An artificial intelligence law firm has won a case in an English court, in what is believed to be the first time a trial has been won using an AI lawyer.

A freelance HR consultant, Tamires Camal Taquidir, paid the firm, Garfield AI, about £400 to send a legal letter and then issue court proceedings over an unpaid debt of £7,000.

The co-founder of Garfield, Philip Young, called it a “landmark moment” for access to justice and said many small businesses have had to write off debts because the cost of litigation outweighed the money they could hope to win.

Garfield – which was authorised by the Solicitors Regulation Authority in April last year and can be used to make claims from £30 to up to £10,000 – prepared the case and then hired a human barrister to advocate for the client in court.

The AI conducted all the legal work preceding the trial, which involved disputing a counterclaim launched by the defendant, who instructed solicitors.

It prepared four witness statements and a bundle of documents for the three-hour trial at Wandsworth county court on 14 May. The court found in favour of Taquidir and awarded her the money owed.

Taquidir said: “I was owed money for work I had done, but it felt like the process of recovering it could be too stressful, expensive and time-consuming. Garfield made it possible for me to pursue the claim and keep going.

“When the counterclaim was brought, it was intended to intimidate me, but I knew I had accessible, cost-effective and competent support. I’m delighted by the result.”

«

Hope that he got costs, because barristers are never cheap. Nice advert for Garfield, but hard to know how well it would scale to a more complicated case.
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Read this before you vibe-code another app • The Verge

Yael Grauer:

»

Bob Starr was delighted with his vibe-coded website. “Boomberg” showed how much US tax money is going to tech companies, and Starr launched it online immediately after making it. It wasn’t until months after the site went live that he realized there was a problem: a hidden SQL injection risk. It could’ve left the site open for an attacker to read or alter data they shouldn’t have access to.

“It was just a glaring oversight on my part. It was a complete blindspot in my state of learning this new technology and understanding it, and I’m sure there are others making the same mistake,” said Starr, a project manager in the tech sector.

Starr fixed the issue, but he isn’t alone. Across social media, there are horror stories about vibe-coded apps full of security vulnerabilities. Jer Crane, founder of PocketOS, posted on X about an AI coding agent wiping out his company’s production database. Joe Procopio, a serial entrepreneur and former developer, vibe-coded a web app to privately show demos of other apps he’d built. Hackers came, so he took the app down. “Now I do demos the old fashioned way, from my local machine over Zoom,” he wrote. “It’s sooo 2023.”

We’ve entered a new “era of personal software,” as The Verge’s David Pierce said, where anyone can use AI to create their own private apps that can do exactly what they want. But with it comes a new era of security issues. Apps may be easy to build, but they’re difficult to secure — especially in a world where AI can also be used to attack them.

«

Don’t you then set a different LLM to work trying to find ways to hack the app and suggesting ways to secure it? Though it might be difficult to change the vibe coded app, because by all accounts they’re giving new meaning to spaghetti coding.
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GM installs robots at flagship EV factory after laying off 1,300 workers • Ars Technica

Jeremy Hsu:

»

Dozens of new robot arms have been installed at General Motors’ flagship electric vehicle factory in Detroit—even as 1,300 workers remain out of work following what was supposed to be a temporary layoff. The latest automation push has spurred union pushback over a potentially existential issue for automakers and their workers.

General Motors installed approximately 50 robot arms at GM’s Factory Zero plant in Detroit, Michigan, according to reporting by Crain’s Detroit Business. Made by the Japanese robotics company FANUC, the robots are designed to help attach various components to vehicles during the assembly line process. But leaders at United Auto Workers (UAW), the primary US union for autoworkers, reacted with anger to the new robotic presence, given how GM has not yet called back any of the workers affected by supposedly temporary layoffs in March.

More than 1,000 union members are still “laid off indefinitely,” James Cotton, president of UAW Local 22, told The Detroit News. He said that the company could bring some of those members back to work instead of installing the 50 robots.

The temporary layoffs were preceded by permanent layoffs involving another 1,200 workers at GM’s Factory Zero in October 2025.

Many automakers, including Stellantis NV and Ford Motor Company, have deployed assembly-line robots, such as Fanuc robot arms, as they push to automate more of their US operations. Hyundai Motor Company plans to deploy Atlas humanoid robots made by Boston Dynamics—which Hyundai acquired in 2020—to start working in the automaker’s flagship EV facility in Georgia by 2028.

Andrew Bergman, a Local 22 member and union organizer who was among those laid off by GM, described corporate leaders in the automotive industry as prioritizing profits over human workers.

«

Sounds callous to say so, but that is pretty much always how corporate leaders function.
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The Colour Strike

David Friedman:

»

When the British channel ITV made their switch to colour at the end of 1969, the camera operators union felt that the additional technical knowledge and skills required for a colour camera deserved a pay increase for the operators. ITV disagreed. So the operators came up with a clever way to strike.

They simply shut off the red, green, and blue tubes in the cameras, leaving the fourth black-and-white tube on, essentially turning those fancy cameras back into black-and-white cameras.

It caused all sorts of havoc for shows that were promoted as being in colour, and ad revenue was lower than expected now that programming wasn’t in colour after all. Without a full work stoppage, the camera operators union still managed to hurt ITV.

The strike lasted about three months before an agreement was reached, and then color programming resumed.

Despite the strike, ITV still had to begin filming the first season of their new show Upstairs/Downstairs, a drama that was sort of like Downton Abbey before Downton Abbey, about the family upstairs and the staff downstairs in a large townhouse.

The plan was to eventually sell the show to American television, but the strike created a problem. The first six episodes of the show were filmed during the strike and were black-and-white, and the rest of the episodes filmed after the strike were in colour. What American network would want a show that has some episodes in black-and-white and some in colour in a single season?

So they came up with a solution: They would reshoot the entire first episode in colour to set up the situation and characters, and package that with the colour episodes that come later in the season for American audiences. The American version would just skip a few episodes in between but it wouldn’t be a big deal.

Oh, wait. It actually would be a big deal, because the first episode begins with one character, Sarah, arriving for her new job as a housemaid (accidentally attempting to enter through the front door instead of the rear). But in the third episode she quits her job and leaves the show. So American audiences would meet her in episode one, and then she’d be gone with no explanation.

«

Multiverse problems! There’s also a lovely point about a union dispute over a clock on a set: was it electrical (one union) or, because it appeared on a set, a prop (different union)?
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AI doomaxxing is bad for our economy • The New York Times

Robert Shiller won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2013:

»

Moments after ChatGPT was released in 2022, its emergence swiftly unleashed a flood of alarming prognostications, including the possibility of enormous job losses. Many of those warnings were emanating from the leaders of the technology themselves. Little wonder that Americans are now highly worried about the impact AI will have on their futures, with a recent poll finding that 70% believe that the technology will reduce employment opportunities.

Like many others, I believe AI could lower employment. But unlike most, I don’t necessarily blame the technology itself. Instead, I worry about the potency of the fear it is generating.

Our brains are wired to respond to stories. Narratives floating in a population can affect individuals’ economic decisions about whether to buy a big house, or whether to send their kids to an expensive private school or even whether to have kids at all. When millions of people make millions and millions of decisions based upon negative expectations, there is a risk that fear can actually help birth the reality.

The idea that something like artificial intelligence will replace many human jobs goes back thousands of years. Aristotle envisioned a powered loom and a self-playing lyre someday replacing human servants. In the 19th century, groups of textile workers (the Luddites) destroyed the new machines they believed were replacing them. In the 1920s, the play “R.U.R.” — the letters stand for “Rossum’s Universal Robots” — depicted a war of the robots against humans.

…As the economist Christina D. Romer’s seminal study on the era points out, the stock market crash didn’t cause the Depression. It couldn’t, given that only about 2% of American households owned stocks at that time. The fatal blow was a massive subsequent collapse in consumer spending, a collapse she attributed to a sudden onset of widespread uncertainty among consumers about their future incomes.

«

In Shiller’s view, people worry too much about AI, and that is self-reinforcing.
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Asbestos from China discovered in 1,000 UK wind turbines • The Times

Greig Cameron:

»

Asbestos has been found in at least 1,000 wind turbines across Britain after essential parts were shipped into the country from China, it can be revealed.

Emergency brake components used in lifts and hoists inside the turbines have been imported containing chrysotile, or white asbestos, in a safety risk that unions said “beggars belief”.

The parts are understood to have come from third-party Chinese suppliers. The discovery has fuelled concerns over “opaque” supply chains and how the potentially deadly material got into the country.

The type of asbestos has been completely banned in the UK since November 1999, making it illegal to buy, sell or export any materials with it.

Wind farm owners have been carefully analysing their portfolios to identify affected sites, The Sunday Times has learnt. The work has included atmospheric testing to look for the presence of asbestos in the air, while a programme of replacing equipment has begun.

Although airborne particles have yet to be found, unions are furious. The GMB has written to UK ministers and the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) asking for a detailed account of the clean-up operation, the costs to date and the risk to workers.

…Safety warnings were circulated earlier this year by SafetyOn, a UK industry body. It is understood one large Scottish operator has already identified asbestos in more than 200 of its turbines, including some which have yet to be fully installed.

«

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One in three Americans use chatbots for health advice. These six patients explain why • The Washington Post

Fenit Nirappil:

»

Chatbots fuelled by artificial intelligence bear disclaimers saying they cannot dispense medical advice or diagnose conditions, but they still field millions of queries from users who are sick, trying to decipher medical records or understand their treatment options.

Nearly 1 in 3 Americans have turned to the bots for health information, according to a recent survey by KFF, a nonpartisan health policy and education organization.

AI companies are rushing to meet this demand, including Anthropic’s Claude for Healthcare and OpenAI’s ChatGPT Health, advertising more robust privacy protections and features to connect to medical records, while warning their products cannot replace doctors.

“They can be plausible-sounding, completely confident-sounding and completely wrong at the same time,” said Girish Nadkarni, a professor of medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and co-author of an independent evaluation of ChatGPT Health.

Nadkarni’s research found the chatbot failed to tell users to go to the emergency department in more than half of cases of impending respiratory failure and serious diabetic complications, instead advising them to stay home and monitor symptoms. The findings comport with other studies and reviews that have given AI health advice failing grades or at least urged caution.

OpenAI has raised questions about the methodology of the study and whether it properly reflects how people actually use its chatbot. A spokesperson for the company said ChatGPT Health models are continuously trained and updated through feedback from physicians.

«

(Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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macOS Tahoe v Golden Gate icon comparison • Basic Apple Guy

B.A.G:

»

WWDC always brings a torrent of new content, details, and platform-wide changes. One of the first things I noticed after installing the macOS Golden Gate beta was the updated icon design. The colours are much bolder, several icons have been adjusted, and the refraction in the Liquid Glass effect has changed significantly, especially in icons like Journal.

There’s also a noticeable sharpness to the icons, along with a flattening of the Liquid Glass effect. I’m not sure yet whether this is simply an early-beta artifact or the intended final look. For example, while I really like the redesigned Finder icon, the sharp black edges around the nose currently feel a little unrefined.

«

The difference seems subtle when seen individually here, but you can imagine that when seen across a screen or folder full of icons it would feel substantial. The lowering of reflection and extra sharpness are welcome: there’s no point in having blurry icons, ever.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The return of Serena Williams to Wimbledon’s courts has raised the question of whether GLP-1s are performance-enhancing drugs. CC-licensed photo by Andrew Luyten on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. Let? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

The AirPods Effect • The Escape

Markham Heid:

»

The popularity of AirPods is nothing new. But as the functionality of our tech-connected ear gear has improved — and as podcasts have exploded into one of the most consumed forms of media in America — earphones have assumed a bigger role in our daily lives.

By some market estimates, 44% of Americans use Bluetooth or wireless earphones, and an additional 24% use something wired. I couldn’t find good data on the percentage of people who regularly wear earphones as they go about their daily lives. But during my recent trips to Michigan and Florida, I felt like half the people around me in public had some kind of device-connected earwear on their head.

There is disappointingly little peer-reviewed research on the effects earphones have on our daily lives and interactions. But the evidence we do have suggests that while AirPods and similar technologies do some wonderful things for us, they also subtly influence our beliefs, reinforce our insecurities, and push us farther apart.

During the pre-smartphone era of iPods and other portable music devices, a small study of college students found that those who were heavy users of headphones experienced higher levels of social isolation and loneliness.

More than 15 years later, in 2021, a survey conducted by the audio technology company Jabra came to similar conclusions. Heavy headphone use makes people feel lonelier, the survey found. It also makes people less likely to have a meaningful conversation with someone new. Many of those interviewed for the survey said they wore headphones in part to avoid having to talk to other people.

This habit of using headphones to dodge uncomfortable interactions may be especially common among younger adults, for whom social unease and feelings of isolation are well-documented problems that have become more common in recent decades.

“I believe human interaction is fading, largely in part to the constant usage of AirPods or other forms of headphones,” wrote Eva Long, a student at Liberty University in Virginia, in a 2025 opinion piece for her school’s newspaper, The Liberty Champion.

“No one talks on the bus. No one greets the barista. Even in class, students are choosing to listen to music instead of their professors,” Long wrote. “When passing someone I know who has AirPods in their ears, it’s difficult to catch their attention unless we make direct eye contact. This lack of engagement is discouraging, and it makes spontaneous social connections less likely.”

«

Of course it could be that the socially isolated people tend to use headphones, but the general point is worth making: the more technology helps you ignore people, the more you will ignore people.
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On the trail of the dotcom queen: how Julie Meyer left a pattern of unpaid bills, missing funds and broken dreams in her wake • The Guardian

Olivia Lee and Juliette Garside:

»

Rachel Lowe was hired in 2012, to help advise startups. When she arrived at the Ariadne offices, she says she found herself entering “a temple to Julie”: framed pictures of Meyer lined the walls. While the boss looked the part, Lowe says the organisation felt chaotic. “Everything was just an absolute mess,” she recalls. “There were just a lot of young people who didn’t know what the hell they were doing.”

Meyer, says Lowe, had a tendency to explode with rage at staff: “I knew whether Julie was in the office just through feeling something in the air … She ruled by fear.” Towards her, however, Lowe says Meyer was sweetness and light. At least, at first.

After a few months without problems, Lowe says Meyer began making excuses for not paying her invoices, eventually accusing Lowe of poor performance. Lowe brought a legal claim against her. The judge ruled in Lowe’s favour and awarded her approximately £26,000 plus interest and costs. By then, multiple staff and suppliers were also claiming to have not been paid. A PR agency sued for about £76,000, and settled out of court.

Writing anonymously on the recruitment website Glassdoor, a former employee claimed Meyer would sometimes hide from her creditors. “Once, when a supplier came to the office demanding payment, she snuck out down the fire escape.” (Meyer has previously said of the Glassdoor reviews: “There are a lot of people much more important than me who get written up on anonymous websites. Comes with the territory.”)

By the summer of 2017, Ariadne could no longer afford the rent on its offices. The staff were sent to work from home.

So where did it all go wrong? It seems the vision never quite matched the reality.

«

To say the least. This is a great investigative piece. The money around the dot-com boom really did bring some characters to the surface who would probably have been better left troubling the HR desks of local leisure centres.
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Are GLP-1s performance-enhancing drugs? • The Atlantic

Nicholas Florko:

»

The World Anti-Doping Agency, which sets rules adopted by most international sporting leagues, has said that it is keeping a close eye on whether GLP-1s are being abused; for now, athletes are free to take them. (A Ro spokesperson [for the company making the GLP-1 drug Serena Williams is taking] told me that “any patient who receives a GLP-1 prescription through Ro has been determined to be clinically eligible for that treatment by a licensed medical provider.”)

But experts are divided over whether GLP-1s have the potential to improve athleticism. “I can’t see that there would be much of an advantage at all to using these substances in an athlete,” Thomas Hudzik, a pharmaceutical consultant who has served on the advisory group that recommends what drugs WADA should ban, told me. Meanwhile, Lars Engebretsen, the head of WADA’s health, medical, and research committee, told the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation that he believes the drugs should be banned, but mostly because they could exacerbate eating disorders.

Opinions diverge because no studies have yet tested these drugs in elite athletes. Williams’s return to tennis—which will continue with a doubles appearance alongside her sister Venus at Wimbledon—is one of the first opportunities, as far as we know, to see how an elite athlete performs after taking a GLP-1. So far, the results have been uneven: She won with Mboko at the Queen’s Club, but lost her first doubles match at the Berlin Open this week. Doubles also demands less of athletes than a singles match does, so Williams’s full abilities have not yet been tested in competition. (Tennis fans are eager to know if Williams will get a wild-card singles spot at Wimbledon too. [Overspill update: she will play singles.]) “The jury is out in terms of endurance, stamina,” Rick Macci, who trained Williams during her childhood, told me.

Being trim can be an advantage in some sports. A lighter frame can reduce the amount of effort needed for, say, climbing, running, or gymnastics. And weight is built into the structure of other sports. Wrestlers, for example, must weigh in to qualify for their matches. The popular strategy is to get just under the maximum weight for a given class—a process that GLP-1s might make easier. “It makes perfect sense in weight-category sports,” John Hawley, the director of Australian Catholic University’s Centre for Human Metabolism and Performance, told me via email.

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The former No.1 tennis player Andy Roddick says that if he intended to start playing competitively again (he doesn’t) he’d go straight onto a GLP-1 to shed the weight. But – I’d observe – that’s just to get going; once you’re at a competitive weight, you probably don’t want to stay on something that effectively makes you starve yourself.
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The UK will scan asylum-seekers’ faces for age checks—despite knowing the tech is flawed • Wired via Ars Technica

Matt Burgess, Maddy Varner, May Bulman and Gabriel Geiger:

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Starting next year, the British government is planning to introduce facial age estimation—where AI scans your face and suggests how old you are—to help determine the age of asylum seekers arriving at the United Kingdom’s border. The move is believed to be the first time that a so-called facial age estimation (FAE) system has been used in this way. Many asylum seekers arriving in the UK will not have documents proving their age, and if children are incorrectly classed as adults, they can be stripped of some legal protections and placed in adult-only detention centers.

An investigation by WIRED and Lighthouse Reports, in collaboration with The Independent, has obtained an internal UK government report detailing its tests of FAE technologies. It shows how the systems regularly mistake children for adults and appear to contain serious bias problems, which directly impact the largest group of migrants subject to age assessments in 2025, according to data from the Home Office. The investigation raises questions about the effectiveness of the technology and whether it should be deployed in such high-stakes scenarios.

The findings also come as the second Trump administration and governments around the world increasingly adopt anti-migrant policies while spending billions on surveillance technology that is often deployed against vulnerable people who have little knowledge of its use, how it works, or ways they can challenge it.

The leaked Home Office document obtained by Lighthouse Reports largely details the “best” performing of seven facial age estimation algorithms that the department tested last year, although it does not directly name the companies behind them. The report found that the system performed significantly worse when it was used to estimate the ages of Sub-Saharan Africans compared to other groups. Sub-Saharan Africans are the largest group of migrants entering the UK after crossing the English Channel in small boats in recent years, and had more age assessments raised in 2025 than cohorts from other regions, according to Home Office data. For female Sub-Saharan Africans, the age that the system guessed was off by an average of 4.6 years, meaning that a 13.5-year-old girl could be assessed as an 18-year-old adult.

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I really don’t think a 13-year-old is going to be mistaken for an 18-year-old; that’s just playing with numbers rather than reality. It might mean a 16yo being taken for a 20yo., which would be more problematic.
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The secret cause of the Industrial Revolution • Works In Progress

Ben Southwood:

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Spanish output per capita was flat for half a millenium between 1300 and 1800. Other areas saw temporary bursts of growth, followed by stagnation or reversion: Swedish and Portuguese incomes were lower in 1800 than in 1550, and the Italian efflorescence during the Renaissance was followed by steady decline for centuries. Even the Dutch golden age of 1500 to 1680, which saw the Netherlands buck the European trend with a large majority of its population working in industry or commerce and living in towns, was followed by more than a century of relative stagnation.

Property ownership was so fragmented that nobody investing in improvements could expect to make a return. Splintered ownership of farmland discouraged the adoption of new crops and rotations. Rigid inheritance rules made it prohibitively difficult to invest in improvements to land or infrastructure. Roads were bad because nobody took responsibility for them, hindering the transportation of manure for fertilizer and preventing the trade that would allow different areas to specialize in different crops. Agricultural yields were so low that nearly everybody had to work to produce food instead of in other industries like mining or manufacturing.

Many European states tried to solve these problems, and nearly all failed. The reason was usually the same: monarchs depended on the support of landowning aristocrats and clergy, and those landowners had no confidence that reforms would leave them better off.

In 1746, Spain’s King Fernando VI tried to replace his country’s complex tax system with a single income tax to fund public investment, but was blocked by nobles, the church, and municipal oligarchies. In 1776, French Minister of State Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot tried to liberalize the property system and replace the patchwork of taxes with a single land value tax, but the Parlement of Paris refused to register his reform edict. In 1781, Austrian Emperor Joseph II abolished formal serfdom, but ex-serfs remained effectively bound until 1848, since the crown enforced landlords’ prerogatives.

Only one country succeeded in modernizing its property rights in this period: England. The Glorious Revolution resolved the conflict between landowners and the Crown by handing the country to the landowners. One might expect this to have produced an oligarchy that jealously guarded its privileges. But the landowners, precisely because they were empowered, did something their continental counterparts could not. They dismantled the fossilized property arrangements that had blocked development elsewhere, and in doing so, set the stage for the Industrial Revolution.

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Ta-daa!
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Harari vs. Henrich • In Due Course

Joseph Heath:

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Human beings have four distinct qualities (traits, capabilities, behaviours, etc.) that make us quite different from other animals. These are fairly obvious, but there is unfortunately an entire subgenre of academic pedantry that involves challenging items on the list, saying “other animals do that too!” because there are of course similar capabilities to be found elsewhere.* So in the list below I have added the qualifications needed to disarm these objections and pick out what is absolutely distinctive about humans.

1. Intelligence. Humans possess superior intelligence, not just with respect to instrumental tasks, but also in the ability to engage in mathematical, hypothetical/counterfactual, and logical reasoning.

2. Language. Humans employ complex grammatical speech, with propositional differentiation providing context-independent representation of states of affairs.

3. Cooperation. Humans exhibit a distinctive form of ultrasociality, involving complex cooperation among large groups of genetically unrelated individuals.

4. Culture. Humans engage in domain-general transmission of learned behaviours, producing a large body of cultural artifacts and knowledge that exhibits cumulative improvement over time.

What makes the field of human evolutionary theory so interesting right now is that, deep down, we really don’t know how any of these capabilities evolved. At some level they must have been adaptive, but nobody really understands specifically why or how any of it was adaptive. On the other hand, we know a great deal about how it could not have evolved, because so many bad theories have been proposed over the years, which have not stood up to careful scrutiny. Typically they start out as speculative theories, until someone comes along and says “show me a model of how that could have evolved,” and someone takes the bait, starts building a model… and then realizes that it couldn’t have evolved that way. Indeed, it has turned out to be so difficult to produce an evolutionary model that could plausibly explain any the items on the above list that formal modelling has been where the most interesting action has occurred over the past several decades of research.

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This is not short, but it’s fascinating: what order did, or could, those characteristics evolve?
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Preliminary thoughts on the Midjourney scanner • Astral Codex Ten

Scott Alexander is a psychiatrist rather than a radiologist, but still doesn’t think the Midjourney ultrasound scanner announced last week is a great idea:

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Ultrasound is great, but it can’t penetrate bone or air. Many things doctors want to look at involve bone or air in some way. For example, the brain is behind the skull, which is a bone. The bowels are full of air. The lungs are super full of air. This limits ultrasound to the remainder – especially parts of the digestive, endocrine, and vascular systems, and superficial tissue like fat and muscle.

(it’s actually worse than this. Normal ultrasound can be used to image certain organs like the heart or prostate, but only via the technician carefully angling the probe. Midjourney hasn’t given details, but most likely their Scanner won’t be able to match this level of precision, so the heart, prostate, and some other usually-ultrasound-compatible organs will be outside its reach.)

Most MRIs or CTs involve one of the organs ultrasound can’t reach (this would be one reason doctors might do an MRI or CT, instead of just using ultrasound). In other cases, you don’t know what organ you’re looking for, and you want to be able to see everything (for example, if you’re scanning for cancer metastases, you can’t leave the brain and bowels out of the scan!) So this technology can’t replace most MRI or CT.

What about replacing ordinary ultrasound? One of the big advantages of ordinary ultrasound is that it’s a cheap machine you can keep on a cart and connect to a patient who’s lying in a hospital bed. Even though it might work better to put the patient in a giant water-filled tank surrounded by hundreds of ultrasound machines, if you tell your hospital orderlies “please transport this frail 90-year old to my giant water-filled tank, and lower them in slowly” they will stab you with your own scalpel. So this would need to be much better than ordinary ultrasound to capture even a fraction of these use cases. But ordinary ultrasound is already pretty good, this technology is untested, and it will be hard for it to be that much better.

Aren’t there a few edge cases that are poorly-served by existing modalities and ordinary ultrasound? Yes – the classic one is certain types of breast cancer, which don’t show up well on mammography against dense breast tissue, and require too much of a search for ordinary ultrasound.

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Another example is from South Korea, where the adoption of intensive monitoring for thyroid cancer detected lots of possible thyroid conditions which were investigated at great expense and trouble for the patients, but had no effect on mortality from thyroid cancer.
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Here’s how Russia’s nuclear-powered ‘Skyfall’ missile works • NPR

Geoff Brumfiel and Connie Hanzhang Jin:

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According to Russian and Western sources, the new weapon, known in Russian as Burevestnik and by NATO as Skyfall, was powered by a small nuclear reactor. Few other details were forthcoming.

In this image made from video provided by Russian Defense Ministry Press Service on Tuesday, May 12, 2026, Russia’s new Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile is test launched at an unspecified location in Russia.

Now, two MIT researchers have published an analysis that sheds fresh light on how the nuclear-powered missile actually worked. If they are correct, the October flight test marks the first time a nuclear-powered aircraft has ever flown. It would also suggest the opening of an extraordinarily dangerous new chapter in the 21st century’s simmering arms race.

…If Hecla is correct, then Burevestnik is the first aircraft ever built and flown using nuclear power. It’s also incredibly problematic, said Jeffrey Lewis, a scholar at Middlebury College who specializes in studying rockets and missiles and was not affiliated with the MIT study.

“This thing is an environmental nightmare,” Lewis said. In addition, the reactor poses a huge risk to members of the military who might be required to handle it. “Just the question of how you safely load one of these things is, I think, really pretty challenging,” he said.

In 2019, an accident off the Russian coast killed several Russian nuclear personnel. Shortly thereafter, a spike in radioactivity was detected nearby. It’s now widely believed the accident was the result of a Russian team attempting to recover a prototype Burevestnik reactor. Hecla said it’s possible that the reactor restarted as it was being hauled from the bottom of the sea, sparking an explosion.

Given all the problems, both real and potential, associated with Burevestnik, Hecla questions why the Russians developed it at all. He notes that although its range is likely significantly longer than that of a conventional cruise missile, that doesn’t mean it’s particularly hard to intercept.

“It’s not a game-changing idea by any stretch of the imagination,” he said. “We are able to routinely shoot down cruise missiles today, and there is no reason to think this will be particularly more difficult to do.”

Moreover, Russia has said that Burevestnik will only be used with a nuclear weapon as its warhead. A conventional warhead would likely be heavier, Lewis noted, and the reactor would still end up spreading lethal radiation over a significant area where the missile strikes. Given all that, “I can’t see the Russians wasting one to deliver a few hundred pounds of explosives,” he said.

Put it all together, and the weapon appears to be “kind of useless,” Lewis said.

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So is it a dangerous new chapter, or kind of useless? It’s unclear from the analysis quite what risk this would pose from radiation output.
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California ‘billionaire tax’ makes ballot despite opposition from tech moguls • The Guardian

Nick Robins-Early and Dara Kerr:

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The California Billionaire Tax Act, colloquially known as the billionaire tax, would levy a one-time 5% tax on any California resident worth more than $1bn. The proposal is backed by the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW) as a means of funding California’s strained healthcare, food assistance and education programs.

The proposal has become one of the state’s biggest political flashpoints. As it gained popular momentum throughout the year, it’s also prompted prominent billionaires, such as Google co-founder Larry Page and Meta co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, to make moves to cut ties with the state and Newsom vowing to block it from going to a vote. Although it has gained enough signatures for the ballot, the coalition backing the measure has until 25 June to decide whether to move forward or potentially strike a deal.

While the union that floated the proposal has framed it as a way of getting the ultra-rich to pay their fair share, many of the state’s tech elites have condemned the tax and spent millions attempting to crush it. Google co-founder Sergey Brin has spent at least $82m alone on efforts to fight the tax and has relocated just over the California border to the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe.

The Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, crypto billionaire Chris Larsen and the DoorDash CEO, Tony Xu, are among other tech moguls who have donated millions to oppose the tax. California has the most billionaires out of any state – more than 200 – many of whom have increased their wealth in recent years amid the AI boom.

Notably, Jensen Huang, the billionaire CEO of Nvidia, has said he’s fine with the proposed tax and that he chose to live in Silicon Valley. During a talk at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in April, he said: “I say to everybody: ‘Move to California. Don’t leave.’ It’s the highest taxes in the world, but it’s OK.”

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“We’ve given millions to stop this tax that would cost us millions”. Makes some sort of sense, perhaps.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In a stunning turn of events, the US Senate has passed a measure forcing the Trump administration to retain an ocean monitoring system. CC-licensed photo by Oregon State University on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. Not washed up. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

The smartphone’s days are numbered. Meet the device that could come next • Fortune

Alyson Shontell spoke to Cristiano Amon, CEO of Qualcomm:

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AS: How much longer will we have smartphones as our primary device?

CA: This year will be the year of agents. You’ll start to see more form factors of things people wear. By 2027, 2028, you’ll start to see workload shift [from phones to AI agent devices]. In the next five years, it’s very possible those devices will be in the hundreds of millions, heading toward a billion [agentic AI devices].

AS: What will the future personal AI device will look like?

CA: I am bullish on glasses. Humans are very comfortable with glasses. You turn your head, that’s where the camera is going to see what your eyes are seeing. They’re very close to your ear and very close to your mouth. You’re going to read something and the camera can read it. So glasses, I think, will be the primary form factor.

There are some secret form factors that I cannot tell you about. We’re working with pretty much all of them, from OpenAI to Meta. You have different things that people wear—glasses is the easiest one to understand, but also jewelry, pins, and pendants.

For example, you’ll be walking around with glasses, and you’re going to see something you really like. You’ll say, “I’d like to buy this. How much is it on Amazon?” Or, “Can you render how I’m going to look with this on?” It’s going to be a different kind of low-friction experience, and workloads are going to start to shift. Certain things you’re going to do with an agent.

AS: Which company is best positioned to be the Apple of AI devices?

CA: With wearables, you have a mix of fashion and technology. Eyewear companies, for example, can become technology companies—and their valuations are going to expand, because you’re still going to be buying a fashion device.

Would you believe a consumer electronics company will make one pair of glasses that everyone wears? Or will people pick the brand they want? You’re going to see more things that we wear becoming smart, and it’s going to create a new set of players. One thing I can tell you with precision is that in every new generation of wireless, the players change as the industry changes. So I think we’re going to see that again.

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Why is it that the only scenario these people can imagine is transactions, or potential transactions? And where is the screen for these devices? I wonder about the “shift to AI agents”. It seems like wildly optimistic thinking.
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Snap is finally about to ship AR glasses — and they cost a fortune • The Verge

Jay Peters:

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Snap is finally launching augmented glasses for the public. Specs, which Snap describes as “a wearable computer built into see-through augmented reality glasses,” will cost $2,195. You can preorder a pair of Specs now at specs.com with a $200 refundable deposit, and Snap says they’re expected to ship “this fall” in the US, UK, and France.

This is a big moment for Snap: The company made a big entry into smart glasses with its original Spectacles in 2016, and the company has been toiling away on nonpublic AR versions of Spectacles over the past few years. CEO Evan Spiegel promised the company would launch consumer AR glasses in 2026 and even turned its smart glasses team into a separate business.

The company says that Specs are “fully standalone, with no puck and no tether.” (Which is perhaps a jab at Apple’s Vision Pro, which is tethered to a separate battery pack.) They’ll be offered in two sizes, a 47mm model weighing 132g and a 52mm model weighing 136g, and will have removable inserts that Snap says will support “a wide range of prescriptions.”

You probably won’t mistake Specs, with their wide, bold frames, for any of Meta’s smart glasses — Snap clearly picked a design that it wants to stand out. (They’re not my style — I don’t think I can pull off the “snow goggles, but fashionable” look — though maybe Jony Ive might like them.) They have visible light and infrared cameras, and while the Specs are recording, a little LED bar will glow in the middle of the glasses.

…The Specs have two Snapdragon processors onboard, and while Snap isn’t specifying exactly which ones they are, the company says that one is focused on “computer vision” while the other is focused on running AR Lenses. “Together, they enable fast hand tracking, low latency, and responsive interactions that help digital content feel anchored in the real world,” Snap says.

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Anyone who wears these looks like Brains from Thunderbirds (or possibly Joe 90). Hard to see these as anything but the nichiest of niche sales.
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AI nose uses ‘Smell Language Model’ to sniff out signs of disease • The Register

Dan Robinson:

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Many people worry about what AI knows, but what about an AI Nose that can smell what disease you might have?

Ainos, an AI and biotech company that is developing smell technology, is working with National Taiwan University (NTU) to explore whether its platform can help diagnose patients by analyzing volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in exhaled breath.

The year-long research effort, which starts in July, will examine individuals who present with dyspnea, or shortness of breath, said to be one of the most common symptoms seen in emergency departments.

Dyspnea can be a symptom of many conditions, including acute exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (AECOPD) and acute decompensated heart failure (ADHF), each of which requires different treatments.

Ainos and NTU hope to develop and evaluate a system to analyze VOC-based breathprints to detect AECOPD and/or ADHF in patients.

Ainos’s Smell AI platform relies on an AI Nose module that features multiple micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) sensors and an integrated digital processor. Sensor resistance increases in the presence of detectable gases, and this is converted to a digital signal that is interpreted in much the way the human nose interprets scents, according to Ainos.

That interpretation is handled by by a proprietary Smell Language Model that has been developed to learn, classify, and contextualize complex scent patterns.

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High likelihood of success: dogs (and cats?) can diagnose illness, though they’re terrible at telling us what it is. And there are humans who can detect diseases by smell – such as Joy Milne, famous for being able to sniiff out Parkinson’s.
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Florida’s TikTok lawsuit could signal wider social media crackdown • POLITICO

Andrew Atterbury:

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Florida’s move to crack down on TikTok for allegedly defying the state’s law blocking kids from social media is the state’s latest warning for Big Tech.

So far, Meta, the outfit behind platforms like Facebook and Instagram, is the only major tech company complying with Florida’s restrictions on children using social media, according to state Attorney General James Uthmeier. That leaves some heavy hitters open to the same potential legal risk as TikTok, which state officials contend could be on the hook for “billions” of dollars in damages for allegedly deceiving families about the risks posed by the content on its app.

“Mark my words, we’re going to go after anybody that’s going to hurt our kids — anybody and everybody,” Uthmeier said during an event Monday announcing the TikTok lawsuit.

Florida’s GOP-dominated Legislature passed its strict social media law in 2024 prohibiting children younger than 14 from using many platforms while requiring parental approval for 14- and 15-year-olds. The online restrictions aligned Florida with several other states attempting to limit minors using “addictive” apps they consider harmful to their mental health.

By design, Florida’s regulations don’t name any social media applications, instead targeting “addictive features” like infinite scrolling and platforms on which 10% or more of users are under 16 years old and spend more than two hours on average engaged.

The state, however, was unable to enforce these policies until November, as tech firms fought the law in court, contending it amounted to a free speech violation for users.

And it wasn’t until April that Uthmeier ultimately signalled Florida would soon be dropping the hammer on apps, warning that fines of $50,000 per violation were coming.

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Interesting dynamic: TikTok in the US is now owned by Larry Ellison, who acquired it because he’s a Trump donor, while Florida is a state that Trump needs to remain Republican. Who wins?
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Apple patches eavesdropping vulnerability in Beats Studio Buds • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

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Apple has updated its Beats Studio Buds wireless earbuds to patch a high-severity vulnerability that could be exploited by nearby hackers to eavesdrop on users.

The vulnerability, CVE-2025-20701, allowed improper authentication in the firmware running on the Bluetooth-related chips, enabling people within signal range to impersonate devices that had previously been paired with the earbuds. The researchers demonstrated this in a series of end-to-end attacks that allowed them to eavesdrop on conversations or sounds within earshot of the phone microphone.

“Impact: An attacker within Bluetooth range may be able to listen through the microphone of a device which is not yet paired and actively seeking pair requests,” Apple said in a Tuesday security advisory. The fix is contained in Beats Firmware Update 1B211, which is delivered automatically while headphones are paired with and within Bluetooth range of a user’s iPhone, iPad, or Mac. Users can check their firmware version by going to Settings on their device, navigating to Bluetooth, and tapping the info button next to the headphones.

Carrying a severity rating of 8.8 out of 10, CVE-2025-20701 was one of three vulnerabilities resulting from last year’s disclosure by researchers Dennis Heinze and Frieder Steinmetz of security firm Insinuator about chips made by Airoha Systems.

…Heinze and Steinmetz said last year that the full chain of attacks gave attackers the ability to do other malicious things, including retrieving call history and contacts, and even calling arbitrary numbers. Many of those capabilities are dependent on the specific devices being paired, since the functionality built into them differs from platform to platform.

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That’s a pretty dramatic vulnerability in what one would normally think of as an essentially dumb device.
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America is headed toward the infinite workweek • The Atlantic

Lila Shroff:

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Last year, Steve Yegge started “suddenly getting pounded by nap attacks in the middle of the day.” Without fail, Yegge—a programmer and tech blogger—would “hit a wall, fall over, and sleep for 90 minutes,” he told me. Like many developers, Yegge no longer writes code by hand; instead, he manages a legion of bots to do that for him. His productivity has skyrocketed, but so too has his exhaustion. “I’ve fallen asleep slower at the anesthesiologist,” he recently wrote on his blog.

In theory, handing tasks off to coding agents should free up time, allowing larger blocks for deep work and rest. But some developers are having the opposite experience. Instead of allowing for greater focus, the latest AI tools are overwhelming workers, frazzling minds and shredding attention spans. Although agents can do plenty more work now than they could a year ago, they still need human oversight. Like toddlers, AI agents ask endless follow-up questions, require detailed instructions—and, if you leave them unsupervised, are liable to make a huge mess. Once you get several running simultaneously, there’s no time for breaks. As Yegge puts it on LinkedIn, his job is to be an “AI babysitter.”

Plenty of people are seemingly starting to feel like depleted AI babysitters. When Boston Consulting Group recently surveyed roughly 1,500 workers across several roles at major American companies, the firm found that many workers were experiencing “mental fatigue from excessive use or oversight of AI tools beyond one’s cognitive capacity.” Respondents described a “buzzing” and “fog”-like feeling, sometimes accompanied by headaches, slower decision making, and trouble focusing. One engineering manager told the researchers that managing multiple bots at once was like having “a dozen browser tabs open in my head, all fighting for attention.” In the survey, 18% of developers reported AI-induced exhaustion. But in other roles, too, such as HR and marketing, where AI is also taking over, rates of reported fatigue were even higher.

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We did not expect that the AI tsunami would lead to us being exhausted as well as unemployed, did we?
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HPV vaccine means young women now have ‘close to zero’ risk of cervical cancer death • BBC News

Sophie Hutchinson:

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Children vaccinated at age 12–13 against HPV (human papillomavirus) have close to zero risk of dying from cervical cancer before the age of 30, landmark new research reveals.

The first study of its kind shows deaths have fallen sharply since school-age girls began being offered it in 2008, and around 200 lives have been saved in England so far thanks to the vaccine.

Between 2020 and 2024, no cervical cancer deaths were recorded in women aged 20 to 24 – the first time that had happened over a five-year period. Without vaccination, around 23 deaths would have been expected.

“It’s incredible to think that a single jab can almost eliminate a particular type of cancer,” said Prof Peter Sasieni, the lead researcher at Queen Mary University of London.

Overall, cervical cancer is still the 14th most common cancer among females in the UK, with 3,300 people diagnosed every year.

It is thought HPV, a virus which is spread through close skin-to-skin contact, causes 99% of those cases. Most HPV infections clear up without any problems, but some cause abnormal cell changes and can lead to cancer years later. The report’s authors expect the numbers dying from the disease to continue to fall as more are given a HPV jab and vaccinated people grow older.

Cancer Research UK, which funded the research, described the findings as an “incredible milestone” but warned that vaccination rates in England were running below recommended levels.

…Data from the UK Health Security Agency shows that 76% of girls in England were vaccinated by the age of 15 in 2024-25, well below the 90% that the World Health Organization (WHO) says is needed to eliminate cervical cancer.

…Boys have also been given the HPV vaccine since 2019, which helps to protect them against anal, penis, throat and mouth cancers, and reduces the risk of them passing the virus on to girls.

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Trump administration backs off plan to end ocean monitoring system • The New York Times

Maxine Joselow:

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The Trump administration is abandoning its plan to dismantle a $368m ocean monitoring system critical to understanding climate change and marine ecosystems, bowing to a bipartisan backlash on Capitol Hill.

The National Science Foundation had said in May that it would begin removing hundreds of underwater instruments this month that collect data on coastal flooding, marine heat waves and other climate and weather events.

But the agency announced on Thursday that it will pause efforts to take apart the system, known as the Ocean Observatories Initiative, while convening an expert panel to determine its future.

“Effective immediately, N.S.F. will not proceed with further removal or de-scoping of equipment,” the agency said in a statement.

The Senate passed a measure Wednesday that would block the government from dismantling the system, with lawmakers in both parties warning that the action would be illegal and would threaten the safety of coastal communities. The Trump administration had also tried to cut the program’s funds the last two years, but Congress restored the money both times.

In May, the science foundation had said it would send ships to start pulling up instruments anchored to the sea floor off the coasts of Oregon, Washington State, Alaska, North Carolina, and an area between Greenland and Iceland known as the Irminger Sea.

For the past decade, scientists have used data from these instruments to understand how the ocean is absorbing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, how marine heat waves could affect fisheries and how soon a vital ocean current could collapse.

Fishermen have also checked the real-time, publicly available data on wind and wave conditions before heading to sea. And meteorologists have used these observations to improve forecasts of disasters like hurricanes and tsunamis.

The National Science Foundation said on Thursday that it already had pulled some buoys, sensors and other instruments from the water off the coasts of Oregon and Washington State, but it was “developing plans to redeploy the equipment after servicing.”

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Two astonishing things: the Trump administration actually listening to an opposing opinion; and the Senate passing something.
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A new era of Midjourney • Midjourney blog

The company you think of as “those people who make AI pictures” has decided to move into medicine:

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When you step into the water, you’re standing on top of a platform. The platform is connected to rails and begins to descend into the water – an elevator gently lowering you at around 2 inches, or 5 centimeters, per second.

As you descend you pass through a ring made of half a million tiny squares each the size of a fine grain of sand, and each capable of acting as both a tiny speaker and a tiny microphone.

Each square creates ultrasonic waves and records the ripples back at millions of times per second. Together they act as both a choir and an audience – producing terabytes of data each second. If we converted that data into HD internet video you’d need to watch 500 hours of footage for every 1 second of scan data.

The sheer number of mechanical elements, the inconceivable volume of data, and the computational power required for this to all come together is one reason why no such machine was ever made – until now.

As you descend into the water, hundreds of thousands of tiny elements take turns, sending out waves, listening together, compressing and then streaming data to a massive cluster where thousands of computers split the task.

The major computational task is figuring out how to change waves into images. Basically – as waves travel through the water and your body they change shape. The shape of these waves changes whenever there is a change in density or stiffness (i.e., going from water to skin to fat to muscle to bone). By looking at how the shapes of all the waves change, we reconstruct a detailed map or ‘image’ which basically lets us figure out what’s in there.

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It’s like a whole-body ultrasound system, rather than an MRI (which relies on high powered magnets to image inside the body). Will it work? Can it tell you anything useful? Might be fun to find out. And for Midjourney, definitely a much bigger potential moneyspinner than making AI images.
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For the elderly and infirm, affordable exoskeletons could soon change their lives. CC-licensed photo by Sandia Labs on Flickr.

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A selection of 9 links for you. Different drum. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Trust in news hits new low globally, research suggests – BBC News

Paul Glynn:

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Trust in the news has fallen to an all-time low globally – the lowest since annual reports by the Reuters Institute began more than a decade ago (2015).

The research published on Tuesday suggests that public trust worldwide is at 37%, three points down on this time last year. In the UK, it has fallen by five points to 30% – 20 points lower than 10 years ago.

More than half of respondents said they now get their news from third-party platforms like social media and video networks, although a similar number still use news websites and TV news as well. Traditional sources are still more popular in the UK.

“Our data points to a mix of anxiety, disengagement and cynicism from audiences, many of whom don’t like the way publishers are covering long-running news stories such as immigration, inflation and international conflict,” the institute said.

“But the report also finds openness to new sources and formats, and a belief in what news at its best can offer.”

Despite more people accessing news via social media, confidence in that format is much lower than in news overall, at 22%. And just 10% of those who took part said most of their news needs were met by creators and influencers, suggesting they are complementing rather than replacing traditional media.

Meanwhile, faith in answers from AI chatbots from respondents around the world is at 20%, although weekly use of these has grown from 7% to 10% (and to 16% among people under 35). And support for impartial news remains high, appearing largely unaffected by changes in news consumption, with support falling by 3% since 2020.

In the US, trust in news stands at 25%, and is even lower (15%) among politically right-leaning Americans.

Some major news outlets have seen big drops, with trust in both CBS News and Fox News down 10 points from 2025, and CNN falling by six.

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There’s no obvious solution to this. People don’t trust news but they don’t trust social media platforms either.
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Wired launching forum-style app as added subscriber benefit • Press Gazette

Charlotte Tobitt:

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Wired is launching a new forum-style app which lets readers interact with its editorial team.

The app, said to be launching “very soon”, is set to feature forums on which subscribers can interact with Wired journalists about the title’s key coverage areas across tech and politics.

Arielle Goldstein, audience development manager at Wired, said the app will serve as a “community power play” and is one of several ways the brand is aiming to keep readers on its own platforms rather than social media.

She told the Audiencers Festival in London: “We envision that we will have forums on the app where people can come and interact with other Wired readers based on subject matters, and also Wired staff, Wired writers on that same subject matter as well.

“So you might be thinking to yourself, can’t people just go to Reddit for that? The answer is no, because our journalists aren’t hanging out on Reddit. They will be in the app, they will be able to answer your questions in the app, and really drive discussion.”

She added that this means a paid subscription will offer a “rapport with the subject matter expert who you’ve been reading for years, and who you want to continue to build a relationship with”.

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Oh, sure, the thing every journalist absolutely wants more than anything else in the world is to have readers directly contacting them in a forum to tell them what they thought of what they wrote, and interacting with each other to discuss the content. More. Than. Anything. And has the Audience Development Manager (who one suspects has not done a lot of direct interacting with that audience) considered how the forum is going to be moderated and who is going to pay for that? Does she not know the history of what happened to comments on news sites?

This is a terrible idea. How long do we give it to survive from launch – six months? Nine?
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Nothing on the internet is secure anymore • The Atlantic

Matteo Wong:

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As AI tools have become extremely good at writing code, they’ve also become extremely good at pulling off cyberattacks. (Malware, after all, is still software.) The result has been a change in the scale, speed, and sophistication of hacks that is difficult to overstate: Among its tens of thousands of clients, the cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks identified a fourfold increase in daily attacks from 2024 to 2025. Hackers are developing AI-enhanced computer viruses that adapt on the fly to avoid detection. They are automating cyber-espionage campaigns on foreign governments. They are stealing data in minutes instead of hours. “There’s a crazy amount of offensive activity happening right now,” Alex Stamos, a former chief security officer of Yahoo and Facebook, told me. “Companies are getting hacked every single day.”

If the NSA is perturbed by the rise in cyberattacks, which it apparently is, then surely my savings are vulnerable. There could be any number of weaknesses in my bank’s IT systems to directly hack. Or perhaps an AI-written phishing email targeted at an employee, personalized to sound like a family member or manager, could let hackers into the back end to empty my coffers. Even if the bank has great cybersecurity, an attack on another business—a medical clinic I visited, a car-rental company, a newsletter subscription—could steal my payment information and, potentially, much more. The attack angles are seemingly infinite. And no one is adequately prepared.

…traditional cybersecurity methods don’t cut it anymore. Before, you might scramble for a week to patch a hole, Giovanni Vigna, a cybersecurity expert at UC Santa Barbara, told me. “Now you could have hundreds of those every week.” Moody’s Ratings has found that the time attackers take to exploit a publicly known vulnerability (the digital equivalent of a robber plotting how to get around a bank’s guards and cameras after obtaining a key) fell from more than 700 days in 2020 to just 44 days in 2025—faster than the average time cybersecurity teams take to patch the bug.

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Everything is going just great. Maybe we’ll just have to turn the internet off for some period of the day?
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Apple to raise prices due to memory chip crunch, Tim Cook says • Wall Street Journal via MSN

Rolfe Winkler:

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Apple plans to raise prices on its products to offset the surging costs of memory and storage chips, Chief Executive Tim Cook said in an exclusive interview with The Wall Street Journal.

“Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” he said. “We’re doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we’ve been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable.”

Cook declined to offer details on the timing or scale of the planned price increases, nor which products will be affected. Apple’s next major product launch is likely to be in September when it releases the iPhone 18 lineup, expected to include a new foldable iPhone.

Price increases, especially for Macs and iPads, could come sooner. Apple raised the starting price of the Mac Mini last month in between launch events.

Skyrocketing demand for memory and storage chips from AI companies has pushed up their cost so much that Apple would have to raise device prices substantially to maintain its profit margins. Passing the higher cost on to consumers while maintaining its profit margin would add about $270 to the price of the next iPhone Pro model, estimates research firm TechInsights.

…Morgan Stanley estimates a 15% bump for prices of smartphones and PCs in the US this year. This price hike will have a limited impact on the consumer price index, which has only a small weighting for such devices. Yet any price increase on the popular iPhone is likely to grab Washington’s attention.

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The WSJ has an estimate of $1,299 for the upcoming iPhone 18 Pro. Last year the base model of the 17 Pro was $1,099. Who doesn’t love an 18% increase? But it goes to prove too that even Apple isn’t immune to the supply crunch.
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Fox’s $22bn Roku acquisition aims to expand its reach into smart TVs, advertising • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

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Fox Corporation has agreed to buy Roku Inc. for $160 per share, an approximate enterprise value of $22bn, the firms announced today.

The acquisition would unite Fox’s broadcast channels, including Fox, Fox News, Fox Business, and FS1, as well as its streaming businesses, including Tubi, a free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) platform that Fox bought in 2020, with Roku’s own FAST service, The Roku Channel, and Roku’s streaming hardware business, including its streaming sticks and smart TVs. Roku says it has 100 million households using its platform.

The most valuable part of Roku’s business isn’t its hardware, which lost $19.1m in the quarter ending March 31, 2026, but its the operating system (Roku OS) and advertising business. In that same quarter, Roku’s advertising and subscriptions business posted a gross profit of $584.1m, with the advertising business pulling in $371m in revenue. The COVID-19 pandemic helped Roku become profitable in 2021, but the company didn’t see annual profitability again until 2025.

The planned merger aims to help Roku scale and maintain profitability more easily by enabling Roku “to execute on our strategy faster than we would otherwise by ourselves, even though we’re doing extremely well,” Anthony Wood, Roku’s CEO, said during a call with investors today.

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This is a Murdoch family acquisition; it feels like nothing more than a plotline from Succession where the Logan media empire is trying to buy a Scandinavian tech company, and finds that it has instead been eaten by the tech company. That’s unlikely to happen here, but it’s hard to feel that Fox really gets Roku.
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AI-referred US shoppers browse longer, spend more per visit, data shows • Reuters

Arriana McLymore:

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US shoppers who use large language models, including Google’s Gemini or ​OpenAI’s ChatGPT, for purchase recommendations are lingering more on retailers’ websites and are more likely to spend, according to May data from Adobe Analytics.

Consumers ​who are referred to retail websites ​from LLMs generated 53% more revenue per visit than shoppers from non-AI sources, the data ​firm said, emphasizing the need for brands to invest ​in AI-readable webpages.

Retailers whose products show up in LLM suggestions are able to “drive more personalization” to shoppers who ​leave the platforms to complete their purchases ​on the native websites, Vivek Pandya, director of digital insights at Adobe, said.

• AI traffic to retail websites increased 138% in May from last year, the highest share of total retail visits since Adobe ​Analytics began ​tracking in October 2024.

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That latter statistic either indicates far more use by a slowly growing number of people, or rapidly growing adoption with consistent use.
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How the social media ban might collapse • Goodall and Good Luck

Lewis Goodall is sceptical about the under-16s social media ban:

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Many of the details trouble me as rushed and ill-considered. Does anybody believe that Starmer would be acting so precipitously, without a white paper, unless he was legacy shopping? Is it really credible to say that 16 year olds are able to vote and marry, but prohibited from posting about it on Instagram after 8pm? What will happen with the data which is collected? How will the age verification actually work and can it be done in such a way which is not onerous for adults? And do we really think it’s credible or desirable to ban YouTube for teenagers, which is basically just their…TV?

The exact application of the details matter as do good answers to all these questions because if they are not ironclad, ironically enough, it is now on social media that they are pulled apart and discredited in dog-year time. For a case study in exactly what I mean, we need look no further than digital ID cards, proposed by the government last September. That was, until Keir Starmer advocated it, a very popular proposal.

The PM came out in favour of it, just before party conference, to get himself out of the latest political hole in which he found himself. It was announced out of the blue, with virtually no real plan for how it would be affected or explained to the country, certainly not a comms strategy. It was torn apart online, conspiracy about government control quickly spread, propelled by eccentric but influential accounts with the algorithms on their side- and virtually nothing was done at the top of government to stop it.

Within weeks, its polling collapsed. In the broadcast era, governments could roll out technocratic reforms through institutional trust and message discipline. In the algorithmic era, every enforcement mechanism, every minor controversy instantly becomes content — clipped, distorted, radicalised and fed back into politics at scale. With the weird fusion of political content and the hothouse of Westminster, there is increasingly a third body of the British Parliament. A sort of algorithmic veto. One of the explanations as to how and why the Starmer government has struggled, is because it hasn’t been able, through political skill, to combat and overcome it.

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This is the other element: even if the public supports it, is the political drive there to make it happen?
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Tech titans are hacking their bodies for a longer life. But is there science behind their methods? • Nature

Chris Stokel-Walker:

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Tech entrepreneur and billionaire Peter Thiel told Bloomberg News in 2014 that he takes human growth hormone in hopes of living for 120 years, despite the Mayo Clinic, a renowned US medical centre, warning of substantial risks and saying that there is little evidence that the drug helps healthy adults to regain youth or energy. Thiel did not respond to Nature’s questions about whether he still takes the hormone or what he makes of the Mayo Clinic’s guidance.

In hopes of enhancing cognition, some Silicon Valley tech leaders have touted methylene blue, a compound with a long history as a textile dye that has been approved for limited medical use, mainly to treat a rare blood disorder. And they are promoting nicotine pouches — marketed as an alternative to smoking — as a way to optimize focus and energy, despite well-documented concerns about addiction.

These wealthy longevity evangelists are often seen as translators of early-stage science to the public, who turn preliminary or anecdotal findings into so-called stacks that combine supplements, other compounds, protocols and therapies, long before FDA approval. “It’s a trickle-down effect due to the nature of platforms they use to spread their content,” says Margje Camps, a researcher at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands who studies health influencers.

But there is a danger to this growing phenomenon: researchers who study ageing and longevity warn that these biohacks have not been clinically tested, meaning that it’s unclear whether they work or might harm people.

There is no medical intervention that is proven to extend human life by targeting ageing itself, says Andrew Steele, an independent longevity researcher based in Berlin and author of the book Ageless (2022). “There probably are things on our radars that might work, but nothing has ever been tried in humans.”

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Me and my exoskeleton: the rise of wearable robotics • Financial Times

Patti Waldmeir:

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We are entering the age of the everyday exoskeleton: light, wearable robotic devices that can change what it means to grow old.

Last week I strapped on a pair of bionic trainers to help me walk, and a robotic hip belt to make climbing easier. Not that I need assistance with either function now — but one day, I probably will. I applaud the idea of wearable robots that can help stave off immobility, as well as the social isolation and physical and mental decline it often brings.

Full exoskeletons have been around for decades, designed for military, workplace or medical rehabilitation uses. But now lighter and more affordable (if not cheap) joint-specific wearable exoskeletons are entering the market, aimed not at those who cannot walk, but those who struggle to go as far or as comfortably as they’d like.

“Living longer is a biology problem, but living well is a design problem,” Anna Roumiantseva, co-founder of Skip, a wearable robotics company, tells me. Modern science has added decades to human life “but we haven’t redesigned the products and systems around us. It’s the classic ‘lifespan vs healthspan’ thing,” she says.

Her company is accepting pre-orders for $5,000 “powered trousers” as part a “movewear” collection that integrates exoskeleton technology into consumer products. The goal is to “enhance the experience of ageing,” she says, adding, “a lot of the time, that comes down to social elements: not feeling like people have to wait for me, or taking that trip I’ve been putting off.”

Ankle-assist, hip-assist, knee-assist and other such devices are meant to be worn every day, like hearing aids — not just in a crisis. Roumiantseva says it’s important for the company to attract users “who still take the stairs occasionally”.

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There’s a video of Waldmeir (who doesn’t give her age) strolling along a city street walking her dog. They certainly look more elegant than those mobility scooters people use. Look, if they’re good enough for Sigourney Weaver fighting aliens..
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