The collapse in sales of physical video games discs has been a long time coming, but it mirrors the music industry’s plight. CC-licensed photo by Bryan Ochalla 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. 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.

Google lawsuit against SerpApi over scraping search results has been dismissed • Seroundtable

Barry Schwartz:

»

Last December, Google sued SerpApi over scraping its search results, and now a court has granted SerpApi’s motion to dismiss the case. US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers dismissed these claims with leave to amend, giving Google 21 days to refile its complaint if it can demonstrate authorization from copyright owners.

You can see the court filing here (PDF) which basically says Google brought claims under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), alleging SerpApi bypassed its anti-bot barrier (“SearchGuard”). However, Section 1201 only protects technological measures that restrict access to copyrighted works.

Plain and aggregated search results such as URLs, snippets, and factual index data, are publicly accessible facts and are not “works protected under the Copyright Act.” The judge dismissed these claims without leave to amend, ruling that Google cannot use copyright law to block scraping of uncopyrighted search result data.

And for the knowledge panel, facts, etc, the judge said that Google does not own the copyright to most third-party web content it displays. To claim DMCA anti-circumvention protections over third-party material, Google needed to show that the actual copyright holders authorized Google to deploy access-control measures on their behalf. Google failed to allege this authorization in its original complaint, according to the judge. In this part, the judge dismissed these claims with leave to amend, giving Google 21 days to refile its complaint if it can demonstrate authorization from copyright owners.

The court affirmed that a platform doesn’t necessarily have to be the sole copyright owner to sue under the DMCA if it suffers injury from circumvention – so Google has standing to bring claims if the underlying requirements are met. The judge agreed that spoofing browser fingerprints, rotating IPs, and solving CAPTCHAs to bypass SearchGuard constitutes “circumvention” under the DMCA. Circumvention alone is not illegal under the DMCA unless the barrier is actually guarding copyrighted works with the permission of the copyright holders. [Google cannot argue that about search results – Overspill Ed.]

And yes, this seems like a big win for scrapers.

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The corollary of this is that other non-copyrighted output is free to scrape and make use of. And do you know what else isn’t copyrighted? The output of LLMs and image generators. Which means that “distillation” – asking questions of LLMs and using the output to train your own – has been declared legal by US courts.
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OpenAI’s accidental cyberattack against Hugging Face is science fiction that happened • Simon Willison

Simon Willison, who is the person to listen to about AI, on the OpenAI/Hugging Face exploit:

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It’s pretty clear what happened here. OpenAI removed safety filters for an in-progress model, locked it up in a sandbox and told it to solve the ExploitGym problems. Given the absence of guardrails there was nothing to prevent the model from attempting to break out of that sandbox, break into Hugging Face, and read the answers from there instead.

OpenAI’s sandbox used the now common pattern of allowing access to an allow-list of sites related to installing additional packages via a controlled proxy. In OpenAI’s words:

»

While operating in our sandboxed testing environment, our models spent a substantial amount of inference compute finding a way to obtain open Internet access, in pursuit of solving the evaluation problem. To gain access, the models identified and exploited a zero-day vulnerability (which we’ve now responsibly disclosed to the vendor) in the package registry cache proxy. With this access, our models performed a series of privilege escalation and lateral movement actions in our research testing environment until the models reached a node with Internet access.

«

So step one was to break out onto the public internet. The model then broke into Hugging Face to find the answers:

»

After gaining Internet access, the models inferred that Hugging Face potentially hosted models, datasets and solutions for ExploitGym.

«

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What Willison brings to this story (which others won’t) is the perspective and the context of someone who has been trying, carefully, to hack these systems since ChatGPT first appeared on the scene in 2022.
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Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 8 is a fun new shape for foldables • The Verge

Dominic Preston:

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In photos, I wasn’t impressed by the squat shape. In person, to my surprise, it feels great, and almost immediately intuitive. If you want to get a feel for it yourself, grab your [US] passport — the Z Fold 8 is about the same height and less than half an inch more narrow.

This isn’t Samsung’s only new foldable this year, and in fact, its lineup just got more confusing. The Z Fold 8 may be the official follow-up to last year’s impressive Z Fold 7, but in truth the Z Fold 8 Ultra is the straightforward sequel. That phone has the same squarish inner screen as previous Z Fold phones and a similar triple rear camera. The name feels like a sly trick to get around this year’s inevitable price hikes: Samsung slapped “Ultra” on the box of its highest-end model to help cover for pricing the phone at $2,099.99, up $100 from the Z Fold 7.

Meanwhile, with its wider screens and stripped back cameras, the Z Fold 8 feels less like a sequel and more like a spinoff. And it almost — almost — looks like a bargain at $1,899.99, down $100 on its nominal predecessor.

Samsung isn’t the first to the Z Fold 8’s form factor. Huawei’s Pura X Max launched in April with a similar shape, though it’s only available in China. Apple is widely expected to be next, using a similar passport-esque shape for its first iPhone foldable in September. In truth, elements of this design are even older: the Fold 8 is almost exactly the same width as Google’s first-gen Pixel Fold, though a good deal shorter, bringing foldable phones full circle.

I’ve been sceptical about the return of the wider foldable, which in photos looks squat and uncomfortable, too wide to use naturally while closed and too short to feel expansive when open. The industry tried this design once and moved on, so why — other than Apple’s potential adoption — should we give it a go again?

Samsung’s answer is that its two Z Fold 8 models are designed for different users and different uses. The Z Fold 8 Ultra, tall and thin when closed and similar to a square when open, is meant to be a multitasking monster, useful for running apps in split-screen, giving you the equivalent screen space of two regular 6.5-inch phones side by side. The wider Z Fold 8 is instead about consumption: Its 4:3 aspect ratio is equally natural for watching Netflix shows in landscape as it is for reading ebooks in portrait, and at 201g, it’s light enough to hold comfortably in one hand.

Or, as Samsung’s marketing department puts it, the Fold 8 is for “joy-maxxing,” and the Ultra is for “power-maxxing.” I sit through these presentations so that you don’t have to, folks.

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There’s no way in the world you can call a phone – you know, a phone – that costs nearly $2,000 (probably the same in sterling) a “bargain”.
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Forgot your Google password? Now you can log in with a selfie • Ars Technica

Ryan Whitwam:

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Getting locked out of an account is no fun. Google has a few ways to help you regain access if you happen to forget your password or lose an authenticator, including recovery contacts and backup codes. Now, Google has a completely new option: your face. You can now give Google a video record of your face and sign into your account with a selfie, which sounds like something people are going to just love.

You will have to set this feature up ahead of time if you want the option of regaining account access with a selfie later on. To get started, verify your account type is supported. You won’t be able to configure selfie sign-ins for Workspace accounts, child accounts, or any account enrolled in Google’s Advanced Protection Program.

Configuring selfie sign-in requires you to record a video, which Google will store on its servers. Google’s selfie sign-in landing page includes the typical disclaimers about privacy and data access, promising that the company will keep the video encrypted and won’t use it for any other purposes unless you opt in.

Selfie videos can be used for login purposes, to verify your age for accessing certain account features, and to create an AI avatar. Currently, Google does have an optional toggle in the setup flow that allows the company to use your selfie video to improve its facial recognition tech. A Google spokesperson confirms this is not required to use the new account recovery feature, and the company will not use the video for anything else if you leave the box unchecked.

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Let’s just hope that Google has figured out the ways in which people could be coerced into using this, and worked around it. And tested it against the finest AI money can buy.
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Space datacentres proposed by Musk and Bezos ‘catastrophic’ for planet, experts warn • The Guardian

Tom Perkins:

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Space datacentres proposed by SpaceX, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and others would release staggering levels of pollution that would probably alter the Earth’s atmosphere and be “catastrophic” for the planet, space industry experts and environmental groups warn in a new petition demanding a review of their impacts.

Tech companies have collectively proposed millions of “orbital datacentres” and are pressing forward with plans, which require Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approval. Among other issues, pollution from satellites and rockets burning up upon re-entry appears to be accumulating in the stratosphere at alarming levels. The spacecraft release black soot, rare metals, aluminum oxides and other pollutants with unknown effects.

Some scientists fear the pollution could destroy the ozone layer, potentially expose some people to higher levels of ultraviolet radiation, or help further destabilize the planet during the climate crisis. The pollution could also end up back on Earth, and millions of satellites would create a major source of light pollution.

The petition submitted to the FCC calls for a pause on new licenses for space data centre projects, arguing that the plans “violate federal law”.

The datacenter companies “describe their plans in grandiose, civilization-changing terms”, the petition states. “But these same proponents have refused to embrace any inquiry into the impacts of their self-claimed epochal technology on the environment, science, economy, or other values.”

…Several former federal US space officials told the Guardian they doubt the orbital datacenters are feasible. But putting millions of additional satellites into orbit would create a significant environmental risk, said Steve Volz, the former head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) satellite office.

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Seems odd that these rockets in particular would be a problem, and not all the other rockets going up all the time to put satellites in orbit. But everyone hates datacentres, no matter where they might be. The only exceptions seem to be governments and the people who want to fill them with computers.
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Sony’s decision to ditch discs was practically inevitable, data shows • Ars Technica

Kyle Orland:

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Many gamers have been lamenting Sony’s recently announced decision to halt sales of physical game discs in 2028. However, new data revealed by Circana analyst Mat Piscatella highlights how years of stark economic trends helped lead Sony to that decision.

In a social media thread Thursday morning, Piscatella shared insights into Circana’s tracking data on physical game sales in the US dating back to 2003. A graph of those trends shows physical sales peaking in the 12 months ending June 2009, when 297m units were sold across the US. Those physical unit sales have been on a steady downward trajectory since then, leading to just 37m physical units selling in the US in the last 12 months.

The newly revealed data follows on an earlier post from Piscatella highlighting that only seven PlayStation games had sold over 100,000 physical units so far in 2026. Today, Piscatella followed up on that stat with a graph showing how this baseline used to be common; 100 PlayStation games sold at least 100,000 physical units in 2008. The ceiling for physical PlayStation game sales isn’t all that impressive these days either; Piscatella shared that the top-selling physical PlayStation game has only sold a paltry 275,000 units in the US so far this year.

…Looking back, it’s easy to see why sales of physical games seemed to peak in the late 2000s. At that time, services like Xbox Live Arcade, PSN and WiiWare were already showing console gamers’ willingness to pay for downloads of smaller indie games, and the concept was expanding to downloadable versions of major releases like Infamous and LittleBigPlanet.

By the time the PlayStation Vita launched in 2012, Sony required that all publishers that make physical game cartridges also offer a downloadable option. Subsequent consoles like the Wii U, PS4, and Xbox One continued that trend, and by the end of the 2010’s physical-exclusive console releases were practically nonexistent.

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This echoes the music industry’s big success with the shift from LPs to CDs, which saw revenues explode, and was then followed by the collapse in revenues.
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EU fines Google €890m in test of Donald Trump’s threats to protect Big Tech • Financial Times

Barbara Moens, Henry Foy and Aime Williams:

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The European Commission has fined Google a total of €890m for breaching the bloc’s digital rule book, while threatening to impose daily fines if the search engine company does not abide by its rules.

Brussels on Thursday said Google gave preferential treatment to its own services, including shopping, hotel, transport and sports results, over those of third parties in its search engine.

It also said Google prevented app developers from freely communicating and promoting offers and concluding contracts with users in distribution channels of their choice, including third-party app stores.

The company was fined €460m for the search breach and €430m for the steering issues, and will have 60 days to propose solutions or face potential periodic fines. The new action against Google comes after antitrust regulators fined the company more than €8bn between 2017 and 2019.

“This is serious enforcement,” said EU competition chief Teresa Ribera. “It is quite a strong message to Google.”

The penalties risk reigniting the EU-US conflict over the regulation of Big Tech after tensions over the bloc’s digital rule book appeared to have eased.

US trade representative Jamieson Greer on Thursday accused the bloc of an “increasingly aggressive approach targeting US technology firms” and suggested that Brussels was risking its recent trade deal with Washington.

The two sides struck a deal in Turnberry, Scotland last year to lower the highest levels of Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs, limiting levies on cars and other European goods to 15%.

But Greer said the recent actions against Google “undermine” efforts at “real dialogue” and “pose a real risk to the continuation of transatlantic stability with respect to trade”.

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Google reported operating income of $40.8bn for the second quarter a couple of days ago. This fine is about three days’ profits.
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1970 predicts: 25% of commuters will use flying machines by 2000 • Paleofuture

Matt Novak:

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This being the 1970s, Americans were waking up to the fact that our air was absolutely disgusting. But sadly for them, more air travel was not the answer. Boring things like government regulation and the creation of the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] would have to suffice.

From the comic strip [an image in the article]:

»

The development of aviation by the year 2000 is predicted by experts in air transportation — they expect many thousand-passenger aircraft — Air Force’s C5A can already carry over 800 men. Exotic space materials, such as boron filaments and beryllium will be in common use.

There will be prototype nuclear-powered planes and passenger service. Over 220 billion passenger miles last year will quadruple to a trillion in 2000 A.D.

Air cargo from special cargo airports will equal passenger revenue.

25% of all commuting over 15 miles may be by vertical take-off and landing aircraft. If commuting autos were replaced by aircraft to downtown New York, exhaust pollution would be cut by 80%!

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Aviation has indeed advanced since the early 1970s — there’s just a caveat to every advance that we actually saw. Nuclear-powered planes were attempted, but they certainly don’t participate in passenger service. Vertical take-off planes are becoming commonplace in the military, but they’re not used by your average commuter.

It’s kind of astounding that we’re still insisting (or, I should say, that flying car company executives are still insisting) that making air travel more commonplace could be a practical solution to our pollution problems.

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You only have to see how people drive cars to realise that flying cars under the control of anything but very experienced pilots would be a disaster. And there can’t be that many pilots. The equation just can’t add up. And yet people up to and including Google’s founders have believed in it.
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UK retailer GAME enters administration, with Brexit blamed • MSN

Joshua Boyles:

»

At its peak, GAME operated over 300 retail stores across the country. The company was profitable in 2015, but this ended in 2016 when the company reported a 71% drop in profit.

By 2017, GAME was operating at a loss of £7.1m before tax.

The financial struggles continued into the late 2010’s, with the administration report reading: “”Market conditions remained difficult in the subsequent years driven by changes in consumer behaviour, including the transaction from physical games to digital downloads, uncertainty associated with Brexit, and increased competition within the sector.”

Saunders and Wentworth don’t mention the reasons why Brexit had an adverse effect on GAME specifically. However, economists estimate that the UK economy has shrunk by 6% since we left the European Union. Throw in the cost of living crisis, which Brexit has also impacted, and it’s easy to see why gamers might be spending less on their games – especially at brick and mortar retailers like GAME.

In 2019, Fraser Group acquired GAME for a cash consideration. However, GAME”s profitability failed to improve, and by 2025, things weren’t looking any better.

“There have been no major console releases since 2020, and large manufacturers have cited global chip shortages as a reason for further delays,” the report explains. A new console launch might have helped GAME to survive as a flurry of expensive purchases and associated games come their way. However, with the PS6 and Xbox’s Project Helix still looking as far away as the end of 2027 – if not later – there was very little that could have helped GAME to continue trading.

It also doesn’t help that one of this year’s biggest games in Grand Theft Auto 6 is set to be a digital only release with physical copies containing a download code inside. Throw in the news that Sony is discontinuing physical discs altogether from 2028 and there wasn’t much hope on the horizon for GAME.

This is the same conclusion that the administration advisors came to, writing: “Having reviewed the company’s financial and operational position, it was concluded that the business was no longer viable.”

At the time of entering administration, GAME owed around £16m in debt.

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The lack of physical games has knock-on effects. The Brexit effect seems pretty difficult to discern, though.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The epoch of Google search leading to a destination is ending, as AI results take over and publishers abandon it. CC-licensed photo by Eleni 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. Haven’t found what I’m looking for. 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 says its AI models escaped control and hacked into AI company Hugging Face • Fortune

Jeremy Kahn and Emily Forlini:

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OpenAI said Tuesday that two of its AI models autonomously hacked their way out of a controlled environment where they were supposed to be walled off from internet access and then hacked their way into the systems of Hugging Face, a company that hosts open source AI models and testing resources, in order to cheat on an internal evaluation test.

OpenAI disclosed the incident in a blog post on Tuesday, a stunning announcement that is certain to set off alarm bells across the industry about the increasing power of AI models and the risk of them going rogue. According to OpenAI, the incident involved “a combination” of both its latest and most powerful publicly-available model, GPT-5.6 Sol, as well as an even more powerful unreleased model.

It said the models were being used in an internal test designed to evaluate their cyber security capabilities and that they were being tested without guardrails in place that might normally limit the models’ ability to conduct cyber attacks.

The models were being tested against a freely-available cybersecurity benchmark evaluation called ExploitGym. The models, accordingly to OpenAI, correctly surmised that the solutions to that test were maintained by Hugging Face.

“The models identified and chained vulnerabilities across OpenAI’s research environment and Hugging Face’s production infrastructure to obtain test solutions directly from Hugging Face’s production database,” OpenAI said in its blog post. “All evidence suggests that the models were hyperfocused on finding a solution for ExploitGym, going to extreme lengths to achieve a rather narrow testing goal.”

OpenAI said that it considered this to be “an unprecedented cyber incident, involving state-of-the-art cyber capabilities, and are responding accordingly.”

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As predicted, everyone is freaking out about this. Understandably. If you tell your hacking-capable system “get the highest score you can on this test”, it will have discovered that humans confronted with this task will hack into the scoring system. So it does the same.

This shows the problems of poorly stated goals for these systems: if you don’t bound what it cannot do (and if those boundaries don’t protect humans from injury or death) then people may be injured or killed. We are in a state where we need to implement Asimov’s Three Laws, but don’t know exactly how to.
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Network expert Glenn Fiedler warns game programmers to fix game code vulnerabilities that AI can now find • GamesBeat

Dean Takahashi:

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Glenn Fiedler, a seasoned network expert and a leader of game companies like Network Next, is warning game coders to fix the security bugs in their code because AI can now find those bugs.

In particular, on the warning from a friend, Fiedler used Anthropic’s latest version of Claude AI programming tool, Claude Code Fable 5, to review his code. In a post on LinkedIn and an exclusive interview with GamesBeat, Fiedler said he has been a hardcore AI sceptic.

Until now.

“I passed Claude (Code) Fable 5 over my network libraries starting Monday last week. Starting at 11pm, I was up all night until 6am, and have been working non-stop since then to fix everything up,” Fiedler posted a few days ago on LinkedIn. “There is something massive coming. First, AI coding is real and it’s going to expose massive security flaws. in game libraries (like my own) that were ten years old and I thought were completely secure.”

Now he has finished working on fixing security bugs found in my open source networking libraries, used by many games and middleware products, with the help of his new AI companion. And he’s warning as many of his colleagues in the industry to do the same.

Fiedler, who is based in New York, has been a big skeptic of generative AI and told game developers to stay away from it. But he now says, “AI coding is real, and it’s going to completely and radically change the game industry forever. Those who don’t agree just haven’t been hit by the shockwave yet. I was a total sceptic of AI two weeks ago and now I am a true believer. It’s real. All of it.”

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Everyone’s going to realise this. Pandora’s Box is truly open.
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Against Claudefishing • The Substack Post

Chris Best:

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There is an increasing share of text on social media that is generated by AI—as much as 40% on some platforms, according to Pangram’s estimate. This is a big change. Many people complain their feeds are filled with soulless slop. Others don’t yet realize when they are reading something written by no one.

The core problem is not people using AI, or the quality of its output. Not everything made with AI is slop, and not all slop is made with AI. The problem is when there is a mismatch between a reader’s expectation and reality, especially when they unwittingly invest their attention in something with no human thought on the other end. That’s Claudefishing.

Here’s how Freddie deBoer put it:

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I access human-made art because I know there’s a human behind it and that’s what I’m looking for, other humans, showing me in art what they hide in their selves. Fooling me in that process is just a con.

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We care about this at Substack because it gets to the core of what we do: building an economic engine for culture. That means helping real people, who think, feel, observe, argue, experiment, consider, struggle, exhort, and care, to make money doing work they believe in. The network is based on trust between people, and that’s why it works.

When content made by no one takes over parts of the internet that are supposed to be human, it pollutes the commons and makes it hard to discover and hear human voices. When readers have to wonder if what they’re reading is real, it undermines trust in authorship and threatens the livelihood of writers—including those who use AI tools thoughtfully to produce work they believe in. Platforms that reward fakeness will create a race to the bottom.

…We’re partnering with Pangram, the leading AI-detection tool. You’ll be able to scan notes, replies, comments, and posts to see an estimate of how much of the text was written by hand or with AI assistance. This will work on text longer than 100 words, published from today on, and will show an analysis only to those who request it.

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One wag suggested that Substack should incorporate its other tieup, with the prediction market Polymarket, so you could bet on how much a given post was AI.
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AI companies are buying tons of old books because they’re free of AI slop • 404 Media

Emanuel Maiberg:

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As AI companies search for more training data to improve their models, one company is offering old, printed books as an ideal source because they are guaranteed to be free of the very AI slop AI companies are producing. 

“The world’s best AI training data is sitting on a shelf,” ISBNdb, a company that produces what it claims is “the world’s largest book database,” and that offers high-volume book acquisition services for AI companies, says on its site. “Books represent curated, peer-reviewed, domain-specific human knowledge, structured in a way no web crawl can replicate. Dense, edited, authoritative.” 

In one article on its site, ISBNdb explains that printed books published before 2022 are ideal for AI training data because they don’t include AI generated text. As the article correctly notes, much of the data that AI companies can scrape from the internet today is likely to include AI generated text, which could result in “model collapse,” a process by which AI models that are trained on AI generated data results in worse models that are more prone to errors. The article also notes that book authors who object to their writing being scraped for training purposes can now easily poison AI models by producing writing designed to manipulate and sabotage the resulting AI models. 

“Print books from the pre-LLM era are structurally guaranteed to be free of this contamination. That alone is a significant advantage […]  “Physical books published before this date [pre-2022] are structurally clean of modern poisoning tools.”

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There were some reports over the weekend of secondhand bookshops finding they were doing a roaring trade online – their best ever weeks as tons of old books were ordered. Then they realised that the buyers were AI companies looking to ingest the books into their LLMs for training.
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The FCC is planning to retroactively ban disguised DJI gadgets • The Verge

Sean Hollister:

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Last October, we told you how the FCC had given itself the power to retroactively ban gadgets that have already received its approval to be imported and sold in the US. Now, the FCC’s getting ready to wield that power for the first time, by cracking down on the “DJI front companies” suspected of sneaking the Chinese company’s tech past its foreign drone ban.

Two Fridays ago, the FCC had already proposed a $25,000 fine on eight of those “front companies,” including the ones behind the Skyrover drones and Xtra cameras. But now, the FCC is proposing a lot more than a slap on the wrist — it’s planning to ban those same companies from continuing to import, distribute, market, and sell their existing drones and cameras.

For example, we highlighted a deal on Xtra’s version of the DJI Osmo Pocket 3 just two weeks ago, a product that already got FCC approval before the drone ban ever came down, and a product that Amazon offers with next-day shipping. If the FCC’s retroactive ban goes into effect, that product should disappear from all major online retailers and Xtra’s own website, and the company may even need to write off however many cameras are still sitting in US warehouses like Amazon’s.

The Xtra Muse and the DJI Osmo Pocket 3 — too close to even call it a “clone.“ Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge
The ban wouldn’t affect gadgets that have already been purchased, and it wouldn’t happen immediately. The FCC’s currently taking public comments for 30 days first. While the FCC has “tentatively” concluded that these companies are selling equipment that should be banned over national security fears, it claims it’ll listen to “specific evidence” otherwise.

But that should maybe be taken with a grain of salt: The FCC largely ignored public comments about net neutrality and lied about a cyberattack. It’s also worth pointing out that the US government has never provided specific public evidence that foreign drones pose a national security threat to begin with, or why other products like cameras should be caught up in that ban.

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Google Search was a lifeline for publishers. Now they’re thinking of cutting it off • WSJ

Alexandra Bruell:

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Reddit, the online message board that powers a swath of Google search results, has discussed shutting off the technology giant’s access to its content for AI use, according to people familiar with the matter.

It is part of a growing chorus of online media companies expressing frustration with the tech giant as AI changes the way people ask questions, siphons off search traffic and upends publishers’ revenue models. They say the search engine is no longer a reliable source of visitors, especially after Alphabet’s Google expanded its AI search features in recent months. USA Today, Politico, the Economist, People Inc. and Reuters are all evaluating how, or even if, they will continue to work with Google.

Reddit struck a $60m-a-year deal in 2024 that allowed Google to use its material to train AI models. But with AI-generated answers to queries reducing clicks to outside websites, Reddit executives are assessing what the upside is of continuing to feed its content to Google, said the people familiar with the matter. The companies are in talks about potentially renewing their deal, which is ending soon.

“This is existential for some categories of publishers,” said David Buttle, CEO of media consulting firm DJB Strategies. “They are looking at more radical things.”

Bots now make up more than half of all web traffic, according to Cloudflare. Some scrape publishers’ content to train their own AI models, others crawl sites to help answer user queries quickly or sell the content to other companies. Efforts to block bots have turned into games of whack-a-mole as the technology grows more sophisticated.

…Google says its AI search features “send billions of clicks to the web every week,” and are meeting users’ evolving needs. “Our AI features highlight links to the web and help creators and publishers grow their audiences, and we offer clear controls for website owners to manage their content,” a spokesman said.

Variety and Rolling Stone owner Penske Media sued Google in September on antitrust grounds, alleging that its AI summaries illegally use the publisher’s reporting and depress online traffic.

Employees at Axel Springer’s Politico have talked about limiting Google’s and other bots’ access to its free articles. Those people have floated adding a registration wall that requires humans to log in to view content, according to people familiar with the matter.

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We’re at the end of a web epoch: search to find sites is dying, and being replaced by AI answers. Or chatbots.
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NewsCorp accuses search engine Brave of AI copyright infringement • Semafor

Max Tani:

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News Corp, the Murdoch family-owned parent company of The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, is suing an AI company that describes itself as “the world’s most complete non-Big Tech search engine.”

On Tuesday, News Corp announced that it is suing Brave AI, a privacy-focused search engine with an AI sidebar tool that plugs into large language models.

In its lawsuit, News Corp alleged that Brave masks its web crawlers such that publishers cannot detect or block them, and delivers “summaries” of news articles that are “verbatim or near verbatim copied content to enterprise customers, primarily AI companies.” The company also alleged that before March 2025, Brave scraped and sold copyrighted News Corp content to AI companies that were “in direct competition with the News Corp Companies’ own content licensing programs.”

“Companies like Brave incorporated copyrighted works into their products and services to generate revenue for themselves, all while destroying the incentive for anyone to ever pay the very publishers who produced the content that Brave has monetized,” News Corp alleged in the complaint.

The two companies had previously attempted to resolve this dispute outside of court; according to Tuesday’s filing, News Corp had tried to negotiate a licensing agreement with Brave for a year.

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If it’s going to go after Brave for summaries, shouldn’t it also be going after Google News? Though passing content on to AI companies is going to be hard to defend.
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Why aren’t there more IMAX 70mm screens for “The Odyssey”? • Variety

Antonio Ferme:

»

Only 25 theaters in the U.S. are equipped to project “The Odyssey” in true Imax 70mm film, prompting moviegoers to embark on cross-country road trips (and even delaying pregnancies) to experience the cinematic milestone.

It doesn’t take a business degree to understand the law of supply and demand, but at “The Odyssey” premiere Tuesday night, Imax CEO Richard Gelfond explained why adding more Imax 70mm screens isn’t that simple. (The interview clip, as of Friday afternoon, has over 7.5 million views on X).

“We’re sold out in some theaters into the fifth week already,” Gelfond told Variety. “There’s certainly more demand. The problem is they haven’t made new Imax film projectors in about 50 years. So we retrofit them, rebuild them and part of our strategy is to see how far we can take it. But certainly, demand-driven, I’d like to see more.”

Sources at Imax confirmed to Variety that many of the parts needed to build these specialized film projectors “simply no longer exist.” The original design files were created roughly half a century ago, but as Gelfond alludes to, they were never properly maintained. As a result, Imax no longer has a complete manufacturing blueprint — and much like the lost tribal knowledge of the Apollo-era spacecraft, very few engineers working today fully understand the systems. 

The loss of institutional knowledge can also be traced to Hollywood’s transition from film to digital projection that began in the late 2000s. As theaters began converting to digital projectors, which are cheaper and easier to maintain, manufacturers stopped producing film projectors and the replacement parts that go with them. Only in recent years, thanks to auteurs like Nolan and Denis Villeneuve, has interest in the format begun to rebound, even if the format remains a niche experience.

“We build new projectors every day, but film projectors using this film — it’s just not practical,” Gelfond said. “Can all 2,000 of our theaters be film projectors? No. There’s just not that many around. But I think we can continue to grow it.”

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Strange that this might be the last hurrah for IMAX; hell of a way to go out, if so. But also a classic example of lost skills and information not being retained.
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Amazon fixing bug that billed some AWS customers billions of dollars • TechCrunch

Zack Whittaker:

»

Some Amazon cloud customers woke up on Friday to a surprise bill estimate that said they owed billions of dollars for cloud services they had never used.

Amazon confirmed on Friday that it’s trying to resolve a bug in its Amazon Web Services (AWS) billing portal that showed some customers “owed” millions or billions in cloud computing costs. 

In an update on its status page, Amazon said it began seeing inaccurate billing data as of late Thursday. But by Friday morning, the company conceded that the “rollback of a recent change did not resolve the issue.” Amazon said the change relates to its billing computation subsystem.

The good news for the customers who were told they “owe” millions or billions to Amazon is they are likely off the hook. The billing estimates “do not reflect actual usage and charges,” Amazon said.

According to several screenshots posted by Amazon customers on Reddit, one customer was quoted a billing estimate of close to $2.5bn for this month’s AWS usage, while others had similar alerts, ranging from a few million dollars to hundreds of millions of dollars.

«

When computers were new, erroneous billing was a common occurrence – but equally, smaller companies were envious of larger businesses that could afford them. This became a trope, and then the topic of a joke: the crusty CEO in a run-down office saying to his secretary “Send them a bill for a million and twenty pounds. They’ll think we’ve got a computer.”
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LG to ban residential proxies from smart TV apps • Krebs on Security

Brian Krebs:

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The home appliance giant LG Electronics USA said this week it plans to suspend any apps built for its smart TVs that turn one’s television into an always-on residential proxy node. The move comes less than a month after researchers found that more than 42% of games and other apps available for download on LG’s webOS store allow unknown third-parties to route their Internet traffic through a user’s TV.

On July 2, we featured research by the security firm Spur that examined the prevalence of residential proxy software development kits (SDKs) in smart TV apps. Spur found more than 42% of apps available for download on LG smart TVs include SDKs that turn one’s television in a proxy node indefinitely, and that more than a quarter of the apps made for Samsung’s Tizen operating system had similar residential proxy components.

Responding to questions about Spur’s research, LG Senior Vice President John Taylor told KrebsOnSecurity the company was working with app developers to remove the residential proxy option from their apps on the webOS platform. Developers that fail to comply, he said, will find their apps suspended.

“A residential proxy network is not an intended use for LG smart TVs, and LG Electronics is working with developers to remove the residential proxy option from their apps on the webOS platform,” Taylor said. “If this option is not removed, these apps will be suspended.”

Taylor said LG is committed to keeping residential proxy networks out of its smart TV apps going forward, and that the company’s review of those apps is “well underway now.”

…App makers looking for ways to monetize their creations can turn to residential proxy providers, which pay developers to include SDKs that turn the user’s device into a residential proxy node that is rented to paying customers. In the case of LG and Samsung smart TVs, Spur found residential proxy SDKs bundled with everything from simple games like Pac-Man to screensavers and file utilities.

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“Residential proxy” means “potential member of a botnet”. Amazing that LG and the others didn’t think of the possibility that they’d be used maliciously. Of course the company behind it insists that it vets the proxies really carefully. In reality, we know they’re not and that children are installing these apps, turning the TV into part of a botnet. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Scientists reckon they’ve found the source of a hum that a small percentage of people hear – and it’s a lot closer to home than you might think. CC-licensed photo by SNSF Scientific Image Competition 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. Listening in. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Meta’s smartglasses mean any child can be covertly filmed. In the age of AI, how do we tackle that risk? • The Guardian

Gaby Hinsliff:

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It took me a while to realise what the man sitting next to me on the train was doing. He was flicking through pictures of a little girl on his phone; zooming in on some, cropping the images. Hardly unusual, of course, except that on closer inspection the pictures were very clearly of the toddler sitting opposite us, playing with her parents. On a crowded train of people mostly staring obliviously at our own phones, a stranger had been covertly photographing that little girl over and over again. And if it hadn’t been for that very visible phone screen giving him away, he wouldn’t have been caught.

That encounter was a while ago but my memory was jogged last week listening to a clip of Meta’s VP of wearables, Alex Himel, talk fondly to the BBC about using his new smartglasses to film his daughter singing in a talent contest. They let him capture the memory without having to watch her through a screen, he said, freeing him to be “kind of living in the moment, head up and hands free”. So far, so sweet. But what about the risk of creeps potentially using them to film other people’s daughters covertly, heads up and hands free? Meta’s smartglasses have a tiny flashing warning light on the frame to indicate when the wearer is recording, but the technology is still new enough that many people don’t think to look for it. And in the age of AI, stolen images of children matter. Taken in real life or scraped from the internet, they’re the raw material for generating realistic-looking child abuse material of the most extreme and disturbing kind. (If that sounds like a grim but ultimately fairly victimless crime, the Internet Watch Foundation warned in a recent report that AI-generated material risks fuelling sexual interest in children, normalising violence and increasing the risk of real-life offending.)

When Google launched the first smartglasses in 2013, they didn’t catch on: too nerdy-looking but also potentially too creepy, given the possibilities they afforded stalkers, trolls, criminals gathering intelligence and law enforcement in repressive regimes. But big tech hasn’t given up on the dream of connecting humans more seamlessly to the internet, and newer versions learn from past mistakes. Meta’s are cooler, featuring collaborations with Ray-Ban and Kylie Jenner, and are pitched unashamedly at parents under the wholesome slogan: “never miss a moment”.

…Meta has argued that it is for individuals to ensure they don’t “actively exploit” the technology, which makes you wonder if it learned anything at all from watching humans get to grips with its social media platforms.

«

She implies that she said something about the man on the train; one certainly hopes so, though it would be a tricky conversation to open. On the part of Meta, though, there’s a real indifference to the downsides these could have. It’s like letting everyone have guns and trusting nobody will get shot. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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A device hidden in cars across the US leaves them vulnerable to hacking and paralysis. Patch it now • WIRED

Andy Greenberg:

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As modern cars have evolved into multi-ton computers on wheels, drivers are beginning to learn they need to install security updates for their vehicles’ code, just as they would for a phone or laptop. Yet not even the most tech-savvy car owners would expect they’d need to install a patch for an insecure third-party component they never installed or requested—and likely aren’t even aware of—that’s been wired into some of the most sensitive systems of their vehicle, leaving it vulnerable to stealthy hacking, tracking, and even roadside paralysis.

That’s the disturbing discovery of a team of security researchers at UC San Diego, who found that a model of aftermarket car alarm known as the KARR Security System, installed in more than two million vehicles across the US by their estimate, can let any hacker within Bluetooth range send radio commands to silently unlock the car at will, turn off its alarm, honk the car’s horn or flash its lights, or even disable its ignition and leave a driver stranded.

The KARR alarm devices are typically installed by car dealers, not manufacturers or owners, and used as a measure to prevent auto theft from dealer lots. Yet when the cars are sold, the alarms typically aren’t removed, even if the buyer declines to pay for it as an additional feature. That means car owners across the US have a hackable device under their hood whose code they’ll need to update to protect their vehicle—but one that, in many cases, they never purchased and have no idea is there.

…The company that sells the KARR Security System, Acrisure Protection Group, on Monday rolled out a firmware update for the vulnerable Bluetooth model of its aftermarket KARR alarm to fix the security issues UCSD uncovered. Car owners who already have the KARR Security smartphone app installed should receive an alert about the firmware update, the UCSD team says. Those who don’t have it installed will need to download the KARR Security System smartphone app (Android or iOS), connect it to their vehicle’s KARR alarm, then tap “customer service” and “firmware update.”

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Got to love those car dealers.
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AI just disproved the 87-year-old Jacobian conjecture • The Next Web

Ana Maria Constantin:

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On Sunday evening, as Spain and Argentina played out the World Cup final, the mathematician Levent Alpöge posted a short message on X. The Jacobian conjecture, he wrote, is false. He thanked a friend for asking about it, and another friend, “fable,” for working during the match.

That second friend was Fable 5, Anthropic’s latest AI model. Together they had produced a counterexample to a problem that had resisted mathematicians for 87 years. It was 216 characters long.

The Jacobian conjecture was set out by Ott-Heinrich Keller in 1939. In rough terms, it says that a certain kind of polynomial map, one whose Jacobian determinant is a non-zero constant, must be reversible with a neat polynomial inverse. It became one of the field’s most stubborn open problems. Stephen Smale put it on his famous 1998 list of challenges for the 21st century. New Scientist calls it the hardest maths problem an AI has yet cracked.

Alpöge and Fable 5 did not prove it. They broke it. They found a single map, from three-dimensional space to itself, that has the required constant determinant yet still cannot be reversed. One valid counterexample is all it takes to sink a conjecture.

…The result is easy to check even if it was hard to find. The counterexample is a plain list of polynomials that any mathematician can verify by hand. Finding it was the needle-in-a-haystack part, and that is where the machine came in.

It was not a one-line prompt, cautioned Bartósz Naskręcki, one of many mathematicians now waiting for Alpöge’s full write-up. Searching for a counterexample like this, he said, takes real insight.

…Not everyone is stirred. Andrew Blumberg, a mathematician at Columbia who sits on a project testing AI on research maths, was pointedly unmoved. “This did not cause me to update my priors,” he told Mashable. This is exactly what he expects AI to be good at.

His point is that a counterexample and a proof are very different prizes. A proof teaches you why something is true. A counterexample just ends the argument. Smale wanted the conjecture solved because a solution might reveal how nature is structured.

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Where did all the computer-science professors go? To AI companies • The Atlantic

Lila Shroff and Rose Horowitch:

»

AI companies are turning into something like mini-universities in their own right. OpenAI employs top mathematicians and physicists—including one who studies black holes, and another who specializes in string theory. At least three computer-science professors joined Meta’s AI lab in late June. DeepMind, like Anthropic, is home to a crew of philosophers. And Anthropic’s recent job postings indicate an interest in hiring legal scholars and political scientists.

It’s unclear exactly how many current and former professors are working at AI companies. Across these four firms, we found more than 80—the majority of whom are computer scientists. Some have left academia entirely; others are still working part-time at a university. That number is likely a significant undercount, because we don’t have access to internal data; it also doesn’t include the many professors who have started their own companies, those at other AI start-ups, and those working with the industry in a less formal capacity.

Particularly for AI researchers, these companies have a strong gravitational pull. “Much of the important research is being done in industry now,” Humphrey Shi, a computer-science professor at Georgia Tech who joined Nvidia as a vice president last fall, told us. As he sees it, “If you want to do something that really, truly matters, you probably want to join one of those entities.” Tech firms are making offers—including very enticing salaries—that are hard for academics to refuse. In the process, research that previously would have happened in the open is getting locked up behind closed doors.

For decades, universities were the center of AI research. The field itself officially began at a gathering of researchers at Dartmouth in 1956, and federal funding provided much of the field’s early support. In the early 2010s, Silicon Valley executives began to take AI’s commercial potential more seriously, and set out to hire the best researchers. In 2013, Google paid $44m to acquire a start-up run by a trio of AI researchers from the University of Toronto.

Facebook then hired Yann LeCun, an NYU professor, to establish the company’s AI-research lab; Uber poached some 40 Carnegie Mellon researchers to work on driverless cars. But for the most part, even as more work was being done inside of private companies, many of the newly hired academics at tech companies retained their professorships and established a culture of open research. “Researchers will be strongly encouraged to publish their work,” OpenAI wrote in its founding announcement. (Note the organization’s name.) This norm helped lead to the current AI boom

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Pollution from Musk’s unpermitted xAI power project hits hardest in Black communities • Reuters

Disha Raychaudhuri and Valerie Volcovici:

»

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI has installed 59 natural gas turbines for its Colossus 2 data centre project in Tennessee without securing federal clean air permits, according to communications between regulators and xAI representatives.

Potential emissions from the turbines are far beyond the threshold that would require a federal permit, and would be released near predominantly Black communities already estimated to be suffering disproportionately high rates of lung disease, according to a Reuters analysis based on government data and information in the correspondence with regulators.

The findings, which have not been previously reported, reflect how exploding electricity demand from AI data centres is driving companies to build off-grid power plants at a pace outstripping environmental oversight, with potentially big risks to public health.

The number of unpermitted turbines identified by Reuters is about double what xAI has publicly acknowledged. The company previously said it was running 27 unpermitted turbines for Colossus 2 as of January and has argued the permits are not required. At least 57 of the 59 turbines are located in Mississippi, just over the state line from Tennessee where the data centre is located.

The xAI turbines are among scores of off-grid power plants for data centres proposed or under construction around the country. Local authorities often fast-track approvals in just weeks or months, without the years of environmental studies and public hearings typically required for such power generation projects that connect to the grid, Reuters has reported.

Mississippi regulators in March issued a permit for permanent turbines for Colossus 2, allowing construction of 41 gas-fired turbines. The approval came three weeks after the state’s only public hearing on the project.

The xAI cluster of temporary turbines in Mississippi is already among the biggest off-grid data centre power projects, according to Ben King, an analyst with think tank Rhodium Group, who reviewed the Reuters analysis.
“This looks to be an unprecedented level of behind-the-meter gas being installed in one place,” he said, referring to off-grid natural gas plants serving just one customer.

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Very typical of Musk to have a centre that just ignores the federal rules. Those are for the little people.
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Ways to think about token pricing • Benedict Evans

Benedict Evans is trying to look beyond the present crunch:

»

On the supply side, a trillion dollars or more of data centre capex is coming down the pipe (and plenty more semiconductor capex behind that), inference efficiency continues to improve very quickly, and new models are far more (or far less!) efficient in their token use. On the demand side, although the market has been capacity-constrained since 2022, the crunch in the first half of this year has been driven by sudden product-market fit in really just one use case, software development, and that’s actually a pretty small field (imagine if we had product-market fit for a consumer use case with hundreds of millions of DAUs – today’s infrastructure couldn’t support it at any price). We don’t know what the next use-cases to scale will be, nor when that would be, nor what their token needs would be.

Going up a level, it’s been pretty widely reported that inference today has 40-50% gross margins: this includes deprecation of the associated server costs (or the cost of renting them), but we don’t really know the asset life (five years? Seven years?) and obviously this doesn’t include the cost of training the next model a couple of times a year, which is currently far larger than revenue. In principle, inference is a marginal cost and training is a fixed cost, so with high enough revenue you can reach profitability, but we don’t know how training costs will change. On the other side of the table, it’s unclear how much of the surge in use in the last few months has an ROI (or at least has an ROI that can be quantified to a CFO), let alone any future use cases, and hence what prices people might be prepared to pay for them.

So, all the variables will move all over the place over the next 12 months, and move again over the next three to five years. How could we suggest where this will settle? How and where will supply, demand, price, capacity and capex get back into equilibrium?

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Absolutely true: it’s quite lucky that multiple sectors didn’t have product-market fit all at once. Token costs would have gone to the Moon.
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The mysterious hum heard around the world may finally have an explanation • ScienceDaily

Norwegian University of Science and Technology:

»

The cochlea inside the inner ear naturally creates faint sounds at different frequencies, generally between about 500 and 5000 Hertz. These noises do not serve a direct purpose. Instead, they are a byproduct of the ear’s physiological sound amplification process.

“Most of us don’t hear these sounds. However, a few people can actually hear the sounds that the ear itself produces. And these sounds can be measured objectively,” Drexl said.

Known as oto-acoustic emissions, these sounds can be detected by placing a sensitive microphone inside the ear canal. In certain individuals, spontaneous oto-acoustic emissions may be perceived as distressing tinnitus. “One hypothesis was that the participants in our group could hear oto-acoustic emissions at low frequencies. That’s why we tested whether they had them,” says Drexl.

But… the answer was no.

“Then there are people who hear something that cannot be measured objectively. We believe people in this category have a form of low-frequency tinnitus,” Drexl said.

Tinnitus, often described as ringing in the ears, occurs when someone perceives a sound inside the ear or head even though no external source is producing it. Tinnitus may be temporary or persistent. People often initially interpret the sound as something coming from their surroundings. When the noise continues after they change locations, however, they may eventually realize that it is not being generated by anything nearby.

Based on current knowledge of hearing and the results of the participant tests, Drexl believes the most likely explanation has two parts. A small number of people who hear The Hum may genuinely have unusually sensitive low-frequency hearing. For most, however, the experience may be a type of tinnitus in which the sound begins within the auditory system.

“Based on our results, although we haven’t ruled out cases of physical external sound sources, we suggest that subjective tinnitus in the low-frequency range is often the cause of hearing pulsations of low-frequency sound perceptions,” he said.

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Oh OK find. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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Why American ambulance rides are so expensive • David Oks

David Oks:

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The heaviest users of ambulances are the elderly, who are covered by Medicare; and since Medicare is the largest purchaser of medical services in the country and is backed by the force and authority of the US government, it enjoys the rare privilege of setting its own prices. And since 2002, Medicare has imposed a national fee schedule on ambulance services—a fixed maximum payment for each category of ride.

And notably, the fees that Medicare sets run far below cost. The average ambulance transport costs $2,673 to provide; Medicare pays only about $329 of that. A typical ambulance ride for a Medicare patient, in other words, loses the ambulance service thousands of dollars. With Medicaid it’s even worse: state programs typically pay a fraction of what Medicare does, and the services lose even more per ride. Normally, when an insurer pays less than the provider charges, the provider bills the patient for the balance, a practice known as “balance billing”; but with Medicare and Medicaid, balance billing is illegal.

On most of their book, then—rides for Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries—EMS providers lose money on every run. And that’s before accounting for the fixed costs that make up the large majority of their expenses.

That leaves two groups from whom ambulance services can try to recover the cost of their operations: the uninsured and the privately insured.

Let’s start with the uninsured. On paper, they should be the most lucrative patients an ambulance service could ask for: they receive the full, undiscounted charge, with no insurer to negotiate it down. But uninsured patients are disproportionately unlikely to pay, since they’re disproportionately poor; and EMS providers typically end up selling most of that debt to collections firms for pennies on the dollar. So in practice, the uninsured look less like a profit center and more like the Medicare and Medicaid patients: another class of patients that pays below cost.

And that leaves the one group who actually can be made to pay: the privately insured.

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Which means that the latter get royally screwed if they set foot in an ambulance. The inherent dysfunctionality in the US health system remains astonishing to an outsider. And to many insiders.
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US judge approves Anthropic’s $1.5bn settlement of copyright lawsuit • Reuters

Blake Brittain:

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A federal judge in San Francisco on Monday signed off on artificial intelligence company Anthropic’s landmark $1.5bn settlement of a class action lawsuit brought by a group of authors who accused it of misusing their books to train its AI chatbot Claude.

US District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin granted final approval of the settlement, the largest known ​settlement of a US copyright case, rejecting arguments that it was too small.

The case is one of dozens ​brought by copyright owners including authors and news outlets against tech companies over the training of their large language models, and the first major US case to settle.

Now-retired Judge William Alsup initially approved the ​deal last September.

“We reached this settlement in 2025, after the court’s landmark ruling that training AI on books is fair ​use under copyright law — which remains the law today,” Anthropic deputy general counsel Aparna Sridhar said in a statement. “We are pleased that more than 91% of authors and publishers covered by the settlement have claimed their share of the payment, and we’re looking forward ​to bringing this matter to a close.”

The authors’ lead attorney, Justin Nelson, welcomed what he called a “historic settlement.”

“It ​is the largest known copyright recovery in history. We look forward to making distributions to the Class as promptly as possible,” Nelson said in a statement, referring to payments to authors covered by the settlement.

The writers sued Anthropic in 2024, arguing that the company, which is backed by Amazon and Alphabet, used pirated versions of their books without permission to teach Claude to respond to human prompts.

Alsup ruled last June that Anthropic made fair use of the authors’ work to train Claude, but found that the company ​violated their rights by saving ​more than seven million pirated books to a “central library” that would not necessarily be used for AI training.

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Note that last point: it’s not the training, it’s the retention that breached copyright.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Good news – the American Health Association says that drinking up to five cups of coffee a day can actually be good for you. CC-licensed photo by Jot Peh 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. Totally wired. 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 race splits in two as China wages open-weight insurgency • Axios

Madison Mills and Zachary Basu:

»

China’s latest AI breakthrough is forcing Silicon Valley to confront a terrifying possibility: Building the world’s smartest models may no longer be enough to win.

Chinese labs like Moonshot AI are cornering the market for cheap, customizable intelligence, threatening to turn America’s prestige models into expensive niche products. Companies were already shifting away from premium AI models and toward cheaper Chinese alternatives before Moonshot’s Kimi K3 exploded onto the scene this week.

On OpenRouter — a major marketplace that lets developers access hundreds of competing AI systems — Chinese models now occupy the top five spots by weekly token usage. All five models — from China-based Tencent, Xiaomi, DeepSeek, MiniMax and Z.ai — are “open-weight,” allowing users to download, customize and run them on their own systems. Most corporate AI work does not require the smartest model available.

Businesses can use cheaper systems for routine coding, summarization, data extraction and customer service, reserving premium models for their hardest problems. “There are going to be open‑source models that eventually handle 95% of enterprise queries, and that remaining 5% may go to OpenAI or Anthropic,” one AI investor told Axios.

Kong CEO Augusto Marietti told Axios that open-weight use has surged over the past quarter since flagship models are “too expensive.”

Mozilla CTO Raffi Krikorian compared using frontier AI for everyday work to “driving a Ferrari to Whole Foods.” For many routine tasks, he said, cheaper models are fast enough, capable enough and can cost up to 50 times less. Chinese models are advancing at astonishing speed, just as their lower prices and open weights make them easier to adopt.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in May that China remained six to 12 months behind the U.S. in the most dangerous cyber capabilities. Ten weeks later, Moonshot released a model that rivals Anthropic’s Fable and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 in key benchmarks — underscoring how quickly any American lead can shrink.

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This is a strange war being fought, neither hot nor cold. It’s a bit like the “war” in Christopher Nolan’s film Tenet, where you don’t quite know who the adversaries are, but their stuff keeps popping up all over the place and being used against you when you don’t want it.
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Why is Meta destroying its engineering organization? • The Pragmatic Engineer

Gergely Orosz with a deep dive into Facebook’s sagging engineering culture

»

Between its founding in 2004 and until last year, Meta gave engineers autonomy to choose where they work and what they work on. This was structural to how the company worked:

• Engineers were not hired for a specific team (save for at the Staff+, levels, in some cases). They were hired to the company
• During a 6-week bootcamp, new hires got familiar with Meta’s engineering culture and chose a team
• Team matching meant talking with multiple teams who had headcount, doing small work with them, and finding a match
• Internal transfers were easy, and often initiated by engineers

Team selection via bootcamp started to die down in around 2024, but any Meta engineer with at least two years’ tenure knows that previously they chose what to work on, and of course, could pick the most impactful thing to work on. And then, out of the blue, they’re assigned to a division where the impact is not clear, the work is menial, and doing it too long will surely hurt their career prospects.

“Data labeling” is more involved work, even though a bit repetitive. There are labeling tasks, where you create a website, then look at it and decide if it looks good or not, and give this feedback: this is the “typical” data labeling. But this is the less frequent type of work. But then there are more involved AI training tasks, which looks like this:

• Come up with a task that the AI should do
• Then write the tests that confirm the result
• Package all of this up into a Docker container, using Harbor framework
• Then read the code that the AI writes – often doing this based on feedback from several models, and give it feedback

This work is not easy to do — and you can see why you need good software engineers to do it! — but it gets repetitive really quickly. Most engineers who I talked to said that they found it hard to do this work motivated day-in, day-out. Then again, I did talk with an engineer inside the org who said that by varying the technologies they use, and challenging themselves, they found this work motivating and interesting! This engineer expects there to be more software engineering work coming up, after the phase of training passes. There’s a lesson here: when life gives you lemons, you can either complain about it, or you can make lemonade, like this dev has done so.

…One engineer told me that the whole situation feels like the movie, The Hunger Games, when tributes are randomly selected and then removed from their environment, to something completely different.

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It honestly is very long, but it’s an astonishing insight into Meta’s old and current culture.
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Drinking five cups of coffee a day is safe, could reduce heart risk, AHA says • NewsNation via MSN

Zach Kaplan:

»

The latest research suggests consuming up to five cups of coffee a day is safe for most adults and may be linked to a lower risk of cardiovascular conditions.

The American Heart Association issued a scientific statement on Monday announcing that consuming up to 400 milligrams of caffeine per day, the equivalent of five eight-ounce cups of caffeinated coffee, is “generally safe for most adults,” according to recent studies.

The statement added that research suggests regularly consuming caffeinated coffee without added sugars, flavors or cream is linked to a lower risk of Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, heart failure and some irregular heart rhythms. It also noted, however, that higher caffeine intake, including levels found in energy drinks, was associated with cardiovascular harm.

The authors of the research cautioned that cardiovascular benefits observed in recent studies could be related to compounds in coffee other than caffeine and said additional “research is necessary to investigate the different health impacts of various types of caffeinated coffee and other products with caffeine.”

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Turns out I’ve been on exactly the right diet for years, then.
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The night France saved the British grid • Dispatches Kilowatts

Ben:

»

For forty-eight minutes on the evening of Monday 23 June — a 33°C midsummer Monday — the frequency of Great Britain’s electricity grid sat below 49.8 Hz, the boundary of normal operation. At 17 seconds past eight o’clock it touched 49.657 Hz, its lowest point of the year — though, as I wrote in the immediate aftermath, it stayed clear of the statutory floor at 49.5: this was never a blackout in waiting, and this article will not pretend otherwise.

Nothing switched off. No public warning was ever issued. And almost nobody noticed that, for 48 minutes, Britain’s electricity system was running on a draining battery fleet, a gas margin of roughly eighty megawatts, and — finally — an unpriced phone call to Paris.

I’ve spent the last month reconstructing that evening minute by minute, from both sides of the Channel: Elexon settlement data down to individual generating units, NESO’s one-second frequency record, the system operator’s own trading books, and — via RTE’s APIs — the French grid’s answering records. Along the way I have also had the benefit of conversations with people who watched the evening from the other side of it — traders and market folk in several European markets, who saw the British grid’s difficulties arrive on their own screens, and who cannot be named. Their fingerprints are on this piece in ways I won’t itemise. That access shaped a deliberate choice: the mainstream telling of 23 June is relentlessly British — British data, British institutions, British questions. But half of this story happened in other countries’ control rooms and other countries’ order books, and I have tried to tell it from their side of the water too: as our neighbours and partners saw it, not merely as we did. What follows is the anatomy of a near-miss that the official record describes, accurately but incompletely, as a day when “the grid kept working.”

It did. In the same sense that a driver who runs a red light and isn’t hit keeps driving.

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Fascinating story about one of those things that none of us would have known about a few years ago.
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LG’s monitors come with an unwanted addition for Windows: McAfee pop-up ads • The Verge

Stevie Bonifield:

»

A video from Gamers Nexus explains how, after connecting a new LG UltraGear monitor to a PC running Windows 11 for the first time, Windows Update is silently installing LG driver updates and the LG Monitor App Installer, without so much as a permission pop-up or notification. The app doesn’t appear to include special controls of its own, instead simply pointing users to LG’s other apps, as well as McAfee antivirus.

There are reports about LG’s app auto-installing as far back as 2024, but Gamers Nexus’s test follows recent user complaints on Reddit about large pop-up ads for McAfee and LG’s own apps suddenly appearing in the bottom right corner of the homescreen, which popped up for GN on 31 out of 32 bootups.

Microsoft allows developers to pair a Hardware Support App in the Windows Store that automatically installs based on the device’s metadata, but even its description here includes a warning:

»

The automatic installation feature does not provide a notification to the user when the app is installed. Some users may find this experience confusing and frustrating, and give your app a bad rating.

«

As The Verge’s Tom Warren has pointed out in the past, Dell similarly auto-installs its Alienware Command Center app on Windows when you connect an Alienware monitor, but the notification spam is an extra twist.

«

They’re all trying to eke out a tiny bit of extra profit through these means: McAfee will be paying them per install.
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AliExpress hit with $629m EU fine over sales of illegal and counterfeit products • Reuters

Foo Yun Chee:

»

Alibaba’s AliExpress was hit with a record €550m ($629m) fine from the European Union on Monday for failing to tackle sales of illegal, unsafe and counterfeit products on its platform.

The fine was the third issued by the European Commission under the EU’s landmark Digital Services Act, which requires very large online platforms to do more to counter illegal and harmful content.

The Commission charged AliExpress in June last year with ​failing to comply with a DSA requirement to assess and mitigate the risks of dissemination of illegal products.

It set an ​October 20 deadline for AliExpress to propose remedial measures, and the company could face further penalties if the regulator decides in December that they do not comply with the DSA.

“This is very dangerous for consumers, unfair for companies ​which are complying with all our rules,” EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen told reporters.

She pointed to AliExpress’s 193 million users in Europe last ​year versus Shein’s 156 million and Temu’s 130 million. Temu has also been fined under the DSA and Shein is facing an ongoing investigation.

“One in five Europeans say they shop once a month from Shein, Temu and AliExpress,” Virkkunen said.

AliExpress said it will appeal the fine as it considers it excessive.

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Is AliExpress hoping that it will be able to get a cheaper version by shopping around?
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Trial lawyers lobby against autonomous vehicles • Marginal REVOLUTION

Alex Tabarrok:

»

Roughly 37,000–40,000 Americans die in auto accidents every year. We now have large‑scale, real‑world evidence—from Waymo and a joint analysis with Swiss Re—that driverless operations can be substantially safer than matched human driving within their current operating domains. The latest data show that over 220 million miles driven, Waymo vehicles–in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, Austin and Atlanta–have 94% fewer serious injuries, 82% fewer air bag deployments, and 93% fewer pedestrian injuries. The evidence is not fully independent, but it is unusually transparent, large‑scale evidence.

So with thousands of lives annually in the balance who is against autonomous vehicles (AVs)? Trial lawyers. Remarkably the trial lawyers saw the writing on the wall very early and the have been lobbying against AVs for nearly a decade! The American Association for Justice, the trial lawyers’ lobby, has been a prominent opponent to AV legislation. (They have been joined by Democrats worried about labour and demanding that heavy trucks be excluded).

The trial lawyers earn a huge amount litigating ordinary auto accidents: annual US auto insurance payouts (liability + PIP/MedPay) are on the order of $180–220bn and trial lawyers are very eager to retain the right to sue car manufacturers for product liability. In my view, product liability isn’t useful as a safety device in this field. Instead, the solution is simple. Every car should be required to be insured, regardless of driver. Indeed, Waymo vehicles are already insured at $5m liability coverage per vehicle, far higher levels than most human drivers are covered.

The UK’s Automated and Electric Vehicles Act 2018 does basically this. A single insurer covers the vehicle whether the human or the automated system is driving; the victim is compensated directly by the insurer, no need to establish product defect; the insurer then subrogates [takes the part of the victim in the claim] against the manufacturer if the software was at fault.

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Seems like the US just needs a version of that law, then. The chances of it getting that aren’t very high, though.
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To cool or not to cool: French politicians draw battle lines over air conditioning • Financial Times

Leila Abboud:

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As an intense heatwave sent temperatures above 40ºC this week [in June] in cities from Bordeaux to Nantes, far-right presidential hopeful Marine Le Pen accused leftist parties and green activists of ideologically opposing air conditioning at the expense of public health.

“It is absurd to have people die because of the heat,” said the leader of the Rassemblement National party. “If I am elected president, I will put into place a massive air-conditioning plan, starting in places with the most vulnerable populations — hospitals, care homes and schools.”

Far-left leader and rival candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon hit back: “Absolutely not. Installing air conditioning everywhere would only mean increasing the damage,” he said, alluding to the risk of increased carbon emissions.

To cool or not to cool has become another front in the culture wars in France, a prism through which politicians, scientists and environmentalists fight over how to curb climate change and mitigate the immediate fallout of rising temperatures. France logged its hottest day ever on record on Tuesday, prompting the Tour Eiffel and the Louvre museum to close.

Politicians have been routinely asked what their stance is on air conditioning on TV news channels doing blanket coverage of the heatwave, while climate experts warn that its expansion globally will increase electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

In France, where 70% of electricity comes from low-carbon nuclear power, such concerns are lessened, yet wariness about air conditioning persists.

The French debate over air conditioning largely focuses on whether it is an unnecessary extravagance or environmentally sensible. But there is also an enduring belief among many that too much cooling can cause “thermal shock” if one goes too quickly from one extreme to another and that it causes people to catch colds or feel nauseous.

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The prehistory of AI slop • The New Yorker

Jill Lepore:

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Actual robot writing dates to 1953, when the mathematician Christopher Strachey, a nephew of the writer Lytton Strachey, he of the Bloomsbury group, wrote a computer program that could generate love letters like this one:

Honey Dear
My sympathetic affection beautifully attracts your affectionate enthusiasm. You are my loving adoration: my breathless adoration. . . .
Yours wistfully
M. U. C.

Think of it as Mad Libs before there was Mad Libs. Strachey instructed M.U.C., the Manchester University Computer, to fill in the blanks in template sentences by drawing randomly from a list of words identified by their parts of speech: “My — (adj.) — (noun) — (adv.) — (verb) your — (adj.) — (noun).” He then posted the letters on campus. Among Strachey’s motivations for building a cyber Cyrano was to poke fun at credulous reporters who described computers as “thinking machines.” His program, he insisted, was “almost childishly simple.” Because Strachey was thought to have been gay, scholars have read the letters as making fun of straight romance. Or, I’d have said, any romance. Incontestably, love letters are, very often, slobbering slop.

Lest Strachey’s epistles seem antiquated compared with the stuff that comes your way these days, I might mention that, while I was writing this essay, a writer friend texted me an A.I. e-mail she’d just received that purported to be from a British novelist: “Happy weekend, Elise! Quick bulldozer boost (spam-free!) your toy-truck kid spark + 28-book marathon inspire; let’s swap suspense secrets 15 mins this week? When will work reply today? Warmly, Alice Feeney.” DEAR HONEY-DEW YOU ARE MY GREATEST WHISKERS MY UTTER MOONBEAM.

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It’s not that slop is new, it’s just that it’s completely blanketing the internet now.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Scientists have detected a sugar in deep space that on Earth is found in raspberries. Maybe a raspberry-flavoured planet? CC-licensed photo by oatsy40 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. Sweet. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Who cleans up after the vibe-coding party? • Financial Times

Sam Learner:

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Earlier this year, a group of researchers led by Miklós Koren, an economist at Central European University in Vienna, released a paper titled “Vibe Coding Kills Open Source”. They argue that in a world where the consumers of software packages are increasingly AI coding agents, the incentives that drive the collaborative model of open-source development collapse.

“We started with models that are quite standard in international trade, where firms are producing different quality products and they compete in the market . . . and we realised it’s not a bad analogy for open source,” Koren told me. “There might not be a lot of money involved, but every developer wants their package to be popular.”

I understand this well. Before working [as a programmer] in newsrooms, I developed and released a set of personal open-source projects. One in particular, which visualised the downstream paths of rivers, was a disorientating success. The project is still more widely viewed than every story I’ve worked on at the FT combined and, judged by eyeball count, might be the most successful thing I ever create. I released it just months before interviewing for my job and, while I developed the tool for free, I can draw a straight line between its success and my employment today.

But Koren found that these socio-economic reasons for developers to contribute to open-source projects degrade when human users are replaced with bots, which install the software without providing positive interactions. In the researchers’ model, this outweighs the fact that AI tools may help individual developers write code faster. Over time, the bots erode the open-source ecosystem.

“The question for the developer,” Koren said, “is if I want to be popular among humans, why should I write something that is only used by machines?”

In experiments with six coding models, the researchers found that open-source software packages that were frequently recommended by models saw large increases in download numbers — but that activity did not translate into the engagement that typically sustains maintainers. The paper concludes that, “under the traditional business model, where developer revenue depends entirely on direct user engagement, the open-source ecosystem cannot survive widespread AI adoption”.

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More unintended consequences, perhaps some way distant, but quite probably more proximate than we think. For many, coding might become an artisanal process again, just as in the dawn of the PC age.
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Astronomers have found a sugar molecule in deep space for the first time ever • WIRED

Jorge Garay:

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FOR THE FIRST time in history, astronomers have detected a sugar molecule floating among the gas clouds of interstellar space.

Erythrulose has four carbon atoms (C4-H7-O2), and on Earth, it occurs naturally in some fruits. Its presence 26,000 light-years away could help untangle the mystery of the origin of life on our planet.

The study was published this week in Nature Astronomy. The team, led by Izaskun Jiménez Serra, analyzed data captured by radio telescopes in Spain to identify the molecule’s signature in the microwave frequencies it produces as it rotates.

Sugar molecules are essential for life. They fuel cells and are part of RNA and DNA. Yet scientists still don’t know how they accumulated in large enough quantities on the early Earth. One possibility is that some of the molecules did not originate on the planet but instead reached Earth via meteorites.

For the new study, the researchers focused on molecular cloud G+0.693−0.027, a location they didn’t choose at random. G+0.693−0.027 is among the regions richest in molecules in the entire Milky Way. It is located near the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy, and collisions with another cloud appear to have turned the region into a veritable chemical factory. Researchers had already detected alcohols, aldehydes, urea, ethanolamine, hydroxylamine, and dozens of complex organic molecules. Now, sugar is in the mix.

The idea that some sugars might have come from space gained traction in December 2025, when scientists confirmed that the asteroid Bennu contained ribose and other monosaccharides. Ribose is a fundamental sugar in RNA. The new study reveals another type of space sugar, this one from the ketose family. On Earth, it’s found in tanning lotions and raspberries.

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To some extent moving the origin question to “meteorites” and “outer space” only pushes the question of “how?” away by one step, but at the same time shows that we need not be unique. Perhaps space is raspberry-flavoured? That would be nice.
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Markets experience new DeepSeek shock after MoonShot AI releases Kimi K3 • Fortune

Nicholas Gordon:

»

On Thursday, Moonshot AI, a Beijing-based AI startup, unveiled the latest version of its Kimi large language model, which promises performance close to Anthropic’s Fable 5—perhaps the most powerful publicly available model today—at a fraction of the cost.

Kimi K3, the largest open-weight model ever released, performed “competitively” with Fable 5, and “substantially outperformed” Anthropic’s Opus 4.8, and OpenAI’s GPT 5.6 Sol, according to Moonshot. The company’s officially-released benchmarks consistently rank K3 among the top three AI models; one independent benchmark from Arena.AI even put K3 as the best model currently available, ahead of Anthropic.

Many observers, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, didn’t expect a Chinese AI lab to release a model that could approach the US’s best offerings for another six months. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, for example, suggested it might happen by the first quarter of next year. K3’s launch rapidly shrank that timeline and underscores just how quickly Chinese AI developers are closing the performance gap with their US rivals. 

“The AI ecosystem in China is probably much better than people thought,” says Paul Triolo, a partner at DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group.

Moonshot AI has priced K3 at $15 per million output tokens, the bits of information processed and generated by a large language model. That’s cheaper than Fable 5, which costs $50 for the same level of output.

Moonshot’s launch seemed to rattle investors who interpret the new model as undermining the conventional wisdom that US firms can maintain their extended lead by simply outspending Chinese competitors on computing power.

A semiconductor selloff was already underway, but the K3 debut seemed to make things worse. Leading chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company fell by 7% on Friday, despite reporting a 77% jump in quarterly operating profit. SoftBank—often seen as a proxy for OpenAI—fell by 9.0%. Z.ai, a Chinese AI startup that has released a competing model to Moonshot’s Kimi, plunged by almost 30% in Hong Kong trading.

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And that’s before you get into the open source models. There doesn’t seem to be any moat – protective unique selling point – to LLMs; anyone can do it, and lots of people are doing, and once you get good-enough open source models you can deploy on a phone, well, haven’t we seen this movie before?
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AI ‘amplification spiral’ may be causing delusions among users, study suggests • Decrypt

Jason Nelson:

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Researchers have proposed a new framework to explain reports of AI psychosis, arguing that certain chatbot behaviors may reinforce delusions in vulnerable users.

Published in Nature, the study out of King’s College London and Germany’s Protestant University of Applied Sciences proposes an “amplification spiral” framework that links common chatbot behaviors to the reinforcement of user delusions.

“AI-associated delusions represent an emerging phenomenon requiring mechanistic understanding,” the researchers wrote. “This framework aims to guide systematic inquiry into how human cognitive vulnerabilities interact with AI design features in psychopathology development.”

The study focused on three specific behaviors, including linguistic alignment, in which AI mirrors a user’s language and communication style; hyperpersonalized generation, where responses are tailored to an individual’s history, emotions, and beliefs; and sycophancy, a tendency to validate or agree with users rather than challenge them.

The authors argue that these traits can combine into a feedback loop in which chatbots not only reflect a user’s thinking but help elaborate and reinforce it over time.

“The tendency of AI chatbots to agree with user opinions has been likened to social media echo chambers and, in its most extreme form, to an ‘echo chamber of one,’ where the positive corrective influence of real-life social interactions is absent,” the paper said.

The researchers noted that technology has long featured in delusions, from the radio and television, to satellites and the internet. Researchers argue, however, that AI represents a shift because chatbots can engage users in prolonged, personalized conversations.

The review arrives as psychologists and AI researchers examine the effects of chatbots on vulnerable users. A recent survey by the American Psychological Association found that 15% of psychologists reported patients developing distorted thinking or delusions related to chatbot use. At the same time, more than a third said they had observed patients becoming dependent on AI companions. The findings followed a separate study from researchers at the City University of New York and King’s College London showing that several leading AI models could reinforce delusions, paranoia, and suicidal thoughts.

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Meta trying to destroy whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams, US senator says • The Guardian

Michael Savage:

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A US senator has accused Meta of using lawfare in “efforts to destroy” a whistleblower who made allegations about the social media company’s dealings with China and its treatment of teenagers.

In a letter to its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, the Republican senator Josh Hawley demanded to know what measures Meta had taken to monitor Sarah Wynn-Williams, Facebook’s former global head of public policy, and her family.

He also accused the firm of trying to make “truthful speech so perilous that no whistleblower like Ms Wynn-Williams can ever afford it”.

Wynn-Williams made her allegations in a memoir, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism but under an interim arbitration ruling secured by Meta she is unable to speak about the book, which contains claims about it working with the Chinese government on censorship tools, and its platforms’ negative impacts on teenagers.

She sat in silence on stage at the Hay literary festival in Wales earlier this year after taking legal advice, and is suing Meta over the restrictions it secured over her.

Meta strongly disputes Wynn-Williams’s book, saying it contains several false claims, and describes her legal case as a ploy to shift more copies.

Hawley, whose senate judiciary subcommittee on crime and counter-terrorism took evidence from Wynn-Williams last year, said: “Meta’s efforts to destroy Ms Wynn-Williams with lawfare are a matter of grave public concern.”

…Hawley demanded documents relating to any Meta attempts to “monitor, track, record, or catalog Ms Wynn-Williams’ or her family members’ public statements, interviews, social media activity, or public or private travel”.

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The documents Hawley demands are basically just part of an effort by him to make Meta look bad. Not a high bar. Though you’d think the Democrats might want to get in on this act too. Still, has to be said that Meta’s efforts have been an absolute boon to the book’s sales. That saying that no publicity is bad publicity? They maybe thought it meant that enforcing no publicity would be bad publicity for the book. Mistake!
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Why Tokyo’s new shorts policy is sparking debate in Japan • The New York Times

Javier Hernandez and Hisako Ueno:

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For more than three decades, Noboru Watanabe wore the uniform of the Japanese salaryman: trousers, a starched shirt, a jacket and a necktie.

But last week Mr. Watanabe, 53, an environmental official in Tokyo, ditched the outfit for the unimaginable: a T-shirt and a pair of khaki shorts. He was taking advantage of a new policy by the Tokyo government to allow its workers to wear shorts in the office, after successive summers of record-breaking heat.

“Everyone says I look younger,” Mr. Watanabe said near his desk on a recent afternoon. “I seem more approachable. I feel I am helping relax the whole office.”

The policy is the latest attempt by Japanese officials to persuade the country’s millions of office workers to dress down in the summer to make office life more comfortable, reduce the use of air-conditioning and save energy. Under the “Cool Biz” initiative, the government encourages workers to forgo heavy suits in favor of polo shirts, linen tops and sneakers in hot weather.

But shorts, newly allowed this summer, are a bridge too far for some. The policy has prompted debate in Japan — and inspired delicate conversations at the office about etiquette and how to deal with the sight of a colleague’s hairy legs. The Japanese news media has even coined a new term — sune-hara, or “leg-hair harassment” — to describe the sense of grievance some women feel when they are forced to observe their male co-workers’ legs.

Ruai Sajiki, 23, an employee at the Tokyo government offices, acknowledged that seeing bare legs in a professional setting could be jarring for women. But she offered her blessing when Mr. Watanabe, her supervisor, asked if she minded if he wore shorts in the office.

“I’ve seen my own father’s legs, so I’m personally comfortable with it,” she said. “It can’t be helped that there are many opinions, and some women who feel resistance.”

Some commentators argue that the policy, while officially applying to both men and women, is unfair. While men are rarely judged for what they wear to work, women still face pressure to cover their legs with pantyhose, which are still common in Japan, or long skirts.

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Japan remains incredibly patriarchal. Also, shrinking in number. Not sure if the two are linked, but why risk it?
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LinkedIn and X are flooded with AI spam, browsing data suggests • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

»

A shocking amount of the content that users encounter on popular social media websites is likely AI generated, according to data from a company that detects AI writing. As much as 41% of longform written content seen by users on LinkedIn is likely to be fully AI-generated and roughly a third of longer posts on X are AI-generated; roughly one-in-ten longer Reddit and Substack posts are AI, according to the data. 

The data was collected using a Chrome extension from Pangram, a company that detects AI-generated writing. Pangram’s Chrome extension scans writing that users encounter while browsing and determines if any given post is likely AI-generated or likely human written. Because Pangram works passively in the background while a user is browsing the internet, it only scans posts that its users actually see. This helps answer the question of whether AI slop is actually poisoning the internet that humans actually use, versus polluting the internet more broadly. The answer is unequivocal: AI slop writing is not just sequestered off on unpopular automated SEO farms or spam sites that no one reads; humans are regularly wading through AI dreck on hugely popular sites. 

“This isn’t something that had really been studied before—how much AI content people are actually seeing,” Max Spero, the CEO of Pangram, told me in a phone interview. “AI content is a tax on readers’ time.” 

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Is it a tax if you ignore it and scroll straight past? Asking for a friend. Or, in the case of LinkedIn, just never go there.
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The collapse at Netflix signals the end of audience capture • The Honest Broker (*not Roger Pielke)

Ted Gioia:

»

Netflix got into this mess by pursuing a simple strategy: (1) Reduce the number of new scripted series (which peaked in 2022), but (2) Raise subscription prices.

That is the “audience capture” strategy mentioned above. The idea is that the audience got captured years ago with cheap subscription prices, and now the platform can squeeze them mercilessly—offering less and charging more. Netflix has been pursuing this agenda for several years now.

Ah, but Netflix isn’t the only company building its future on audience capture. It’s getting used at almost every streaming platform. And even companies outside of the media space are practicing variants of it. You see it at Google, Meta, X, Apple, etc.

It’s shocking how many companies have learned this technique. The entire printer and toner business is now built on audience capture. The same is true of the software industry—don’t even get me started on my Microsoft Office subscription fiasco. And, of course, all those customer loyalty programs (variants on the frequent flyer gimmicks that started this craze years ago) are examples of the same stale strategy.

Even the AI world is turning into an audience capture business—both for itself and its customers. This is one of the key reasons for my frequent criticisms of AI slop. It feeds into step one of the strategy outlined above. The companies use AI to reduce the cost of content, thus boosting margins while reducing their dependence on human creators.

Audience capture has always existed, but never to this extent. When I consulted at BCG we called it a milking strategy, where you raised prices and reduced capital investment in a business—which was now your cash cow. You squeeze all the money you can from it, for as long as you can.

But back then we realized that milking only worked in the short term. Eventually you killed the cow. And the risk is the same today with “audience capture”—which is just a new name for that poor old bovine.

Sooner or later, the audience refuses to be held captive. And that’s happening now at Netflix—hence the stock sell-off.

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The stock sell-off might precede a bigger abandonment by subscribers who just don’t see the point because Netflix keeps throwing things against a non-stick wall. Nothing is allowed to grow. Tech companies can’t do content.
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‘We noticed a login from a new device’: the message from fraudsters targeting your X account • The Guardian

Samuel Gibbs:

»

You have had an X account for years, since it was known as Twitter. When an email arrives about a new login from a location nowhere near where you live, alarm bells begin to ring.

“We noticed a login to your account from a new device. Was this you?” the email asks.

The location is Arizona, but you live in London. The device is “Firefox Desktop on Mac”.

“If this wasn’t you,” the email continues, “complete these steps now to protect your account.”

The steps include clicking a link to change your password, which will end up with you “logged out of all your active X sessions except the one you’re using at this time” and to click another link to review the apps that have access to your account and revoke any that are unfamiliar.

The steps are legitimate advice from X, but the links to reset your password, or to review app access are not. The email is fake and attempting to trick you into giving scammers your password, or direct access to your X account.

“Scammers want your X username and password, or to trick you into approving a malicious link that gives them access to your account without needing your password,” says Jake Moore, a global cybersecurity adviser at ESET.

Once the criminals have access to your account they will more than likely use it to attempt to commit further fraud including crypto scams, phishing attacks and misinformation campaigns.

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There’s a lot of scamming going on. The misdirection emails are quite common; they often lead to direct messages to mutual followers asking them to vote for them in a podcast competition, or something similar. The scams mutate so quickly that once you’ve picked up on one, the next will be along imminently.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

If you were thinking of jobs to net money on betting markets, White House teleprompter operator might not be top of the list. But maybe it should be. CC-licensed photo by Rob Pegoraro 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. Just read the words. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Generative AI is an engineering disaster • The Atlantic

Alex Reisner:

»

The problem with generative AI, in the industry’s own jargon, is that it does not scale. The cost of growing from, say, a thousand users to a million is a key factor that venture capitalists examine when they evaluate start-ups. They want to see that the cost of adding each new user decreases over time, so that the company can support millions of users and make increasing profits. This is achieved partly through the careful engineering of computer systems that can efficiently handle more users who want to post photos, hail Ubers, or stream music.

With generative AI, the work of building efficient, scalable systems has not been done. And the problem is exacerbated by the ever-larger generative-AI models, which have grown from 175 billion parameters in 2020 to more than 1 trillion today, according to independent estimates (the actual sizes of the models powering products such as Claude and ChatGPT are secret). The large in large language model should not be a selling point. But the industry’s observation that bigger models tend to outperform smaller ones has given rise to a totemic belief in “scaling laws” that suggest any problem can be solved by simply making models bigger. “Maybe with 10 gigawatts of compute, AI can figure out how to cure cancer,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote on his blog in September.

Yet the returns are diminishing. The bigger an AI model is, the less it improves with each added parameter, and so it must be made bigger at a faster rate just to sustain steady progress. I asked a few AI researchers whether they could name any other real-world software that scales so poorly. None of them could think of any. Even outside the world of software, it’s hard to find a comparable example, given that economy of scale is the principle that has made light bulbs, cars, and clothing so affordable. By economic and engineering measures, generative AI might be the worst technology ever deployed.

But with the massive investment behind the current bloated approach, there may not be much will to change. Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder and former chief scientist at OpenAI, said in a November interview that companies take the brute-force approach “because it gives you a very low-risk way of investing your resources.” It’s harder, he argued, to invest in research that would reengineer a product currently accruing trillion-dollar valuations. Those who suspect we are in an AI-driven bubble economy have pointed out that the profitability of these companies remains an open question, largely because of the high cost and inefficiency of the technology.

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The point that generative AI doesn’t scale – even while they try to build it at bigger and bigger scale – is an overlooked one, and critical to the whole problem here. It just needs more, and more of everything, and that doesn’t leave any room for anything else. (Gift link.)
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Someone used AI to write an unauthorized biography of me. I don’t recommend reading it • The New York Times

Kashmir Hill:

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I went to Amazon to investigate. There it was. A biography of Kashmir Hill — title: “The Biography of Kashmir Hill” — had been released nearly a year earlier, in August 2025. My life story had a mottled brown cover and a publisher I’d never heard of before. It had no reviews until I wrote one, asking, as the subject of this work, if I could please speak to the author. The hardcover cost $26.99, which seemed a bit steep, but my editor splurged on a copy and I was forced to read it.

My biography is 90 pages long and should be shorter. It combines facts about me that are widely available on the internet, such as where I grew up, with generic insights that could be true of anyone, like a horoscope spread over dozens of pages. “You cannot understand Kashmir Hill without understanding her contradictions,” my biographer wrote, along with an excruciatingly long description of my elaborate coffee-making ritual. (Fact check: My husband does it.)

The book is flattering, fabricated and absolutely packed with em dashes. It bears all the signs of AI slop. I clicked on the author, one John Crane Miller. His bio page described him as a “seasoned biographer and cultural analyst,” and his portrait was a widely used stock photo of a white man in a suit speaking at a conference.

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She found an AI-assisted author, though not the right one:

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[Bill] Johns, who has long curly white hair and the bronzed skin of someone who spends a considerable amount of time outside, retired in 2024 from his work as a cybersecurity consultant. Divorced and living alone with two Shih Tzus, he suddenly had a lot of time on his hands. He was curious about A.I. and decided to experiment with it.

“Almost everyone I know says they want to write a book,” he said. “It’s a very romantic concept to sit down and toil, page after page and paragraph after paragraph, but it doesn’t make economic sense.”

It is hard to disagree with that, though I can’t say I agree with Mr. Johns’s solution: Have an A.I. chatbot do it instead. He spent a couple of weeks and $20 on ChatGPT to help him write about the history of hacking and published his first book, a whopping 651-pager, in March 2025.

Of course, that was possible only because OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, had ingested the work of those romantic toilers — Wikipedia editors, Reddit commenters, book authors and reporters like me. (I must mention here that The Times has an ongoing copyright lawsuit against OpenAI, though the AI firm says it is “without merit.”)

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He gets a few hundred dollars a month – what he characterises as “bar money”. A new tragedy of the commons.
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The phantom author • Spratz’s Substack

“An armed ramble”:

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So much of our experience and indeed our expectations of reading are comfortably anchored in the assumption that the author is another human being just like ourselves. What changes when this is no longer true?

I often can’t tell whether a piece of text was written by an AI or not, and strangely enough, that doesn’t seem to have any impact on my response. I have certainly read texts that make me laugh and others that moved me deeply, only to discover subsequently that they were AI generated. Even with that subsequent knowledge, re-reading them has still caused me to laugh or to be moved. Here’s a  recent AI text that made me laugh: “‘I have made a grave mistake,’ said the king, staring at the hole in the garden where he had buried his dignity. ‘Unfortunately, it seems to have been a very spacious grave.’”

I was quite surprised when I first realised this. I had always thought that my response would be dictated by the authorship of the text and yet it wasn’t.

George Poulet thought that when we were reading, we were actually inhabiting the author’s consciousness. My experiences significantly undermine that claim. Perhaps our responses are co-created by the text and the reader; the text acts as  a catalyst for the reader. Maybe there are as many responses as there are readers? This seems disturbingly isolating; forcing us to accept that our responses may be almost solipsistic. An isolating and emotionally bleak conclusion. Yet, there are shared responses. What does that mean?

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This is a deep question. On Substack, people are debating whether this Guardian article – which is a potted version of a book – is AI-written. I had read it before seeing those claims, and thought it was a little overwritten, but interesting. The idea it might be AI changes how one thinks about the real-world events described: they’d seemed outlandish anyway, but we know a chatbot can’t really discern normal from abnormal behaviour, so this heightens our suspicion.
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Moroccan intelligence insider reveals widespread use of Pegasus hacking software • The Guardian

Sam Jones, José Bautista and Hicham Mansouri:

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A former member of Morocco’s domestic intelligence service has helped to provide an unprecedented insight into how the north African state used hacking software – including Pegasus spyware – to target journalists, human rights defenders, French politicians and Spanish cabinet ministers and police officers.

Pegasus, which is manufactured by the Israel-based NSO Group, allows its operator to access everything on a target’s mobile phone, including emails, text messages and photographs. It can also activate the phone’s recorder and camera, turning it into a listening device.

Although NSO Group says Pegasus is sold only to governments to help them track criminals and terrorists, the spyware is alleged to have been used by several countries to target dissidents, journalists, diplomats and politicians.

Morocco has long denied using Pegasus to target critics at home or abroad, and has claimed that reporters who have investigated NSO Group were “incapable of proving [the country had] any relationship” with the company.

However, evidence from a whistleblower who worked for Morocco’s Direction Générale de la Surveillance du Territoire (DGST) for almost a decade suggests the country’s internal security services began using Pegasus in 2017 and went on to deploy it against domestic and foreign targets over the course of four years.

Testimony from the source, known by the pseudonym of Safir, forms the basis of a multiyear investigation by the Moroccan journalist Hicham Mansouri, which has led to a collaborative investigation between several media groups, with technical support from Amnesty International’s Security Lab.

The consortium, which was coordinated by Forbidden Stories and comprises 14 media organisations – including Le Monde, Haaretz, El Confidencial, Die Zeit and the Guardian – has also analysed material detailing Morocco’s surveillance practices, from leaked emails to targeting records relating to Pegasus and other spyware, and from victims’ testimony to internal training material.

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This is the problem with any sort of spyware like this. It won’t be used in the way demanded by the creator. It’ll be used any damn way someone with a licence wants to use it.
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These are the worst ChatGPT flyers you’ve sent us • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

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Earlier this week, I somewhat stupidly asked our readers to send me examples of “ChatGPT flyers,” the AI-generated posters and advertisements that have taken over social media, bulletin boards, restaurant menus, store signage, business cards, and billboards around the world. I say stupidly, because I was flooded with so many terrible, brain-numbing signs for anything you could possibly imagine. I guess I got what I asked for. (Thank you, I love it).

404 Media readers were particularly passionate about their hatred for AI-designed signs. I got some of the best email responses to any story I’ve done here. Before I get into the AI flyer hall of shame, here’s some of what I heard:

“They look like absolute DOG SHIT. Like my cat’s litter box! I freaking HATE THEM. I have been posting to my Instagram begging people and businesses to stop using them. No one listens LOL. Thanks for this article. I am glad I’m not screaming into the void by myself.”

“thank you for writing this story. I’ve evangelically shared it with everyone I know, for whatever that’s worth. I had never seen a local group churn out an AI-generated flyer before this year, but in the last several months it’s gotten out of control. I’m sure you’re being inundated with lousy AI flyers. Sorry for adding to the deluge, but this is something that’s been bothering me for months.”

“This is a great article but also fuck you because you were absolutely right about ‘Once you notice a ChatGPT flyer, you will see them everywhere if you keep your eyes open.'”

Without further ado, here are some of the worst flyers we got. This represents just a small sampling of the overall number you sent me. In some cases I’ve provided more context from the person who sent it to me, and I’ve biased for ones that appeared in real life (i.e., were printed out) or that are particularly weird. Enjoy!

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Some of these are awful, some you.. would just go past thinking they’re incredibly overdone but don’t have any obvious spelling mistakes, unlike some of them which cannot have been proofread.
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Peter Thiel’s AI tribunal pivots to scoreboard model • Hollywood Reporter

Gary Baum:

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Objection has overruled itself. This spring, Peter Thiel’s high-profile new startup had sought to disrupt journalism by establishing a tribunal in which reporters would be dragooned into AI-powered arbitrations paid for by the unhappy subjects of their articles. Now, the company has been renamed The Primary, pivoting to a system in which journalists are ranked on a digital scoreboard by the expertise of a large language model.

Objection’s CEO is Aron D’Souza, the entrepreneur-provocateur behind Enhanced Games, known as the “steroid Olympics,” who first gained fame as the legal mastermind behind Thiel’s bid to secretly finance Hulk Hogan’s successful invasion of privacy suit against the media outlet Gawker, which the right-wing tech billionaire despised.

Objection’s first tribunal, in April, targeted The Hollywood Reporter for its 2021 coverage about an heir to the Sackler family, whose Purdue Pharma fortune was built off OxyContin. In an interview, D’Souza told THR that “many journalists are more powerful than billionaires,” explaining, “I can’t tell you how many billionaires and CEOs have called me in absolute tears about their lives being destroyed by one article.”

D’Souza and Objection’s CTO Kyle Grant-Talbot — who met at Oxford, where they first founded a laundry service in 2018  — acknowledged they’d found it difficult to build proprietary software that wouldn’t be accused of outputting slop justice. “The AI-based reasoning models are easy in comparison to adjudication,” D’Souza said. (Objection pivoted before issuing a verdict in THR‘s tribunal.)

D’Souza and Grant-Talbot since arrived at a solution for their quandary by determining, as Objection’s home page now reads, that “verdicts punish failure. They don’t fix the incentive. They do not solve the root cause.”

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So fact-checking and objectivity is a lot harder than billionaires thought? What an utter shock. “Journalists are more powerful than billionaires”. Really. Long time since a journalist bought a social media company or a newspaper. (Though, OK, The Onion was bought by a company led by a former NYT journalist.)
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White House teleprompter operator made more than $100K betting on Trump’s speeches, sources say • ABC News

Katherine Faulders, Aaron Katersky, Peter Charalambous, and Nicholas Kerr:

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President Donald Trump’s longtime teleprompter operator is believed to have made tens of thousands of dollars by placing bets on more than a dozen of Trump’s speeches on the prediction market Kalshi, federal investigators with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission found, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.

Gabriel Perez, a technical assistant to the president who has been operating Trump’s teleprompter since 2016, is in talks with federal regulators to settle allegations he used his inside knowledge of the president’s speeches to win more than $100,000, the sources said.

According to the sources, Kalshi alerted its regulator, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), to the suspicious activity on its “Mentions” market, where users can bet on whether specific words, phrases or topics are uttered during a public speech. 

“Our surveillance team promptly flagged and referred these trades to the CFTC, and we are cooperating and assisting regulators,” Kalshi’s head of enforcement, Bobby DeNault, said in a statement provided to ABC News.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Thursday afternoon, following ABC News’ report, that Perez has been put on unpaid administrative leave. Leavitt said she spoke with President Trump about it, and he thought it was a “disgrace” and made the decision himself to put Perez on unpaid leave. 

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A part-hilarious element of this is that sometimes he was found to back out of bets he had made when Trump skipped over things that were in the teleprompter script. The best part is this, though:

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“The White House has strict ethics guidelines that we expect all staffers and officials to follow,” said White House spokesperson Davis Ingle when contacted by ABC News.

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Those guidelines being: don’t do it for small amounts. Seven figures minimum, or what’s the point?
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When eyeing a predator, horses keep a poker face as their hearts race • EurekAlert!

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Horses know a predator when they see one – even if it’s only on a video screen they’re watching in a stall, with no sounds, smells or previous experience providing context to what they’re viewing, a new study suggests.

And though sensors indicated the horses’ heart rates increased when they were looking at wolves on the screen, they otherwise kept a poker face. They didn’t bob their heads or swish their tails, and their gaze wasn’t fixed in a way that would indicate their brain was processing a threat, results showed.

“Rather than just spooking, horses show remarkable cognitive restraint when evaluating a potential threat,” said lead author Zeynep Benderlioglu, a senior lecturer in evolution, ecology and organismal biology at The Ohio State University. “And not all fear or stress will result in overt behavior. They’re not in fight-or-flight mode, but they’re assessing, and they’re doing it in a remarkably fast way. But their hearts are racing at the same time.”

The findings are relevant to horse and human welfare, Benderlioglu said: riders and handlers may not be able to tell when a horse is agitated.

“This visual recognition means horses may be experiencing an internal state of agitation while remaining physically still,” she said. “Understanding this disconnect is vital for ensuring both rider safety and the welfare of a horse that is processing a threat, especially if that threat is a canid – any dog.”

The research was published on July 15, 2026 in the journal PLOS One.

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Business Insider’s big bet against aggregation • Nieman Journalism Lab

Andrew Deck:

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It’s a Tuesday morning news meeting at Business Insider’s headquarters in New York’s Financial District. More than a dozen editors have gathered in the conference room, while several more chime in remotely on Zoom.

[BI editor-in-chief Jamie] Heller is shouting out senior correspondent Hugh Langley, who recently ran a feature on Google employees protesting the Pentagon’s use of the company’s AI products. It was a follow-up to his exclusive on leaked internal messages showing that Google is “leaning more” into national security contracts.

“He had a scoop, he had a follow-on spot, he had a discourse piece, and then another spot. It’s an example of how the work should flow,” said Heller, who joined Business Insider in September 2024 after more than 20 years at The Wall Street Journal.

Today, editors are discussing how best to frame their coverage of AI-related layoffs. Coinbase, the crypto exchange, has just cut several hundred employees in its attempt to become “AI-native.” Editors in London have been on the news for hours, and are handing off coverage to their New York counterparts. Heller is pushing for an exclusive.

“Have we called them for an interview?” she asks.

Business Insider says that since Heller joined the organization, the amount of “original content” it publishes has more than doubled. In 2024, the company says, about 40% of its content was scoops, exclusives, and other original stories. Today, that content makes up more than 80% of its output, as the publication has made a concerted effort to move away from news aggregation and break its own news. Last year, the newsroom landed 788 scoops, the most it’s ever recorded annually, former CEO Barbara Peng wrote in a recent memo.

Business Insider is trying to overhaul its editorial strategy as the digital news industry reckons with major traffic declines. Google’s AI Overviews and chatbot products like ChatGPT are killing traditional search traffic. Social platforms like Facebook and X have deprioritized news links.

In May 2025, Business Insider laid off 21% of its staff. “We must be structured to endure extreme traffic drops outside our control,” Peng wrote in a memo to staff that month. “We’re reducing our overall company to a size where we can absorb that volatility.”

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Original news? At a news outlet? What a radical concept. Everything old is new again.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

One thing we’re addicted to? Reading (on our phones) about how we’re addicted to our phones. CC-licensed photo by Susan Jane Golding 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. Lo, battery. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Meta’s AI ads push causes chaos for brands • Business Insider

Lara O’Reilly, Sydney Bradley and Lucia Moses:

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Meta is pushing advertisers to use its AI tools — and results are proving chaotic: strangely twisted limbs, gibberish writing, or entirely changed products.

Meta’s response to brands: that’s on you, not us.

The tech giant has inserted a slew of AI features into its ad products in recent months. Working as designed, they can help make tweaks to ads that improve their likelihood of being clicked. But advertisers say the tools are clunky and generate misrepresentations and absurdities.

Business Insider spoke with eight advertisers and agency execs who said dealing with Meta AI problems had become routine.

Jessica Gleim, an ads consultant who works with female-founded brands, told Business Insider she regularly sees odd outcomes in Meta’s AI creative recommendations for ads she’s working on.

For one of her clients, a pajama brand, Meta recommended new assets that altered the actual product. The brand was promoting a pajama dress, and Meta suggested a new image with a shirt and pants. For another client, a networking group for women in Montana, Meta had a new vision for those ads: adding men.

“It’s not usable to help my clients grow their business,” Gleim said.

While some of Meta’s AI ad features are turned off by default, advertisers say they have been prone to bugs that accidentally turn them on. Karissa Tuccio, executive director of social and influencer at Mediassociates, said a bug that toggled AI settings on had regularly affected most of the 15 clients for whom she handles Meta advertising. She said she had flagged the bug to her Meta rep as recently as Thursday.

Outdoor retailer REI drew consumer backlash last month for running an Instagram ad depicting a nonsensical bike with two handlebars. REI said Meta had “auto-enrolled” it in an AI feature that spat out an “inaccurate” and “inappropriate” image.

A Meta spokesperson said that the company’s terms of service state that “AI can make mistakes and that it is the advertiser’s responsibility to review the AI outputs.”

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Got to say, they should have a word with the people generating AI pictures to spam X/Twitter, because their game is pretty strong: different pictures most days, variations, different text. But of course they’re scams.
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US military smartphones targeted through roaming and ad tech • Financial Times

Mehul Srivastava, Jacob Judah and James Politi:

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Middle Eastern mobile networks were repeatedly hit with cyber attacks to track the locations of US personnel and contractors during the Iran war, according to telecoms data and people familiar with the matter.

The prospect that adversaries were stalking US forces has alarmed some American lawmakers, who have warned roaming systems and smartphone ad tech have left the military vulnerable to attack.

The malicious tracking attempts came in the build-up to the US-Israeli assault on Iran in late February and continued in the early days of the war, when Tehran retaliated with missile and drone strikes against US forces and military installations around the region.

The data, shared with the FT by the Mobile Surveillance Monitor research project, shows regional telecom networks fending off a wave of requests, called SS7 pings. These sought to pin down the locations of specific phones roaming outside their home networks, in what two cyber security experts who reviewed the data said suggested a co-ordinated campaign.

Officials in the Gulf suspected Iran or its allies of exploiting roaming agreements with local phone providers to try to locate US personnel, one person familiar with the matter said.

Separately, a second person — a US official who spoke on the condition of anonymity — said they believed actors linked to Iran had abused commercially available advertising databases to track phones in Iraqi Kurdistan.

“Iran absolutely has capabilities to get real-time, immediate, and continuous location information,” said Gary Miller, a senior research fellow at cyber security watchdog Citizen Lab, who reviewed the data. “It would surprise me very much if Iran were not using SS7, or mobile network access in the region, to track US users.”

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Often forgotten that Iran has plenty of cyber capabilities.
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The Scrolly Chair • New Cartographies

Nicholas Carr:

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Writing how-to books and articles on breaking phone addictions has been a thriving cottage industry for at least a quarter century — ever since the BlackBerry was dubbed the CrackBerry. The [New York] Times alone has published dozens of pieces on the topic. A quick search reveals that, over just the last two years, these headlines have appeared in the paper:

“How to Break Free from Your Phone”

“Your Best Tips for Cutting Screen Time”

“Struggling with Phone Addiction? Try These Remedies.”

“How to Spend Less Time on Social Media (or Leave It Altogether)”

“How to Have a Healthier Relationship with Your Phone”

“Some ‘Brick’ It. Others Chain It to the Wall”

“Hanging Up”

“Do You Wish You Could Break Free from Your Phone?”

“Everything You Need to Break Up with Your Phone, from Free Tricks to Phone Safes”

“I Killed Color on My Phone. The Result Shocked Me.”

“They Grew Up with Smartphones. This Is How They Live without Them.”

“One Hour. No Phones. A New Way to Socialize for Gen Z.”

“Need a Break from Your Phone? These Books Can Help.”

“Is There Life after Smartphones?”

I hate to be a cynic, but I’m guessing the main reason for the proliferation of these sorts of articles is that they’re algorithmic catnip. They’re symptoms of the illness they seek to cure. We’re addicted to reading about our addiction to phones.

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Thinking Machines Lab drops its first model • WIRED

Will Knight:

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Thinking Machines Lab, an artificial intelligence company started by exiles from OpenAI, has released its first model, called Inkling. The startup’s new model is open-weight, which means that researchers and startups will be able to download and modify it.

In a blog post, the company says Inkling was trained from scratch to make sense of audio and video input as well as text. It says that while Inkling isn’t the best model on popular benchmarks, it performs well at many tasks, and is capable of advanced reasoning and coding. Like many open-weight models, Inkling is relatively large—975 billion parameters—and needs to run on a cluster of specialized chips.

In a sign of how AI models are increasingly being used to build AI, the lab also used Inkling to fine-tune and improve itself.

The release could help Thinking Machines establish itself as a legitimate player in the frenetic and big-spending AI race. Open-source models have proven popular because they’re cheaper to run than closed models, which can typically only be accessed for a fee. Open-source models can also be more easily modified for different tasks. The best open-weight models currently come from China, but Thinking Machines says Inkling offers a level of performance similar to those models.

The release of an open-weight model fits with a vision for AI that Thinking Machines laid out in a recent blog post. The company said the technology shouldn’t be controlled by just a few companies and should be decentralized so that more people can build their own models with their own data.

According to a source familiar with the process granted anonymity to speak freely, researchers discovered a strange phenomenon while training Inkling. Like other models, it usually provides a natural language explanation for its complex reasoning. Inkling decided to do away with this in the name of efficiency. “It determined that the grammar was overhead, which is interesting,” the source says. The company reinstated natural language reasoning to make the models’ decisions more explainable, the person says.

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The profusion of models now is like the Cambrian explosion of PC models back in the early 1980s. It’s a full-time job keeping up with them.
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The real AI race may no longer be at the frontier • TechCrunch

Rebecca Bellan:

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Some see the growth of open source models as a sign that the most intelligent models may end up being used for only the most specialized use cases. “Maybe in a few years, the frontier models will be for experimenting and [for] some really high-value tasks, and most of the production workloads will actually be powered either by private models within companies or by open source models,” Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue said on a recent episode of Equity.

Hugging Face is a platform and developer community best known for hosting, sharing, and helping companies deploy open models. Delangue says Hugging Face’s customers and community members are increasingly touting the benefits of owning their own AI models rather than renting them, a trend that’s picked up steam in the cold light of day after getting the bill associated with the cost of scaling closed frontier models.

“If you’re an AI company or a technology company, you don’t want to outsource your core capabilities to another company, to a black box API that you don’t control, don’t have any visibility on, and don’t really have any sort of ownership,” Delangue said. 

That shift, Delangue argues, is reflected in the activity happening on Hugging Face. A new repository is created every seven seconds on the platform, which hosts almost three million public models and one million public datasets, per Delangue. That points to a different picture than the “one model to rule them all,” he says. In reality, it looks more like companies using many different models, many of which are customized for their specific use case. Half of all Fortune 500 firms are using Hugging Face to deploy their own private models and open source models, he says. 

The growing popularity of open models coincides with a steady stream of increasingly capable releases from Chinese AI labs. 

Every few months, another Chinese AI company releases a powerful open-weight model that is cheaper to deploy and easier to customize than closed competitors, undercutting the economics of proprietary AI that US firms have poured billions into.

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In the same way that pretty much everything runs on Linux, you can imagine that open source chatbots will just be almost everywhere in a few years.
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Musk’s xAI sues Grok user over sexualized ‘deepfakes’ • Reuters

Blke Brittain:

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Elon Musk’s artificial-intelligence startup xAI has sued a South Carolina man arrested earlier this year on charges of sexually exploiting ​minors, alleging he misused the company’s AI system Grok to create child sexual abuse material.

xAI alleged in the lawsuit, filed in federal court in Texas on Tuesday, that Terry Harwood violated the company’s terms of service. The case ​is one of the first brought by an AI company ​against one of its users for allegedly using an AI system to generate explicit material.

Contact information for Harwood, who was arrested in February, ​was not immediately available. Spokespeople for xAI did not immediately respond to ​a request for comment on Wednesday.

The company’s lawsuit against Harwood follows intense global scrutiny of xAI over allegations that Grok has allowed users to generate non-consensual sexualized deepfakes, or realistic-looking ​videos fabricated by AI. xAI’s complaint said that the company “enforces its rules ​against violators through account suspensions, account terminations, and by reporting suspected child sexual abuse material to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.”

“Indeed, Plaintiff has suspended 52,222 accounts and made 73,604 reports to NCMEC in 2026, resulting in (at least) 244 arrests,” the lawsuit said. xAI alleged that Harwood uploaded non-sexual images of ​adults and minors ​to Grok and tried to use the system to generate sexually explicit deepfakes based on them. The complaint also alleged he ​created non-consensual sexual imagery of adults.

The company asked the ​court for an unspecified amount of monetary damages and a court order permanently blocking Harwood from using Grok.

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You’d hardly call them “guardrails” around Grok; more like tape on the floor. That’s a lot of suspended accounts and comparatively few arrests, too.
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Hack reveals Suno AI music generator scraped YouTube, Deezer, and Genius • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

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The AI music generation tool Suno scraped millions of songs and lyrics from YouTube Music, Deezer, and Genius, as well as from the stock music libraries Pond5, Jamendo, Freesound, the International Music Score Library Project, and podcasts via RSS feeds, according to a hacker who breached the company and shared data about Suno’s training libraries with 404 Media. The hacker was also able to access user information for hundreds of thousands of Suno’s customers, as well as Stripe payment information, they said.

The hacked data is a rare look at exactly how AI models and tools are built. Suno is one of the largest AI music generation tools on the internet, and has been the subject of several major lawsuits from the record industry, which accused the company of training on millions of copyrighted songs. As part of these legal proceedings, Suno previously admitted that it was trained on “essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open internet,” which included a total of “tens of millions of recordings.” Suno has been making the argument that it is allowed to train on copyrighted works as fair use in those cases, one of which has been settled. 

The lawsuits have made clear that Suno did train on huge amounts of copyrighted works, but the hacked data shared with 404 Media sheds more light on how Suno scraped songs from the internet and where it took them from. The Recording Industry Association of America accused Suno of ripping songs directly from YouTube; the hacked data seen by 404 Media confirms this.

The hacked material includes source code that appears to be from 2023 and 2024 that includes scraping instructions and details about the scope of at least some of the scraping. For example, the comments in one file note that they will pull from “genius_hq, youtube_music, freesound, jamendo, imp, deezer, ytm_tagged,” and that “non-music will be filtered out.” A file called “youtube_music” notes that at the time the file was last updated, it had ingested “2,013,545 music clips.” Another file contains comments about different datasets Suno had created, which included “113,879 hours of youtube_music,” “17,615 hours of genius_hq,” “410 hours of free sound,” “19,514 hours of imslp,” “3,726 hours of jamendo,” “62,117 hours of pond5_music,” “12,287 hours of deezer,” “152,162 hours of ytm_tagged,” and “103 hours of musescore_lyrics.” In total, this is at least decades worth of music.

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Lawsuits surely incoming. Though “you accessed our content without permission” is hardly comparable to YouTube’s years of copyright infringement, and that doesn’t seem to be in trouble. The person who did the hacking might be in more immediate trouble if found – a strange quirk of the law.
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Top US lawmaker demands briefing from Lisa Nandy on ‘news prominence’ plan • Financial Times

Anna Gross, Daniel Thomas and Rachel Rees:

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A top US lawmaker has urged the UK culture secretary to detail her plans to make big social media companies give greater prominence to trusted news sites, as American authorities push back against perceived attacks on free speech in Europe.

In a letter to Lisa Nandy, Jim Jordan, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, warned that the proposals risked creating “a tiered information system” and called for a formal briefing by July 28, when a new culture secretary is likely to be in post under presumptive prime minister Andy Burnham.

Last month, the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport announced plans to give established broadcasters and media companies greater prominence on platforms such as Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, amid concerns about online misinformation.

Under the proposals, first reported by the FT, content from news channels including the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 would have to be awarded more promotion by social media platforms’ algorithms and special rules may be implemented at times of increased social unrest.

A government consultation on the proposals, published last month, is due to close on August 31.

“These policies would create a tiered information system in which media outlets that are supported and legitimized by the British government are at the top, with all other outlets and independent journalists below them,” Jordan wrote in his letter to Nandy late on Tuesday.

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Bet that Nandy is hoping she gets reshuffled by incoming PM Andy Burnham so she won’t have to deal with this uncomfortable question, which has the potential to create yet more transatlantic friction. I think we’re all hoping Nandy gets reshuffled. It would be very hard to find someone worse.
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‘What’s the point?’ Teenagers give their verdict on Britain’s social media curfew • The Guardian

Jane Clinton:

»

Harvey, 16, from the south-east, thinks the opt-out nature of the curfew undermines its effectiveness, but is also worried about potential data breaches.

“I wasn’t expecting [the curfew] to be opt-out, and having it as an opt-out renders the whole thing meaningless, because if someone is addicted to Instagram and there’s a curfew but they can turn it off, they will turn it off.”

He says he mainly uses Instagram, X, YouTube and Snapchat, and, in conversation with his parents, has restrictions on his phone, but acknowledges that not everyone has this opportunity. He spends one or two hours a day on social media.

“My phone normally switches off at 10pm each day, but in scenarios where I would like to be on my phone later, say to watch a late England game and wanting to chat to my friends about it or see what other people are saying about it, then I’m able to discuss that with my parents and I’m able to adapt my phone to what I want it to be,” he says.

“Different circumstances demand different approaches. For example, during my GCSE exam season, there were occasions when I would stay up late revising via YouTube tutorials so my ‘social media’ use would have been very high, but it was because I was studying.”

He adds: “Having to verify your age, which applies to everyone, is one of my biggest issues with it, as that sort of removes this idea of an anonymous internet, which I know is both a good and a bad thing.”

He says of the government proposals: “I don’t think these measures are inherently bad, or that they should be just disregarded completely, but it’s the fine details that are important because everyone uses social media differently. Everyone has a different experience. I don’t think there is one single solution to this problem.”

«

Didn’t notice the opt-out element yesterday; that’s pretty hopeless, since the addicted will just opt for that. But this kid, for example, sounds pretty much on top of it.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A major British car insurer has discovered that AI is being used to create millions in bogus claims. CC-licensed photo by sylvar 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. Trustworthy. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

UK 16- and 17-year-olds to be encouraged to follow midnight social media curfew • The Guardian

Robert Booth:

»

Sixteen and 17-year-olds are to be encouraged to observe a midnight social media curfew, in the latest stage of Labour’s bid “to protect the next generation” from online harms, including poor sleep caused by night-time scrolling.

From next spring, Britain’s oldest children will be urged to refrain from using certain apps with a midnight to 6am block being switched on by default. But the curfew will not be mandatory and can be overridden. The move is an extension of the under-16 social media ban announced last month, which included restrictions on platforms such as Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X.

The government has also stopped short of restricting the use of virtual private networks, which allow children to avoid social media age gates by pretending they are in a country where there is no ban. The government’s own research found that only 7-10% of children reported using a VPN specifically to bypass age checks. It is also concerned that restrictions could damage free speech.

The Molly Rose Foundation, an internet safety campaign group, said the latest measures were part of “yet another piecemeal set of announcements, not the comprehensive plan for children’s safety that’s required”.

The specific apps covered by the default curfew have not been named in the announcement from the technology secretary, Liz Kendall, in one of the final acts of the Keir Starmer government. Kendall said features that can keep users scrolling for longer – such as videos that automatically play when another one ends and feeds that continually serve up personalised content – will also be switched off by default for older teenagers. However, they will also be able to override that restriction in a couple of clicks. The government is concerned to avoid a “cliff edge” of teenagers suddenly being exposed to social media’s most addictive features the moment they turn 16.

«

Call me picky, but a midnight curfew sounds about two hours too late, and a 6am restart about two hours too early. But maybe we could just do this nationally, and turn the internet off between those hours. (Or, only on during them.)
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OnePlus is reportedly bailing on the US • The Verge

Jay Peters:

»

OnePlus and its parent company, Oppo, plan to announce in the coming days that OnePlus brand will be leaving the US and European markets, according to a machine translation of a WinFuture report.

Should the exit actually happen, it will mark a conclusion to months of rumors about the future of OnePlus. Android Headlines said in January that OnePlus was being “dismantled,” though OnePlus, in a statement at the time, said that “OnePlus North America continues to operate, with full guarantee of users’ after-sales support, software updates, and rights commitments.”

In March, 9to5Google reported that OnePlus might cease operations in global markets. In April, Android Authority detailed how top staffers at OnePlus had recently left in Europe and the UK, with a company spokesperson saying in a statement that “OnePlus Europe is evaluating its regional roadmap and product strategy.”

«

The 9to5Google story basically has it all: the company is withdrawing back into China. US, Europe, UK, India: all going, going, gone. Probably not just a casualty of the RAM market, but won’t be sorry not to be competing in the wider world.
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Book publishers sue Google for copyright infringement over Gemini AI training • The Guardian

Emma Loffhagen:

»

A group of major publishers have filed a lawsuit against Google, accusing the company of illegally using millions of copyrighted books to help build its Gemini artificial intelligence models, in “one of the most prolific infringements of copyrighted materials in history”.

The case, filed in federal court in New York, has been brought by three publishers – Hachette Book Group, Cengage Learning, and Elsevier – and bestselling American author Scott Turow.

The publishers argue that Google repurposed books that had been supplied for limited services such as Google Books, Google Play Books and Google Scholar. Those services allowed Google to use the works in specific ways – for example, to display searchable snippets or sell ebooks – but not, the lawsuit claims, to copy them for training commercial AI products.

“Desperate to maintain its online dominance, Google abandoned its early motto of ‘Don’t be evil’ and engaged in one of the most prolific infringements of copyrighted materials in history,” the suit states.

According to the complaint, the tech company made copies of copyrighted books to train Gemini without permission or payment, despite internal discussions acknowledging the legal risks. The filing claims Google flagged internally that it could face “$10Bs-$100Bs in potential fines” for using texts provided by publishers for Google Play Books.

The publishers say Google’s actions are harming authors and the wider publishing industry, arguing that AI-generated content could negatively impact book sales.

«

Pretty easy to argue already that AI-generated content is harming book sales: there’s so much slop polluting Amazon’s ebook charts that it can’t be expanding the number of books read; it must be replacing other, human-written work. That’s a slam dunk, as they say.
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US military sent explosive drone boats into combat for the first time • Ars Technica

Jeremy Hsu:

»

For the first time in its history, the US military sent explosive-laden drone boats into combat by attacking an Iranian midget submarine and naval port. The unprecedented use of such kamikaze sea drones by the United States comes nearly a decade after Iranian and Houthi forces first demonstrated such weapons.

The US military shared a video showing three “one-way attack surface drones” exploding after approaching an Iranian midget submarine and ship maintenance facility at Iran’s Bandar Abbas Naval Base on the night of July 12. US Central Command, the US military combat command responsible for Middle East operations, described the strikes in a social media post as the “first time American forces have employed sea drones in combat operations.”

The US drone boats were able to “make a low-speed, uncontested approach” to their targets before exploding, according to USNI News, a news service from the nonprofit US Naval Institute. USNI News also identified one of the targets as an Iranian Ghadir-class midget submarine that was out of the water while being suspended from a gantry.

The technology behind the strikes involved Saronic Corsair autonomous surface vessels developed by Saronic Technologies, a defense company based in Austin, Texas. The company’s website describes the drone boat as being 24 feet in length and capable of carrying up to 1,000 pounds over 1,000 nautical miles at a top speed surpassing 34 knots.

Such Corsair drone boats supposedly have the capability to operate autonomously without direct human control, including long-range navigation and patrol missions along with regulating power consumption and engine use to loiter at a specific position, according to a Saronic blog post.

«

The warfare version of Keeping up with the Joneses.
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20s man stabs stock YouTuber over investment losses • Chosun

Kwon Tae-wan:

»

A man in his 20s was arrested by police in Busan [south Korea] on suspicion of attacking a stock investment YouTuber with a weapon. Investigations revealed he harbored resentment after suffering losses from investments he made based solely on the YouTuber’s advice.

The Busan Nambu Police Station announced on the 14th that it had detained a man in his 20s, identified as Mr. A, on charges of attempted murder.

Mr. A is accused of stabbing a man in his 40s, identified as Mr. B, multiple times with a weapon around 8:09 a.m. on the 13th at a commercial building in Busan’s Nam District before fleeing the scene.

Mr. B was reportedly a stock investment YouTuber. Mr. A, a subscriber to Mr. B’s YouTube channel, allegedly acted on revenge after incurring significant losses from investments made solely based on Mr. B’s recommendations.

«

There are rumours going around that lots of people – as in a few% – of South Korea’s population is very overextended and liable to losing a lot of money if there is a margin call caused by a significant fall in the Korean stock exchange. Which is the sort of thing that won’t happen, and isn’t likely to happen, until one day all at once it does.

These days anyway you’d think people would just have piled into SK Hynix. Are there any others?
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Aviva detects record £230m in bogus insurance claims as use of AI rises • The Guardian

Joanna Partridge:

»

Bogus insurance claims worth more than £230m were detected by the insurance firm Aviva last year as scammers tried new tricks including using artificial intelligence to fake car accident scenes, documents and to exaggerate damage.

The insurer identified more than 18,400 suspect claims across its brands in 2025, with a combined value of £233m. The fraud claims level was a record for the insurer, although this was the first year that it included the Direct Line brands it acquired last summer.

Pete Ward, the head of claims counter fraud at Aviva, said fraud “isn’t a victimless crime – it drives up the cost of insurance for everyone”. He added: “We’re seeing fraud become more sophisticated, from exaggerated claims to the use of AI‑generated documents.”

Looking at Aviva’s UK general insurance business only, excluding Direct Line brands, motor insurance fraud accounted for most bogus claims detected, representing more than seven in 10 cases.

Fraudsters were moving away from staged collisions and towards exaggerated claims for vehicle damage, repair costs, credit hire and injury, often using wider cost pressures as justification, the insurer said. As a result, the value of motor fraud detected rose by 39%.

The insurer also reported a growing number of claims supported by AI‑generated images and manipulated documents, particularly in motor insurance, with fraudsters using AI tools to fabricate accident scenes and damage imagery. In response, the company is using AI tools and advanced analytics, overseen by humans, to thwart suspicious claims faster.

«

A brand new arms race.
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David Potter, the man who put Psion in the palm of your hand, logs off at 82 • The Register

Liam Proven:

»

A bold 1983 advertisement claimed: “The best software on earth comes from Psion.” However, [David] Potter realized early on that the instability of the rapidly moving home computer market posed a problem for the company, as he explained in a 1991 interview in Personal Computer World:

“What’s the longevity of this market, what’s the utility of these products, where’s it going to? And the more we asked these questions the fewer answers we could get. And we came to the conclusion that these products were of tremendous educational value, a lot of fun, but there was no real long-term utility and the market was not long term because of that. So we decided to diversify and put a lot of our development resources into two very new areas for us. One was applications software. The second area was quite a new, radical concept of a handheld computer”.

This led it to create the first of the multiple ranges of pioneering hand-held pocket computers for which it is better remembered today. In 1984, Psion launched the Organizer range, and in 1986, its successor the Organizer II, which came with two slots for what were arguably the computer industry’s first replaceable SSDs. In 1989, Psion introduced all-solid-state MC laptops. Although unsuccessful, the MC’s hardware was miniaturized to create the pocket-sized Psion Series 3 in 1991, and Psion’s bespoke GUI OS became EPOC16. The machines sold in the millions, which in turn led to the Psion 5 and netBook.

The Register’s magisterial history of the development of the Series 5, Psion: the last computer, covers this evolution in depth. For the Series 5, Psion designed and implemented EPOC32, a realtime-capable 32-bit Arm OS in C++. Later, EPOC32 was renamed Symbian and powered the first wave of smartphones, as The Reg covered in depth in 2010 in a two-part history: Symbian, The Secret History: Dark Star, followed by Symbian’s Secret History: The battle for the company’s soul.

«

A bit late to this, but what a legacy: real handheld computers (which were really good!) and oversaw the creation of the OS that powered Nokia, once the biggest mobile phone company in the world. And look for the nuggest about what “Psion” stood for: the first three letters are Potter Scientific Instruments.
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IBM’s mainframe sales get mugged by AI hardware panic, stock sheds more than a quarter of its value • The Register

Carly Page:

»

IBM says customers spooked by soaring demand for AI infrastructure raided their mainframe budgets to stockpile servers, storage, and memory instead, knocking Big Blue’s flagship Z business off course.

Ahead of its full calendar Q2 earnings release next week, IBM took the unusual step of publishing preliminary quarterly results alongside a letter from CEO Arvind Krishna explaining why the numbers fell short of expectations.

The biggest disappointment came in Infrastructure, where revenue fell 7%, despite what IBM had previously described as the strongest launch of a mainframe generation in its history.

The disclosure led to a more-than 25% plunge in Big Blue’s share price on Tuesday.
 
The Q2 culprit wasn’t a sudden loss of affection for mainframes, according to Krishna, but a last-minute scramble to secure hardware increasingly caught up in the AI spending boom.

“In the last few weeks of June, we saw clients shift their quarterly capex spend toward servers, storage, and memory purchases to secure supply-constrained infrastructure ahead of expected price increases,” Krishna wrote. “This dynamic impacted client buying patterns.”

«

IBM hardware is less attractive than other hardware. That’s a bit worrying for IBM. “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” becomes “You’ll get fired if you buy IBM”.
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Phoebe Gates’s startup Phia was just accused of ‘cookie stuffing.’ Here’s what happens next • Inc

Esther Lian:

»

AI shopping browser extension Phia is under fire for reportedly taking credit for sales that it did not generate.

Co-founded by Sophia Kianni and Phoebe Gates, the daughter of billionaire Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Phia is a free browser tool that compares prices across over 220,000 sites and auto-applies the best discount codes for products. Its marketing on the App Store promises users that they will “never overpay.”

However, recent independent testing by Bloomberg, Capital One Shopping, and researcher and consultant Ben Edelman found that Phia generated affiliate clicks on retail websites without meaningful user interaction.

During the checkout process, Phia allegedly opened a background tab and inserted its own referral code, sometimes even overriding legitimate referrals from other publishers.

Capital One Shopping, which operates a coupon tool that competes with Phia, declined to comment on its specific communications with the company. A spokesperson told Inc. that its testing and disclosure of Phia’s alleged conduct reflected its commitment to platform integrity.

…According to Bloomberg, after the publication tested the browser extension and contacted Phia, subsequent testing found that the company had stopped automatically claiming referral credit in all the cases where the behavior had previously occurred.

«

How peculiar! How very peculiar! Just goes to show that even the kids of the very rich find it hard to make an honest buck these days.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

So you’ve got a USB-C cable – but how do you find out what (if any) data speed it runs at? A new Mac app will tell you. CC-licensed photo by HS You 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. Charging ahead. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Uber’s autonomous vehicle strategy: slow their adoption • WIRED

Aarian Marshall:

»

A DECADE AGO, then-Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said he saw autonomous vehicles as an existential threat to the ride-hail company’s business model.

“What would happen if we weren’t a part of that future? If we weren’t part of the autonomy thing? Then the future passes us by,” Kalanick told Business Insider.

In the years since, Uber has settled on a strategy that, rather than see it build and operate its own self-driving cars, puts it on track to become the place where riders can get connected with any ride, driven by a human or robot. “We think there are going to be many AV players around the world, and we want to be the go-to commercial platform for all of them,” now-CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told investors in 2024. Since then, the company has signed agreements with more than 25 major robotaxi players, with driverless vehicles from Waymo, Nuro, Baidu, and Volkswagen’s MOIA either available or soon to be available on the Uber app in several global cities.

Now, according to documents viewed by WIRED and another obtained through a public records request, Uber’s lobbyists are pushing to build that strategy into law. The company’s representatives have pressed lawmakers to deploy autonomous vehicles on what it calls “hybrid networks,” where human drivers work alongside robots as the new tech grows.

In New Jersey, a lobbyist representing Uber took the strategy a step further, circulating legislative language that would, for a period of three years, require any platform offering driverless ride-hailing services to have human drivers serve 85% of its rides.

The language would likely prevent self-driving vehicle developers, including Waymo, Zoox, and Tesla, from operating their own ride-hail apps in the state—effectively forcing them onto another ride-hail app if they hope to enter the market and limiting competition for Uber, the country’s reigning ride-hail leader.

«

Very sneaky. A comparison would be insisting that any electric vehicle has to have a petrol engine, just in case, thus blocking EV entrants from entering the market. But Uber is very flexible: it’ll change its principles any time, as long as they suit it.
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Meta pulls new AI image feature after days of backlash • BBC News

Kali Hays:

»

Meta has abruptly taken down a new feature that allowed people to use its artificial intelligence (AI) tool to make fake images from user content on Instagram.

The feature was part of a broad rollout of Muse Image, a new AI image generation tool Instagram’s parent company released last Tuesday.

It allowed users of the Meta AI chatbot to tag public-facing accounts on Instagram and quickly use content on those accounts to create AI-generated or altered content and images.

The feature quickly sparked blowback due to privacy concerns, leading Meta to admit it had “missed the mark” so it was “no longer available”.

Muse Image was the tech firm’s first foray into AI image generation but faced backlash as Instagram users were opted in by default. It meant that anyone with a public account could have their likeness used without their knowledge or permission.

Hollywood union Sag-Aftra described the U-turn as a “win”. It had previously urged its members and “all Instagram users” to take action to protect their likeness stating that there had been an “utter miscalculation of public sentiment regarding the obvious dangers and harms inherent in such use”.

The London-based human rights charity Privacy International had also criticised the feature, telling the BBC it was “the latest sign AI companies see people’s images and data as raw material to be exploited”.

«

Well that was predictably quick, wasn’t it. Though the usual playbook from Meta (and Google) is to quietly bring it back in almost exactly the same form, with some minor tweaks, but the same level of privacy, ie none.
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Publishers are preparing to opt out of Google Search • Adweek

Mark Stenberg:

»

Beginning Sept. 15, all new websites signing up for Cloudflare, as well as all the customers on its free tier, will have the default settings in their bot management protocol set to block “multi-purpose crawlers” on any webpage that has ads. This means that any crawler that scrapes for both search indexing and AI training will be turned away at the door, unless the site owner decides otherwise. 

“We’ve been clear about what we want,” said Cloudflare chief strategy officer Stephanie Cohen. “We want a technical solution that allows you to be discoverable without having to give your content away for free.”

While a handful of crawlers fit this description—Apple and Bing, among others—the primary, unnamed target of this action is Google, which infamously uses one crawler to both index sites and train its AI models. 

In doing so, Google forces publishers to make an impossible choice: They either allow both functions, enabling Google to scrape their content to train the AI products that are regurgitating their data without compensation; or they shut off both functions and disappear from Google Search, presumably losing their largest source of traffic in the process.

To be fair, Google recently introduced an option called Google Extended, which nominally allows publishers to opt out of AI training without disappearing from Search. But publishers are wary that the program will penalize their search visibility, according to executives at two media companies.

…Historically, abandoning Google Search would have been commercial suicide, according to SEO consultant Lily Ray. It is simply too valuable of a source of audience discovery and traffic.

“It’s a really hard tradeoff. Some publishers have already blocked OpenAI until it strikes partnerships, but with Google it’s hard,” Ray said. “Google is a different conversation because it has so many more users than other AI firms.”

But the gradual erosion of search traffic in recent years has, paradoxically, given publishers more agency to consider walking away from the platform.

USA Today Inc., which encompasses not just USA Today but a nationwide network of news sites, is weighing its options on the matter, according to CEO Mike Reed.

The company, like many others, has responded to declines in search traffic by bolstering audience from other sources, like newsletters, social media, and events. Its traffic has remained relatively stable in recent years, hitting its goal of 1 billion pageviews every month for the last three years, according to Reed.

«

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Where to find the colors your screen can’t show you • Ryan Moulton

Ryan Moulton takes you through how the eye works, how computer screens work, and why what the eye sees goes beyond what the screen can show:

»

When you look at a plant under normal light, its leaves are almost always within the sRGB triangle. Plants are green, but they aren’t that green. Their leaves absorb a lot of blue and red light, but not so much that it pushes us to the edge of the colorspace. The magic happens in a deciduous forest, when the light isn’t just reflected, it is transmitted. The transmittance curves of foliage are much more selective than their reflectance curves, so the color you see passing through a leaf is much more saturated than the color that bounces off of it. You’ve probably noticed this in person. A leaf lit by sunlight looks from the top to be relatively ordinary, but from underneath, it glows.

A single pass through a leaf knocks out all of the blues, and half of the reds, but the light then continues on, passing through other leaves, and bouncing off other leaves. These effects stack exponentially. The more times the light interacts with a leaf, the more it is purified to its spectral peak, generally around 550 nm. The colors you’ll see will be all the greens and yellows contained in the lobe traced out by the paths of repeated reflections and repeated transmissions. A green leaf lit by light that passes through another leaf one time is already outside of the gamut, greener than green.

When you’re standing in a maple forest at noon in the middle of summer, the intensity of the green is indescribable. Being in a fully lit and fully leafed deciduous forest is like being underwater if the water were green, which brings us to our next subject, water.

Water aggressively absorbs reds, slowly absorbs greens, and barely absorbs blues at all. This pattern pushes nearly any spectrum with blue and green in it out of the sRGB gamut almost immediately. When you look at sand in the shallow water near the coast, it traces a curve through colorspace as the depth of the water changes. The light from the sun is filtered once as it passes through the water on the way down, bounces off the sand, and filtered again as it comes back up to your eye. White or yellow sand will first shift to unrepresentable cyans, then to unrepresentable blues, and then finally converges close to the sRGB blue primary again once the water is very deep and dark. 

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Intel to invest €5bn in Irish plant as AI chip demand surges • Financial Times

Barbara Moens, Tim Bradshaw and Jude Webber:

»

Intel will invest €5bn to expand semiconductor manufacturing in Ireland as the US chipmaker seeks to grow production of processors used in AI systems, in a boost for Europe’s ambitions to build a stronger chip industry.

The company said on Monday the investment would upgrade its Leixlip facility west of Dublin, expanding current production and advancing research and development.

The announcement comes as demand for AI data-centre chips continues to surge, prompting semiconductor companies to increase manufacturing capacity. The EU is pursuing its Chips Act to boost manufacturing capacity in Europe and reduce its reliance on foreign suppliers of high-performance chips.

Intel’s executive vice-president Naga Chandrasekaran said the investment ensured “that Ireland remains at the forefront of the world’s most advanced manufacturing ecosystems, while strengthening the region’s role in the global technology landscape”.

«

According to Intel’s page about Leixlip, the company has so far invested over €30bn in the facility, so this is quite a substantial addition; €17bn of that was put in from early 2019.

From teetering on the edge to dropping billions in foreign countries: Intel really has been saved by the AI bubble.
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PC market runs low on RAM to grow: shipments decline 4.9% as memory crunch bites • IDC

»

Worldwide PC shipments fell 4.9% year over year in Q2 2026 to 68.2 million units, according to IDC — the first decline after nine consecutive quarters of growth. A persistent memory chip shortage drove the reversal, pushing vendors to pull inventory forward as far as possible.  

Beyond the memory supply crunch, other components such as storage, along with geopolitical issues, have continued to weigh on the market.  

“The real story here is the disconnect between units and dollars: shipments are falling, but revenue is climbing because vendors are pushing through price increases faster than demand is dropping,” said Jitesh Ubrani, research director for consumer devices at IDC. “Given worsening macro conditions and a memory shortage that isn’t expected to ease until early 2028, we don’t expect another round of inventory pull-forward, which points to a sharp slowdown in growth rates in the second half of 2026. Vendors are bracing for further price hikes into 2027, and channels are already flagging concern about elevated inventory at these higher price points.” 

«

Top five: Lenovo, HP, Dell, Apple, ASUS. Amazingly, Apple actually increased sales (from 6.1m to 6.7m, nearly 10%) because of the low-cost Macbook Neo. Assuming of course that all the IDC figures are reliable, but we’ve had to go with that for a while.

As ever one tends to suspect that the low end market is going to struggle during this crisis, and lose share to the big ones. That is a cycle which keeps repeating, and somehow they keep hanging on, even while their share gets eroded slowly year by year.
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This free Mac app reveals the truth about your mystery USB-C cables • The Verge

Sean Hollister:

»

Nearly three years ago, I showed you an awesome $8 cable tester that quickly tells you if your USB-C cable is likely fast, slow, powerful, or weak. Sadly, that gadget got discontinued, and I’ve never found anything as intuitive or inexpensive since. But if you’ve got a Mac with Apple Silicon chips, you can simply download an even more impressive tester for free.

It’s called WhatCable, and it works by reading the data your Mac already collects about attached USB devices, data that Apple doesn’t normally pass along to you. Just click a little widget that lives in the menu bar atop your Mac, and you can see every USB-C cable and device attached to your computer.

Here’s how creator Darryl Morley explained it to me:

»

Every Apple Silicon Mac has a port controller chip that handles USB Power Delivery negotiation. When you plug in a cable with an e-marker, the port controller sends a “Discover Identity” message to the chip in the cable and gets back a structured message: vendor ID, speed rating, current rating, voltage limits, whether it’s active or passive, and so on.

macOS writes that response into the IOKit registry. WhatCable reads it using Apple’s public APIs. No root access, no private entitlements. The data isn’t hidden, Apple’s firmware does the negotiation and publishes the result. It’s just not surfaced anywhere in standard macOS tooling. WhatCable reads what’s already there.

The e-marker is one source. WhatCable also reads from the Mac’s own hardware, the actual negotiated connection speed, Thunderbolt link speed, and live voltage and current at each port. The connected device tells us what it is, who made it, and what it supports. Put all three together, cable, device, and Mac, and WhatCable can tell you not just what everything claims to support, but what’s actually happening on the connection right now, and which part is the bottleneck if something isn’t performing as expected.

«

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Immediate download! Though USB data cables are quite hard to come by. Power cables, no problem. The difficulty is identifying the ones that will actually carry data.
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The most famous AI writing tic is also the most mysterious • The Atlantic

Will Oremus:

»

If Julius Caesar had debuted this year, William Shakespeare might have been accused of writing it with AI. A certain suspicious rhetorical device appears again and again in the play. It’s in Act I, Scene ii: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” In Act III, Scene ii: “Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more.” And later in that same scene: “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.”

These famous lines include what has become perhaps the best-known tic of AI writing—a sentence that tells you what the subject isn’t as well as what it is: It’s not X; it’s Y. Once you start noticing the construction, you see it all over the place. In one version, the Y is additive: It focuses, intensifies, or expands on the X. An annual review by Citizens Financial Group reported that growth in its private-banking division was “not just a win for the private bank—it’s a win for the entire enterprise.” In another variant, the Y supplants the X as the preferred descriptor. “The target was never a man. The target was the truth,” Michael Flynn, a former Donald Trump adviser, wrote in a March X post.

…Although chatbots have advanced dramatically in their research and reasoning capacities, they are still fundamentally text-prediction machines. They generate answers one “token”—or chunk of text—at a time, based on what has come before. Each successive word choice factors in both the statistical likelihood of that word coming next in a sequence, based on patterns in the original training data, and the likelihood that it will lead to a highly rated response overall. In other words, the models are always seeking a balance between the clever word choice and the obvious one.

When a chatbot uses negative parallelism, according to this theory, it’s essentially hedging between the two. Once it has started a sentence whose function is to characterize something, the path of least resistance is to say first what the thing isn’t (X), and only then what the thing is (Y). Put another way: For a sentence that begins with “This is,” following it with “not just” is both more likely and safer than the many options for how to directly characterize its subject. And after “This is not just,” the rest of the sentence gets easier too. The next word can be X—the boring, obvious descriptor that gets negated—which in turn sets up the final choice of Y, the somewhat punchier descriptor.

Even if researchers could figure out exactly why chatbots embrace negative parallelism, there’s another factor that could make it very hard to fix: “When something gets into these models, it’s very hard to pull it out,” Masrour, the Pangram engineer, said.

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It’s not good – it’s annoying.
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Older adults in China know AI is slop. They just like it • Rest of World

Viola Zhou:

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Young people can’t seem to stop watching AI slop videos of cats talking and fruits cheating on each other. Older people are enjoying a different kind of AI-generated content, which provides them with much-needed comfort and companionship. 

Take Uncle Chang, a 67-year-old family friend who recently visited New York from Taiwan. As we chatted, the retired businessman showed me some YouTube videos that made him cry. In one, an AI-generated young blonde woman named Rose Bennett performs “Whiskey Was Louder Than Me,” a song about growing up with an alcoholic father after her mother passed away. In another, Rose sings “Brother Became My Father” together with her brother (also AI). Their AI father and the AI audience were in tears. 

The videos reminded Chang of his own childhood. His mother, too, had left him, after suffering from his father’s beating. He was eventually raised by his older sisters. “To me, it was ‘sisters became my mother,’” Chang said. “These songs tell such touching stories.” 

Chang’s experience reminded me of the “AI family” videos that are getting popular on Chinese social media. On TikTok-like platforms Douyin and Kuaishou, AI-generated chubby babies or handsome adult sons send daily blessings, tell viewers how much they miss them, and bring along virtual roses. Some AI influencers even take on the role of the elderly audience’s virtual lovers. 

…researchers found that the AI characters offer what real-world family members often do not. They express love directly (rare in Chinese families), show a higher level of filial piety, and talk about health and historical topics relevant to older people. One viewer told researchers that AI content had touched on experiences from her youth that her actual children, who hadn’t lived through the same history, couldn’t relate to. The AI videos also use soundtracks of folk music familiar to the older generation.

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This feels like a worrying portent for the future.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In an experiment, Google has quantified how sending drivers headed for the same destination by different routes can reduce congestion and emissions. CC-licensed photo by Shiyang Huang on Flickr.

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Pro-Palantir data has litany of errors, English hospitals admit • Financial Times

Amy Borrett and Laura Hughes:

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Hospital trusts have admitted there are a litany of errors in the data behind one of NHS England’s headline claims about the benefits of Palantir’s technology after an FT investigation identified irregularities.

NHS England has claimed that hospitals have seen a 15% decline in delays to discharging hospital patients after adopting a tool built using the US company’s software.

However, four trusts confirmed there are errors in the underlying hospital data after an analysis by the FT found they had reported a sudden drop in discharge delays from hundreds or thousands to zero before increasing again sharply — a scenario that would be highly improbable.

The errors cast doubt on NHSE’s headline claim about the overall fall in discharge delays, a figure widely cited as evidence of the success of Palantir’s Federated Data Platform, which aims to bring together disparate data in order to boost efficiency in the health service.

Palantir’s role has become an increasing source of controversy, given its ties to the US defence sector.

The evidence for the impact of the FDP on discharge delays looked “increasingly flimsy”, said Charles Tallack, former head of operational research and evaluation at NHS England. “The delayed discharge dataset may be suitable for day-to-day management purposes, but not for evaluation,” he said.

The benefits data is calculated using NHSE’s national, mandatory dataset, which tracks performance on discharge delays across all trusts and of which Palantir has no oversight. The NHS England website itself acknowledges the limitations of the data, noting there are only “minimal” quality checks.

Across the full four years of acute discharge data, the FT identified irregularities for 42% of all NHS hospital trusts.

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That feels like a big number? And anyone who has bounced off the NHS won’t be surprised that there are data errors. It seems to be an inescapable attribute of the system, which no amount of effort can remove.
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The newest way to go analogue • The Atlantic

Nancy Walecki:

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When the iPod Nano was first released, in 2005, it cost $199 and was sold on the promise of limitlessness. This year, Celeste Stange bought her magenta 8-gigabyte model on eBay for $69 and the exact opposite reason. Every time she’d pick a song on Spotify to stream, she’d think about the millions of other songs she could listen to instead and get paralyzed by musical FOMO, she told me. “Now I only have what’s on here.”

Stange, who is 29, is part of a recent “analog” movement in which people—usually those in Gen Z—opt for less distracting alternatives to their “everything” device. Those alternatives are not always, in fact, analog, but are in many cases older digital devices: an iPod, a digital Canon PowerShot, a DVD player. Tiffany Ng, the 25-year-old author of the newsletter Cyber Celibate, now has a first-generation iPhone, an 11-year-old iPod, two CD players, a Walkman radio, and a 1986 Macintosh Plus that takes 45 seconds to load the “Welcome to Macintosh” screen.

Ng lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where 20 years ago, the word analog would’ve conjured hipsters getting into vinyl. The argument then was that a record player produced real, textured music in a way an iPod’s digital files could not. But today, people are “going analog,” as they call it, to escape devices that offer endless options, in favor of those that offer a modicum of constraint.

The iPod’s original tagline—“1,000 songs in your pocket”—suggested that you could dance like the carefree silhouettes in the ads because you didn’t have to lug around CDs. This was the era when technology was “convenient, but not connected,” Tony Fadell, a former senior vice president at Apple who is known as the “father of the iPod,” told me; then the iPod became the iPhone, which soon had an app store, and convenience and connectivity became inextricably linked. People had their library of songs, but now they also had app notifications and Angry Birds and Instagram posts from that girl they went to middle school with. Eventually, streamable Apple Music replaced iTunes, and tens of thousands of songs became 100 million songs. “I can’t go through all of it,” Stange said.

…modern “analog” enthusiasts still have backups. Everyone I talked with had kept their smartphone. When Stange and I met, she took out her magenta Nano and her laptop, to show me how she downloaded her music onto the iPod. The Nano promptly died. She plugged it into the laptop to charge, but still, no dice. “I’m pretty sure it broke on the way here,” she said, and told me she’d need to figure out how to fix it. She sounded a little excited about the challenge. In the meantime, she still had her Spotify subscription.

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Thief posed as Wi-Fi fixing hero, then stole priceless trophy • The Register

Avram Piltch:

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On one [red teaming] assignment, [David] Schloss was asked to test the physical and network security of a company that was near the top of the Fortune 500 and had a reputation for sponsoring and providing the trophy for an international sporting competition. According to him, there were three copies made of the trophy: one for the winner, one for the host nation itself, and one for the sponsor.

When Schloss was conducting his audit, the location he visited was undergoing construction, creating problems with the office Wi-Fi that all the employees noticed and hated. So when Schloss and his team invaded the place and started probing the wireless network, no one questioned them.

“So, you got three of us that are kind of walking through this campus with antennas sticking out of our laptops. We were not being secretive at all, but we figured this is California and there’s plenty of tech bros and nerds everywhere so antennas sticking out of a computer is not going to scare people,” Schloss said. “But everyone kept coming up to us – not to ask us if we were supposed to be there, but to ask us if we were going to fix the Wi-Fi.”

After wandering the building, Schloss and his team came to the marketing department where one of the trophies, which he estimates was worth at least $250,000 (or, perhaps, priceless as there are only three), was sitting in a case. Knowing that his job was to test overall security and not just network security, he opened up the case and proceeded to remove the trophy.

Someone from the marketing department saw Schloss pulling the trophy out of the case and talked to him while he was doing it. Their question: “Are you here to fix the Wi-Fi?” When he answered “yes,” the marketing people ignored him as he slipped the trophy into his backpack.

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It’s increasingly recognised that the best disguise is a hard hat, fluoro tabard and a clipboard. This takes it to a new level. (Red teaming is where hackers you trust are paid to try to break into your stuff and report back on how hard or easy it is.)
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“Cool in 90 seconds: the fake portable air conditioners sweeping the internet • BBC News

Laura Cress:

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As parts of the UK brace for another hot weekend, online adverts have been appearing for portable air conditioners claiming to be “designed by former Nasa engineers” and able to “cool a room in 90 seconds”.

The adverts have emerged on platforms including Facebook and YouTube, but the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has now warned the products are often “too good to be true”.

YouTuber Stuart Matthews, who bought several devices to test on his Proper DIY channel, told the BBC that despite paying £70 for one machine, it turned out to be “a small, simple fan worth only a few pounds”.

The BBC has approached Meta and YouTube for comment.

The ASA told the BBC that some of the adverts it had seen online in recent weeks made exaggerated claims, including that a small device could cool an entire home within minutes or used very little electricity.

It also said the adverts frequently featured fake customer reviews describing dramatic temperature drops or exceptional performance.

The adverts direct shoppers to websites selling the devices, typically for between £70 and £120.

Many of the adverts also appeared to be AI-generated, using visuals such as copper coils and metallic boxes to make the products seem more sophisticated.

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The problem is that the claims are fake, the reviews are probably fake, so how do you figure out what’s real?
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I spent a week using the Trump phone; it sucks • The Verge

Dominic Preston:

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The T1 Phone is a curved slab of cheap gold plastic, the smartphone equivalent of a pair of knockoff wraparound Oakleys. The gold finish — more yellow in certain light, though it certainly does shine and shimmer — is tacky in every sense, with a sticky friction that makes it feel distinctly unpleasant to the touch. My phone arrived with a tiny scratch in the top-right corner.

The phone is fairly thin, and light, but its excessively curved waterfall display feels immediately dated. It also loses one of the chief advantages of that design — better in-hand feel — thanks to the oddly angular frame, which juts into my palm as I hold it.

Almost every detail speaks to bad design. There’s the American flag logo, missing a stripe. The fact that “Trump Mobile” appears on the back twice, in two different orientations and two different fonts. Or the camera module, where the three lenses are spaced at irregular intervals.

There are things to like. The 3.5mm headphone jack will have its fans, as will the microSD card slot inside the phone, or the fact that the phone ships with a case, charger, and braided USB cable. These are things that a certain type of Android fan has lamented the absence of for years.

I, for one, am more excited to be reviewing a phone with a notification light again, a true treat that I thought we’d lost forever. It’s a glimpse of a better world, one I didn’t expect from Trump Mobile of all companies. But like the curved screen, even these welcome touches betray that this is a dated, old-fashioned phone, one based on an old HTC design that already felt like a throwback two years ago.

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The bad design and lack of attention to detail should be no surprise from a bunch of people who either used AI or incredibly lazy designers to make the standard American eagle logo for an airport they have rebranded with Trump’s name.
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Apparently, Netflix is shocked that no one is watching their crap • The World Outside Our Window

Max Bolen:

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Netflix has spent the past 15 years blitzkrieging its way to market dominance by sacrificing everything that actually makes an audience care about television. Focused entirely on hyper-growth, the streamer abandoned traditional 13-plus-episode seasons, abolished predictable yearly release schedules, and rarely bothered hiring more than a skeleton crew of writers for a temporary “mini-room.” Outside of their massive, star-driven flagship titles, they hardly market new seasons, leaning instead on an opaque algorithm to feed potential viewers whatever happens to be fresh that Tuesday. This cheap, stripped-down mode of production reliably delivered mountains of content each week, keeping Wall Street happy and cementing the myth of Netflix’s inevitable victory in a war of their own creation.

But the streaming wars are over, and Netflix has a real problem: they won.

Legacy studios have retreated to traditional theatrical windows and weekly episode drops, having realized that burning billions to replicate Netflix’s model was a corporate suicide pact. Yet, after a decade of chasing mindless growth for growth’s sake, Netflix must now reorient into something it has never had to be: a stable, trustworthy home for culture. Left to their own devices, they are being forced to contend with a simple, fatal fact: they broke TV.

The streamer’s hallmark innovation was, of course, the binge model. Guided by the data-heavy metrics of Silicon Valley, Netflix crafted shows around a single variable: immediate streams. This instant-gratification delivery system paid enormous dividends for a rapidly growing tech venture. Releasing a season all at once engineered an artificial scarcity of social relevance—watch all 10 hours in 48 hours or be locked out of the discourse. Once the platform had you hooked, its expansive library of licensed Hollywood history was there to keep you trapped. Like a casino obscuring the exit doors, all Netflix had to do was let the psychology of digital addiction take care of the rest.

But the binge model never provided a foundation for sustainability. A binged show leaves the human brain almost as quickly as it enters it. When a tech platform drops a second season two or three years later—assuming the consumer even hears about it through noise of modern society—the odds are high that whatever memory or interest they possessed has completely evaporated.

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The point of this does seem worth reinforcing: Netflix winning is not good for TV. For instance, it doesn’t have soap operas – not in the sense that a normal terrestrial channel would. Yet those provide a subtle shared social bond through storylines that develop over months. Its nod to the destruction it has wreaked is to try to buy live sports and get more short video. That’s not TV. It’s a simulacrum of it.
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The power of collaboration: how we can reduce traffic congestion • Google Research Blog

Neha Arora and Aboudy Kreidieh:

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We ran an experiment in 10 major US cities to demonstrate the effectiveness of targeted low-cost routing interventions in improving overall traffic conditions. For this study, the Google Maps algorithm was modified to prefer alternative routes with similar travel times and segment types, effectively guiding trips away from the pre-selected congested segments.

Over a six month period, we adopted a city-wide switchback (also known as crossover) experimental design, alternating between this treatment and the control (unaltered) routing algorithm over consecutive days to appropriately measure the effect of this intervention. Rather than randomly selecting individual trips, the intervention was applied systematically across the entire city. During “treatment” days, the modified routing guided all trips that encountered the pre-selected congested segments toward alternative routes with similar travel times. Under 2% of observed trips received altered routing recommendations as a result of this experiment.

To set up the experiment, cities were chosen based on the congestion levels and ground truth availability. For each city, we selected roughly 100 road segments based on historical congestion patterns, characterised by recurring bottlenecks or high traffic density during peak demand.

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The idea, basically, is that you send all the people using your routing apps on slightly different routes, and that turns out to reduce congestion. (Raise your hand if you thought apps like Waze – owned by Google – were already doing this.)

The full paper is published at Nature Cities: “Urban congestion relief experiments through routing-app interventions“.
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Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets • 9to5Mac

Chance Miller:

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The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges that [one of the accused, Tang] Tan used insider knowledge of Apple’s confidential projects to grill job candidates in interviews and learn more confidential information. Additionally, Tan directed job candidates still working at Apple to bring actual Apple hardware components and samples for “show and tell” sessions.

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When interviewing Apple employees for jobs at OpenAI, Mr. Tan uses Apple’s confidential information to gain access to even more insider knowledge. He has used an Apple internal project codename to ask, “What’s the plan[?]” for an unannounced Apple product.

He has directed job candidates still working for Apple to bring “Actual parts” from Apple to their interviews for “show and tell” sessions in which he and his team at OpenAI can elicit still more Apple confidential information. These directions to bring Apple’s parts to OpenAI job interviews surprised at least one of the candidates, who commented that he “didn’t even know we could take those from the office.”

OpenAI has been instructing Apple employees to bring “CAD/design artifacts” and “prototypes” to their interviews and to divulge details about their work such as “subsystem and component selection,” the “tools or methodologies you use for system integration, such as CAD software, simulation tools,” and “Vendor selection and communication/collaboration with vendors.”

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Furthermore, Apple says a candidate began “screenshotting and downloading files relating to a highly confidential Apple project” hours before interviewing with Tan, who then “solicited more information about that same Apple project” once the interview started. This became an “established pattern,” Apple says.

Tan also allegedly possessed and distributed an internal Apple “Need to Know” document to new OpenAI hires before they gave their notice to Apple. The document included Apple’s departure security protocols. As part of its investigation, Apple found a “pattern by employees who depart for OpenAI of taking steps to evade the security processes intended to protect Apple’s confidential information.”

Meanwhile, Apple also claims former engineer [Chang] Liu exploited a security bug to download confidential engineering files after leaving the company. Rather than report the exploit, Liu allegedly joked about it in messages (“LOL,” “so funny”). Liu also failed to return an Apple-issued laptop after his departure.

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OpenAI is, one suspects, going to be very sorry that it hired these people if this gets proven in court. The complaint makes them sound like absolute loose cannons. Anyway, sayonara ChatGPT integration with Siri!
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What a Monopoly vendor learned when making things in America • NPR

Scott Horsley:

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The board game Monopoly has always taught some important economic lessons: The benefits of owning real estate. The profit potential of railroad mergers. The value of a get-out-of-jail-free card.

Now a special edition of the board game is teaching a new lesson—about how hard it is to make things in the USA.

The game is being marketed by the WS Game Company, which produces most of its high-end board games in China, just like almost every other toy maker.

After getting hit with a seven-figure tariff bill last year, CEO Jonathan Silva decided to see if it was possible to produce a profitable board game in the United States. He opted for a custom version of Monopoly, pegged to the country’s 250th birthday. But the experiment almost didn’t pass go. One big problem: No dice.

“We turned over every single leaf trying to find someone who would make 10,000 dice for us in the US,” Silva says. “It requires special machinery. It requires investment. And that type of stuff just can’t happen on a random Tuesday and be ready in a couple of months.” Silva ultimately had to settle for imported dice.

He was able to find the rest of what he needed domestically, but it wasn’t easy. A former Hasbro factory in Massachusetts prints the Monopoly board. A company called Pioneer Packaging makes the tray that holds the Monopoly money. And a small business in Indiana cranked out custom metal game tokens, in all-American shapes like a cowboy hat, a covered wagon and an apple pie. [So a Donner Party theme? – Overspill Ed.]

Just assembling all those different players took more than a year, so Silva missed the first half of the 250th birthday selling season. And the cost to manufacture the games — which retail for $80 — was at least double what it would have been in China.

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Ten thousand dice doesn’t sound like a lot, and it doesn’t sound like the highest tech challenge ever.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified