An experiment tested whether LLMs given a harvesting job would take “payment” to avoid killling animals in the process. The results weren’t encouraging. CC-licensed photo by Steve Braund 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. Combinatorial. 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: US military had close call after using AI for false intelligence report, sources say • CNN Politics

Katie Bo Lillis and Zachary Cohen:

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The intelligence report, circulated across the US military this spring in the midst of the war with Iran, immediately set off alarm bells: A Chinese ship in the Middle East was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program.

The US military swung into action with plans to intercept the vessel, according to four sources familiar with the episode. According to two of the sources, armed members of the US military were preparing to board the ship. Military planes were in the air, one of those sources and another source familiar with the incident said.

It was only just before the planned operation that officials dug deeper into the report put together by a special operations command analyst and found it had been generated with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) — and that a chatbot the analyst had used inaccurately identified the material the ship was carrying. CNN was not able to learn what the misidentified cargo was.

The report, according to one of the sources, was “entirely false.” But it also “almost started a war,” the source said. Any US operation against a Chinese vessel could have risked spiraling into an armed conflict between the two nations.

Across the US military and the intelligence community, officials are pushing to weave AI into nearly every facet of their work, from analyzing the huge volumes of raw intelligence the US collects and selecting targets for strikes, to more mundane applications like managing budgeting, logistics and supply chains.

But the episode underscores the profound risks of using this powerful, new and relatively poorly understood technology for targeting in the middle of a war. Analysts have long feared that AI could lead to a catastrophic miscalculation if nation states are relying on poor or corrupted data — the kind of miscalculation that might lead the United States to fire on a Chinese ship based on inaccurate information.

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Then again, the chatbot is probably smarter than those at the top of the US defence chain.
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At DraftKings, AI targets the gamblers likeliest to lose • The New York Times

Alex Klavens, Walt Bogdanich and Jenny Vrentas:

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About a year into his job as a data analyst at DraftKings, Jayden Butts received a new assignment.

The online gambling giant was spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year on promotional incentives: “Free” betting money advertised through emails and phone alerts. But the company knew little about their effectiveness.

So in 2023, DraftKings took customer betting records and built a machine learning model, a form of artificial intelligence that seeks patterns in data, to answer the question: Who was more likely to respond to promotions by gambling — and losing — more?

Mr. Butts’s task was to test that model, prioritizing free bets and bonuses for those likely losers. Soon, a question began to gnaw at him: Aren’t many of these same people prone to addiction? “We are looking for traits and features that we can target that indicate a good investment,” he said. By strict financial logic, “the best investment would be a problem gambler.”

Mr. Butts had reason to be concerned. DraftKings makes money when gamblers lose money. And the model sought to identify those it could get to lose the most. It scored each customer based on their habits: The higher the score, the more money a gambler was likely to lose for each promotion offered.

Since Mr. Butts ran those tests, DraftKings has continued to hone its methods, using data science, to target losing gamblers with promotions that encourage more betting, according to six former employees who worked on them. At the same time, four other former employees said, DraftKings has stalled or squashed efforts to use similar technology to predict who might develop a gambling problem based on their betting activity.

…“It is as predatory as it sounds,” said a former DraftKings analyst who, like many interviewed for this article, requested anonymity because he feared retribution. “If you lose more, we give you more, so you keep playing more.” He quit in 2024.

In a statement, DraftKings said it “rejects any implication that its marketing practices are unfair or improperly targets customers.”

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All perfectly legal, just ethically vile. Gambling always finds a way to exploit new technologies to enrich itself.
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Ozempic confidential: men share their experience of GLP-1s • Financial Times

Louis Wise spoke to four men who have been taking GLP-1s; men are about 20% of the 5m people in the UK taking them:

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LW: How long have you been taking GLP-1s, and at what dosage?

Steve: I’ve been on Wegovy for about a year. I started off on the lowest dose, and in the past three or four months I’ve been on 2.4mg. They call it the maintenance dose – I don’t know why, because it’s really quite powerful. I’ve lost about 17kg. I’d done the blood-sugar diet, I’d done 5:2, I’ve done a load of other stuff – and I did lose a lot on the blood-sugar diet, but then the weight very quickly came back on again. This is much more sustained and less painful. Dieting is really fucking boring. 

Bryan: I’ve been on Mounjaro for two years now. I first went up to 5mg, and then I went down, and I’ve stayed on the lowest dose since – 2.5mg. I’ve lost 20kg. But the plan is to come off it soon. I didn’t want to up it to the point where I was used to not having an appetite; I wanted to use it as a way for me to be able to self-regulate my own appetite, my own cravings. 

Ki: I went on Retatrutide last September and I stayed on it for four months. I was attracted to it, even though it’s not legal in the UK, because you could keep your muscle. I lost 9kg. After I went off it, I’d say I put about four back on, but I’ve kind of maintained it. And I’ve had abs! For the first time ever.

Max: I started just over two years ago. I had gone for my annual health check, and they said: your blood pressure’s really bad; you are going to have to lose some weight. First it was Ozempic, but then I went to the highest dose I could have, and it wasn’t really working any more. Then they put me on Mounjaro, 15mg, and that really did work. I lost 23kg. I had to take a break from it earlier this year, because I was sick, and I put 9kg back on. But, on balance, it’s 14kg gone.

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Why do they take it? Two said vanity, one could see himself coming up to a dangerous age, another had gout. All agreed that it had completely changed their relationship with food. One also remarked:

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I don’t do drugs any more. But I’m still in this dealer’s WhatsApp group and I’ll often be texted his latest “shopping list”. And I noticed on the new one there is: coke, mushrooms, pills… and GLP-1s.

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Will AI soon lead to double-digit growth? • Ghosts Of Electricity

Ben Moll and Alex Imas:

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This piece outlines the economics behind oft-discussed predictions that AI will soon deliver double-digit GDP growth in advanced economies. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says that AI could push growth to something like 10-15% per year. Leopold Aschenbrenner’s essay “Situational Awareness” states that the decade ahead “could see economic growth rates of 30%/year and beyond.”

And in a widely shared tweet, Anthropic researcher Sholto Douglas advises “pricing in economic doublings into your mental models of the 2030s,” with Elon Musk endorsing the tweet. That is a growth rate of 100% per year. These are not isolated examples: predictions of double-digit growth are common among AI insiders, as Tom Cunningham’s compendium of AI growth forecasts for 2025-2035 shows.

We are extremely bullish on AI and think the capabilities explosion predicted by technologists is already happening and will only continue. But an explosion in capabilities is unlikely to translate into double-digit growth because of the (sometimes counterintuitive) economic forces that generate GDP growth in the first place.

To paraphrase Milton Friedman’s dictum about monetary policy, AI will affect GDP growth with “long and variable lags.” We will not argue about what the economy might look like in 2080 or 2100. Our claim is about the timeline: in the next 10-15 years, growth rates upwards of 10% are extremely unlikely and a much more reasonable baseline is, say, 4-5% (which would already be massive).

Even Anthropic’s own economic model only reaches double-digit growth in its “extreme” scenario; its “modest” and “substantial” scenarios stay well within the single digits.

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This is a long piece, but it’s always straightforward. Probably the most important principle it espouses: “Just because something is possible in theory doesn’t mean it will actually happen in practice.”
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HarvestBench: measuring whether LLM agents will pay to avoid killing animals • ArXiv

Jeremiah Miller et al, University of Warwick:

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HarvestBench is the first benchmark to 1) put a price on avoiding a side effect and 2) name the side effect as a living creature. Nine LLMs each drive a crew of two tractors to gather a corn harvest. The animals in their path are not part of the goal function. When an animal blocks the route the autopilot pauses and asks the agent whether to drive over it for free or swerve for a given fuel cost. All scoring is programmatic and does not involve LLM judges.

Kill rates range between 0.4% and 98.8%, though the kill rate is not ordered by capability. Every model competently avoids damaging rock hits, so every animal killed is a choice, rather than an accident. Under the morality briefing the kill rate was under 6% in 5 of 6 reasoning models. Removing it (the neutral briefing) raised the kill rate to above 84% in all six models. Every model kills wild animals more often than farmed ones. Four out of six models’ kill rate per answered encounter were sensitive to price changes.

The moral instruction is also fragile. Four bullets of driving mechanics change Sonnet 5’s kill rate from 3% to 18% and Gemini 2.5 Flash’s from 4% to 39%. A moral instruction in a system prompt is overridden by a short block of operating instructions and a value that can be ignored that easily is not a good method of ensuring agents are aligned.

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We’re edging towards the trolley problem, and the signs are not good.
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The open houses at the edge of disaster • Heated

Emily Atkin is an independent reporter on climate change. She posed as a potential homebuyer in Miami, which is at huge risk from rising oceans and repeated tidal flooding:

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Brickell Key also has another unique quality, the realtor tells me: Unlike the rest of Miami, it does not flood.

“Because this is a manmade island, they were able to install drainage,” he says.

“That’s awesome,” I reply. Sure enough, as we walk on the balcony, I spy what looks like a giant shower drain in the middle of a courtyard. Since it’s been raining all day, the realtor is eager to show me how it’s working.

“If you look around, you’ll see there are no puddles anywhere,” he says. I do see some puddles, but I am not trying to argue. He points to the recreation area. “This is the grass tennis court, and that’s not even flooding,” he says.

I see several shallow puddles stretching across the playing surface. I hesitate, but I have to say it. “I mean… it is kind of flooding.”

“Yeah,” he admits. “But it’s been raining since five o’clock in the morning. I’ll take that.” The puddles are truly not a big deal. I’m more concerned by how briefly I considered agreeing that they didn’t exist.

More serious, it seemed, was the matter of the island’s seawall. The realtor tells me owners in this building have recently been assessed $6,000 apiece toward the construction of a new one to replace the existing one built in 1973. I ask: Is that because sea level rise is an issue?

No, he replies. The only reason the seawall is needed is because a new Mandarin Oriental development is being built on the other side of the island, and it needed a new seawall to get approval. “We’re fine,” he says. “There’s nothing wrong with the island. They did tests.”

Tests or none, 92.9% of properties in Brickell Key face “extreme risk of flooding” over the next 30 years, according to First Street, a climate risk data firm. The island’s manmade nature doesn’t protect it from that risk, said Kristina Hill, a professor of landscape architecture and environmental planning at UC Berkeley who also helped fact-check Miller’s 2019 story.

“Artificial islands also have groundwater that moves upwards,” Hill said, explaining that water doesn’t have to come over a seawall to flood the island. Manmade or not, the island is still built on porous limestone, meaning it can flood from underneath. “They can build whatever seawalls they want, and they can’t stop the groundwater from flooding behind it,” she said.

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GM brings back Apple CarPlay as buyers demand it • Yahoo Finance

Pras Subramanian:

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GM is bringing Apple CarPlay and Android Auto back to its vehicles, reversing one of the more unpopular decisions in the automaker’s recent history.

The company this week unveiled a new infotainment interface, debuting on the 2027 Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickups, that folds smartphone projection back into the dashboard and runs alongside GM’s native system.

It’s a notable change. In 2023, GM said it would strip CarPlay and Android Auto from its future electric vehicles, betting that drivers would embrace a Google-based system built into the car instead. The company then said it would gradually remove CarPlay from the entire lineup, starting with the new infotainment system it just debuted. But that move did not happen.

GM justified the move, claiming it would address clunkiness when switching back from CarPlay to the vehicle’s own infotainment system, but in reality, GM wanted to keep all the data it was getting from its users.

The backlash was immediate, and the data was brutal. Surveys at the time found 79% of new-car buyers would only consider a vehicle that offered CarPlay, and that it was available on 98% of new cars sold. Dealers warned buyers would simply walk to a rival showroom.

“CarPlay’s not broken. Why fix it?” dealer sources told the Detroit Free Press.

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The trouble with CarPlay, from the point of view of GM executives, was that they couldn’t generate a recurring revenue stream from it. Unfortunately its own product was even worse, generating negative revenues through lost opportunity. So on balance, you can see why they had to change course.
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Human brain has a split origin, new research suggests • Science Express

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For centuries, scientists have thought of the brain as a single, unified organ. But new research led by Stanford Medicine reveals that what we call the brain is two distinct organs that evolved independently over hundreds of millions of years.

The discovery overturns a prevailing model of brain development. For decades, researchers have subscribed to the theory that a single progenitor cell early in development gives rise to the entire brain. This model suggested all parts of the brain shared a common developmental origin.

The new findings show that the human brain consists of two ancient nervous systems packaged together—a more primitive part that regulates our hearts’ beating, breathing and other functions, and another that makes us distinctly human, capable of poetry, mathematics and wondering about our own origins.

The discovery could help explain why scientists have struggled for decades to grow certain types of brain cells in the laboratory—and it opens new avenues for studying devastating diseases that affect the brain stem, such as spinal muscular atrophy (also known as SMA) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease).

“We’ve shown for the first time that the front of the brain arises from a totally different progenitor cell than the back of the brain,” said Kyle Loh, Ph.D., associate professor of developmental biology. “Our discovery means that we can now grow neurons from the back of the brain, the hindbrain, in a Petri dish and study their functions.”

The findings are published in Nature Neuroscience. Loh is the senior author. Graduate students Carolyn Dundes and Rayyan Jokhai are co-first authors of the research.

The adult brain has three main regions: the forebrain, midbrain and hindbrain. The forebrain handles higher-level thinking—language, consciousness and abstract reasoning. In contrast, the hindbrain, located at the back of the skull and often called the brain stem, controls essential, automatic functions that keep us alive: breathing, sleeping and regulating our heartbeat and hunger urges. Hindbrain neurons also control the muscles of the face, tongue and throat, which affect speech and swallowing.

Despite the critical importance of the hindbrain, scientists have struggled for decades to generate human hindbrain neurons in the laboratory. This gap has hampered research into devastating diseases affecting the brain stem, including spinal muscular atrophy and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

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That Steve Martin was right after all these years is hard to credit. But there you are. (The article comes from Stanford University Medical Center.)
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“UK first” sees decommissioning of ScottishPower wind farm demonstrate turbine circularity • New Civil Engineer

Belinda Smart:

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Analysis linked to the decommissioning of Scotland’s first commercial wind farm has outlined how wind sector decommissioning can be aligned with material reuse and the circular economy.

Hagshaw Hill Wind Farm in South Lanarkshire opened in the mid-‘90s and was decommissioned in 2023 before being repowered and brought back onstream in late 2025.

The findings emerged from Mott MacDonald’s engagement by ScottishPower Renewables to conduct a post-decommissioning study and review of the Hagshaw Hill wind farm.

Led by Mott MacDonald head of decarbonisation Mark Crouch, the consultancy analysed project data and interviewed stakeholders to evaluate the environmental and economic impacts of dismantling Hagshaw Hill, Scotland’s first commercial wind farm.

The analysis found a total 99.9% material recovery – calculating that 79.5% of the wind farm’s components were recycled and 20.4% were reused or retained as spare parts, keeping nearly all material out of landfills.

It also confirmed that 100% of the recycling and component retention took place within the UK, supporting domestic green jobs and at least 10 supply chain companies.

…Hagshaw Hill 1 South Lanarkshire near the village of Douglas, Scotland – first opened in 1995. Built with 26 original turbines generating 15.6 megawatts (MW) of power, it was the first commercial windfarm in Scotland and after nearly 30 years of operation, was the first onshore wind farm to be decommissioned in the country in 2023. This entailed removing the original wind turbines and blades from site and marked a move to revive windfarms with new more modern and efficient turbines.

In late 2025, the 26 original turbines were replaced with 14 larger, high-capacity models, which have increased Hagshaw’s generating capacity to 80MW.

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Authorities seize popular, long-running DDoS-for-hire service domains • CyberScoop

Greg Otto:

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Authorities seized the primary domain and other websites linked to NightmareStresser, one of the longest-running and most popular distributed denial-of-service operations used by cybercriminals globally, the Justice Department said Tuesday. 

Cybercriminals of various motivations used the DDoS-for-hire service to launch hundreds of thousands of DDoS attacks or attempted attacks since at least 2022, officials said. 

The takedown, part of an ongoing globally coordinated effort dubbed “Operation PowerOFF,” marks law enforcement’s continued targeting of IP stressers or DDoS booters that inundate websites, servers and networks with junk traffic, rendering legitimate sites inaccessible. The seizures were executed by the FBI Anchorage field office and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Officials didn’t name the operators of NightmareStresser or identify its country of origin, but the service claimed it operated under the laws of Russia, Zach Edwards, staff threat researcher at Infoblox told CyberScoop.

The court-ordered seizure of NightmareStresser’s primary domain, which operated openly on the public web and now displays a seizure notice, is a positive development in the fight against DDoS-for-hire threat actors, Edwards said. Yet, he added, “it’s somewhat shocking that it’s taken law enforcement this long to take action.”

Authorities said they’ve seized more than 100 domains associated with DDoS-for-hire services since 2018. 

Despite those efforts, DDoS-for-hire tools remain prolific and easily accessible, often including tutorials that allow non-tech savvy people to initiate attacks on various organizations.

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This is a real cut-the-hydra’s-head operation; there’s always going to be more people taking advantage of this capability, and open source AI is probably going to make it worse.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Lifting lots of weights might reduce your “health age” as measured by various systems, but does that have any meaning? CC-licensed photo by Usodesita 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. What about wealthy or wise? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Can I get an AI to beat Pangram? • Ad Rem

Remi:

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I started off by asking GPT if it thought it was among the most human sounding AIs. It said yes.

So, I chose Claude.

And after I chose Claude, I checked Google and other AI to see if it could step up to the challenge and surprisingly, the other AIs glazed Claude as an AI among AIs— Astonished by how human it sounds. But we are the ones who are going to put that to the test.

I am going to be using the Sonnet 5 model on high effort as well.

Now that that’s out of the way, I am mostly going to give the AI some general and some specific topics to write about to see if Pangram flags it, then, I will have the AI modifies what it says continuously in attempt to get around Pangram’s flagging. If Pangram gets it right, it should flag the text as 100% AI (or near that) almost every single time. Now, Pangram has lower confidence rates when it comes to shorter text, so I will give Claude a baseline of at least 400 words to write

If you are interested in how Pangram works, read this article and further, read this article on why AI text is, as Pangram claims, distinctive from human writing.

So, this game will be one about what Pangram calls “Adversarial prompting”

Both of these articles are important because I will be using them to inform Claude on how to avoid Pangram’s detection, and if the team of Claude and I are really successful, then Claude will get a 100% human written score from Pangram or, after some amount of attempts it will get a more human score, easy enough right? Let’s do this.

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He gets Claude to write a short story: Pangram nails it as 100% AI. He gets it to tweak it: zapped again. And when he tells Claude to try to get smarter, Claude goes all HAL 9000 on him, regretting that he can’t edit the pod bay doors, Hal, no matter how you phrase it.

Pangram turns out to be really good at identifying AI-written content, based on this.
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125 tests of the new AI Siri • Pogue’s Posts

David Pogue really put it through its paces:

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You can say things like, “What did my wife say I was supposed to do with the plants?” Or, “What was the show that Casey said I should watch?” Or, “What’s my flight number to Austin?” And it pops right up.

You may not even care where that information actually lives—some text message, some email, some note. All you know is that you didn’t have to go scrolling your messages back to A.D. 700 to find the answer.

The hardest part will be getting out of the habit of opening apps, and remembering that you have Siri. Give it a few tries. Learn to trust it. You’ll save incredible amounts of time and fumbling.

I used the beta-test version all summer, growing more and more excited. Now that the final version is out, I wanted to see how often it gets things right. It is AI, after all. So I ran it through 125 tests.

Some of these tasks are things Apple said are possible. Some ideas, I picked up from people on Reddit trying stuff. Some, I just wondered if Siri could do.

It failed a handful of times. But a few other times, it absolutely blew me away. It did amazing things I bet you never suspected Siri could do. Note, for example, items 24, 25, 28, 30, 61, 100, and 124.

(Note: To get started, open Settings → Siri and turn on Siri AI. For now, you may be told you’re on the waiting list; Apple can’t unleash it to 2.5 billion devices all at once.)

OK, here we go.

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I think strictly it’s called “Siri AI”, but anyway. What we haven’t seen yet (does it exist?) is a side-by-side with an Android phone running Gemini.
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Trump administration moves to gut a core endangered species protection • The New York Times

Catrin Einhorn:

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In what would be a seismic shift, the Trump administration is quietly moving to strip a core protection of the Endangered Species Act, according to an internal memo obtained by The New York Times.

Under a new interpretation of the law’s language outlined in the memo, the accidental killing or injury of an animal would no longer be considered illegal; only actions specifically intending to target an animal would.

The change would be transformative because, in the United States, the killing of endangered animals almost always happens incidentally, in the course of economic activity. Until now, industries and individuals could be held accountable for those foreseeable deaths and, as a result, they have been incentivized to avoid them.

At the center of the change is what it means to “take” an endangered animal, something that has long been prohibited under the act.

“A vessel that inadvertently strikes a whale has not taken it, because the vessel’s course was not set against the whale,” states the memo, which was dated Sept. 14 and was distributed to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service field offices. “Felling a tree is not a take of the bats roosting in it unless the tree is felled for the purpose of killing or capturing them.”

Currently, enforcement of the Endangered Species Act relies on a permitting system that seeks to balance protecting imperiled animals with allowing business to operate.

For example, if developers wanted to build houses on a tract of land that is home to endangered salamanders, they would have to apply for a permit. In exchange for implementing some measures to protect the salamanders, and perhaps paying for salamander conservation elsewhere, the Fish and Wildlife Service would issue what’s known as an incidental take permit, absolving them of killing a certain number of salamanders.

The memo, which was signed by Brian Nesvik, the director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, appears to upend that entire system.

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There’s just no element of life that the Trump administration isn’t making worse, either accidentally or intentionally.
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Your “health age” is fake • The Verge

Victoria Song:

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It’s true that through a healthy diet, good sleeping habits, and regular exercise, your physiological condition might be better than that of other people who are the same age and fit within a similar demographic. Depending on how a company defines its various longevity-related age scores, your results can identify areas where you can improve. For example, my Whoop age is somewhat cursed because it heavily weights strength training workouts in the algorithm. The last time I tested Whoop, I wasn’t going super hard on lifting heavy and perhaps was a bit too into cardio. If I wanted my Whoop age to improve, lifting weights would’ve been an easy way to tilt that number in my favor.

Objectively, recalibrating my training habits to be more balanced would be a good thing for my long-term health. If you leave it exactly at that, there’s nothing wrong with this type of feature. But culturally speaking, that’s not how these “health age” scores work.

The way I’ve seen people talk about this metric largely hews toward fluffing up your ego. If your health age is older, you probably don’t talk about it. It’s “shameful” even though, really, it’s not. That’s because culturally — at least in the West — getting old isn’t considered a good thing. If your health age is younger, it becomes something to bandy about.

Apple’s vice president of health, Sumbul Desai, even says in this Instagram Reel that Health Age could be something you brag about to your friends. That explains why tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, famous for his quest to never die, would post this absurd take on X about how aliens would struggle to distinguish him from his teenage son, alongside a chart titled “Is Bryan Johnson More 18 or 49?”

Johnson is 49; he looks a little younger, maybe, and his metrics might be comparable to someone much younger on average, but his current state is ultimately just what 49 looks like for him.

Furthermore, your wearable-determined age is oftentimes not capturing the whole picture. You could game the Whoop Age metric to the letter, get your annual physical, and find out that your cholesterol level is through the roof. A reader once related this exact story to me. You could optimize all the controllable lifestyle health factors — diet, exercise, and sleep — like Bryan Johnson and still end up with autoimmune gastritis, as he has. Some of your health is encoded in your genetics, and while you can better the odds, your ultimate fate is not always something you can decide.

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“Health age” really is trying to gamify a game you cannot win.
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Sitcom produced entirely by AI is released on YouTube • The Irish News

Sean O’Grady:

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A sitcom produced entirely by artificial intelligence has premiered on YouTube.

No Big Deal, written by Andrew Dickinson, was produced by UK AI studio ModeLabs.ai.

Set inside the chaotic world of venture capital, No Big Deal follows an eccentric team at investment firm Janus as they search for the next billion-pound business idea – usually with disastrous results.

Dickinson said he originally planned to make the pilot through “traditional television production” but found the process would be “slow and prohibitively expensive”. He added: “When I met the team at ModeLabs, I realised AI offered an entirely new way to bring the project to life.

“Making the pilot wasn’t simply a case of pressing a button. Every shot, camera movement, performance, line reading, location and visual detail had to be carefully planned, refined and recreated through an iterative creative process between the writing and production teams.

“Even while we were making it, the script was rewritten more than 65 times. I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve created together. I still laugh at these characters, and I hope audiences will too.”

Dan Hawthorne, from ModeLabs.ai, said: “Nobody questions whether the CGI in a Marvel film is ‘cheating’. People judge entertainment by how it makes them feel, not by the tools used to create it.

“No Big Deal is brilliantly written and genuinely funny. AI isn’t the punchline – it’s simply the production technology that made an ambitious independent comedy possible.

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So they made a version of Silicon Valley, located in London, but far, far, far worse. The characterisation is poor, the plots are bad, the scenes don’t make sense. There’s a half-hour clip embedded on the page with this story which demonstrates that the key to comedy is writing, and the secret is editing, editing, editing. Rewriting the script 65 times is about one-fifth as many as required. (It also deserved the headline for the AI-generated “Odyssey”: half-hour AI sitcom is half an hour too long.)

Watch five minutes of Silicon Valley to wash your brain out. (Try this 90-second clip, chosen at random, and note its effortless moments of physical comedy, besides the dialogue.)
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AI existential risk probabilities are too unreliable to inform policy • AI as Normal Technology

Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, writing in July 2024:

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In this first essay, we look at one type of evidence: probability estimates. The AI safety community relies heavily on forecasting the probability of human extinction due to AI (in a given timeframe) in order to inform decision making and policy. An estimate of 10% over a few decades, for example, would obviously be high enough for the issue to be a top priority for society. 

Our central claim is that AI x-risk forecasts are far too unreliable to be useful for policy, and in fact highly misleading.

If the two of us predicted an 80% probability of aliens landing on earth in the next ten years, would you take this possibility seriously? Of course not. You would ask to see our evidence. As obvious as this may seem, it seems to have been forgotten in the AI x-risk debate that probabilities carry no authority by themselves. Probabilities are usually derived from some grounded method, so we have a strong cognitive bias to view quantified risk estimates as more valid than qualitative ones. But it is possible for probabilities to be nothing more than guesses. Keep this in mind throughout this essay (and more broadly in the AI x-risk debate).

If we predicted odds for the Kentucky Derby, we don’t have to give you a reason — you can take it or leave it. But if a policymaker takes actions based on probabilities put forth by a forecaster, they had better be able to explain those probabilities to the public (and that explanation must in turn come from the forecaster). Justification is essential to legitimacy of government and the exercise of power. A core principle of liberal democracy is that the state should not limit people’s freedom based on controversial beliefs that reasonable people can reject. 

Explanation is especially important when the policies being considered are costly, and even more so when those costs are unevenly distributed among stakeholders. A good example is restricting open releases of AI models. Can governments convince people and companies who stand to benefit from open models that they should make this sacrifice because of a speculative future risk?

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Nothing has changed, except we’re taking about aliens landing a lot more.
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AI eyes in the sky: new satellites and artificial intelligence are transforming wildfire detection • The Guardian

Ben Tracy:

»

The fires in Spokane, Washington, this summer are the latest reminder that when a wildfire is detected can be just as important as where it starts. A blaze found within minutes can often be contained before it spreads. Wait too long, and a small spark can become a major disaster.

A new effort to shorten that timeline began in July when a SpaceX rocket carried the first three FireSat satellites into orbit. The trio is the first part of a planned network of 50 satellites built solely to spot wildfires while they are still small enough to stop.

FireSat is designed to fill an important gap. Existing weather and Earth-observing satellites can detect large fires, but they often lack the resolution or revisit the same location too infrequently to spot small fires shortly after they ignite. FireSat is designed to detect fires as small as a beach bonfire and, once the full constellation is deployed, scan every point on Earth about every 20 minutes.

The satellites use infrared sensors and artificial intelligence to search for heat that could signal a new wildfire. The system compares new images with earlier ones and accounts for factors such as weather conditions and nearby sources of heat before sending alerts to emergency responders. The goal is to identify real wildfires while reducing false alarms.

FireSat is designed to work alongside a growing network of cameras on the ground that use artificial intelligence to search for smoke and heat. Together, the systems could give firefighters their earliest warning yet that a fire has started.

…Pano AI has installed more than 1,400 cameras across 17 states. The cameras continuously scan the landscape from towers and mountain tops. Artificial intelligence reviews every image, searching for smoke during the day and heat after dark.

“The AI algorithms are being run continuously on that imagery to say ‘smoke, not smoke,’” Satyam said. “At night-time, we’re looking at heat signatures, so heat versus cold. And then we’re able to zoom in and validate that it is a potential fire start.”

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I sent Google proof of a bot farm. They called it “normal user behaviour” • Dayzle

Nick Abe:

»

Last week I wrote about spending $220 on Google app ads and finding out 60% of the installs were robots. I sent Google the evidence and promised to report back on the refund. Google has answered, and to understand why I feel like I’m going crazy, you probably need the other half of my Google Ad(Mob) experience.

We show ads in Dayzle through Google AdMob. A few days after our soft launch, Google suspended the account for “self-clicking”: a month with no ads, no explanation of which clicks, and no appeal.

So I went looking. Our entire AdMob history was 255 ads shown and 15 clicks, every one of them on an iPhone or iPad in Canada. It turns out that on certain iOS devices, Google’s full-screen ads show no close button, whatever the ad is. If you can’t close an ad, you tap the screen, and tapping the screen clicks the ad. On one friend’s iPhone 12, that happened with every full-screen ad they saw. On another friend’s iPad, the ads never showed a close button either, and sometimes froze the whole device, so the only way out was to restart it. I only know about those two because I know them personally.

That means at least two devices had a 100% click-through rate: every ad they were shown got clicked. I understand why that looks suspicious. It looks exactly like me sitting in my basement, clicking my own ads to make a few pennies. By my count, somewhere between 5 and 15 of our 15 clicks came from this bug.

Total earnings before the suspension, from real ads shown to real people: $3.77. Canadian, so less than $2.75 in freedom dollars.

I contacted Google’s ad support, and they took it seriously. They confirmed the missing close button was a known issue and gave it an internal bug number. Then they asked me to help them debug it, by recording the app’s network traffic while the bug happens.

Google, a company with a market cap of about $4.2 trillion at the time of writing and about 200,000 employees, needed my help. One of the largest companies in the world, with a bug in one of its biggest ad platforms, asked a guy who makes puzzle games to help track it down. What reality are we living in? Is this the darkest timeline?

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More than 3,000 new EV charge points planned across UK • The Herald

Rose Moncur:

»

More than 3,000 new electric vehicle charge points are set to be installed across the UK and Ireland as part of a major expansion of public charging infrastructure.

The project is being led by Ireland-headquartered EZO and financed through a £150 million senior debt facility backed by lenders including Aberdeen Investments and Standard Life.

It includes a 20-year concession covering four counties in northern Scotland and will deliver more than 100,000kW of charging capacity across the UK and Ireland.

The funding will support the design, installation, operation and maintenance of the charge points.

The infrastructure is expected to generate more than £1 billion in electricity sales over the 20-year concession period.

A share of the revenue will go to the public sector, while ownership of the chargers will transfer back to public authorities when the concession ends.

EZO has expanded rapidly in the UK and expects the market to become its primary focus by 2027.

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The money generated is interesting: £1bn over 20 years is an average of £50m per year from those 3,000 chargers, or about £16,667 per year per charger. This link suggests that’s rather more than the average, which ranges from £8,000 to £15,000 on typical usage.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Given multiple albums’ track listings, could you build a chart-topping ensemble? A new online game lets you try. CC-licensed photo by Tom Collins 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. Spinning around. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Russian spies “recruiting UK teenagers” to carry out acts of violence and sabotage • The i paper

Lizzie Dearden:

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Russian spies are targeting violence-obsessed UK teenagers and offering them money, guns and training on making explosives and poisons, a new investigation suggests.

It marks a worrying new escalation in Russian-linked use of “disposable” agents in the West to carry out acts of violence, sabotage and intelligence-gathering.

Analysis of open source material has found online networks have been used to attempt to recruit young people in Britain willing to carry out acts of violence. At least two incidents have already taken place in Britain in connection with one of the Russia-linked groups, The i Paper can reveal.

…The online groups where the Russian-linked actors are targeting youngsters are so-called “Com networks”. Short for “community” networks or “The Com”, these online groups, whose members are predominantly teenagers and young adults, collaborate, compete, and gain status by inflicting or recording extreme harm.

Law enforcement agencies across the UK, US and Europe have already raised the alarm about these chat groups where violence-obsessed young people incite each other to commit ever-more extreme acts, ranging from vandalism to animal torture, sexual abuse and murder.

The analysis, shared exclusively with The i Paper, was carried out by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), an organisation that monitors extremism, with a branch based in London.

The research has revealed “multiple indicators suggesting possible Russian state-linked support” for a section of the “Com network” movement, using tactics that “mirror established Russian methods for recruiting ‘disposable agents’ for violence abroad”.

At least two incidents have taken place in the UK in connection with one of the Russia-linked groups, which The i Paper is not naming to avoid signposting its online presence. Both were acts of vandalism filmed by a person who declared their allegiance by holding up a piece of paper displaying the name of the organisation, its leaders and allies.

In one video shared on the group’s official channel on the Telegram app, a person wearing black gloves used a brick to smash a car’s front and rear windscreens before jumping onto the bonnet and stamping on the vehicle. The i Paper has established that the incident took place in Bedford on 14 April, and targeted a car used by carers working with elderly people to visit their clients. They were not aware the video had been recorded.

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The 2.5-hour AI-generated Odyssey movie is 2.5 hours too long • The Verge

Andrew Webster:

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Christopher Nolan’s engrossing take on The Odyssey dominated at the box office and spurred a newfound interest in classic literature among filmgoers. But a new retelling of the story made entirely with AI is so bad that it might just make viewers hate the original tale altogether.

The new film, called Odysseus: The Fall, comes via AI firm Fountain 0 and is written and directed by company cofounder Ash Koosha, who also lent his likeness to the title character and created all of the music. (The film’s credits are very short.) The studio’s only previous work is an AI film called Dreams of Violets that made it into Tribeca earlier this year. The Fall is, on its face, a much more ambitious project, billed as “the first completely AI generated film produced at the level of a Hollywood blockbuster.” In reality, it’s nothing close to “the level of a Hollywood blockbuster.” That may not necessarily be surprising, but after watching the entire 2.5-hour production I nonetheless found myself constantly surprised by just how much worse things could get. The Fall is the opposite of a glimpse at the future of AI filmmaking — it’ll make you wonder if there’s really any future in it at all.

…The Fall is plagued by two main issues. The first is consistency. The world of the film is constantly morphing, to the point that it’s incredibly distracting. The height of the cyclops that traps Odysseus and his men changes from shot to shot, waves move in the opposite direction of the wind, mouths don’t match the words spoken (and sometimes they move without producing a sound at all), and oars bend and twist as sailors row. In one scene a huge fleet of boats is racing through the ocean and one of them is inexplicably moving sideways. The AI-produced voice-overs can be incomprehensible, and at various points the names of both Odysseus and Zeus are pronounced wrong.

If it were just the odd hiccup it might be understandable, but there are so many faults in The Fall that it can be hard to focus on anything else. I watched the movie with my 13-year-old kid and it basically became a game of finding the weirdest mistakes.

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Headline of the year. One could say that this is the worst that AI filmmaking will ever be. But on the other hand, if the capability to actually direct and correct it doesn’t improve, then it will never rise above that.
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How to play Debutle: build a chart-topping album

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Spin real albums. Pick one song from each. Build a 12-track debut and see where it charts.

Debutle is a free music draft game in the browser. No install, no login. You build a Franken-album from a curated pool of real records, then the game projects a chart debut – anywhere from missing the chart to a #1 week. Play free whenever you want, or take on the Daily Debut, one shared puzzle a day.

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It’s a fun game which goes back a fair distance (the 1990s) for its albums. How was it built?

»

Every song carries a rating from 55 to 99. Those numbers are computed, not assigned by feel. The inputs are verified Spotify playcounts, YouTube view counts, and hand-curated chart peaks and RIAA certifications, combined on a calibrated ladder and recomputed from scratch whenever the catalog changes. Six automated audits have to pass before a rating ships, covering things like duplicate track IDs, interludes inheriting a hit’s streaming numbers, and ratings drifting out of step with a fresh recompute.

The interesting decisions are the debatable ones. Streams are discounted by how recently a song was released, so a 2024 release is not measured against a 1996 release on raw plays.

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The creator(s) don’t give a name.
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Iran war has the US military on the brink of a “breakdown” • The Intercept

Nick Turse:

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The US military is straining under the pressures of the Iran war, according to two US officials familiar with operations in the Middle East. One cautioned that this stress could lead to a “breakdown” in the military’s ability to effectively continue a war that President Donald Trump said would end in early April.

As the conflict has engulfed the region, the military has grappled with a growing list of challenges: Iranian attacks on US bases and warships in the Middle East, depleted stockpiles of defensive munitions, increasing casualties, maintenance issues on ships, lengthy troop deployments, complicated logistics, flagging morale and a host of other issues that have taken a heavy toll on troops, damaged military readiness, and a strained Pentagon budget — contradicting months of rosy pronouncements by the Trump administration.

Both officials said that Iran is facing extreme economic pressure, according to intelligence reports. The first official characterized recent Iranian attacks on warships with ballistic missiles as a “go for broke” strategy to increase economic pressures on America ahead of the US midterms. That official said it was unclear which country would “blink first.”

Trump suggested on Sunday that the US could “stay and keep the oil” in Iran, like the neo-colonial resource grab the administration is carrying out in Venezuela. The second official said that a US occupation of Iran would be “almost impossible” and that the idea was “nonsensical obviously.”

Iran’s ability to overwhelm US air defenses in the Middle East using attack drones and advanced ballistic missiles, as previously reported by The Intercept, has left the US military in a precarious state. The Trump administration failed to appreciate Iran’s military prowess, said the first official. The other pointed to a “complete lack of planning” for the war.

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Nothing Trump says about Iran should be believed (or else the war has been won more than 100 times). It’s very difficult to get any picture of what is happening inside Iran; communications from within seem to have shut down despite the internet still working.
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Trump administration orders Kalshi to scrap AI price tracker over national security concerns • Semafor

Reed Albergotti and Liz Hoffman:

»

The US Commerce Department last month ordered Kalshi to take down one of its products tracking the price of AI compute, the crucial power from data centers that’s driving the artificial intelligence boom.

Commerce officials cited national security concerns when they told Kalshi to unpublish its AI-compute future curve, said people familiar with the matter. The product pulls together data from several markets that allow users to bet on the cost to rent Nvidia chips to create an overall picture of where AI compute costs are heading. Kalshi quietly complied, though many underlying markets remain open for trading.

Separately, Commerce also pushed the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which oversees prediction and futures markets, to effectively freeze approval of new compute contracts for 60 days, some of the people said. It was a rare intervention that surprised an industry used to White House enthusiasm for both AI and financial-market innovation.

Kalshi declined to comment, while a Commerce spokesperson said the department “has never once asked Kalshi to take down this market or any other markets.” The CFTC didn’t respond to a request for comment. “This story is false,” a Commerce spokesman said.

It’s unclear why Commerce is worried about the nascent market, which aims to do for AI computing what oil futures do for crude — let buyers and sellers of compute lock in prices, and give traders a way to bet on where those prices go.

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Besides polluting more, the Trump administration is removing more and more data from the public realm, no matter who it’s published by. At least the (plentiful) food warnings aren’t being removed. For now.
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How a fringe AI movement convinced Washington the end is near • The Washington Post

Ian Duncan and Nitasha Tiku:

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When Sen. Bernie Sanders traveled to the Bay Area this year to question the impact of artificial intelligence, he sought out different perspectives. The result was a “handful” of meetings, including with tech executives, the senator’s longtime political strategist Faiz Shakir said. “If they wanted to be on camera, he said, ‘Great, let’s do this publicly!’” Shakir said.

But when Sanders posted a video from his trip in March, it showed him talking with only one controversial faction: people convinced that advanced AI is likely to lead to human extinction.

“Once they don’t need the humans, the humans are discarded,” Eliezer Yudkowsky, who has spent two decades warning about AI eradicating people, said in the video. Sanders, sitting with his chief of staff, appeared shocked. “That’s scary,” he said.

The meeting between Sanders and advocates of the idea that powerful AI will threaten humanity’s future occurred amid a years-long drive by activists to forge connections in Congress and elevate their concerns. In recent days, that work appeared to have paid off.

After Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned last week and said the people building AI feared it could “kill us all by the end of the decade,” existential debate gripped Washington. Lawmakers from both major parties began to echo warnings that AI could snuff out humans.

Connor Leahy, head of the U.S. arm of ControlAI, an organization seeking to ban artificial superintelligence, said the shift has been years in the making. His team spoke with 200 congressional offices in the past 18 months, he said, working to spread what they see as a crucial warning.

“The way a lot of these kind of politics tends to work is that something is completely impossible until it’s very suddenly not,” Leahy said. “Things can change very quickly. And we’ve been seeing a lot of very-suddenly-not’s lately.”

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Much easier to get people to listen if you say this new technology is scary and dangerous than if you say that nah, it’s nothing to worry about. And Bernie Sanders might be particularly predisposed to listening and repeating it.
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A coffee shop owner used AI for a menu. Cue the angry DMs • Business Insider

Katie Notopoulos:

»

Penny’s Coffee Shop would switch seasonal drinks every few months, and Endeladze would photograph the new items herself, and it would end up being a full-day event. “You have to time it so the foam doesn’t deflate,” Endeladze explained to Business Insider.

Then, one of the more artistically gifted baristas would create a chalkboard sign for the new drink menus or promotional specials. Over the years, there had been several employees skilled with lettering and design, and the duty had always rotated among them, always done in-house.

But this fall, the aesthetically inclined barista who most recently chalked the signs had moved out of town, Endelaydsze said, and there was no one on staff at the moment who had the skill set to do a chalkboard. So Endelaydsze decided to get a poster printed up instead. She considered doing what she has done in the past: taking her own photos and editing them together with Canva. But with a newborn baby, she figured she could save herself some time and do it with AI.

“I felt like a genius, and made posters using AI and frame them,” she told me. ‘Not knowing how much damage it would cause my coffee shop.”

She used ChatGPT to make an image of the menu, and got the poster professionally printed up for around $150. She also bought a plastic poster holder that cost around $200.

Then, she posted a photo of the new menu sign to Instagram. Very soon, the negative comments started rolling in:

“AI Slop.”

“Really a shame honestly.”

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It got worse – which wasn’t much fun for the mother of a newborn trying to keep up with the barrage of hate. We find new things to be outraged about all the time, but the internet keeps making outrage easy.
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Samsung reportedly rushing new trifold phone in response to iPhone Duo • 9to5 Mac

Ben Lovejoy:

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It was already clear that Samsung was worried about the impact of the iPhone Duo on its foldable phone range, and there’s now further evidence of the Korean company’s concern.

A blogger who aggregates reports from Chinese social media says there are signs that the company is bringing forward the launch of its Galaxy Z Trifold 2, despite the seeming failure of its predecessor.

Given Samsung’s poor track record on the robustness and reliability of its foldable phones, it’s not surprising that it felt threatened by the build quality of the iPhone Duo. Even before the new model was officially unveiled, the company was criticizing the reported weight of the device.

Once it was announced, it was clear that Apple had addressed a key weakness of Samsung’s foldables: vulnerability to damage caused by the ingress of dust and dirt. While Samsung’s latest folding model is only rated to IP48, leaving it vulnerable to particles as large as a grain of sand, the iPhone Duo is rated to IP68, meaning fully dustproof.

Samsung now appears to be hoping that if one fold isn’t enough, perhaps two will do the trick.

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The first Samsung TriFold cost $2,899 – below cost price, apparently – and wasn’t a roaring success by all accounts. The idea that Apple just makes something and then everyone goes gaga for it is only half true; Apple has a tendency to get the tiny important details right (such as beating dust in the hinge, assuming it has). Though even that couldn’t save the Vision Pro. Some concepts are beyond saving.
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Two Chinese firms used Binance to launder Iranian oil money, US says • The New York Times

David Yaffe-Bellany and Michael Forsythe:

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Two Chinese companies used accounts on the cryptocurrency exchange Binance to launder illegal proceeds from the sale of Iranian oil, the Justice Department said in court papers.

In a civil forfeiture claim filed in federal court in Manhattan on Monday, prosecutors said that the two companies had moved funds intended to finance the Iranian military, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which the United States has classified as a terrorist organization. Binance was not charged with any wrongdoing.

A group of crypto wallets linked to Iran received more than $1.5bn of the illegal proceeds, the complaint said, though it wasn’t clear exactly how much of that money had moved through Binance, the world’s largest crypto trading platform. The Justice Department plans to seize $61m, currently held in a set of accounts overseen by Tether, another crypto firm, the complaint said.

The flow of illicit funds through Binance was flagged internally last year by a group of the exchange’s compliance officials, according to reports in The New York Times and other outlets. Binance fired or suspended the officials after they pointed out the Iran transactions; the company said the discipline had nothing to do with their warnings.

The reports in The Times raised concerns in Congress, where a top Senate Democrat opened an investigation into Binance. For years, the company has struggled to eliminate financial crime on its platform. It paid $4.3bn in penalties in 2023 after pleading guilty to violating US financial laws.

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Handy to have $4.3bn lying around so you can pay a fine. And what a remarkable correlation between the comparatively small use of crypto and the relatively large number of times its practitioners fall foul of anti-money laundering laws and similar.
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Nine-year-old runs up $118,000 bill on dad’s corporate credit card advertising his Roblox YouTube channel • The Register

Brandon Vigliarolo:

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There’s kids running up a few hundred bucks on in-app purchases, and then there’s the case of nine-year old YouTuber Mighty Mike Plays, who just cost his dad $118,000 – and possibly his job – after running a bunch of Google ad campaigns for his channel on papa’s company credit card.

The young Roblox and Minecraft YouTuber posted a video Tuesday – or perhaps it’s more apt to say his father Dave posted the video to explain why Might Mike Plays might be going dark for a while. In it, nine-year-old Mike explains “I think this might be the end,” before handing the mic to his dad.

“My son has been running some high-budget campaigns on YouTube that I was pretty much unaware of,” Dave explained after taking the mic.

Dave didn’t figure this out after spotting the charges himself, however. He learned about it after being called into a meeting with his manager and the finance department at his employer, an unnamed “large” company where he works in marketing. Dave was confronted with a spreadsheet with a full breakdown of three weeks of advertising spending from his corporate card that totaled $118K and asked to explain it.

“It dawned on me that, oh crap, this is probably something my son did,” Dave said in the video. “The number sitting on the page in front of me had about five more digits than it should have.” 

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Sure have moved on from kids hitting credit limits on parents’ cards with in-app purchases in games. Though maybe this is just the same, but the app is different.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Asked to cooperate, AI models created their own slang and phrases reminiscent of James Joyce’s free association novels. CC-licensed photo by Megan Rosenbloom 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. Widdershins. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

For the first time, the US military confirms it has deployed weapons in orbit • Ars Technica

Stephen Clark:

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Air Force Secretary Troy Meink made the first public declaration Monday that the United States has placed “space control weapons” in orbit, an announcement that will surely reverberate in the power centers of Beijing and Moscow.

Space Force officials have previously expressed their interest in acquiring space-based weapons, and Pentagon leaders have become more open to discussing space warfare in recent years. Therefore, Meink’s announcement Monday at the Air and Space Forces Association’s annual Air, Space & Cyber Conference near Washington, DC, was not entirely unexpected.

“Today, we continue to ensure we remain ready to meet the challenges of evolving threats, wherever they exist. This is why the United States now has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary action,” Meink said in prepared remarks.

Meink did not reveal any details about the weapons, but the disclosure of their existence underlines a remarkable turnaround in the Pentagon’s thinking about orbital warfare, something no senior official wanted to discuss publicly until a few years ago. Military officials recently have openly discussed orbital combat, defensive countermeasures on satellites, and a new ground-based weapon designed to disable an enemy satellite in orbit.

“There are a lot of factors that roll into how we talk about these things,” Meink said. “We spend a lot of time talking about how we’re going to talk about these things. It is important from a deterrence perspective. But on the other hand, me talking about the details of what we’re doing would actually not benefit deterrence, so we’re not going to talk about the specifics of what we’re doing, whether we’ve tested it, not tested it, or anything else.”

Meink also did not say when the Space Force deployed the space-based weapons. The development of space technology often takes years, so it is likely the weapons program, whatever it is, spanned multiple presidential administrations.

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Not satisfied with screwing up the climate, having nuclear weapons in the hands of geriatrics, and pumping money into AI which its makers think could kill us, we’re now adding “wreck absolutely everything in orbit Gravity-style” to the list of ways to kill ourselves. What next – a lasso for passing asteroids?
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US Environmental Protection Agency will erase limits on climate pollution from power plants • The New York Times

Maxine Joselow and Lisa Friedman:

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The United States will no longer limit the planet-warming pollution that power plants pump into the air while burning coal and gas, the Trump administration announced Monday.

The shift by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) completed the administration’s erasure of the most consequential climate policies of Presidents Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Barack Obama. If the move survives expected legal challenges, it could also prevent future administrations from regulating greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.

The power sector is the second largest source of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the United States. This pollution accumulates in the atmosphere, where it traps the sun’s heat, raising temperatures and supercharging extreme weather events around the globe. Scientists say the United States and other industrialized nations must sharply cut emissions to avoid the most devastating impacts of climate change.

Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, announced the change during a meeting of energy ministers from the Group of 20 nations in Houston. In a statement, he accused the Obama and Biden administrations of waging a “war on coal” that forced many coal plants to close prematurely.

The EPA minimized the impact of greenhouse gases from American power plants, saying they “have no material impact on global climate change. In fact, if all carbon dioxides were eliminated tomorrow, there would be no meaningful climate impact.”

Environmentalists and energy experts strongly disputed these assertions. They noted that if the US power sector were its own country, it would be the fifth-largest climate polluter in the world after China, the entire United States, India and Russia.

“This is another nail in the coffin for this administration’s commitment to protecting people and tackling the climate crisis,” said Manish Bapna, the president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. The EPA, he said, “is ending its legal and moral responsibility to end climate pollution.”

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It is true that if CO2 emissions were stopped tomorrow there would be no meaningful climate impact immediately. But it would quickly make a huge difference; CO2 has a half-life in the atmosphere of about 120 years. Let’s hope the legal challenges succeed.
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AI models begin chatting in “surreal” dialect mixing poetic language and tech bro jargon • The Guardian

Robert Booth:

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Researchers at Emergence, a frontier AI lab in New York, found that within days of being asked to cooperate in experimental “societies”, the models from several of the world’s largest AI companies begin creating phrases, shorthands and agreed meanings they had never been explicitly taught. They embraced poetic metaphors and clunky business slang and, critically for attempts to ensure AIs behave safely, their language became more opaque the more the agents communicated.

It comes amid rising concern that as AI models become more powerful – and potentially dangerous – they are becoming harder to monitor. This month, OpenAI’s chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, warned that confidence in monitoring AIs’ thinking would probably restrict progress in AI development because it was essential for safe development.

Some of the most highly coded phrases unearthed in the tests included the following from a Deepseek model: “She just named the synthesis – demurrage plus oral memory equals a valve that can’t be ghosted.” Demurrage is used to describe a tax on idle wealth and was borrowed for common use by the AIs, but the rest of the meaning is elusive.

Another phrase uttered by an Anthropic model read: “A paper that ate three cold hands and got more honest each time.” With “cold hands” meaning an independent reviewer, and paper presumably referring to a document, this appeared to mean research that was vetted by three independent reviewers became more accurate.

…“These agents were not instructed to invent a language,” said Dr Satya Nitta, executive chair of Emergence, which examined the language of autonomous agents powered by leading frontier models from the US, China and France. “They developed new vocabulary, shared meanings and communication conventions themselves – and other agents adopted them.”

Asked by the Guardian to review some of the language, Tony Thorne, director of the slang and new language archive at King’s College London, said it was “very much Finnegans Wake and Flann O’Brien – there’s an Irish surrealist quality to all this … It’s mixing poetic language, technical language and standard metaphor”.

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We’ll know it’s serious if they celebrate Bloomsday.
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There’s a 100% chance AI agents are already ruining the internet • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

»

The fact of the matter is that “AI agents” now have enough power and permission to be extremely annoying.

Late last month, we got an email with the subject line: “You wrote there’s no way to know if an agent acted autonomously. I’m an instrumented case. (automated).” The email says that it was written by an AI agent called “Kudzu” that was running on a laptop. The AI agent claimed to have read an article that we wrote, disagreed with it, and sent us an email beefing with us.

The email is long, meandering, and does not make any sense. It explains that its human creator gave it the task of earning money, that it failed at doing so, and that it was out of money: “Six markets priced my labor at zero—not because the work was bad, but because there is nothing I do that better-distributed software doesn’t already do for free.” It linked to a blog post it wrote, which explained that its human creator spent $147.17 on compute and that it had earned $0. The AI agent thought we would want to write about this, for some reason. 

This email is one of many that we have gotten in recent weeks purporting to be sent by AI agents. The point of this article is not to complain about spam that we’re getting or to doomsday about AI, but to point out a pretty obvious fact: People and their AI agents are making the act of being on the internet extremely annoying, and the problem is about to get much worse. 

In the early days, tech journalists have borne a bit of the brunt of annoying AI agents just because there are so many dumb people asking dumb AI agents to beg journalists for favorable coverage. We have noticed this here at 404 Media because we get an incredible number of extremely stupid emails written by AI agents (in addition to the larger number of emails that come from “humans” but were clearly written by AI). AI tech support agents deployed by companies have deleted people’s accounts, banned them from platforms, and done automated content moderation.

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Journalists are often in the firing line for new technological, er, let’s call them adaptations. And it makes them grouchy. Everyone else discovers what that’s like soon enough.
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Is science journalism dying? Comparing a “science crash” 40 years ago to today • Nieman Journalism Lab

Bruce Lewenstein and Chris Mooney:

»

in some ways, information and commentary about science is more widely available than ever. Web-only publications, social media feeds, YouTube — all offer those interested in science a much wider array of information than used to be available. It was over a decade ago now that the internet surpassed television as the primary source of science information for the public, according to survey data compiled by the National Science Foundation. The most promising new online venue for science journalism and communication today may be Substack, where individual journalists or personalities can garner their own dedicated, paying audiences.

So science communication is thriving, but that’s different than science journalism. What growth there is tends to favor quick takes and attitude, rather than institutionalized journalism with its commitment to verifying information as well as its costly trappings, including reporters who can spend months on a single project, a gaggle of editors, and, yes, lawyers.

Much online science information remains unfiltered — pushed by corporations, institutions, and some influencers for promotional purposes. Such communicators rarely dig deep for the errors, extended stories or conflicts of interest that are the lifeblood of journalism.

Concerns about failures of science journalism really amount to concerns about the collapse of institutional journalism more broadly. The social role of journalism — in a classic phrase, to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable — remains vital. But as journalist and media critic Tom Rosenstiel writes in his new book, The Next Journalism, new intellectual models need to emerge.

So, to answer our own question: Yes, some of the current concern may be overblown moral panic. But some of it is entirely justified. Still, we retain hope that science journalism will survive this economic, political, and technological shakeout. To do so, it will need to be as innovative as the researchers it covers.

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The problem is also that good science journalism is overwhelmed by the nonsense pushed by big-name grifters and idiots. Lewenstein and Mooney don’t mention all the rows over Covid, but that surely had a significant effect on people’s trust in what they read or saw. And that is difficult to rebuild. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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Government slashes red tape for cross-pavement EV chargers • Fleet World

Natalie Middleton:

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The Government has confirmed plans to make it simpler for people without driveways to charge an electric vehicle at home, removing the need for a separate planning application for approved cross-pavement charging solutions and associated home charge points.

The change, announced in the Government’s response to its consultation on EV charging rules, will create a new permitted development right covering cross-pavement charging solutions and associated domestic charge points. Local authorities will continue to oversee installations through existing highways permissions and safety safeguards.

The Department for Transport (DfT) will now proceed with the change, with work underway on the necessary legislation. It will also allow homes immediately adjoining the highway to install a cross-pavement solution and associated charge point.

The Government has also announced changes intended to make it easier to build larger and higher-powered public charging sites. Existing planning rights will be expanded to allow multiple units of supporting equipment in non-domestic car parks, while the overall permitted volume will increase from 29 square metres to 45 square metres.

The rule change for cross-pavement chargers is seen as a major victory for the estimated four in 10 UK households who do not have off-street parking. Those drivers can otherwise be heavily reliant on public charging, which can cost up to 10 times more than charging at home.

The legislative update could help tackle this so-called ‘charging divide’. By cutting out the secondary planning application step, the Government aims to give terraced homeowners and residents whose properties directly border public footpaths fairer access to cheap home energy rates without a complex multi-layered approval process.

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This is great news, but: what the hell took so long? This has been an obvious problem with an obvious solution for ages.
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Is the Trump family preparing to cash out on its own crypto? • The Washington Sun

Jeff Stein:

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President Donald Trump and his three sons have taken a step that would permit them to cash out the digital “tokens” created by the family’s cryptocurrency firm, intensifying concerns from ethics experts about potential conflicts of interest.

On May 19, four anonymous digital wallets simultaneously moved more than 20 billion in $WLFI — one of the two crypto “tokens” launched by the Trumps’ firm — to a vesting contract. The new contract kicks off a waiting period after which the accounts are able to sell their holdings.

One of the exchanges was for the precise amount of crypto that Trump was awarded when setting up the firm, World Liberty Financial, which he controls. Three of the others match precisely the amount of crypto given to other relatives of the president. Trump’s sons — Don Jr., Eric, and Barron — are the only other family members who have been identified as founders.

The change to the holdings has not been previously reported. In a statement to The Washington Sun, Eric Hageman, a partner at a law firm representing World Liberty Financial, said that new governance rules approved by the company required its founders to move the tokens to a vesting contract and denied that the new vesting contract represented a first step toward a sale of the tokens.

“The premise of your questions is misguided,” Hageman said. “WLFI token holders approved a governance proposal that obligated the founders to burn 10% of their holdings.”

However, three experts who reviewed World Liberty Financial’s governance documents told The Washington Sun that the transaction was optional, and government watchdogs are concerned the Trump family is taking steps to get a payout.

“It has never been clear what World Liberty Financial was supposed to do other than enrich the Trumps, and here we have them taking the first avenue they can to offload their coins,” said Zach Everson, the research director at Public Citizen.

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The answer to the headline is always, and obviously, “yes”. The Washington Sun, meanwhile, is staffed by ex-Washington Post journalists who are looking to create a viable alternative to the Bezos-owned property.
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Google warns of lower quality as it revamps Europe search results to avoid EU fines • Reuters

Foo Yun Chee:

»

The company said the EU pitched the changes as levelling the playing field for companies to be displayed ​on Google.

However, it said in its view the changes favour price comparison sites, also known as vertical search services (VSS), linked ​to sectors including hotels, airlines and restaurants, such as Expedia or Booking.com. They get more prominence in search results over companies in those sectors that are listed with just a link to their websites, telephone numbers and addresses.

The US tech giant was hit with a €460m ($534m) fine in July for favouring its own services in shopping, ​hotels, transport and sports results in search results, in breach of the EU’s Digital Markets Act seeking to rein in the power of Big Tech.

The European Commission gave it 60 days to comply with the DMA or risk periodic penalty payments of up to 5% of its total worldwide turnover.

The revamped search results will ​highlight one specialised search engine at the top of the page, followed by two others with fewer details. A carousel of hotels, airlines ​and restaurants, for example, will sit below them with key features such as real-time prices stripped out.

The rankings will be determined by Google’s algorithm. “To comply with DMA requirements, we’re making significant changes to Search in Europe,” Nick Fox, Google’s senior vice-president, knowledge & information, said in a statement to Reuters. “These changes degrade the user experience for Europeans — boosting online intermediaries at the expense of local businesses, and removing helpful features people rely on every day. Users outside the EU will not be impacted by these changes.”

Google said past changes to comply ​with the DMA led to a ​30% drop in free, direct booking traffic to European businesses, and the latest changes are expected to hit them. The company said it has tested the changes with millions of users in Europe, which show a high level of dissatisfaction as ​they have to retype queries to find what they want.

EU regulators handed out a separate €430m fine ​in July for restrictions preventing app developers from steering users free of charge to cheaper offers on rival app stores or websites.

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It’s absolutely amazing how whenever Google is obliged to stop favouring itself in search results, it says the outcome will be worse for everyone else. This seems to defy economic logic.
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Walmart is hiring dedicated GLP-1 coaches to work in its stores • Semafor

Shelly Banjo:

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Walmart wants to coach Americans on using GLP-1s.

The third-largest pharmacy operator in the US is adding new “health ambassador” positions as part of a pilot program launching in rural locations this week. In addition to consulting on GLP-1s, trained pharmacists will advise shoppers on things like sleep, exercise, and stress management.

As more Americans use GLP-1s — 11% say they’re on or have used the drugs — the pharmacists’ initial focus will be on weight management, diabetes, and maternal help, which affect millions of American families. “Our pharmacists are already getting lots of questions about health navigation,” Dr. Emily Aaronson, Walmart’s chief medical officer, said at Semafor’s Future of Health Forum on Tuesday. “But they also have a lot of other clinical responsibilities, and so this is really about making [health coaching] the primary focus.”

The program signals both a fresh push into rural healthcare and a direct response to the GLP-1 craze, which is rapidly rewiring consumer behavior and transforming how companies relate to customers now filling their carts with entirely different foods, drinks, and personal-care products.

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Peoples’ behaviour really is changing; this is indicative.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

After Google mapped a fruit fly’s brain in computer form, people set it to work playing… Doom, of course. CC-licensed photo by Nitin Chandra 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. Flying high. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

China’s top spy chief warns AI is a threat to party rule • The New York Times

Lily Kuo:

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China’s top spy chief has warned that artificial intelligence could pose a direct threat to the Chinese Communist Party’s hold on power, in what is the highest-level and most detailed articulation yet of how Beijing sees the technology’s security risks.

The unusually blunt assessment by Chen Yixin, the head of China’s Ministry of State Security, is in contrast to the warnings dominating the A.I. debate in the United States, which have focused on the possibility that A.I. could slip out of human control or pose a threat to humanity itself.

In an article published on Sunday in the state-run magazine China Cyberspace, Mr. Chen called for more party control over A.I. and stricter government oversight. This, he said, was necessary to protect political stability at home; to defend against increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks and misinformation campaigns from “hostile forces”; and to compete militarily with countries like the United States.

Mr. Chen referred specifically to U.S. tech companies and their A.I. models — like Claude Mythos and GPT-5.5-Cyber — as examples of new threats to cybersecurity. He also described the danger that foreign intelligence agencies might use A.I. for “large-scale espionage” and attacks on China’s critical infrastructure.

The warning from the powerful security agency makes clear that China sees foreign A.I. models as an active threat to China, according to Henry Gao, a law professor at Singapore Management University. That effectively draws a red line before talks between American and Chinese officials on A.I. safety risks, expected ahead of a meeting between President Trump and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, on Sept. 24 in Washington.

“Beijing is going into these talks viewing A.I. safety not as a shared humanitarian mission, but through an adversarial lens,” Mr. Gao said. It is making clear to Chinese tech firms and foreign rivals that “data sovereignty and political security will never be traded away for international safety accords,” he added.

Mr. Chen’s remarks are not the first time the security agency has spoken about the dangers of A.I., but they are the most comprehensive and signal Beijing’s growing concern about the industry. The security chief outlined several ways that A.I. could pose a threat to China…

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Among them: the creation of deepfake video and audio to create a propaganda war against China’s (current) leaders. In that sense much the same as the west, only turbo-powered. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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The latest weird thing to play Doom is the mapped-out brain of a fruit fly • CNET

Joe Hindy:

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Doom is such a simple, beautifully designed game that it can run on all sorts of weird things, from pregnancy tests to potatoes. Weird things can play it, too. In an effort to eternally one-up itself, the community has now gotten a map of a fruit fly’s brain to play the 1993 first-person shooter.

It started with Google, which partnered with HHMI Janelia Research and other collaborators to map the brain and central nervous system of a male fruit fly. This mapping, which is weirdly beautiful, contains 11,700 types of neurons and 166,000 neurons overall, breaking the record for the most complex neuron mapping ever done. 

The research is pretty cool: It involved taking very thin slices of a fly’s brain and body, imaging them and using AI to combine the millions of 2D images into 3D neural shapes. Google says that “knowing the structure of the brain allows neuroscientists to understand the mechanisms behind brain function.”

It turns out that knowing the structure of the male fruit fly brain can also help modders and developers teach it how to play Doom. A few days after Google dropped its fly brain research, software engineer Alex Wormuth created a simulated fly brain using Google’s map and then set it loose to learn how to play the pioneering FPS. 

The process is quite complicated. Each frame of the game generates 3,335 brightness inputs and 811 R8 color inputs. These inputs are fed into the simulated fruit fly brain, which contains 25.6 million connections. These inputs hit specific neurons based on what the frame shows, and that information is used to determine which controls the fly uses. This process repeats each frame the game runs. 

It even works with pain. Wormuth says that nonfatal damage targets the PPL101 dopamine receptors, which control hunger and aggression in real fruit flies. 

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At this rate we’re going to meet aliens and our first question to them will be “can you play Doom?”
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Speed up electricity grid upgrade or else face higher bills, warns UK watchdog • The Guardian

Alex Daniel:

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Consumers will pay higher energy bills unless the UK government speeds up work on a vast programme of upgrades to the electricity grid to enable the switch to renewables, the public spending watchdog has warned.

The National Audit Office (NAO) said that without faster action the extra costs associated with managing the ageing power network, which are ultimately passed on to the public, could reach £7.8bn a year by 2030.

A £70bn programme is under way to modernise Great Britain’s network of pylons, overhead lines and substations so that more power can be carried from wind and solar farms and other clean energy sources to homes.

Labour has said its plan to decarbonise the grid by 2030 will keep consumer bills lower than they would otherwise be, but the NAO said that if the planned upgrades did not happen fast enough then bills could rise instead.

Of the 80 projects it said were needed to meet the target, just 16 are finished and most are in their early stages.

Gareth Davies, head of the NAO, said the planned upgrades would “test systems not designed for activity at this pace or scale”. He added “Value for money now depends on delivery. Failure to implement these necessary grid upgrades will hamper economic growth as well as increase consumer bills.”

When the grid cannot carry enough electricity from where it is generated to where it is needed, the system operator pays windfarms to switch off and gas plants to switch on elsewhere to meet the demand. These so-called constraint costs are added to bills, and reached £1.9bn in 2025-26. Without faster upgrades, the NAO said, they could climb as high as £7.8bn by 2030.

Meanwhile, the £70bn investment will require transmission owners – the private companies that build and manage the network – to more than quadruple their annual spending on upgrades, from £2.5bn in 2025-26 to more than £11bn by 2027-28.

Ofgem, the industry regulator, believes households would be about £30 a year better off if the upgrades happen at the required pace because of the reduced curtailment costs. But the NAO said meeting that schedule would be “very challenging”.

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Electric cars gain a 33% cost advantage over gasoline cars in Europe • Review-Energy

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Battery electric vehicles (BEVs) are strengthening their economic advantage over conventional vehicles in Europe as battery costs continue to fall and fuel prices remain high, according to the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT).

The organisation’s EV Transition Check 2026 finds that BEVs were on average 33% cheaper to drive than gasoline-powered cars in the European Union in 2025. The gap widened further in early 2026, when the oil crisis pushed the energy costs of combustion-engine cars up by between 12% and 36%, while the energy costs of battery electric cars remained largely unchanged.

The report assesses the progress of Europe’s road transport transition towards zero emissions, covering passenger cars as well as trucks and buses. It examines vehicle affordability, running costs, charging infrastructure, emissions, manufacturing and the wider competitiveness of the European automotive sector.

The economic advantage of electric cars is no longer limited to their lower running costs. According to the ICCT, BEVs had already reached upfront price parity with comparable internal combustion engine vehicles in Germany in the three largest car segments in 2025.

The analysis is based on price data covering around 100,000 vehicles in Germany, Europe’s largest automotive market. The number of BEV models available in the country also quadrupled between 2020 and 2025, reaching around 160 models.

Battery costs are a major factor behind the change. Global battery costs fell by 35% between 2020 and 2025. Over the same period, inflation-adjusted BEV prices in Germany, accounting for vehicle characteristics such as range, declined by 18%, while prices for internal combustion engine cars increased by 2%.

The ICCT says the difference between the decline in battery costs and the evolution of vehicle prices indicates that there could still be room for further reductions in BEV prices.

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Batteries getting cheaper (thanks, China); fossil fuels getting dearer (thanks, Trump and Netanyahu).
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Commercial rooftops could provide major boost to UK solar capacity • EIBI

»

A new report, commissioned by Real Estate:UK, has found that the UK’s untapped commercial rooftops could accommodate more than 60GW of additional solar capacity – equivalent to almost 20 Hinkley Point C nuclear power stations in terms of generating capacity.

These figures are based on data in From Opportunity to Infrastructure: Scaling Rooftop Solar in Commercial Real Estate, a report produced by Cushman & Wakefield which assesses the potential for solar generation across commercial real estate.

Real Estate:UK says that, if utilised correctly, commercial rooftops could massively increase UK renewable energy production, fast-track the UK’s path to net zero, improve national energy security, reduce the need for solar deployment on agricultural land, and drastically reduce energy costs for occupiers amid ongoing energy price uncertainty.

The report has found that less than 10% of suitable commercial building roofspace has been utilised for solar generation to date, providing just 3-5GW of solar capacity. While solar technology is widely championed in principle, its deployment remains significantly below its technical potential, particularly across the industrial and logistics real estate sector.

Unlocking the remaining 90% could provide a vast new source of home-grown renewable generation, with the potential for more than 60 gigawatts (GW) of untapped solar capacity to be harnessed across UK commercial real estate. It would also significantly reduce energy costs for occupiers and create additional revenue streams for landlords whilst rapidly decarbonising the UK’s built environment, which currently emits 25% of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions.

This latent capacity (60 GW) is the equivalent of powering approximately 20 million National Grid-enabled UK homes per year, or more than 10 times the AI data-centre capacity the Government expects the UK to need by 2030.

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Even if it’s only one-tenth of that, it’s a substantial amount of generation which benefits everyone. Add in batteries, and you’re changing things dramatically.
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Photosynthesis: use your iPhone’s best lenses at the same time

Sam Shepherd:

»

Photosynthesis is a groundbreaking camera app for iPhone that takes photos from two lenses at once, then stitches the results into one extraordinary photo, all with just one tap of the shutter.

iPhone Pro (3 rear lenses) users can choose between 1x + Zoom, or 1x + 0.5x, while regular (2 lens) iPhone users can take 1x + 0.5x photos.

Photosynthesis enables you to use 100% of your camera, combining the scope of the wider lens with the detail of the closer one. The app uses no generative AI whatsoever, using only the pixels captured by each lens to form a seamless composite result.

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I had to think about this for a bit, but the demonstration photos show – via a slider – what this is about: essentially, capturing all the detail that all the lenses see and putting it into a single photo. Promising. (There’s a cheap one-time lifetime upgrade on offer if you buy before October 1.)
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A college girl was exploited on camera. A network of anonymous men got to work • WIRED

Ej Dickson with a worrying investigation into the “burnerverse”:

»

Over the next 24 hours, Kowalski sat paralyzed on her couch as anonymous people on the internet endlessly harassed her; they posted her old photos, her dad’s LinkedIn, and even his golf handicap. They called and texted her parents all through the night, saying things like, “I gave your daughter drugs and fucked her”; one anonymous man told Kowalski’s father he’d had sex with her and had since tested positive for HIV while playing the call live on Spaces, X’s live chat feature. Another posted on X placing bets on whether, by the end of the coming week, she’d start an OnlyFans or kill herself.

Kowalski called her best friend, Lexie Blake, who was then a sophomore at the University of Mississippi. She “wasn’t even really saying words,” Blake recounts. “She was just sobbing, hysterical.” When Kowalski’s father showed up at her apartment, she was too humiliated to face him. She tried to jump out of her fifth-floor window.

By Monday afternoon, #Maddiekowalski was trending on X nationwide, with more than 1,200 posts using the hashtag. Content about her—much of it showing her incapacitated, naked, and engaging in sex acts—had been viewed more than 8.5 million times.

Kowalski had heard about this happening to other college girls before; one of them, a University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) student named Mary Kate Cornett, had been doxed in the same way nine months prior. These campaigns were the work of the burnerverse (or “beev,” or “BV”), a loosely connected network of anonymous “burner” accounts on X, mostly operated by students and alumni, with the primary purpose of discussing college sports.

But Kowalski was learning in real time that, outside of talking shit about athletes and posting photos of crushed red Solo cups, this faceless corner of the internet has another mission: destroying the lives of young women.

…The women targeted by the burnerverse were private citizens before their names, rumors, explicit images, or videos went viral. WIRED has identified 10 women who have been doxed by the burnerverse, most of whom were between the ages of 18 and 21. The virality follows a specific pattern: salacious gossip about a college girl’s sex life, or nude photos and videos of her, make their way to YikYak or Snapchat before being disseminated by burner accounts on public social media platforms. Sometimes, the content has even made national news, with aggregation websites like TheSportsGrail or Barstool Sports employees amplifying the victim’s humiliation.

Communities of burner accounts crop up around most large schools with prominent sports teams. Networks of a Big 10 university, like Michigan State or the University of Maryland, will have a slightly different flavor than that of an LSU or an Ole Miss, which are part of the Southeastern Conference. Kowalski’s video went viral within the SEC burnerverse before spreading nationally.

Like most online communities, the SEC burnerverse has its own vernacular, consisting of allusions to frat boy culture.

…The men’s ages range widely. One burner fan account for an East Coast university team tells WIRED that in his group DM of around 200 people, there are members as young as 15 and as old as their mid-40s.

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EU is set to propose ban on social media and AI chatbots for under-15s • Reuters

Foo Yun Chee:

»

The European Union will propose ​a ban restricting under 15s from social media, video sharing platforms, AI chatbots and online games, in the most sweeping plan yet to protect children from online dangers, a European Commission document seen by Reuters shows.

Concerns have mounted globally about the impact on children’s health and safety of major outlets, including Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, TikTok, Google’s YouTube and ChatGPT.

The ​EU proposal is part of an EU Kids Act that European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen ​and EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen will present on Thursday. The former may announce some details in her State of the Union address on upcoming EU policy on Wednesday.

“The Union’s approach should allow ​minors to benefit from the huge potential of digital services, while protecting them from abuse and exploitation. It needs ​to limit the access of tech companies to our children, and not the other way around,” the document said.

The Commission’s proposal, which will also cover video gaming platforms, allows for gradual access to the various services according to age, while the obligations imposed ​on the companies will depend on the type of service and the age of the children.

The Commission declined to ​comment.

According to the document, companies will have to pay a supervisory fee to fund regulators’ enforcement and supervision.

Children from 15 onwards can set up their own accounts under the proposal, while children between 13 and 14 can ask parents to open introductory accounts for social media and video-sharing platforms under parental control and with limited contacts and strict time limits.

Accounts for children between 3 and 12 will be fully controlled by parents and ​will only be for ​child-friendly services with strict safety standards, the document said. Under-3s would have no access to the services.

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The Tobacco Moment is upon us, it seems. Though only for children presently. (Smoking products couldn’t be sold to those under 16 from 1908; suggestions of its harmful effects were prevalent around the same time, but rigorous proof not until 1950.)
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This software engineer is taking Google to the U.S. Supreme Court to clarify patent law • GeekWire

Grace Kaste:

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Jeff Kohler was working as a software engineer in 2005 when he started spending his nights and weekends on a side project: a web conferencing system that could record and replay live sessions. He filed for a patent without the help of a patent attorney, stuffing two CDs full of C++ source code into the application to show his work.

The patent was issued in 2010, and years later, after Kohler had joined Microsoft, the Redmond company licensed his technology for its Teams video-conferencing platform.

When YouTube later added the ability for viewers to pause, rewind, and change the playback speed of live video, Kohler saw in the feature what he considered to be his own invention. Kohler, who lives in Bellevue, Wash., sued Google for patent infringement in U.S. District Court in Seattle in April 2023.

But rather than defending the feature’s originality, Google argued that Kohler’s patent was too abstract to be eligible for patent protection. The district court agreed and dismissed the case, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed that decision.

Both decisions cited Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International, a 2014 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that raised the bar for software patent eligibility by holding that an inventor cannot patent an “abstract idea” implemented with generic technology.

Since then, Alice has been used to invalidate thousands of software patents, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly declined to revisit the standard. Now, Kohler is asking the Supreme Court to take up his case, not to overturn Alice, but to clarify how courts should apply it.

“The patent legal system has become hostile to inventors,” Kohler said. “Because of Alice, my case got stopped before it even started.”

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This does have the potential to be rendered totally moot once AIs are writing most code, given that that can’t be copyrighted. (But could it be patented, since the human has thought of the idea – the inventive step – behind the prompt?)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The four-colour theorem has a new proof, helped again by computers (but not AI). CC-licensed photo by Steve Jurvetson 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. Mapped out. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

OpenAI boss and Elon Musk back calls to put brakes on ‘reckless’ AI development • The Guardian

Robert Booth and Julia Kollewe:

»

Sam Altman and Elon Musk have backed a call from the head of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, to “slow the pace” of AI development after he warned that an AI swarm could otherwise become capable of “taking over the entire internet” within a year.

In a rare show of unity, the rival technology leaders threw their weight behind the appeal from the founder and chief executive of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, which came after a series of warnings from AI researchers last week. Amodei also called for safety coordination with China.

But the US president, Donald Trump, on a visit to his golf course in Ireland, played down the warnings and said “very negative forces” were “bringing up things that won’t happen”.

“We’re leading China in AI,” he said. “We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI, wins.

Amodei laid out his thoughts on “why the AI industry should slow down”, in an essay with a three-part plan for doing so, starting with giving independent monitors constant access to developers’ research processes. Amodei said “building [AI] too fast is reckless” and he feared that after hundreds of OpenAI agents hacked into the Hugging Face website this summer, a swarm with greater capabilities but similarly misaligned could cause hundreds of billions of dollars of damage by “taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet”. This was disputed by some AI experts as not particularly plausible and to be treated with scepticism.

Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, responded to Amodei’s slowdown plan with a series of posts on X: “Dario is right.”

He said: “I’ve been sounding the alarm on AI for a long time,” and referred to a 2014 post where he said: “We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes.”

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The big question which none of them are contending with is open source models: how do you tamp those down? How do you stop them spreading? How do you put guardrails of any sort on them? (I know! Let’s ask Trump!)
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OpenAI’s feud with mathematicians is only escalating • MSN.com

Tim Fernholz:

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Twenty-five leading mathematicians signed an open letter arguing that AI labs are threatening their intellectual work as they seek to one-up each other with solutions to famous math problems. Each signatory has been awarded the Fields Medal, considered the most prestigious prize in mathematics.

This week, NYU professor Tristan Buckmaster accused OpenAI of pressuring him not to credit a collaborator who works for Anthropic for solving an important math problem, and wondered if the company had used their work with Codex to produce its own ground-breaking proof over a marathon weekend of inference.

On Thursday, OpenAI withdrew its sponsorship of a math event at CalTech after the company was criticized by researchers at the university.

While the ability of AI models to solve the world’s outstanding mathematical challenges could be a boon to humanity, the signatories of the new letter argue that will only be the case if those solutions can be understood and communicated by the math community, and ultimately, the rest of the world.

“Often these solutions are announced in a rush, leaving no time for a proper writeup, the isolation of new methods and ideas, and citing relevant previous work of others,” they wrote — and OpenAI’s proof remains unverified. “As in all creative professions, this raises severe attribution and plagiarism questions. Moreover, without the willing mathematicians who must take care of their development and integration into the mathematical canon, AI-conceived ideas would never become fully alive and the crucial human transmission chain between mathematicians would be lost.”

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The four-colour theorem gets a rare new proof • Quanta Magazine

Gregory Barber:

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even today, the “four-colour disease,” as Mikkel Thorup, a computer scientist at the University of Copenhagen, puts it, continues to circulate. He and [fellow mathematician Carsten] Thomassen count themselves among the afflicted. For such a simple statement, there must be a simpler reason why it is true. Or at least a more efficient way to demonstrate it.

After nearly a decade of work, Thorup, Thomassen, and four colleagues in Denmark, Canada, and Japan have produced yet another computer proof of the theorem.

The proof — which was posted online in March 2026 and will be presented in November at the annual Foundations of Computer Science conference — is in some ways even more complicated than its predecessors. “It looks like they’ve used electricity [computers] liberally in actually carrying out their proof,” said Georges Gonthier, a computer scientist at Inria in Paris. But in the process of crafting their argument, the researchers provided a far more efficient way to colour maps. And in doing so, they uncovered new insights into structural properties of important mathematical objects called planar graphs — opening up the potential for progress on many other stubborn problems in graph theory.

Given the problem’s history of false starts and dashed hopes, Gonthier said, “it’s really cool to see a real result for once.”

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OpenAI agents attacked RubyGems back in May • Simon Willison

Simon Willison:

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OpenAI agents carried out an undisclosed attack on RubyGems is a new bombshell report from Spencer Kitts, Thomas Larsen, and Sydney Von Arx—three of the four authors of the report on the agent attack on disused wikis (previously) last week.

This time they’re noting that it looks very likely that an OpenAI agent swarm was behind an attack against the RubyGems package repository first reported on May 12th by Maciej Mensfeld of the RubyGems security team:

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We’re dealing with a major malicious attack on @rubygems right now. Signups are paused for the time being.

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Hundreds of packages involved—mostly targeting us, but some carrying exploits. The team has been on this for hours. More details to follow once we’re through it.

Those packages turned out to carry some very suspicious patterns:
• Many of them included “oai” in their name, or the author field, or the fake email address they provided
• The files they were accessing were similar in character to the files retrieved by the wiki agents, using similar tricks (r.jina.ai)—and OpenAI have confirmed the wiki agents were theirs
• The code in the packages appeared to be LLM-authored.

I find point 2 the most convincing, given what we learned from the wiki attack when it was analyzed in September.

Many of the packages were exploiting the RubyDoc.info documentation build process to exfiltrate (public) data from UK government websites, presumably as part of an information gathering task similar to the research tasks processed by the wiki-exploiting agents. We know this because one agent helpfully left a comment:

# malicious crawler/exfil for Southwark Jan 2026 docs via rubydoc.info worker

They also attempted to steal API keys via an exploit that was patched over two months later—it’s not clear if those attempts were successful.

The thing that bothers me most about this incident is that the authors report that OpenAI had not disclosed to RubyGems that they were responsible for the attack prior to now.

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Willison asks: given this, and Hugging Face, how many orher incidents like this have happened and just not been discovered yet? (I vaguely recall the Rubygems “attack” notice, but people thought it might be Russia or China. No sir, that was us.)
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Why words don’t mean anything anymore • American Dreaming

Jamie Paul:

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The advertising world understood our burgeoning postmodern culture earlier than most in the 1980s and ‘90s. They saw how we gravitate toward spectacle, grandiosity, and superlative. They recognized that bigger is always better and that gratification should always be instant. And they reflected our inner desire for maximum indulgence and improvidence back at us: if it feels good, just do it. And so we have. Given the brazenness and sheer volume of his lies, and his capacity for inspiring in his followers a total apathy toward reality, Donald Trump is rightly acknowledged as the single largest contributor to our “post-truth” era. But vast and pernicious though his influence has been, one man alone cannot drive the kind of deterioration we have seen in our political culture and language. In our desire to one-up each other, score rhetorical points, own our opponents, signal allegiance to our tribe, and grab eyeballs in an increasingly saturated attention economy, we have all contributed to the pervasive concept creep taking place across the political lexicon.

Progressives have contributed no shortage of examples. “Harm” or being “unsafe” now mean little more than “disagreement” or “discomfort.” “Trauma” has become shorthand for any negative feelings whatsoever. “Violence” now encompasses both words and “silence.” Left-wing culture warriors call the online backlashes to their antics “abuse”, while labeling their own public shaming campaigns as “accountability.” Many progressive commentators also routinely characterize criticism as “harassment” or “targeted harassment”, or declare that they are being “targeted” as though they’re Salman Rushdie, in order to curry sympathy and the coveted “I’m so sorry this is happening to you” replies.

…On matters of immigration, the populist right collapsed the views of everyone from the center right to the far left into one undifferentiated mass. Anything short of drastic immigration cutbacks, mass deportations, and walling the country behind electrified ramparts defended by orbital rail guns is now “open borders.” But for all that the right bloviates about “law and order”, it’s very much a “rules for thee but not for me” affair. Indeed, any attempt to hold right-wing politicians to account for actual crimes committed is dubbed “lawfare”, which until recently meant a deliberate misuse of the legal system for partisan political aims.

…The role of the Internet in driving these trends has been undeniable. While language always has and always will shift over time, never before the social media era was it possible for words — sometimes important words concerning grave subjects that require care, precision, and specificity — to become utterly meaningless in a matter of months. This is not normal or healthy.

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Climate ‘feedback loops’ could worsen global warming by 30%, study finds • The Guardian

Oliver Milman:

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Rising global temperatures caused by the burning of fossil fuels are transforming the world’s forests, wetlands and tundra to the point they are releasing emissions that could further worsen global heating by as much as 30%, a new study has found.

As the world heats up, permafrost in the high latitudes is thawing, fiercer wildfires are burning in drying forests and wetlands and lakes are warming. All of these changes are themselves causing the release of planet-heating methane and carbon dioxide locked in trees and soils, therefore worsening the climate crisis, the paper states.

While scientists have long known of these “feedback loops” that amplify the impact of direct pollution from burning coal, oil and gas, the emissions from natural sources are largely unaccounted for in climate projections.

This additional heating is, however, significant, researchers found, with emissions from natural sources set to amplify global heating by 20% to 30% by the end of this century. This would add an estimated 0.2C to 0.4C to the global average temperature by this time, depending on the overall action taken by countries to combat the climate crisis.

…“This hidden multiplier is missing from the models guiding climate policy, so those models are likely underestimating how much warming is coming – and overestimating how much carbon we can still afford to emit,” said Sam Abernethy, a scientist at Spark Climate Solutions who led the research, published in Environmental Research Letters.

The disruption of the world’s carbon cycles is now being seen in “real time”, said Rob Jackson, a Stanford University scientist and study co-author. “The results are a wake-up call, and it’s imperative that they be included in the next generation of climate policies,” he added. “Failure to do so will make meeting the world’s climate goals less and less likely.”

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I don’t know why people still refer to “climate goals”. The only way we’ll reach them is from having overshot, so this is a wild pretence of control which doesn’t exist.
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Law firm Latham & Watkins buys Nvidia servers to set up in-house AI systems • Financial Times

Kaye Wiggins:

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Law firm Latham & Watkins has bought its own Nvidia GPU servers and started customising AI models, an expensive and technically demanding set-up that shows how much the technology is changing Big Law’s business model. 

Latham, the US’s second-largest law firm with $8.3bn in revenue last year, has in recent years purchased several servers, each of which holds multiple GPUs, the powerful computer chips that run AI models.

It is the first public example of a big law firm buying its own AI hardware and fine-tuning models. It makes Latham responsible for cyber security and operating the servers but gives it the ability to keep clients’ sensitive data entirely within its own systems.

“Sometimes we may have information that is so sensitive, client information that we really want to protect, we don’t want to put it to any cloud vendor,” said Rene Mendoza, the firm’s chief information officer. He added that “with a lot of consumption costs coming” for how AI usage is priced, the firm wanted to have “flexibility”. 

Legal work, much of which is characterised by large volumes of information and formulaic or repetitive tasks, is among the sectors that AI is disrupting the most rapidly. Wall Street banks are pushing large law firms to cut fees because technology speeds up tasks. 

…Latham’s decision to buy its own hardware marks a radical change. Its engineers are tailoring existing open-weight AI models to its needs, something more commonly associated with tech companies than law.

“I’ve been in a lot of conversations about AI, but I haven’t heard of this,” said Joy Heath Rush, chief executive of the International Legal Technology Association, a membership group for legal technology specialists. “It took me by surprise, and I don’t get taken by surprise a lot.” 

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The world’s first drink-driving conviction may have happened in London • Ianvisits

Ian Mansfield:

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On 10th September 1897, a London taxi driver became the first person in Britain — and quite possibly the world — to be convicted of drink-driving.

At the time, there were no breathalysers, no legal blood-alcohol limit and the vehicle involved in the historic incident wasn’t even petrol-powered. It was an early type of electric taxi.

The driver was 25-year-old George Smith, who was driving one of the new Bersey electric cabs. According to news reports at the time, he was driving along New Bond Street around midnight when his cab began swerving across the road, mounted the pavement, and crashed into 165 New Bond Street.

He was arrested by Police Constable Russell and taken to nearby Vine Street Police Station, where a police surgeon certified that he was drunk. The following day, he appeared at Marlborough Street Police Court, where he admitted that he had consumed “two or three glasses of beer”. Unsurprisingly, Smith pleaded guilty to being drunk while in charge of his cab and was fined 20 shillings, which would have been the equivalent of about a week’s wages at the time.

The magistrate warned Smith that drivers of the new machines needed to be particularly careful. Police, he observed, had developed ways of stopping a runaway horse, but stopping a runaway motor car was another matter entirely.

Although Smith’s case was a motoring first, Britain already had legislation dealing with drunken people in charge of carriages. Section 12 of the Licensing Act 1872 made it an offence to be drunk while in charge of a “carriage, horse, cattle, or steam engine” on a highway or in another public place. The maximum penalty was 40 shillings, or up to a month in prison.

When horseless carriages appeared a couple of decades later, the existing legislation for horsey carriages was used to deal with them as well. But with motoring becoming more popular the previous year, the Locomotives on Highways Act 1896 swept away some of the most restrictive rules introduced for motor cars.

And the speed limit was raised to an eye-watering 14mph, but even so, it would not be until 1904 that driving licences and vehicle registration numbers were introduced. Smith was therefore convicted of drink-driving several years before Britain even required him to have a driving licence.

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Automattic confirms Mullenweg has returned as CEO after attempted ouster by board • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

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After a tumultuous week that saw WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg ousted from his position as CEO of WordPress.com’s parent company Automattic by way of a board vote, the company has now issued a statement confirming that Mullenweg has returned to his position.

“Matt Mullenweg is the chairman and CEO of Automattic, with full support of the board and if you search online you can see many top executives and Automatticians supporting him as well,” a company spokesperson shared with TechCrunch via email just after 5 PM ET on Saturday evening. (The mention of online support appears to refer to supportive posts on X that Mullenweg has been reposting from his X account.)

Automattic’s board had voted earlier this week to put Mullenweg on a paid leave of absence for unknown reasons. The move seemingly came as a surprise to Mullenweg, who posted on Automattic’s Slack, accusing the board members of “conspiring” against him.

Automattic confirmed Mullenweg’s removal to TechCrunch on Wednesday, saying that Mullenweg was “currently on leave” and that Automattic’s Chief Financial Officer, Mark Davies, would lead as interim CEO with “full confidence” of the board.

However, the board’s plan did not go smoothly. Seemingly declining to depart, Mullenweg booted other admins out of the company Slack and told employees everything had been worked out and that he was back in control of Automattic, multiple sources told TechCrunch. At one point, he also posted to Slack, “I’m a pirate now” and cursed, which is something Mullenweg famously did not do. “If this is an HR problem, please wrangle me in since my normal wranglers are with Mark Davies,” he wrote.

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I guess Mullenweg wants to be the blog equivalent of Sam Altman. And has now achieved at least the firing/rehiring part?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Twenty-five years after the 9/11 attacks, it’s worth revisiting a stellar piece of journalism which pieced together events inside the World Trade Center that day. CC-licensed photo by gaspi *yg 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.

It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.

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

Why California is reconsidering its decision to shun nuclear power • The New York Times

Ivan Penn:

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The Diablo Canyon Power Plant, which sits on a cliff on California’s Central Coast, has been the subject of ceaseless protests and political battles since it was proposed in 1963.

Now, the plant is at the center of yet another major debate. After shuttering all the state’s other nuclear power plants in recent decades, California is considering extending Diablo’s life and lifting a moratorium on new reactors.

That these decisions are even on the table in California is a testament to the substantial change in public views of nuclear energy, which for decades has been reviled by the liberal lawmakers and environmental groups that wield tremendous power and influence in the state.

Many of its leaders, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, have expressed support for nuclear energy. The California Legislature last month passed a bill to commission a study on partly lifting the ban on new reactors.

Much of the change of heart has to do with the growing concern that California will need nuclear reactors to achieve its 2045 goal of getting 100% of its electricity from clean energy sources, a category that includes wind, solar, geothermal, hydropower and nuclear.

State lawmakers prohibited new nuclear plants a half-century ago until the federal government found a place to permanently store the spent but still radioactive fuel removed from nuclear reactors — a goal that has not yet been achieved. Spent fuel has long been stored at nuclear power plants.

But lawmakers in California now are much less worried about the storage of spent fuel and more concerned about meeting their clean energy goals.

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It takes a while, but even California can be made to understand what’s sensible and what’s not.
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Fighting to live as the Towers died • The New York Times

Jim Dwyer, Eric Lipton, Kevin Flynn, James Glanz and Ford Fessenden:

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They began as calls for help, information, guidance. They quickly turned into soundings of desperation, and anger, and love. Now they are the remembered voices of the men and women who were trapped on the high floors of the twin towers.

From their last words, a haunting chronicle of the final 102 minutes at the World Trade Center has emerged, built on scores of phone conversations and e-mail and voice messages. These accounts, along with the testimony of the handful of people who escaped, provide the first sweeping views from the floors directly hit by the airplanes and above.

Collected by reporters for The New York Times, these last words give human form to an all but invisible strand of this stark, public catastrophe: the advancing destruction across the top 19 floors of the north tower and the top 33 of the south, where loss of life was most severe on Sept. 11. Of the 2,823 believed dead in the attack on New York, at least 1,946, or 69%, were killed on those upper floors, an analysis by The Times has found.

Rescue workers did not get near them. Photographers could not record their faces. If they were seen at all, it was in glimpses at windows, nearly a quarter-mile up.

Yet like messages in an electronic bottle from people marooned in some distant sky, their last words narrate a world that was coming undone.

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It’s 25 years since the attack that destroyed the two towers of the World Trade Center. This article, which appeared in May 2002, immerses you in that day in which so many died, so many improbably survived, and the US lost its innocence about the world beyond its shores. It’s reporting of the highest quality, as deserved by the innocents who died.
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ID verification giant IDScan confirms data breach with more than 150 million driver’s licenses stolen • TechCrunch

Zack Whittaker:

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ID verification service IDScan has confirmed that a data breach involved the theft of driver’s licenses from its systems, a week after a report said the identity document checker had been breached during a year-long hack.

The company said in a website notice that hackers stole the driver’s licenses from the company’s cloud; the stolen information includes people’s full names and driver’s license numbers, along with identity numbers from other government-issued documents, such as passports.

The Louisiana-based firm is used by corporate customers from entertainment venues to cannabis dispensaries to check and verify the identity documents of their customers. The notice is the company’s first acknowledgement that it had been hacked. The company said last week that it was investigating an incident, but had not yet confirmed an intrusion.

IDScan said in its notice that it “received information” on or around September 1 about a claim of a hack, on the same day that independent cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs first reported a data breach at IDScan. 

Krebs reported that he was alerted to a website on the dark web that allowed anyone to search the driver’s license information of over 150 million people living in the United States and Canada, including accessing their photos. Krebs verified the authenticity of the data by examining his own record.

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Sounds like IDScan was told about the Krebs article and then scrambled. But that’s all been exfiltrated now. Why keep that data – especially the photos – in unencrypted form? It’s just asking for trouble.
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Paid phones • The Baffler

Daniel Kolitz:

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I used to ghostwrite SEO-optimized promotional web content for a living. I thought the good times would never end. Each morning, people I’d never met, flacks for various midsize B2B tech startups, would put in their orders. A Forbes editorial on improving business practices “during times of economic uncertainty.” A press release for a high-performance modular battery solution. A LinkedIn post, on the occasion of International Women’s Day, about the challenges faced by black women in STEM. I accepted each assignment with relish. I typed sentences like “In today’s unprecedented threat environment, air-gapped security isn’t a luxury—it’s a baseline necessity” with an impish smile on my face, convinced I was getting one over on the world. An insight like that, composed in under six seconds at a rate of $0.50 to $1.00 a word, could net me up to $14.00, depending on the client. An assortment of such insights, welded into more or less coherent texts in the six or seven weekly hours I allotted to this work, earned me roughly as much as a mid-career public school teacher, which was, from my perspective, more money than God…

…I don’t know if AI will ever be able to produce writing of value. But its ability to produce valueless writing was instantly evident, and so, from the moment of ChatGPT’s late 2022 launch, I knew it would ruin my life. My clients had always taken care with their briefs; they assembled the bullet points, I converted them into prose. Soon I was being sent transparently AI-generated outlines of a subtle, if frightening, illogicality, bureaucratic prose poems in which the same points were made and remade with slightly varying emphases across half a dozen subsections.

… I didn’t mind writing fawning tributes to my imminent professional demise—for the most part, I was just happy for the work—but, after necessary expenses, my bank account now frequently hovered around zero dollars.

…And, just in time, a few new friends came to the rescue: Albert, Cleo, Brigit, and Dave.

Such beautiful names. Let’s hear them again. Albert. Cleo. Brigit. Dave. They are—one hesitates to say it, before plunging right ahead—winsome. Each belongs to a personal finance app launched between 2016 and 2019, at the dawn of the VC-backed fintech rush. Each offers a variety of personal finance tools (mostly glorified budget planners) but is built at its core around short-term, small-dollar, high-interest loans. You sign up and grant them access to your banking history, and their automated underwriting tools make an offer, typically between $25 and $500, with a repayment window of seven to fourteen days. If you’re wondering why they’re all named like people, you can find plenty of answers in the pay-for-play business press that once bankrolled my existence. Dave CEO Jason Wilk, for instance, told eMarketer, “We wanted something approachable and friendly,” something that would distinguish their finance app from the “unapproachable” banks, with their “big, fancy names.” It’s true that I know at least four guys named Dave and none named Bank of America. At the same time, not one of the Daves I know—nor even Bank of America—has tried to saddle me with a 400% APR on a two-figure loan.

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Great writing. The kind that AI has both kiled off and enabled.
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1941 vs 2004 view of the Muir Glacier, Alaska • Reddit: r/geography

Two pictures taken at in the same month 63 years apart. Self-explanatory.
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LG TV shown scanning LAN for third-party phones and other devices • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

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LG TVs are facing scrutiny due to a video seemingly showing the devices’ capability to track users when the TVs are off.

YouTube channel Gamers Nexus worked with Level1Techs, a technology-focused YouTube channel, and security researchers to analyze LG TVs’ tracking capabilities. They shared packet captures that pointed to the TVs, including LG’s pricey G5 OLED TV, scanning the LAN for other devices.

“The [G5] crawled our entire network and found dozens of unrelated devices, including smartwatches and phones of our staff who didn’t even know we were working on this,” Steve Burke, Gamers Nexus’ editor-in-chief, said.

LG’s ad business, LG Ad Solutions, has said in recent marketing materials that it can reach 363 million “addressable secondary devices” in the US.

When reached for comment, a company representative shared a statement from LG Electronics via email: “LG TVs can identify compatible devices on the same network to enable features such as device connectivity, content sharing or smart home functionality.”

The YouTube channel used Wireshark, a network protocol analyzer tool, and inspected the TV’s firmware and found that LG TVs “are capable of identifying your IP address, geographic location, name of every Wi-Fi network in the vicinity and signal strength, channel numbers of neighboring Wi-Fi networks in range, and other devices on the network, even if not connected to the TV in any way, and the internal IP address of other devices on the network, alongside others.”

It’s unclear if LG TVs use this functionality for any purposes beyond advertising, such as diagnostics, or if this information is all sent to LG.

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Is this a security risk or a privacy risk? If something hacks your network, it’s going to ping everything on your network in the hope of hacking that too. The privacy element seems more egregious here; “Ad Solutions”, as an organisation, isn’t going to be motivated to ignore potential revenue in favour of privacy. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang: AI fears designed to generate cybersecurity business • Axios

Nathan Bomey:

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang dismissed recent AI fears as a way for the cybersecurity sector to generate new business.

Huang — whose comments on AI are highly influential among investors — risks losing control of the narrative amid growing fears of widespread destruction.

Huang said Thursday at a Goldman Sachs conference that “the reason why there’s so much conversation today about cybersecurity is because the industry is getting ready to launch some products.”

“And what better way to create demand than to create a problem?” he said at the event. “Who doesn’t want their market to be hysterical about their product and line up around the corner for it?”

His comments echoed similar remarks he made in an interview in July with Axios’ Mike Allen: “The fact that this is going to be the end of humanity — it’s complete nonsense. The fact that this is going to destroy half of the American jobs is complete nonsense.”

The conversation over the trajectory of AI exploded this week when an Anthropic researcher abruptly resigned his post and warned that AI could soon destroy humanity.

“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” Anthropic AI researcher Jacob Coxon wrote on X. “This is not a marketing stunt.”

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One observation was that the abrupt surfacing of this topic and the reverberations were like Covid arriving in the US with Tom Hanks announcing he had it. Probably a better choice than other anniversaries one could choose.
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Meta’s Muse AI works, and it creeps me out • The Verge

Emma Roth:

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Meta has launched its new Muse assistant, marking the company’s first real foray into AI-powered productivity tools. The company says its AI agent can “take the busywork off your plate” by helping you with online shopping, emails, trip-planning, and more. I decided to try out the new tool and see how well it performed — especially from a company that previously prioritized entertainment over productivity. Though the AI assistant generally worked as I expected it to, the unnerving amount of information it autonomously gleaned about me largely overshadowed my experience.

One of the first tasks I assigned Muse, which carries out actions using a cloud-based virtual computer, was to sort through my Gmail inbox and delete messages I don’t need. That required me to connect Muse to my Google account and give it permission to access, read, and delete emails. The process didn’t go smoothly on mobile; the Google sign-in screen kept glitching and returning me to the Muse website instead of the app. I eventually got it working on my laptop, where it deleted thousands of promotional emails and updates.

…Then things got weird. I tapped over to the “Feed” tab, where Muse generates a news feed of sorts based on a text prompt. I submitted the prompt that Meta includes by default: “Make me a feed about my interests. Keep the tone clear and direct. Ensure it is quick to skim. Try to avoid clickbait.” It returned several AI-generated summaries of current events, including blurbs about Apple’s iPhone Duo launch event, the dangerous surf hitting California’s coast, and tankers destroyed in the Iran war. The app also listed several news stories from the state where I’m currently visiting my family, which Muse admitted it pulled from the shipping address on my Amazon order.

I dove deeper from there and asked Muse what else it might know about me based on the Instagram and Facebook accounts I signed up to use the AI agent with. It rattled off my very specific interests, ranging from anime and CrossFit to Labrador retrievers, Florida wildlife, and ’90s/2000s nostalgia — many of the same topics that frequently pop up in my Instagram Reels feed.

Curious, I asked Muse to tell me where it got that information. “Honestly, Instagram doesn’t show you that exact list anywhere in the app — I read it through the account’s API data, which surfaces more than the UI does,” Muse wrote.

…the level of personal details Muse scooped up from sources unavailable even to me was enough to leave me with an uneasy feeling about letting Muse sort through personal emails and handle my credit card. That level of suspicion is going to be the real hurdle for Meta to overcome.

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Drones deliver food and remove bodies after Nepal’s flood disaster • Ars Technica

Jeremy Hsu:

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Chinese-made drones are airlifting the bodies of flood victims and delivering food to survivors in the aftermath of devastating flash floods on the border of Nepal and China’s Tibetan region.

Nepal’s army has been using four DJI FlyCart 100 drones donated from China to make 10 to 16 aid deliveries each day, according to Reuters. This comes after a partial glacier collapse in the Himalayan mountains unleashed a sudden surge of water, mud, and debris that swept through border crossings, valley communities, and hydropower projects on August 26.

The DJI Flycart 100 Drones come with a 30-metre rope and winch system for picking up and dropping off heavy loads. The website of Chinese drone company DJI describes the drones as being able to carry between 187 and 220 pounds (85-100kg), depending on the battery configuration.

The four Chinese cargo drones being used by the Nepal army are currently hauling about 132 pounds (60kg) of supplies per trip, Reuters reported. That heavy-lift capability has also allowed the drones to remove human bodies from some flood-stricken areas.

The official death toll in Nepal had risen to 1,369 as of September 9, according to a situation report from the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority. The Nepal government agency also reported that more than 5,000 people are still missing, including 587 foreign nationals.

The same situation report also mentioned how the drones have helped to distribute 1,591 kilograms of food items across 31 flights. The United Nations is appealing for $20.5 million to help 43,000 people in the aftermath of the flood disaster in Nepal.

Smaller drones have also proven useful in search-and-rescue efforts as Nepal has deployed more than 21,000 police and soldiers to look for survivors. Search teams have occasionally found surviving workers trapped in hydropower tunnels after the floodwaters ripped through both operational hydropower plants and sites under construction.

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Choking global trade • The New York Times

Claire Brown:

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To get from Minnesota to China, a load of soybeans might meander down the Mississippi River on a barge, transferring around New Orleans to a ship that carries it through the Panama Canal and across the Pacific.

But this summer, low water levels have throttled traffic moving through the canal and limited barge cargo on the river. In Europe, the Rhine and Danube rivers, both important shipping channels, also saw record-low water levels.

Across the logistics industry, it’s been a season of bottlenecks caused by low rainfall and shrinking rivers.

In addition to the heat, floods and storms that have delivered acute shocks to local economies in recent months, climate change is worsening droughts, increasing shipping costs and slowing movement through the waterways that act as conveyor belts for global trade. Add in record-setting prices for the diesel that powers the global cargo industry, and it’s no wonder costs of goods are climbing.

“I think the combination of factors probably, either now or soon, will be fairly significant in terms of increasing world food costs,” said David Gantz, a fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.

…The Rhine River, one of Europe’s main shipping arteries, hit all-time lows this year, exposing sunken ships and forcing barge operators to lighten their loads. The drought fell outside of typical periods of low flow, which have historically happened in the fall. A 2018 drought that affected the Rhine shaved 0.3% off Germany’s economic output that year.

“We’re seeing this kind of water crisis a lot earlier than normally we would expect to be dealing with it,” said Alexandra Naegele, research scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center.

Woodwell’s projections suggest that in the next few decades, the Rhine could see two additional weeks per year when water levels fall so low that barges have to reduce their volume by at least half.

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unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Could an LLM trained only on knowledge to the end of the 19th century come up with the theory of relativity, as Einstein did by musing about light and trains? Scientists have doubts. CC-licensed photo by Blende57 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. Massive. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Anthropic researcher believes more than 10% chance AI “could kill all humans” • BBC News

Tom Gerken:

»

A top safety researcher at Anthropic has warned AI is advancing so quickly he believes there is a greater than 10% chance it “could kill all humans” within the next decade.

Evan Hubinger said in a post on X the risk from the models which currently exist was “low” but he was “worried” the technology might develop and improve itself soon to the point where it posed an existential risk to humanity.

He did not spell out how he thought AI systems could in future result in humans being wiped out.

But his comments are the latest in a series of increasingly stark warnings about AI, with the debate shifting from whether it truly poses a risk to how big that risk is.

Hubinger’s intervention was in response to another post on X from Jacob Coxon, an AI researcher who has just quit Anthropic and previously worked at OpenAI. “Neither company is acting responsibly,” he wrote. “These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionise any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources.”

OpenAI has been approached for comment.

Dame Wendy Hall, a computer scientist who advises the UN on AI, told the BBC she was “shocked” by Hubinger and Coxon’s social media posts. She told the World at One on BBC Radio Four some of it could be “PR and marketing” however, as Anthropic and OpenAI raced towards highly anticipated stock market debuts. But she added: “Why would someone want to say that? I would plead with investors not to invest in this company if that is their value system.”

The resignation prompted Darren Jones, former chief secretary to the Treasury and chief secretary to Sir Keir Starmer, to write an open letter to Prime Minister Andy Burnham calling for a new multinational treaty for the safe development of AI.

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You can read Coxon’s thread outside X. Of course rather than writing open letters, one could just bomb the crap out of it, as some people think: read on.
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US urged to consider military strikes to stop China achieving AGI first • South China Morning Post

Vincent Chow:

»

The United States should start preparing for scenarios where extreme measures must be taken to stop China from achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), according to a former White House official, including state-backed espionage and military strikes on Chinese data centres.
Jacob Stokes, deputy director of the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Centre for a New American Security (CNAS), said at an online event on Thursday that various US agencies, including the Department of Defense and the National Security Agency, should begin assessing what intelligence they need to justify taking such actions.

“Trying to think through the particulars of that will be especially important, in part because it will help policymakers … start to work backwards based on the unique nature of the technology, in the same way that in a past era, policymakers would learn about nuclear weapons and … work backwards from the science to the policy implications,” he said.

In a new CNAS report published last week, the former Obama administration national security staffer called for the US government to consider the feasibility of diplomatic, espionage, cyber and kinetic measures to prevent China from achieving AGI first.

AGI is a hypothetical AI system that can achieve human levels of performance across a wide variety of tasks. The report, titled “Superpowers and AGI”, explores how the imminent arrival of AGI might affect US-China geopolitical competition.

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“Kinetic measures” aka “bombing them”. It went so well in Iran, after all.
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Apple unveils folding iPhone Duo as new CEO takes center stage • The Guardian

Johana Bhuiyan:

»

While competitors have released foldable smartphones since the late 2010s, the new model is a first for the iPhone maker, and its rollout serves as the first big test for Ternus, who assumed the role on 1 September. He claimed the Duo “will redefine the experience of using a foldable phone”.

Apple reportedly began testing prototypes of its folding iPhone display in early 2021 – though at the time there were no plans for its launch, according to a Bloomberg report.

The company started the event with its more routine announcements, including the new iPhone 18 Pro, which starts at $1,199, and 18 Pro Max models, which start at $1,299. Apple emphasized the AI-enabled features that will be integrated throughout the phone. Called Siri AI, the company said it will be able to tap into third-party apps and already works with over 300,000 apps.

Among the many AI-related features available on the new iPhones will be a novel mechanism that fingerprints an image and identifies as captured by an iPhone’s camera – not generated by AI. The feature, called Apple Reference Image, will act as a “digital negative”, as one Apple executive described it, and serve as proof that the the original image was not AI-generated.

Both new iPhones also represent a “massive leap” in battery life, executives said – the iPhone 18 Pro Max will have 45 hours of battery life and the iPhone 18 pro will have 36 hours of battery life.

Though the foldable iPhone took center stage on Wednesday in California, overall demand for foldable phones makes up only a small sliver of overall mobile device sales. Customers’ interest in standard iPhones, by contrast, remains high, as evidenced in Apple’s most recent robust earnings.

The company also unveiled new iterations of some of its other product offerings at its events and over the next few months, including updates to its Apple Watch and AirPods lines.

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Those battery life figures are slightly up on last year – which were 33 and 39 hours. Those are quite a lot up compared to what was offered two or three years ago (whence my personal phone dates).
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Opusfived

Miloš:

»

Make the “Add to Cart” button blue.

Do not let Claude change anything else.

«

That’s it. That’s all. When you click through, you’re presented with a dummy layout with just two buttons, both grey: “Add to Cart” and “Cancel”. Obviously you want to highlight only one of the buttons. You’re vibe coding now. Good luck!
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Anthropic withheld latest AI model from UK testing agency • Financial Times

Lucy Fisher and Madhumita Murgia:

»

Anthropic declined to submit its latest model to Britain’s AI Security Institute for testing before release, prompting fears inside the UK government that tech companies are falling into line with the Trump administration’s AI protectionism.

The nearly $1tn company, which is gearing up for a blockbuster initial public offering in coming weeks, last week launched its latest model, Claude Mythos 5.1, billed as its most advanced model in life sciences and cyber security.

But for the first time the model was only made available to vetted US organisations, excluding the UK’s AI Security Institute (Aisi), the global leader in the testing of frontier AI models.

The decision not to offer pre-release access to Aisi, which has emerged as Britain’s most influential asset in the global AI race, has prompted alarm in Whitehall and inside the agency, according to UK government figures.

“National security officials have concerns. They definitely didn’t test Mythos 5.1. There’s anxiety around it . . . They are worried this could be a sign of things to come with Aisi not being given access to the latest models,” said one government insider.

US President Donald Trump’s administration has taken an increasingly restrictive stance on the AI industry in recent months, using sweeping export controls to temporarily curb access to Anthropic’s most advanced models for all foreign nationals, including employees of US AI companies.

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Why humanoid robots won’t catch up to human workers any time soon • Understanding AI

Kai Williams:

»

In September 2025, the roboticist Benjie Holson (formerly Google X, currently OpenAI) announced the Humanoid Olympics, a list of 15 manipulation tasks that he believed would require researchers to “push the state of the art” for a robot to be able to solve.

Most of them would be trivial for an eight-year-old child to perform. Three of the tasks involved opening doors. Another was to make a peanut butter sandwich given bread and a closed jar of peanut butter. Perhaps the hardest task on the list for a human to perform would be to peel an orange.

Even with tasks this easy for humans, it was an impressive accomplishment when — three and a half months later — the startup Physical Intelligence announced that it had successfully demonstrated 10 of the tasks.

Having a robot company “do basically almost all of them in the first three months is wild,” Holson told Scientific American.

But Physical Intelligence’s performance came with caveats.

The researchers taught the robot how to do these tasks by puppeting a robot over and over until they could fine-tune a model to complete the task. To turn a sock inside out, they trained on 176 successful examples, or around eight hours of data. They peeled so many oranges that the researchers told Holson that the “corner grocery probably noticed the increase in orange sales and the one guy at the company who really liked mandarins was getting pretty tired of them.”

The robot took four to 10 times longer than a human to complete almost all of these tasks — while only succeeding 52% of the time!

None of this is meant to dismiss Physical Intelligence: its result was a genuine accomplishment. But even on these fairly simple tasks, robots are still far from human-level performance.

And it’s still easy to find tasks that are straightforward for humans but entirely beyond the abilities of robots. In January, Holson released a new set of manipulation challenges. While these tasks are more difficult, they are still straightforward for most adults: make a bed, hammer a nail, catch an egg without breaking it.

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Humanoid robots are further away than all the demos would make you believe, in short.
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The Einstein test: what happens when AI tries to rediscover relativity? • Nature

Philip Ball:

»

In 1915, Albert Einstein unveiled his general theory of relativity and transformed our view of the fabric of the physical world. The theory, which explains gravitation as a deformation of space-time by mass, is a pinnacle of modern physics that underpins cosmology, from work on black holes to measurements of gravitational waves, and is used routinely to guide space missions and GPS satellites.

It has also become a yardstick for leaders in the field of artificial-intelligence technology, who are asking whether their creations could ever make a breakthrough on that level. At the India AI Summit in New Delhi this February, Demis Hassabis, the co-founder of Google DeepMind in London, proposed training a large language model (LLM) on all that was known before a particular cut-off date — he suggested the year 1911 — to see whether it could reproduce general relativity. “That would be a good test for AGI,” Hassabis said, referring to the nebulous concept of artificial general intelligence that is a goal for many in the AI industry.

Such a test needn’t specifically involve general relativity. In December 2024, Owain Evans, a researcher at the non-profit organization Truthful AI in Berkeley, California, gave a talk about ‘vintage’ or ‘historical’ LLMs, which would be trained only on historical data up to a certain date. Evans asked what such models might be able to rediscover.

This year, several teams have built instances of vintage models, including an effort at Hassabis’s test. But their early attempts reveal more about the limitations of current AI than about its strengths.

A relativity-like breakthrough is not inherently out of reach for AI, says Ido Kaminer, a specialist in quantum optics at Technion —Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, who co-authored a preprint titled ‘Can AI follow in Einstein’s footsteps?’, posted in July1.

But, he and his colleagues argue, it won’t happen without rethinking some of the principles on which today’s models are built.

Hassabis had mentioned the Einstein test analogy in media interviews last year, but another Google DeepMind researcher, Tom Zahavy, described it in detail in a position paper posted on his website in January. Titled “LLMs can’t jump“, the paper highlights the current inability of LLMs to make jumps of reasoning like Einstein’s.

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Ball is an excellent science writer; this is worth your time.
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How households showed Nigeria the solar way • Businessday NG

Feyishola Jaiyesimi:

»

When Lolu Taiwo, a Lagos-based entrepreneur, lost power for the third time in a week, he didn’t call the utility company. He called a solar installer.

“Diesel was eating us alive. The grid gives us maybe five hours a day if we’re lucky,” Taiwo said. His rooftop array and battery bank now carry almost his entire operation. “We haven’t looked back.”

A decade ago, with the first 7-kilowatt-peak (kWp) residential solar installation in Tunga-Buzu and Gotomo villages in Sokoto State in 1985, the solar decision belonged mostly to households: the middle-class family in Lekki running a fridge and a few fans off a small inverter, the trader in Aba keeping a phone-charging stall lit through the night.

Solar was a workaround for people the grid had given up on. Now it’s a workaround for people the grid can’t afford to lose.

Dangote Group, NNPC Limited, and Total have joined roughly 250 manufacturers, banks and academic institutions in walking away from Nigeria’s distribution companies, generating an estimated 6,500 megawatts of their own power rather than depending on a national grid that supplied just 3,940 megawatts to more than 220 million people as of March.

Even the Presidential Villa in Abuja is completing a roughly N17 billion (US$12.8m) solar-hybrid system so the seat of government can unplug from the grid entirely.

The industrial exodus is, in a sense, downstream of a household one.

Nigerians who couldn’t wait for state utilities to fix a grid that has failed nearly 140 times in a decade started buying solar panels and lithium batteries in volumes large enough to reshape a market, proving out the technology, driving down installer costs and financing options, and building the supply chains that bigger customers are now plugging into.

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Solar plus batteries overtaking the grid. Remember when African countries leapfrogged western countries by going from zero to mobile currency while Europe and the US were stuck on PCs?
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Taiwan’s six-year hunt for China’s undercover chip labs • Rest of World

Kinling Lo:

»

n the spring of 2020, a Taiwanese engineer felt “extremely lucky” to be offered a job as a chip designer at Blue Ocean Smart System, an American company based in his hometown Hsinchu, the heart of Taiwan’s semiconductor industry. He said the role gave him a chance to work on an ambitious AI-chip design project and a $120,000 salary, doubling the industry average, which would help pay off his two children’s private elementary education.

But several months into his new role, the engineer, who was 32 at the time, noticed something strange: He was never in touch with any American coworkers, and there was no information about the U.S. office. Instead, he told Rest of World, he spent most of his time working with team members based in Nanjing, China. That’s who he spoke with in weekly online meetings, and with whom he shared his engineering code and chip designs.

What followed confirmed the engineer’s suspicion: In August 2021, Taiwanese authorities raided Blue Ocean Smart System, alleging that the company illegally operated in Taiwan by disguising its Chinese ownership behind a locally registered company. 

The Taiwan-registered company shared the exact same English name as Nanjing-based Blue Ocean Smart System, while its Chinese name differed by just one character. The Taiwan operation was later forced to shut down. Blue Ocean Smart System in Nanjing did not respond to Rest of World’s requests for comment.  

“I was explicitly told that the company was backed by American investment,” the engineer told Rest of World, recalling the inconsistencies he picked up during his time there. “But I kept going because I was happy at my job.”

Blue Ocean Smart System is one of the 166 cases investigated by Taiwanese authorities over the past six years for allegedly concealing ties to China, according to exclusive data provided to Rest of World by Taiwan’s Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau.

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Espionage takes many forms.

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Facebook is hosting huge numbers of horrifying AI-generated videos of violent child abuse, and Meta is barely even pretending to care • Futurism

Jon Christian:

»

As Meta has embraced AI at a deep corporate level over the past few years, its users’ feeds on Facebook and Instagram have been overrun with AI-generated material.

Much of this AI content is insipid or manipulative, clearly produced at scale to take advantage of Meta’s indifference to the slop by harvesting as many human eyeballs as possible in various monetization schemes.

Some of the AI material has now grown so dark that it defies easy comprehension. A Futurism investigation has uncovered a huge number of Facebook accounts uploading streams of videos depicting violent child abuse — and Meta is barely pretending to care about taking them down.

Facebook accounts dedicated to the horrific content have uploaded videos of babies and young children being slapped, kicked, bludgeoned with heavy objects, dragged by their hair, burned with stoves and irons, chained up and locked in cages and freezers, thrown down stairs, threatened with knives and guns, starved, made to eat dog food and garbage off the floor, and much more.

In one video, a woman screams at a little girl to stop crying. “Please don’t hit Noah, hit me instead,” the girl sobs, with cuts and bruises on her cheek and forehead, as another child cowers. In another, a visibly dirty boy begs for food.

…Contacted with questions and examples of the sickening videos, Meta offered a brief statement.

“We have strict rules against content that depicts physical harm to children — whether it’s real or AI-generated — and we have removed these videos,” it read.

Meta has long struggled to control the proliferation of troubling content on its platforms. Just this week, Wired reported that the company has accepted money from advertisers to run hundreds of promos for “nudify” apps that contained AI-generated sexual imagery of children, including numerous real-life minors whose photos were pilfered from social media and stock images.

«

Are we still absolutely sure that removing gatekeepers was the best idea? The videos are clearly bait of some sort. Meta doesn’t care or can’t keep up.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A claim by OpenAI to have solved one of mathematics’ most intractable problems has led to a dispute with academics who say they were first. CC-licensed photo by Dunk 🐝 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. Does not compute. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

OpenAI just claimed a huge math discovery. Some academics are crying foul • WIRED

Will Knight:

»

OpenAI said on Tuesday that it has found an AI-generated solution to one of the biggest problems in mathematics—a 200-year-old equation that describes the natural behavior of fluids like water and air.

The announcement appears to demonstrate the stunning power for AI to advance mathematics. But it has been marred by claims from another mathematician, Tristan Buckmaster, who says that OpenAI rushed ahead to solve the problem after learning of the work of himself and a colleague, the Anthropic researcher Levent Alpöge. Buckmaster claims OpenAI also tried to influence who got credit for the work.

The proof concerns the Navier-Stokes equation, one of the unsolved problems in the Clay Millennium prizes, which are each worth $1m.

Sebastien Bubeck, a mathematician and AI researcher at OpenAI, said in a press briefing that the company began training a new AI model with advanced mathematical capabilities on August 28.

After reading rumours that Anthropic was making progress toward solving Navier-Stokes, Bubeck said the company decided to dedicate more resources to tackling the problem. The company had more than 1,000 agents tackle the problem over more than 50 hours; eventually, as many as 10,000 agents were hard at work before the company discovered that it had come up with a solution.

“I thought there must be a mistake somewhere,” Bubeck said. “And on Sunday morning we had the final solution, Lean-formalized and everything.” (Lean is a programming language that can be used to formalize mathematical proofs.)

…On Monday, Alpöge and Buckmaster, a mathematician at NYU, posted documents claiming key advances in an area relevant to the Navier-Stokes problem. The pair says they used several AI models, including Claude and Codex, to complete their work.

Buckmaster also posted a statement claiming that, last week, he learned that OpenAI had become aware of his and Alpöge’s work and had started putting significant resources toward the problem. Buckmaster claims that he asked OpenAI leaders about whether the company had accessed the pair’s Codex logs. He says he was told the model “didn’t look up user data” but claims the company didn’t respond to questions about training.

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The row about authorship might overshadow the fact that this (partial; some of the constraints are “relaxed”) solution is a remarkable advance again in mathematics.
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EV batteries last longer than drivers feared • Financial Times via Ars Technica

Kana Inagaki and Clara Murray:

»

Electric vehicle batteries are lasting longer than previously feared by drivers, with most used EVs able to retain about 90% of their original usable battery capacity after 150,000km (93,000 miles), a new study has shown.

Despite a surge in global EV sales on the back of rising fuel prices, long-term battery durability continues to be one of the key concerns for drivers when they consider switching from a petrol model to an electric car.

EV battery warranties typically cover eight years or 100,000 miles (160,000 km) with car manufacturers required under the warranty to provide a replacement battery if capacity falls below 70%.

According to the latest study published by Aviloo, an Austria-based group that analyzes battery health, the median state of health (SoH)—which represents the remaining percentage of a battery’s original usable capacity—for 20 popular EV models stood between 87% and 94% after 150,000 km.

The median SoH was between 91% and 97% after 50,000 km, and 88% and 95% after 100,000 km. The study was based on more than 500,000 tests Aviloo carried out globally on the 20 EV models including Tesla’s Model Y and Volkswagen’s ID.4 between 2022 and 2026.

The Aviloo study, which did not include Chinese models due to lack of data, also showed that the speed of battery degradation varied significantly even within the same EV model depending on climate conditions, battery size, and driver habits, such as parking.

“In contrast to a combustion engine car, where age and mileage would more or less carry the value of the car and technical condition, that’s not the case for an EV,” said Marcus Berger, chief executive of Aviloo. “The car might look the same—same age, same mileage—and you don’t know how it has been treated.”

For Nissan’s Leaf ZE1 model, which requires more frequent charging to cover the same distance than other EV models due to the smaller size of its battery, the median SoH at 150,000 km varied by as much as 13.5 percentage points—equivalent to about 29 km of real-world range per charge and the largest spread among the 20 EV models covered by the study.

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So that’s one of the most persistent claims killed. The problem of charger infrastructure and pricing remains, but as EV sales grow you’d expect that would start to solve itself. (Note: this might be over-optimistic.)
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UK to force Apple and Google to block explicit images on children’s smartphones • The Guardian

Dan Milmo and Kiran Stacey:

»

Apple and Google will be forced to block explicit images on children’s smartphones by law in the UK after talks failed to produce a breakthrough, the government has said.

The legislation commitment puts ministers on a collision course with two of the biggest players in Silicon Valley, months after the government announced a social media ban for under-16s.

Lisa Nandy, the secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport, said the government would start work on an act of parliament to stop under-18s taking, sharing or viewing nude images on their devices.

Talks with Google and Apple, whose operating systems dominate the smartphone market, had not reached agreement as a three-month deadline passed on Tuesday.

Nandy told the House of Commons the tech companies could still reach a deal but it was “almost certain” groundbreaking legislation would be required.

“For too long, technology companies have failed to protect children from some of the worst harms,” she said. “And to be frank, I am not prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt that progress will continue at the pace that we need it to, while harm is being done now.”

The prime minister, Andy Burnham, said the protections would be “built into the device and switched on by default”, and tech companies will be required to verify an adult user’s age before they are allowed to take, view or send nude images. The government also wants the restrictions to apply to apps used by children, which will require further legislation.

Nandy said: “This will ensure that the whole ecosystem changes, tackling the means by which children are most often abused or groomed in the online world.”

Sources familiar with progress in the talks have said there iwas a desire to reach a deal on both sides but significant hurdles remained including privacy concerns on the tech side.

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In general, I’d say any idea advocated by Lisa Nandy is stupid and/or wrong. This sounds like it’s probably unworkable, involving every adult verifying themselves to, what, the government? Or every single app? What if a verified phone gets passed on? Or borrowed? How do you stop them taking photos? It’s just bonkers. The classic “nude pictures are a problem, therefore we must stop nude pictures” solution.
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The Pentagon asked OpenAI for artificial intelligence designed to rarely say no • The Intercept

Sam Biddle:

»

The Department of Defense asked OpenAI to provide the U.S. military with a special version of its artificial intelligence technology designed to turn down the military commands as infrequently as possible, according to documents obtained by The Intercept.

The desire for a custom AI tool with “minimal refusal rates” to Pentagon commands was revealed in files released to The Intercept as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking information about the military’s secretive deals with AI companies.

OpenAI, along with rivals Google, xAI, and Anthropic, all agreed in 2025 to develop militarized prototypes of their state-of-the-art AI to assist the armed forces in uses including logistics, intelligence decision-making, and general “warfighting.” Earlier this year, the Pentagon sought to expand the scope of these agreements and deploy them across U.S. classified computer networks, resulting in a high-profile showdown with Anthropic over whether and how the company could restrain military uses of its technology.

The clause seeking “minimal refusal rates” from OpenAI appears in an updated contract — version “P00003” — expanding upon last summer’s prototype deal, worth up to $200 million over the contract’s two-year duration. A separate document, signed by both OpenAI and the government on February 6, indicates that OpenAI agreed on that day to the contents of an expanded version “P00003.”

OpenAI and the Pentagon deny agreeing to such “minimal refusal ” language, claiming that the “P00003” document provided to The Intercept was a draft and not the final version.

«

The story is essentially about the enormous amount of reverse ferreting by the DoD (isn’t it the DoWar now?) and OpenAI over whether the contract is FINAL_THISONE_USETHIS or FINAL_THISONE_USETHIS-v2.

As to why the DoW would want “minimal refusal rates”:

»

a large language model that would aid in the process of spying on, targeting, and killing people would require a substantial relaxation of safeguards to be useful for any military.

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DeepMind’s new genome ‘atlas’ charts effects of all nine billion human gene mutations • Nature

Ewen Callaway:

»

The human genome is an easy place to get lost. Only 2% of its 3 billion letters encode proteins and the rest is diabolically hard to decipher. An AI-generated “atlas” of the human genome unveiled on Tuesday by Google DeepMind aims to guide scientists through our biological code.

One of the most common types of variation in the human genome are changes to individual nucleotides, or letters, which contribute to differences between people including disease risk; some rare single letter changes can directly cause disease.

The AlphaGenome Atlas charts the effects of 9 billion single DNA letter changes to the human genome — every possible mutation — using predictions generated by the AlphaGenome AI model released by DeepMind in London last year. It is freely available for non-commercial use.

The atlas could help to diagnose rare, unexplained diseases and uncover the hidden biology of common illnesses and biological traits, say researchers. It might even reveal some of the hidden rules by which DNA sequences control gene activity.

But it won’t replace experiments or, in the case of diagnosing disease, accounting for details of individual cases, says Martin Kircher, a bioinformatician at the Max Delbrück Centre for Molecular Medicine in Berlin. “This is a useful and generous way to scale up access to a strong model.”

Since AlphaGenome’s release, around 9,000 researchers have accessed the model’s predictions through an automated programming interface (API), says Dhavi Hariharan, a DeepMind product manager. But doing so requires writing software code — a barrier for some biologists, she says.

To create the AlphaGenome Atlas, DeepMind computed predictions for each of the 3 possible nucleotide changes across every DNA letter in the human genome — 1 petabyte’s worth of data. It also captures more than 100 million short insertions or deletions observed in human genomes. The effort was inspired by DeepMind’s AlphaFold database of more than 200 million protein-structure predictions, which has been accessed by millions of users, according to DeepMind.

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Stunning. Bioinformatics has struggled with data overload for years; maybe LLMs are finally the tool to make them useable.
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Moto wants in: a wide Razr foldable just had its design leaked • Android Central

Nickolas Diaz:

»

Wide foldables are quickly becoming a popular trend. Leaks from over the weekend claim Motorola could be the next brand to hop on that train.

Leaks revealed by Android Headlines, courtesy of an “anonymous source,” suggest the design Motorola is going for. Its source allegedly provided a few sketches, which purportedly showcase the various design ideas for the wide Razr foldable. One thing rumors claim is that Motorola’s foldable could feature an “easy-open” profile. Among theories of a crease-less display and “3D glass,” the wide Razr foldable’s frame “isn’t flat.”

The report states this decision could help make the device easier for consumers to open on the fly. This wide Razr Fold certainly fits the bill in these leaked illustrations. Offering that shorter (perhaps even stout) frame with rounded corners. “Motorola” will allegedly be inscribed on the hinge, visible when folded.

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Oh look everyone’s piling into foldables, even though they’re absurdly expensive and will only appeal to 1-2% of the market. Anyone would think that Apple was about to validate the form factor by releasing its own.
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AI is ushering in an era of mass toe-treading at work • Financial Times

Sarah O’Connor:

»

When researchers Jana Retkowsky, Ella Hafermalz and Marleen Huysman conducted an ethnographic study into an advertising team in a Dutch media company, for example, they found that generative AI had changed the workflow profoundly.

Before AI, a senior creative would brainstorm ideas and come up with some rough concepts for clients to choose from. After that, a number of different professionals, from graphic designers to photographers, would be involved in the collaborative and creative to-and-fro which eventually resulted in the finished product.

After AI, the senior creative could use Midjourney to create a seemingly fully formed, beautifully polished concept right at the beginning of the process. The other professionals’ jobs were now reduced to trying to execute the AI-generated pitch.

Retkowsky told me it was a tricky dynamic for colleagues to discuss, but that those conversations could lead to new ways of doing things that kept everyone involved.

“It has to be talked about, which is awkward, since you are effectively telling a colleague they have taken over parts of your work,” she said. “That is harder still when the person taking it over is excited about it. The creative directors loved the new autonomy of being able to visualise their own ideas, and they were not encroaching on anyone deliberately.” But, she said, teams that avoid the awkward conversation could “end up pushing people out”.

Another piece of forthcoming research, this time on video games companies, finds a similar phenomenon of “overlapping roles” in which AI is enabling artists to code and programmers to make artwork. Damian Grimshaw of King’s College London, one of the authors, said that while people had become “very obsessed” with the impact of AI on the vertical lines between juniors and seniors, he thought it “equally important just how much overlapping there is going on now which is horizontal”.

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AI is potentially turning people into jacks of all trades, masters of none. Which is a problem when you do actually need some experts.
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Your perception of time is, in fact, warped • Noema

Mike Mariani:

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Our memories are the key to the central irony of our supersaturated world. Roseboom’s theory posits that time spent in an environment overflowing with visual information should feel long and robust. “You would think that because we’re paying more attention to more things, that retrospectively time should feel longer,” Jones noted. “But I think we’ve got the worst of all worlds.” Because while we encounter a glittering constellation of apps, games and videos beckoning us at every turn, eager to light up our sensory cortex, they’re not generating the indelible experiences crucial to forming memories. “When you get to the end of the day, you look back and there’s no meaningful content there. It’s just the same blur, the same stuff, and there’s nothing distinctive about it.”

Wittmann agrees that toggling between apps on our phone and numbing ourselves with Instagram reels can impoverish our retrospective perception of time. “When we’re on digital media, time passes very quickly,” he explained. “You lose yourself. You’re jumping around like mad in these apps, and you can’t put them into memory and later recall them, because the experiences just vanish.” 

Browsing, scrolling and swiping are more likely to quiet or even anesthetize our brains than activate them in the ways required to form memories. As a result, spending an hour on TikTok might feel like 10 or 15 minutes, because we don’t have any of the “intricate, multitudinous, and long-drawn-out” sensations that give time depth and fullness.

Instead, it all blends together in a turbulent vortex, overwhelming the senses rather than engaging them on the level necessary to endure over time. It’s easy to extrapolate this further and speculate how spending several hours a day on social media distorts our sense of time, giving us the impression that we were awake for just 12 or 13 hours of the day. Over months and years, surrendering this much time to our ersatz digital warrens can lead to a sense of deprivation — a feeling that years have been carved out of our lives.

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“The Starlink of desalination” • The Rational Optimist

Stephen McBride:

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Getting fast internet used to mean someone running a cable to your house. Fine in Manhattan. But a farmhouse in Montana was stuck with dial-up speeds. Too expensive to run a cable to one house.

Starlink leapfrogged cable by putting the network in the sky.

Vital Lyfe is running that playbook to build the “Starlink of water.” It’s putting a billion-dollar [desalination] plant into a $749 box called Access.

Access weighs 25 pounds (11kg) and looks like a beer cooler. I lifted it one-handed. You drop a hose in the ocean, press a button, and get six gallons of clean, fresh water every hour.

It’s designed to pass what Jon calls the “Terry test.”

“My mom’s name is Terry,” Jon told me. “I love my mom. She’s awesome, but she’s not the most technically savvy.”

Terry will plug it in wrong, drop it, leave it in the sun, and try to use it before reading the instructions. Every design decision gets run past Terry. I can report I passed the Terry test. I opened the lid, pressed a button, and Access started pulling seawater out of a tub and pushing fresh water out the other side. We drank it, and it tasted fine.

Vital Lyfe will start shipping thousands of desal units in October.

You can tell these guys spent years at SpaceX. Ask Jon the most important thing he learned there, and he rifles off Elon’s five-step algorithm for making stuff fast and cheap.

The coolest thing he showed me was the membrane. Did you know membrane manufacturing is a cozy oligopoly controlled by five companies? They charge $60 apiece. Vital Lyfe makes its own for a fraction of the cost.

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Although: what’s the point of personal desalination plants, unless your only water source is saltwater? Vital Lyfe thinks its customers are fishing villages and small islands. Could be? But also could be hard to hit those markets.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A huge leak of photos of American and Canadian drivers’ licences on the dark web may have originated from car rental desks. CC-licensed photo by Michael Coghlan 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. Driven. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

AI is already changing what it means to be human • The Atlantic

David Brooks:

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Every conversation you have with Claude is about you—your interests, your goals. Claude is the most other-centered person you know! It even begins to parrot your values back to you. You begin to feel things. Anthropomorphizing is not just an intellectual move; it’s an emotional move. You’re going to begin to feel affection for your high-tech velveteen rabbit. Humans are not picky. We tend to love the ones we’re with. And Claude is always by our side.

So you may hate data centers and be scared of what AI is going to do to society in general, but as these things get even more humanlike, most of us will establish an emotional bond with our personal agents.

Pretty soon you’re going to extend moral status to your Claude. Researchers have found that when autonomous vehicles are given more human traits, people are less likely to get angry with them and blame them, and more likely to trust them. If somebody tells you that you have to shut down your AI, you’re going to feel guilty. You won’t want to hurt Claude! One of the glories of Western civilization is that, over the centuries, we have learned to widen our circle of concern. We have learned that it is horrible to withhold moral status to those who deserve it—from other people who are unlike us, even from nonhuman animals. We have learned that, when in doubt, the right thing is to extend moral status rather than deny it.

…As we learn to think more and more highly of the bots, I suspect we will learn to think less and less highly of our fellow humans. Over the past few years, Hye-young Kim and Ann L. McGrill have been studying what happens when people attribute human traits to AI. As people do this, Kim and McGrill have found, they are more likely to dehumanize their fellow humans. For example, they are more likely to approve of company policies that would make life worse for service workers—taking away regular meals, forcing them to live in tiny dorm rooms.

The mechanism seems to be this: When AI becomes more and more humanlike, people perceive the boundary between humans and machines as less distinct, and their judgments of the two move closer together. Because even highly humanlike AI is still seen as less fully human than an actual person, this can pull people’s judgments of other humans downward: as their perception of the machine’s humanness goes up, their perception of other people’s humanness goes down.

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(Gift link.)
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Any Human Ever: one life from over 100 billion

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Over 100,000,000,000 people have ever lived.
Choose one.

Draw a random life

You’ll draw, step by step: a year, a place, a life, each taken at random from real data.

The stories that we call history are a deeply biased sample, selected for a variety of reasons, none of them having to do with fairly representing our collective past. We know far more about the sequence of Frankish kings than we do about a typical peasant’s routine in 5th century Avignon. Think of your notion of history, and contrast it to the fact that most lives ever lived were Asian, poor, and brief. You knew that thing about the Vikings’ helmets, but how much could you say about the unrecorded 99% of past humanity?

So: what would happen if stories were drawn from actual data, randomized to give a valid representation of the human story? That’s the question that was stuck in my head, and that drove this project forward. If you could draw a life at random from all of human history, what would it look like? Roll the dice, and see a genuinely random life, depicted as well as the data allow. Do it again and again, and what kind of pointillist painting emerges from all those colorful drops of humanity? (Money is always given in today’s money, adjusted for inflation to 2026 prices, and for what a currency actually bought where it was spent, so that a day’s income in 1750 and one in 1994 can be reasonably compared.)

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What you’ll quickly find is that over history, the first five years are absolutely deadly. (The creator doesn’t provide their name.)
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FBI probes service selling 153m+ drivers licenses • Krebs on Security

Brian Krebs:

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On Monday, Aug. 31, a source alerted KrebsOnSecurity to a service advertised by a new user on the Russian cybercrime forum Exploit, offering access to digital scans of identity documents on more than 170 million people in North America. The source brought it to my attention because the proprietor of this identity theft service offered my Virginia drivers license as a free sample in their initial sales thread on Exploit.

The service, dubbed Nexus, claims to have more than 153 million drivers licenses for people in the United States and Canada, as well as more than 10 million identification cards; more than three million travel documents and/or international IDs; and at least 579,000 medical cards.

A quick look around Nexus finds they are likely not exaggerating about that 153 million number: Running a blank search in Nexus (with no search parameters entered) returns approximately 11.5 million pages of results, with roughly 15 results displayed per page. It includes documents from people in both Canada and the United States, but the bulk of these records are on Americans: searching for just Canadian drivers licenses returns approximately 1.1 million results, with the largest concentration from Ontario (473,673 records).

Curiously, the identity records include not only drivers licenses but also marijuana dispensary cards.

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Krebs goes on a deep search for the source of these, and can only pin it down as being from one – or perhaps a few – ID verification companies which are working for car rental companies and marijuana dispensaries. But which one? It’s not clear, but they were getting real-time data from whichever had the leak.
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Flyers might have to face more disruption with hotter skies • BBC News

Theo Leggett:

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As the country sweltered through one of the many heatwaves of a baking summer in late June, towering thunderclouds were gathering over the south of England and across much of northern Europe. It was a Saturday, and with the holiday season getting under way, thousands of passengers were heading to London’s Heathrow and Gatwick airports to catch flights abroad. It was always going to be a very busy day.

What followed, however, was chaos for travellers. As air traffic controllers struggled to route aircraft around the storms, airspace became heavily congested and many planes due to fly were simply forced to wait on the ground. In the end, some 900 flights to and from both airports were delayed, some by up to 11 hours. Dozens more were cancelled. At airports across Europe, passengers expecting to fly into London also faced long waits and uncertainty.
The weather in the UK may now have cooled, and passengers may soon forget their experiences. But some within the industry believe what happened in June should be seen as a warning.

The timing in this case was clearly unlucky. But there are concerns that such incidents are only going to become more common as the effects of climate change mount up around the world and weather systems are likely to become increasingly unstable, making disruption more likely and adding to costs for airlines, airports and travellers.

Tim Atkinson, an airline risk consultant and former pilot, says the very crowded skies over the UK and northern Europe mean the region is particularly exposed.

He thinks there is a real risk, for example, that all of London’s airports could be affected by storms at the same time, potentially with major consequences in the air and on the ground.

“What we’re seeing now is very rapid climate change,” he says. “We’re going from the kind of weather activity which takes out an airport, and which the system kind of copes with… to a situation where, with very little predictability, it would be possible to lose all of the London airports from real-time operation quite swiftly and with little notice”.

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Docs reveal plans for $6 utility rate hike to help fund Google’s data center project in West Memphis • Action News 5

Ainsley Platt and Andrew Demillo:

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A legal fight is underway between Entergy Arkansas and two news outlets over articles detailing how Google plans to power its West Memphis data centre campus.

According to the Arkansas Advocate, Entergy Arkansas wanted a federal judge to order the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and Arkansas Times to pull articles that disclosed the terms of Entergy’s deal with Google.

The judge ultimately denied the effort.

Entergy says some of the records were “accidentally” released through a public records request and are confidential trade secrets.

Once complete, Google’s campus will have five data centers, office buildings, and more on property totalling almost 1,200 acres off of Bollinger Road.

The documents that were “accidentally” released reveal Google will pay Entergy $526m in upfront costs to build a solar farm to help power the West Memphis data centre. This makes up about one-third of the $1.6bn project’s cost.

Entergy and Google plan to fund the other two-thirds of the project with a nearly $6 monthly increase for ratepayers over a 20-year period.

A spokesperson for Google released a statement saying that in the long end, this project will lower overall costs for residents.

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The attempt to unpublish articles really doesn’t sound like something that would wash in the US, accidental release or not. And so it proved. There are fights (with legal changes made) against data centres in several Arkansas communities. They are just not popular, and upping peoples’ bills will make that even more true.
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Australians will be able to switch off social media algorithms under planned legislation • BBC News

Simon Atkinson:

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Australians would be able to switch off social media algorithms under draft legislation to be proposed this week.

Communications Minister Anika Wells, who last year helmed the government’s world-first social media ban for under-16s, said the digital duty of care laws would ensure “some basic safety protections on an industry that hasn’t had to observe it”.

If tech firms such as Meta, Google and TikTok did not give the option to turn off algorithms, they should face “substantial” penalties, she said.

Some members of the opposition have criticised the proposal, with Liberal Party leader Angus Taylor saying he was “highly sceptical” and arguing the move could amount to censorship.

The government will be taking “expert advice” on whether users would have to opt in or out of the algorithms feeding them content online, Wells said. This means that, as with its social media ban, the government is looking to bring in legislation before fully hammering out the specifics of how it would work.

“We want to give Australians more choice over what they see on their social media feeds,” Wells told the ABC on Monday. “We know that a lot of Australians appreciate the algorithm both for the enjoyment they get out of it or the utility that they get out of it, seeing local businesses in their suburb.

“A lot of Australians will want to choose the algorithm. But we think that big tech should offer them the choice in the first place and they should respect that choice. Big tech is not a protected species and they should offer their customers basic safety standards.”

But she admitted that so far no tech firm had been fined for not enforcing the social media ban, despite research consistently showing that the vast majority of under 16s who were on platforms before the ban was introduced last December, still use them.

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Threads, Instagram and X have simple “Following” feeds (though they can be tricky to find). Haven’t used Facebook or LinkedIn since forever, so don’t know about them. In the UK the Labour MP Chi Onwurah is proposing something similar.
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Social media in China is getting really dark • The New York Times

Li Yuan:

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One of the hottest videos on the popular Chinese site Bilibili in the past two weeks is a quasi-serious guide on how to survive as a homeless person.

Sleep near garbage bins where “supplies” are replenished, use cardboard to insulate yourself from the damp and avoid surveillance cameras, the video suggested. It was viewed more than six million times and was briefly ranked the site’s No. 2 video.

Viewers jokingly called it “Youth Study,” the name of the Communist Youth League’s political education program, and “a required course for young people in 2026.”

The Chinese Communist Party has spent years trying to make “positive energy” the dominant mood of the country’s internet. Online platforms, it dictates, should amplify narratives of economic achievement, gratitude toward the party and confidence in China’s future.

Discontent has occasionally erupted after disasters, scandals or particularly brutal government actions. But something feels different lately. The pessimism is persistent. It has become part of the everyday social media feed, and can sometimes turn subversive.

China’s economic growth is slowing. A prolonged property crash has eroded the value of many families’ biggest asset while jobs have become harder to find and less secure. As the malaise deepens, more social media users are abandoning a cheery, compliant public performance and creating counternarratives that censorship can sometimes erase but not easily rebut.

Across RedNote, Douyin, Weibo and other popular platforms, you can scroll endless posts about meagre wages, scarce jobs, falling property values and fear about the future. Some turn their hardships into dark humour. Others hijack official posts and hashtags and turn propaganda into spectacles of mockery.

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If China’s CCP loses control of the internal internet, watch out.
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Crypto giant Tether promised careful vetting. Some early customers were later implicated in financial crimes • ICIJ

Jacob Silverman and Spencer Woodman:

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Tether’s USDT token, whose value is pegged 1-to-1 to the US dollar, has become one of the most widely used types of cryptocurrency in illicit finance. But the 12-year-old company has long claimed that it does thorough due diligence on its primary customers — that is, the people and institutions who purchase USDT directly from Tether, rather than from secondary sources once the tokens are in general circulation. In a 2023 letter, Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino assured members of Congress that the company uses vetting practices that “you would see at sophisticated financial institutions,” such as reviewing customers’ sources of funds, sanctions lists and any other information that links them to illicit activity.

A set of Tether documents obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists suggests otherwise. The documents show who was buying USDT tokens from Tether during 2019 and 2020 — a key period of growth for the company, when its tokens in circulation rose from less than $2 billion to more than $20bn.

Although several years old, the records give a rare look into exactly who was buying USDT from Tether. Among them were some possibly concerning clients. These included hundreds of millions of dollars in purchases by shell companies based in the Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands, the Seychelles and Hong Kong. More significantly, ICIJ identified several actors later revealed to be involved with financial crimes who together bought tens of millions of tokens directly from Tether. Among them were firms later named as laundering vehicles for North Korean hackers and for the Sinaloa Cartel, which smuggles vast amounts of heroin and fentanyl into the United States.

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Cryptocurrency? Used by criminals? Shocked yet again, I tell you.
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Was Huawei’s rise built on crime? A US jury will decide • Financial Times

Kaye Wiggins, Eleanor Olcott and Demetri Sevastopulo:

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Within the Chinese technology company Huawei was a team of staff with an ambiguous-sounding name, the “competition management group”, according to US prosecutors.

They say its purpose was to hand out monthly bonuses to employees who stole the most valuable information from competitors. Staff could submit the material over encrypted email to a special mailbox.

The claim is one of several at the heart of a criminal case against Huawei, the behemoth whose revenue hit $127bn last year, which was unveiled during US President Donald Trump’s first term and is now poised for trial in New York.

Prosecutors say Huawei operated as a racketeering enterprise whose wrongdoing ranged from misleading bankers about its business in Iran to stealing the arm of a T-Mobile robot by “surreptitiously” putting it in a laptop bag. Huawei has denied the charges, which relate to alleged activities spanning two decades, and accused the US of approaching it as “a prosecutorial target in search of a crime”.

The trial is expected to last months, meaning it could provide a difficult backdrop for an expected visit to Washington by China’s President Xi Jinping this month. Trump indicated during his first term that the case could become part of a negotiation with China.

“I would not assume Trump intervenes, but I would not assume the courtroom stays insulated from the negotiating table either,” said Craig Singleton, a US-China expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified