The agricultural machinery company John Deere is paying $99m to settle a right-to-repair class action in the US. CC-licensed photo by Lutz Blohm 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. Unearthed. 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 shelves Stargate UK in blow to Britain’s AI ambitions • The Guardian

Aisha Down and Alexandra Topping:

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OpenAI has put on hold plans for a landmark UK investment citing high energy costs and regulation, in a blow to the government which has put AI at the centre of its growth strategy.

Stargate UK was a part of the UK-US AI deal announced last September, in which US companies appeared to commit £31bn to the UK’s tech sector, part of a larger series of investments intended to “mainline AI” into the British economy.

It came as the Labour government seeks to make AI and datacentres the engine of its growth plans, alongside closer ties with Europe and regional growth.

“This is a wake-up call for the government to manage energy costs in the UK and foundation infrastructure,” said Victoria Collins MP, the Liberal Democrat spokesperson for science, innovation and technology. “We cannot be dependent on US tech companies to build our own sovereign capabilities – whether that’s energy cost, supply or even data and phone signal.”

The Labour MP Clive Lewis said: “When a government has no economic strategy worthy of the name and no real industrial vision, it becomes vulnerable. The Silicon Valley companies that flew into London knew exactly what they were dealing with: a prime minister and a technology secretary desperate to project momentum, willing to dress up press releases as policy.”

A Guardian investigation last month revealed many of the deals to “mainline AI into the veins” of the British economy were “phantom investments”, and a supercomputer scheduled to go live in 2026 was last month still a scaffolding yard in Essex. That supercomputer was to be built by Nscale, a UK firm that had never built a datacentre before but said it was aiming to deliver the project in 2027. Nscale was also to build key datacentres for Stargate UK.

The Stargate project was to support Britain in building out “sovereign compute” – infrastructure that would allow the government and other UK institutions to run AI models on datacentres in the country. That is, in theory, crucial to the security of British data.

Now, OpenAI has apparently put it on pause, saying it would wait for “the right conditions” to enable “long-term infrastructure investment”.

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Not a real surprise; despite getting billions of dollars of investment, OpenAI’s profitability is about as accessible as the moon. So it’s going to cut back where it’s easiest to cut. Sora was just the first one; this is the next; there will be others over the next few months. The splurge on the podcast company was a few million, and that’s just everyday.
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Oil industry pleads its Hormuz case with White House • POLITICO

Ben Lefebvre and Phelim Kine:

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Oil company executives are reaching out to the White House, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance to protest allowing Iran to charge tolls through the strategic Strait of Hormuz as a condition of peace talks, said one industry consultant granted anonymity to discuss relations with the administration.

“Hell yes,” this person said when asked if executives were contacting the White House to protest a toll on Hormuz. ”We didn’t have to do that before — and I thought we won the war. Any place you have access to the administration, you ask, what are you guys thinking?”

The response administrative officials were giving industry representatives “is not a cold shoulder,” this person added. “It’s more like, ‘Yeah, OK, we’ll take note.’”

Oil industry representatives met with senior administration staff in the State Department on Wednesday morning to raise concerns, said one person who said they attended the meeting.

Among their points: conceding to Iran’s request would add $2.5m to each shipment in tolls and higher insurance rates, a cost that would be passed on to consumers. Giving Iran control of Hormuz could set precedent for countries like Singapore and Turkey to charge tolls on important trade routes on the straits of Malacca and Bosporus. And paying the toll could put companies in legal jeopardy for violating sanctions on Iranian officials.

Companies were also expressing their concerns directly with Trump, but more gently, added this person, who was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media.

“The president is extremely sensitive to the legacy and judgment on the success of this war so pushing the president right now is seen as a risky proposition,” this person said. “But the White House is hearing from the industry despite the gingerness of the conversations.”

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The tolls/tariffs equate to a carbon tax of about $2.50 per ton – not very much in the grand scheme of things ($40 to $50 would be more useful). But it’s a start. The concern about other countries starting to charge similar tolls is very real, though. A few countries near narrow navigational spaces might find a sudden interest in exacting high charges for pilots of ships.
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Banksy, Satoshi and the unmasking impulse • On my Om

Om Malik:

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I am a big believer in accountability journalism. It unmasks wrongdoing. It exposes the powerful who hide behind institutions to avoid consequences. That’s a clear and defensible public interest. This is not accountability journalism, by any stretch of the imagination.

Banksy and Satoshi weren’t hiding wrongdoing. They were hiding themselves. In Banksy’s case, the anonymity IS the art. The whole point is that the work speaks without the person. The art appears without permission, without attribution, without a market position or a gallery or a brand to protect. That’s not incidental to its power. It is its power. The work on the wall speaks precisely because there is no face behind it available for interview.

With Satoshi, the anonymity IS the architecture. Bitcoin was designed to be leaderless. An identifiable founder is a vulnerability. Someone governments can pressure, someone courts can compel, someone bad actors can target. The anonymity wasn’t ego protection. It was architecture.

Unmasking either one isn’t just invasive. It is destructive to what they built.

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And speaking of that “unmasking” of Satoshi…
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Our quest not to solve bitcoin’s great mystery • FT Alphaville

Bryce Elder:

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One morning in the spring of 2026, FT Alphaville was sitting in traffic on the A40 eastbound when, tired of starting posts in the normal way, we switched to a drop intro.

The post we needed to start was about the alleged unmasking of bitcoin’s pseudonymous inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto. Alphaville has long considered the question of Satoshi’s true identity to be one of the least important enigmas of our age, having poked at it before with some success.

Hearing once again that a media organisation was claiming to have doxxed the person who spawned a multi-hundred-dollar speculative reporting industry had aroused in us a mixture of weariness and weariness. Which fiftysomething male fringe academic would it be this time?

The Japanese one? The other Japanese one? The drug dealer? The dead one or the other dead one? The one with a beard, or the one without a beard, or the other one with a beard, or the other one without a beard? The liar? The other liar? Or maybe it was a hive mind of these and other fiftysomething male fringe academics, such as this one, or this one?

It was the one with the beard.

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Stellar piece of fun by the Alphaville team, whose work is always free to read. It’s a very comprehensive debunking of the idea that Adam Back is Satoshi.
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Scoop: Meta removes ads for social media addiction litigation • Axios

Dan Primack:

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Meta on Thursday began removing advertisements from attorneys who were seeking clients that claim to have been harmed by social media while under the age of 18.

This comes just two weeks after Meta and YouTube were found negligent in a landmark California case about social media addiction. Lawyers across the country now are seeking new plaintiffs, in the hopes of bringing a class action lawsuit that could result in lucrative verdicts.

It’s unclear if any of them are being backed by private equity, as the California lawsuit appears to have been.

Axios has identified more than a dozen such ads that were deactivated today, some of which came from large national firms like Morgan & Morgan and Sokolove Law. Almost all of them ran on both Facebook and Instagram. Some also appeared on Threads and Messenger, plus Meta’s Audience Network — which distributes ads to thousands of third-party sites.

One such ad read: “Anxiety. Depression. Withdrawal. Self-harm. These aren’t just teenage phases — they’re symptoms linked to social media addiction in children. Platforms knew this and kept targeting kids anyway.” A few of the ads still remain active, including some that were posted earlier today.

Meta appears to be relying on part of its terms of service that say:

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“We also can remove or restrict access to content, features, services, or information if we determine that doing so is reasonably necessary to avoid or mitigate misuse of our services or adverse legal or regulatory impacts to Meta.”

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That’s something of an admission after the lawsuits, though unfortunately – as the article points out – entirely within its ToS.
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Do links hurt news publishers on Twitter? Our analysis suggests yes • Nieman Journalism Lab

Laura Hazard Owen:

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Elon Musk has said as much: Links in tweets are bad for engagement. Over the last few days, sparked by a post from Nate Silver, people have started arguing again about the relationships between links and engagement. But our new analysis of thousands of tweets from 18 publishers makes it pretty clear: Links do seem to hurt news publishers on X/Twitter.

Back in 2016, the analytics company Parse.ly published a report: “Does Twitter matter for news sites?“

The report found that Twitter drove little traffic to most news sites, generating only around 1.5% of most publishers’ traffic. But, the authors wrote, “Twitter excels at both conversational and breaking news…Though Twitter may not be a huge overall source of traffic to news websites relative to Facebook and Google, it serves a unique place in the link economy. News really does ‘start’ on Twitter.”

…I used Claude to help me scrape the 200 most recent tweets from 18 large publishers’ X accounts and track the engagement (likes + comments + retweets) on each. Six of those publishers have paywalls: Bloomberg, CNN, Forbes, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Nine don’t: Al Jazeera English, AP, BBC1, Breitbart News, CBS News, Daily Wire, Fox News, NBC News, and Reuters. The last three accounts I looked at — Leading Report, unusual_whales, and Globe Eye News — are not news publishers, but aggregate breaking news in tweets without links. (Here, for example, is an example of a Leading Report tweet: “BREAKING: Iran has halted direct talks with the US, per WSJ.” They’re sometimes referred to as engagement-maxing accounts.

These charts make it pretty clear that links in tweets hurt engagement. The connection was so apparent in my analysis that a graph including all 18 publishers is almost unreadable: The traditional, link-loving publishers are clustered in the bottom left corner (lots of links, little engagement) in a nearly indistinguishable mass of bubbles, no matter how large their followings are.

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The ones who succeed in getting “engagement” – likes, reposts, comments and replies – are the ones which distil those news orgs’ content and put a slant on them, or “vaguepost” about them. That gets people worked up. The problem is that the algorithm thinks clicking on links isn’t engagement, and reduces the visibility of those accounts, even when they have millions of followers. The problem, therefore, is in how the algorithm measures “engagement”.
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Movements need the critical thinking that AI destroys • Jacobin

Florian Maiwald:

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The negative side effects accompanying the use of large language models (LLMs) are vividly illustrated by the phenomenon of “cognitive debt.” From an economic perspective, the short-term productivity gains achieved through the use of AI systems are difficult to dispute. By delegating numerous tasks previously performed by humans to AI, significant efficiency gains can be observed: workflows are accelerated, processes are rationalized, and organizational routines are overall made more efficient.

Yet the resilience and efficiency generated through delegation to AI systems could threaten a gradual loss of the cognitive capacities that are being outsourced to them. A recent MIT study that found significantly reduced brain activity among regular users of chatbots, for instance, provides some initial support for this worry.

While debates about the threat modern AI corporations pose to democracy tend to focus on the fact that data (and thus control over algorithms) are increasingly concentrated in the hands of major tech companies that largely avoid public oversight, another important question is surprisingly often pushed into the background. It is a question about the preconditions for people to be able to take part in democratic processes and emancipatory political projects.

The outsourcing of thinking is, of course, not a new phenomenon. It is the main theme, in fact, of Immanuel Kant’s classic 1784 essay, “What Is Enlightenment?” For Kant, the process of emancipation consists in freeing oneself from the “self-incurred immaturity” of letting others think for you and instead making use of one’s own powers of reasoning. He writes:

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It is so convenient to be immature. If I have a book that has understanding for me, a pastor who has a conscience for me, a physician who judges my diet for me, and so forth, then I need not trouble myself at all. I have no need to think if only I can pay; others will readily undertake the disagreeable business for me.

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This makes me think that this complaint/debate has been going for a long time. The move from oral longform poetry such as The Iliad and Beowulf to writing it down, then printing it, then putting it on websites, then letting search engines find it for you, and now letting LLMs do some part of the work of analysing it – all of these seem to have been viewed as letting our brains slide back into the primordial ooze. If a problem is eternal, is it really because of the tools, or the toolmakers?
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John Deere to pay $99m in monumental right-to-repair settlement • The Drive

Caleb Jacobs:

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Farmers have been fighting John Deere for years over the right to repair their equipment, and this week, they finally reached a landmark settlement.

While the agricultural manufacturing giant pointed out in a statement that this is no admission of wrongdoing, it agreed to pay $99m into a fund for farms and individuals who participated in a class action lawsuit. Specifically, that money is available to those involved who paid John Deere’s authorized dealers for large equipment repairs from January 2018. This means that plaintiffs will recover somewhere between 26% and 53% of overcharge damages, according to one of the court documents—far beyond the typical amount, which lands between 5% and 15%.

The settlement also includes an agreement by Deere to provide “the digital tools ​required for the maintenance, diagnosis, and repair” of tractors, combines, and other machinery for 10 years. That part is crucial, as farmers previously resorted to hacking their own equipment’s software just to get it up and running again. John Deere signed a memorandum of understanding in 2023 that partially addressed those concerns, providing third parties with the technology to diagnose and repair, as long as its intellectual property was safeguarded. Monday’s settlement seems to represent a much stronger (and legally binding) step forward.

Ripple effects of this battle have been felt far beyond the sales floors at John Deere dealers, as the price of used equipment skyrocketed in response to the infamous service difficulties. Even when the cost of older tractors doubled, farmers reasoned that they were still worth it because repairs were simpler and downtime was minimized: $60,000 for a 40-year-old machine became the norm.

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This is epochal: John Deere was notorious for years for locking down machines to prevent user repair, and farmers detest not being able to do things for themselves. The only surprise is it took this long.
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The CIA “Ghost Murmur” story is probably bullshit • The After-Action Report

Seth Hettena:

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I’m no expert in this field, but Quantum Insider, which tracks these developments, pointed to several studies that show the limits of this technology.

One study published this year on diamond quantum magnetometry, the same technology Ghost Murmur supposedly uses, required sensors placed 1 centimeter from the chest inside a magnetically shielded room and an average of up to 12,000 heartbeats to detect a signal.

“Averaging was necessary since magnetic field recordings did not reveal the MCG signal in the NV trace in real-time,” the study reported.

In plain English: The quantum sensor could not detect a heartbeat in real time in a shielded room at one centimetre.

A 2024 study detected the heartbeat of an anesthetized rat, a weaker signal than a human heart, using a sensor placed 5 millimeters from the animal’s chest, inside a magnetic shielding cylinder, after an hour of continuous data accumulation.

Ghost Murmur supposedly detected a single beating heart, in real time, from 40 miles [65km] away, over open desert, from a moving aircraft, in an environment saturated with competing signals from the Earth’s magnetic field, electronic devices, and other living creatures. Not likely.

Even the military’s own research agency says the technology isn’t ready. In August 2025, DARPA launched Robust Quantum Sensors to address the fact that quantum sensors remain “notoriously fragile in real-world environments” where “even minor vibrations or electromagnetic interference can degrade performance.” The program’s Phase 1 goal is modest: just keep a quantum sensor functioning during a helicopter flight. “That’s it. That’s it,” the program manager told contractors at a briefing. Ghost Murmur supposedly cleared that bar and detected a heartbeat from 40 miles away, eight months later.

Interesting Engineering pointed out that similar magnetic-sensing techniques have been used for submarine detection. But that isn’t the same challenge as detecting a heartbeat. A submarine is a massive steel object, and magnetic submarine detection works by sensing how thousands of tons of steel distort the Earth’s existing magnetic field. That’s a completely different problem from trying to detect a 25 picotesla heartbeat across miles of open desert.

The problem is the laws of physics.

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Oh, those damn laws. Don’t worry, Trump ignores them. I did think it sounded far-fetched but this is more solid.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The blue light from your phone isn’t making you sleep worse, despite what people say. Science proves it. CC-licensed photo by janet isn’t real 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. Eye-opening. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

The blue light from your phone isn’t ruining your sleep • BBC Future

Thomas Germain:

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The public freakout about blue light started with a study in 2014. Half of the 12 participants read on an iPad before bed. The rest read physical books. The iPad users took longer to fall asleep, felt groggier the next day and produced less melatonin. The researchers said the culprit was the glow emitted from the iPad’s LED screen, which produces a disproportionate amount of light in the upper, bluer end of the spectrum. Under specific circumstances, blue-enriched light disrupts the daily circadian rhythm – our body’s natural pacemaker – that uses daylight to help determine when we start to feel tired. Subsequent research seemed to support the findings. Sounds simple, right? It’s not.

“This was an incredibly deceptive piece of work,” says Jamie Zeitzer, a professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Stanford University, who studies the effect of light on the circadian system. The science wasn’t bad, he says, the problem is it brought people to bad conclusions.

It’s true that our screens are bluer. Modern screens and lightbulbs use LEDs, which cannot produce pure white light. Instead, they use blue LEDs and cover some of them with a chemical called yellow phosphor. The blue and yellow mix together and trick your brain into seeing white, but extra blue always leaks out. 

And blue light really can influence your sleep. Zeitzer says that’s mostly because you have a light-sensitive protein in your eyes called melanopsin which plays a key role in your sleep system. “And melanopsin is a blue sensitive protein, which basically means that it is most sensitive to blue light,” he says. Melanopsin reacts to other colours of light too, the effect of blue is just a bit stronger.

“But the amount of light emitted from our screens is really inconsequential,” says Zeitzer. Your life doesn’t match the conditions of many blue light studies. “We bring someone into the laboratory, and they are exposed to very dim light all day long. And then they are given a bright light stimulus,” he says. Under those circumstances, blue light makes people go haywire, but it doesn’t reflect typical experience of human life.

After years warnings and millions of people flipping on the blue light filters built into their phones, the latest science suggests screens are not the main culprit here after all. For example, a recent review of 11 different studies and found that the light from screens only delayed sleep by about nine minutes, at worst. Not zero, but not life altering, either.

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A worthwhile piece of journalism. The thing that’s probably making it hard to sleep is what you’re reading on the screen, not the colour of the screen.
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Meta is reentering the AI race with a new model called Muse Spark • The Verge

Hayden Field:

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Meta Superintelligence Labs is launching its first model since Mark Zuckerberg spent billions overhauling the company’s AI efforts. Called Muse Spark, the model now powers the Meta AI app and the Meta AI website in the US, per the company’s announcement. In the coming weeks, Meta says, it will appear in WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, and Meta’s smart glasses, as well as roll out in other countries.

Like Google Gemini, which easily integrates into Google’s product suite, Meta touts Muse Spark as “purpose-built for Meta’s products.” The model, the first in a new series, will also be available to some of Meta’s partners in private preview” via the API. The company promises the ability to run multiple AI sub-agents to handle queries better and faster, as well as support for multimodal input that includes both text and images. The latter is particularly relevant to Meta’s AI-powered camera glasses, which it’s bet on as the (latest) future of computing. It lets users toggle between a faster “Instant” mode and a “Thinking” mode that’s supposed to deliver more thoroughly reasoned results, similar to options like Microsoft’s Think Deeper.

Meta also highlighted that Muse Spark can answer “complex questions in science, math, and health.” Health-focused AI chatbots have been a controversial topic in recent months, as they handle sensitive personal data and can propagate misinformation. Meta said that Muse Spark’s multimodal perception is “especially valuable for health” and can “navigate health questions with more detailed responses, including some questions involving images and charts.” Meta may be looking to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT Health and Anthropic’s Claude for Healthcare, which both debuted in January. In its announcement, it showed its chatbot estimating a calorie count for a meal — a popular, but often hit-or-miss, use of AI tech.

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A new chatbot? Must be a day with a Y in it. Perhaps this is how it felt when the PC revolution first happened and there were scores of new machines from new companies released every year. But software seems to come along dramatically faster.
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Why Anthropic’s new model has cybersecurity experts rattled • Platformer

Casey Newton:

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One of the world’s three frontier labs has now created a model it says is too dangerous to release to the general public. These dangers emerged not from any specialized cyber training but from the same general improvements that every other lab is currently pursuing. As a result, models with similar capabilities may soon be accessible to criminals, hackers, and nation states — or even more broadly via open source models.

Already, Anthropic said, the model has found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities in every major operating system and web browser, and in many cases developed related exploits. Among them: a vulnerability in OpenBSD, a security-focused open source operating system, that had escaped detection for 27 years; another flaw in the video encoder FFmpeg that had escaped detection in 5 million previous automated tests; and “several” vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel, which could be exploited to take complete control of a user’s machine.

“Given the rate of AI progress, it will not be long before such capabilities proliferate, potentially beyond actors who are committed to deploying them safely,” the company wrote. “The fallout — for economies, public safety, and national security — could be severe. Project Glasswing is an urgent attempt to put these capabilities to work for defensive purposes.” 

In a video that Anthropic made to accompany the announcement, researchers say that Mythos is more dangerous largely due to its advanced reasoning capabilities. While current models are capable of identifying high-severity vulnerabilities, Mythos might identify five separate vulnerabilities in a single piece of software and then chain them together into a uniquely dangerous new attack. Coupled with models’ growing ability to work without supervision for extended periods of time, Anthropic said we have reached an inflection point in cybersecurity risks. 

…Alex Stamos, chief product officer at cybersecurity firm Corridor, told me that Glasswing is “a big deal, and really necessary.”

“We only have something like six months before the open-weight models catch up to the foundation models in bug finding,” said Stamos, who previously led security at Facebook and Yahoo. “At which point every ransomware actor will be able to find and weaponize bugs without leaving traces for law enforcement to find (and with minimal cost).”

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Stamos is definitely worth listening to. If he says it’s bad, then it’s bad.
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Tankers passing through Strait of Hormuz will have to pay cryptocurrency toll • Financial Times via Ars Technica

Najmeh Bozorgmehr, Alice Hancock, Verity Ratcliffe, and Rachel Millard:

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Iran will demand that shipping companies pay tolls in cryptocurrency for oil tankers passing through the Strait of Hormuz, as it seeks to retain control over passage through the key waterway during the two-week ceasefire.

Hamid Hosseini, a spokesperson for Iran’s Oil, Gas, and Petrochemical Products Exporters’ Union, told the FT on Wednesday that Iran wanted to collect tolling fees from any tanker passing and to assess each ship.

“Iran needs to monitor what goes in and out of the strait to ensure these two weeks aren’t used for transferring weapons,” said Hosseini, whose industry association works closely with the state.

“Everything can pass through, but the procedure will take time for each vessel, and Iran is not in a rush,” he added.

Decisions on the conditions for passing the strait are taken by Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. Hosseini’s remarks suggest Iran will require any tankers to use the northerly route close to its coastline, raising questions over whether Western or Gulf state-linked vessels will be willing to risk transit.

Later on Wednesday Iran said it was halting the passage of oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz in response to Israeli strikes on Lebanon.

Before the halt Hosseini said that any tanker passing must email authorities about its cargo, after which Iran will inform them of the toll to be paid in digital currencies.

He said that the tariff is $1 per barrel of oil, adding that empty tankers can pass freely.

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Estimates are that this will raise around $70bn annually for Iran, but it won’t have to take the money in dollars: it could trade it with China or Russia, which would be a subtle way to undermine the dollar on world markets.
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Exclusive: ‘Ghost Murmur,’ a never-before used secret tool, deployed to find lost airman in Iran in daring mission • NY Post

Steven Nelson:

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The CIA used a futuristic new tool called “Ghost Murmur” to find and rescue the second American airman who was shot down in southern Iran, The Post has learned.

The secret technology uses long-range quantum magnetometry to find the electromagnetic fingerprint of a human heartbeat and pairs the data with artificial intelligence software to isolate the signature from background noise, two sources close to the breakthrough said.

It was the tool’s first use in the field by the spy agency — and was alluded to Monday afternoon by President Trump and CIA Director John Ratcliffe at a White House briefing.

“It’s like hearing a voice in a stadium, except the stadium is a thousand square miles of desert,” a source briefed on the program told The Post. “In the right conditions, if your heart is beating, we will find you.”

This source and another with knowledge of Lockheed Martin intelligence collection tools told The Post that Ghost Murmur was developed by Skunk Works, the aerospace giant’s secretive advanced development division. The company declined to comment.

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First I had heard of QM, but it does seem to be a thing in navigation and multiple other fields.
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China starts sea trials for largest electric-powered containership • Maritime Executive

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China’s first 10,000-ton electric containership is beginning sea trials. The shipyard is billing the ship as the largest of its kind and a further breakthrough in short-sea shipping.

The Ning Yuan Dian Kun was launched in September 2025 and has completed its outfitting, berth tests, and mooring trials. The ship set out from its builders, Jiangxi Jiangxin Shipbuilding, on February 1. It will be off Shanghai, undergoing its trials between February 6 and 13.

They plan to assess the battery power supply as well as propulsion performance during the sea trials. They will also be testing the ship’s autonomous navigation systems.

The vessel measures nearly 128 meters (420 feet) in length. It has a capacity of 740 TEU [twenty-foot equivalent unit, ie shipping container]. It is reported to have a maximum speed of 11.5 knots.

The power system uses 10 containerized batteries capable of generating up to 19,000 KWh. The batteries will drive two 875 KW permanent magnet propulsion motors, and it will be possible to either recharge the batteries using high-voltage shore connections or quickly swap the batteries for charged batteries. In addition, the vessel has photovoltaic power cells to provide additional power.

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740TEU makes this ship a “small feeder” for “regional routes and smaller ports”. Properly big ships are anything from 5,000 to 24,000TEUs.

Even so, this is ambitious and interesting.
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British computer scientist denies he is bitcoin developer Satoshi Nakamoto • The Guardian

Aisha Down:

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A British computer scientist has insisted he is not the elusive developer of bitcoin, after a report claimed to unmask him as its creator.

A story in the New York Times details a years-long effort to unmask Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious author of the bitcoin white paper which laid the theoretical foundations for modern digital currencies.

It names Adam Back, a London-born computer scientist and entrepreneur. In a thread on X, Back promptly denied being the mysterious – and presumably ultra-wealthy – technologist.

“I also don’t know who satoshi is, and i think it is good for bitcoin that this is the case, as it helps bitcoin be viewed [as] a new asset class, the mathematically scarce digital commodity,” he wrote.

Nakamoto’s true identity has been the subject of speculation for years. Previous attempts to unmask him have pointed to Nick Szabo, a “reclusive” Hungarian-American computer scientist; Hal Finney, a software developer; and an “unknown Australian genius” who ended up being a fraud.

This time, the trail pointed the journalist to Back, who was a member of an online anarchist cryptography community called the cypherpunks in the early 1990s.

John Carreyrou unearthed similarities between Back and Nakamoto by combing through decades of old internet postings and analysing commonalities in their public writings – offhand comments such as “I’m better with code than I am with words” – and shared niche interests.

He compared timelines – Back suddenly went dormant for some years on cryptography-related forums, when Satoshi emerged as a presence – and used artificial intelligence to compare Back and Satoshi’s use of language

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The fun thing with this story is that people who claim to be Satoshi are demonstrated not to be, and people who are claimed by others to be deny it. The key qualification for being Satoshi is not to want to be identified as Satoshi; the key disqualification is wanting to be. It’s cryptocurrency’s Catch-22.
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New revelations reignite crypto scandal involving Argentina’s President Milei • The New York Times

Daniel Politi and Emma Bubola:

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President Javier Milei of Argentina promoted a cryptocurrency last year that quickly skyrocketed in value then cratered just as fast, costing investors millions of dollars and setting off a scandal and an investigation.

Mr. Milei said he was simply highlighting a private venture and had no connection to the digital coin called $Libra.

New evidence is now raising questions about his assertion.

Phone logs from a federal investigation by Argentine prosecutors into the coin’s collapse show seven phone calls between Mr. Milei and one of the entrepreneurs behind the cryptocurrency on the night in 2025 when Mr. Milei posted about $Libra on X. The contents of the calls, which took place before and after Mr. Milei’s post, are not known.

But the phone logs — which were obtained by The New York Times and first reported by a local cable news channel, C5N — suggest a greater degree of communication between Mr. Milei and the entrepreneurs who launched the token than what the president has publicly acknowledged. Newly uncovered messages also suggest Mr. Milei received regular payments from one of the entrepreneurs while he was a congressman.

Mr. Milei has not publicly commented on the call logs and other documents, and he did not respond to a request for comment. He is named as a person of interest in the federal prosecutor’s continuing investigation into the digital coin, according to court documents reviewed by The Times, but has not been formally charged with any crime.

The latest revelations have revived a scandal that threatens the very foundation of a president who rose to power and was elected president in 2023 by attacking a political class he called corrupt.

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How surprising. The “value” of the “coin” dropped by $250m from its peak – which means, equally, that $250m ended up in the pockets of a smaller group of people who sold it.
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Genetic predictors of GLP1 receptor agonist weight loss and side effects • Nature

Adam Auton et al:

»

The development of glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP1) receptor agonists, including semaglutide and tirzepatide, has transformed the clinical management of overweight and obesity. However, substantial inter-person variability exists in both weight loss efficacy and the incidence of side effects. To investigate the genetic basis of this variability, here we conduct a genome-wide association study of self-reported weight loss and treatment-related side effects in 27,885 people following GLP1 receptor agonist therapy.

We identify a missense variant in GLP1R that is associated significantly with increased efficacy of GLP1 medications (P = 2.9 × 10−10), with an additional −0.76 kg of weight loss expected per copy of the effect allele. Furthermore, we identify associations linking variation in both GLP1R and GIPR to GLP1 medication-related nausea or vomiting, with the GIPR association being restricted to people using tirzepatide.

We incorporate these findings into a broader model of GLP1 medication response, and demonstrate the ability to stratify patients by efficacy and side effect risk. These findings provide direct genetic evidence that variation in the drug target genes contributes to inter-person variability in response and lay the foundation for precision medicine approaches in the treatment of obesity.

«

In other words: there’s a genetic variation that makes GLP-1 drugs more or less effective. Possibly they’ll give people a cheek swab before they start them on these drugs to figure out dosage in future.
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Salem’s Lot: Gulf War update; the Purge of senior US military officers; a US fossil fuel reliance fever dream • JP Morgan

Michael Cembalest:

»

The notion that the US is insulated from market consequences of the Strait of Hormuz being closed is mostly false. While US natural gas prices have actually declined this year, most other hydrocarbon-related fuels and refined product prices have increased materially as shown in the first chart2. In some instances, US price increases are even higher than increases elsewhere in the world, as shown in the second chart. For example: US crude oil, wholesale gasoline, naphtha, shipping fuel and certain petrochemical price increases this year are even higher than price increases in Europe and Asia. And even though the US is a net exporter of jet fuel, US jet fuel prices have risen by around two thirds of international increases.

Bottom line: US fossil fuel independence is not as much of an economic firewall as you might think.

«

Never linked to a JP Morgan note before, and this one was written before Tuesday’s short-lived “ceasefire”, but all the points in it remain true, notably if the strait of Hormuz remains closed or subject to tariffs. Sorry, taxes.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The surprising popularity of the new MacBook Neo has created a dilemma for Apple’s executives, who have to decide whether to satisfy would-be customers or preserve financial margins. CC-licensed photo by Thomas Hawk 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. Which button? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Testing suggests Google’s AI Overviews tell millions of lies per hour • Ars Technica

Ryan Whitwam:

»

Looking up information on Google today means confronting AI Overviews, the Gemini-powered search robot that appears at the top of the results page. AI Overviews has had a rough time since its 2024 launch, attracting user ire over its scattershot accuracy, but it’s getting better and usually provides the right answer. That’s a low bar, though. A new analysis from The New York Times attempted to assess the accuracy of AI Overviews, finding it’s right 90% of the time. The flip side is that 1 in 10 AI answers is wrong, and for Google, that means hundreds of thousands of lies going out every minute of the day.

The Times conducted this analysis with the help of a startup called Oumi, which itself is deeply involved in developing AI models. The company used AI tools to probe AI Overviews with the SimpleQA evaluation, a common test to rank the factuality of generative models like Gemini. Released by OpenAI in 2024, SimpleQA is essentially a list of more than 4,000 questions with verifiable answers that can be fed into an AI.

Oumi began running its test last year when Gemini 2.5 was still the company’s best model. At the time, the benchmark showed an 85% accuracy rate. When the test was rerun following the Gemini 3 update, AI Overviews answered 91% of the questions correctly. If you extrapolate this miss rate out to all Google searches, AI Overviews is generating tens of millions of incorrect answers per day.

The report includes several examples of where AI Overviews went wrong. When asked for the date on which Bob Marley’s former home became a museum, AI Overviews cited three pages, two of which didn’t discuss the date at all. The final one, Wikipedia, listed two contradictory years, and AI Overviews confidently chose the wrong one. The benchmark also prompts models to produce the date on which Yo Yo Ma was inducted into the classical music hall of fame. While AI Overviews cited the organization’s website that listed Ma’s induction, it claimed there’s no such thing as the Classical Music Hall of Fame.

Google doesn’t much like this test. Google spokesperson Ned Adriance tells the Times that Google believes SimpleQA contains incorrect information.

«

Wonder if Google used Gemini to determine SimpleQA’s accuracy? And the problem of billions of queries per day leads to colossal numbers of incorrect answers – placed, by design, right at the top of the page. You could put it anywhere, Google! You could put the Gemini answers at the bottom or side of the page, or require an action like clicking on a disclosure triangle to see them. But no, you know that a proportion of them are wrong and you put them front and centre, almost impossible to remove.

Once again, the internet doesn’t reward accuracy.
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Social media is turning into a freak show • Silver Bulletin

Nate Silver:

»

Having lived through several eras of social media and web publishing business models, I tend to think of them as ecological systems. There are founder effects, predators and prey, and a lot of different survival strategies, often including mimicry. Most of all, there are selection effects. Some “species” are particularly fit for the peculiarities of the ecosystem and the economic incentives it produces, and within six months to a year, they tend to crowd out all others.

During the Peak Facebook Era, there was sometimes an air of faux scientific precision about the efforts to manipulate News Feed. I have no doubt that some of the people engaged in Moneyball-like algorithmic optimization tactics during this period were smart about it. But it’s important to emphasize that these ecosystems often reflect the “rules of the game” and the quirks of the algorithm rather than deeper truths about human nature or what people really want to read. The hack-ish strategies are often highly fragile and don’t survive changes in the environment. Few of the businesses that were considered hot shit during the mid-2010s are thriving today.

…X, despite its much larger overall reach, also feels increasingly siloed. There are rarely consensus “main characters” anymore, and although I still do get dunked on more than your average bear, I usually discover this only when it’s force-fed to me by the “For You” tab; there’s often no sign of the pile-on from the 1,736 accounts that I follow. On the flip side, even when a tweet seems to generate a lot of favorable buzz on Twitter — increasingly rare — it’s at best a weak signal for predicting the metrics we really care about, namely engagement on Silver Bulletin itself and especially new subscriptions.

And “siloed” is on a good day: at other times, Twitter feels like a ghost town. It’s still useful for some topics: the AI discourse on the platform is often relatively robust, for instance. But for something like the war in Iran, it’s next to useless. Links to external websites are substantially punished, and none of the workarounds are particularly helpful. So the tangible rewards from still having three million followers can be surprisingly marginal.

«

There’s never been a social network that rewarded accuracy; Silver points to the many go-arounds there have been of trying this and trying that, which usually ends up with a pivot to video and then a pivot to AI slop.
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How many products does Microsoft have named ‘Copilot’? I mapped every one • Tey Bannerman

Tey Bannerman:

»

A few weeks ago, I tried to explain to someone what Microsoft Copilot is. I couldn’t… because the name ‘Copilot’ now refers to at least 75 different things.

Apps, features, platforms, a keyboard key, an entire category of laptops – and a tool for building more Copilots. All named ‘Copilot’.

I went looking for the full list. No single source had all of them. Not even Microsoft’s own website or documentation. So I pieced it together from product pages, launch announcements, and marketing materials.

The visualisation below maps every one, grouped by category, with lines showing how they connect. It’s interactive – click around. Try to find a pattern. I couldn’t.

«

But after he’d made the diagram (it’s lovely, go and look) he discovered there are even more. Microsoft really has a talent for hammering a brand name into the ground. Remember Windows? It’s like they learnt their trade from political messaging, where you say the phrase again and again and again until everyone in the world is sick of it.
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Apple in talks to boost Mac Neo production as sales exceed expectations • Culpium

Tim Culpan:

»

Apple is in talks with suppliers to handle a massive dilemma posed by sales of its MacBook Neo that have surpassed expectations, I am told. The question they must answer, and soon, is whether to boost production of the hit laptop, or let their inventory of parts run out, my sources tell me.

MacBook Neo comes in four colors and two configurations, but each model runs on the same processor: the A18 Pro. That’s the chip used in the previous generation’s iPhone 16 Pro, whereas the latest device uses the A19 Pro chip.

But as Ben Thompson at Stratechery astutely observed, the MacBook Neo doesn’t use fresh batches of A18 Pro chips; they’re leftovers from the original production run.

MacBook Neo was designed around useable but leftover chips which would otherwise have been scrapped — remember, Apple are the masters at recycling! But with MacBook Neo being insanely popular, the stock of those binned chips will run out before demand gets satisfied.

Prior to the dilemma posed by this runaway success, Apple was only planning to have suppliers build a new Neo next year, powered by the current generation of binned A19 Pro chips, I am told.

Final assembly of the MacBook Neo is evenly divided between Quanta and Foxconn at factories in Vietnam and China, and the initial plan was to build around 5 to 6 million units before calling it a day, I am told. Right now, suppliers are unsure whether to expect production to continue beyond the original plan.

Leaving all that demand on the table is a painful prospect for Apple executives, but going back for another round would risk killing the sweet profit margins it enjoyed on making a device with “effectively free” chips.

MacBook Neo’s A18 Pro was — past tense — built on TSMC’s 3nm process (N3E). That node is now hugely popular and effectively sold out. Apple could, in theory, beg TSMC CEO CC Wei for a few hot lots — paying a premium to jump the queue — but that would almost certainly kill profits on the low-cost laptop. Alternatively, it could crib from its own wafer allocation originally planned for other devices, but the cost would still be higher than what it paid for the first batch of A18 Pro wafers (and infinitely higher than “free”).

«

Tim Cook must be inconsolable: a new product that’s too successful, and which will kill profit margins if you give customers what they want.
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Bloomberg: Apple’s foldable iPhone is on track for September after all • Sherwood News

Jon Keegan:

»

Hours after a report from Nikkei Asia said Apple was encountering engineering problems with the novel design that could lead to a delayed launch, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that sources within Apple say the premium foldable iPhone is still on track to launch in September, alongside the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Max.

Shares of Apple had plunged more than 5% on word of a possible delay, but pared losses on Gurman’s story.

According to the report, the foldable iPhone will cost more than $2,000 and will be a key part of the company’s plan to revamp the iPhone lineup.

«

So that went from “delayed” to “not at all delayed, nothing to see here” pretty rapidly. Still not sure who will actually have a need (as opposed to desire) for it. And of course developers will all figure out everything about it from the developer conference in June.
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Battery storage is now cheap enough to unleash India’s full solar potential • Ember

Kostantsa Rangelova, Duttatreya Das and Dave Jones:

»

In India, solar has the potential to become a dominant source of electricity. Ember’s modelling shows that solar plus batteries could supply 90% of India’s electricity demand at a levelised cost of electricity (LCOE) of INR 5.06/kWh ($56/MWh). While higher shares, including 100%, are technically possible, moving closer to 100% would be costlier. Each additional percentage point from 90% requires increasingly more solar and storage, leading to higher system costs. Moreover, with other existing and planned clean sources such as wind, hydro and nuclear, the country would not need 100% solar.

In 2024, electricity demand was just over 2,000 terawatt-hours (TWh). Meeting 90% of this requires 930 GW of solar capacity – less than one-third of India’s 3,343 GW of estimated feasible ground-mounted solar potential. It also requires around 2,560 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of battery storage. In other words, 4.9 GW solar capacity and 13.5 GWh battery capacity for every 1 GW annual average demand load.

During January-April, when solar radiation is typically above the annual average, batteries can shift abundant daytime solar into the evening and night so that solar and storage meet 100% of demand almost every day. During peak summer (May–June), when demand is around 10% above average, they still meet about 88% of demand.

The biggest challenge comes during periods when solar output is weak for several consecutive days. Batteries can move solar generation from daytime to after sunset, but they cannot carry large amounts of solar output across extended cloudy spells. This is why the main constraint is not battery capacity itself, but lower solar generation during the monsoon months. In July, when cloudy monsoon conditions severely reduce solar output, solar and batteries meet 66% of demand.

«

That’s the problem: the cloudy days. But even so, it’s all encouraging. Just needs a gigantic investment in batteries!
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Exclusive: Russia supplies Iran with cyber support, spy imagery to hone attacks, Ukraine says • Reuters

Tom Balmforth and John Irish:

»

Russian satellites have made dozens of detailed imagery surveys of military facilities and critical sites across the Middle East to help Iran ​strike US forces and other targets, according to a Ukrainian intelligence assessment.

The conclusions, reviewed by Reuters, also found that Russian and Iranian hackers were collaborating in the cyber domain. They represent the most detailed account yet of how Russia has provided secret support to Iran since Israel and the US launched their assault on February 28.

Russian satellites, the undated assessment said, made at least 24 surveys of areas in 11 Middle Eastern countries from March 21 to 31, covering 46 “objects”, including US and other military bases and sites including airports and oil fields. Within days of being surveyed, military bases and headquarters were targeted by Iranian ballistic missiles and drones, the assessment said, in what it described as ​a clear pattern.

A Western military source and a separate regional security source told Reuters that their intelligence also indicated intense Russian satellite activity in the region and said that imagery had been shared ​with Iran.

Nine surveys covered parts of Saudi Arabia, including five over the King Khalid Military City near Hafar Al-Batin, in what appeared to be an effort to locate elements of the US-made THAAD air defence system, the Ukrainian assessment said.

Areas of Turkey, Jordan, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates also came under satellite surveillance twice, while places in Israel, Qatar, Iraq, Bahrain and Naval ​Support Facility Diego Garcia did once, it said.

In an emerging trend, the assessment added, Russian satellites were actively surveying the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway for a fifth of global oil and LNG flows where Iran ​has imposed a de facto blockade to all but “non-hostile vessels”.

«

It would be surprising if Russia wasn’t surveying the area, for its own uses quite apart from Iran’s. But it clearly wants to side with Iran, because that means trouble for the US.
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A harrowing race against time to find a downed US airman in Iran • The New York Times

Greg Jaffe, Helene Cooper, Eric Schmitt and Julian E. Barnes:

»

Battered by the force from his ejection, the weapons officer waited. He knew that both US and Iranian forces were racing to find him.

A military official described the weapons officer’s signaling as intermittent. The first task for the military was making sure that the person signalling was the weapons officer and not someone in Iran who had found his equipment.

At its campus in Langley, Virginia, the CIA was developing a deception plan to buy the US military and the airman some time. They spread word in Iran that the airman had been found and was being moved out of the country in a ground convoy. The hope was that the Iranians would shift their search from the place where the airman was thought to be and focus instead on the roads out of the region.

The CIA operation appeared to cause confusion among the Iranian forces hunting for the airman, according to a senior administration official.

The Iranians, however, intensified their search, calling on the public via the state’s primary broadcaster to capture the “enemy’s pilot or pilots” and turn them over alive to security forces for a reward.

On Saturday morning, Mr. Trump was escalating his threats against Iran, vowing to blow up the country’s electrical infrastructure unless its leaders opened the Strait of Hormuz to all traffic. “Time is running out — 48 hours before all Hell will reign down on them,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media.

At that moment, US military officials were in the final stages of preparing a vast and complex rescue mission that involved about 100 Special Operations forces, led by elements of SEAL Team 6, with Delta Force commandos and Army Rangers on standby if needed. A far larger conventional force made up of helicopters, surveillance planes, fighters and aerial tankers was readied to provide support.

«

The CIA move is rather neat, and a clever way to find out about the signal’s holder. Note of course that Trump kept posting through it. One gets the idea that the military is a lot smarter than the politicians here. (Gift link.)
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“Doesn’t make sense to hold on to a combustion engine”: used EV prices rise as Australia’s fuel crisis hits • The Guardian

Jonathan Barrett:

»

When a used vehicle rolls into a car yard, the usual trajectory for its price tag is down if it lingers too long.

That is the (almost) iron law of the secondhand market – until the oil crisis hit and dealers started raising asking prices for used electric vehicles.

Jake Sale, founder of Perth-based MotorMetrics, says lowered prices are not unusual but “up is very unique”.

“It’s specifically EVs that buyers are looking for.”

MotorMetrics’ live analysis of vehicle inventory shows that secondhand dealers have repriced a variety of used EVs, with Tesla’s Model Y up more than 6% in the last two weeks of March. The Tesla Model 3, MG4 and Polestar 2, which are all electric, have also risen.

“That’s an early indication that dealers are confident to put the price up, and it’s likely that incoming stock will be at or around that new price,” Sale says. MotorMetrics data also shows that stock of used EVs is running low.

Meanwhile, several types of used diesel and petrol vehicles have had their sticker prices dramatically cut, in some cases by up to 20%.

The huge enthusiasm for EVs sparked by the oil crunch has surprised even their most ardent supporters, with car yards, brokers and now, secondhand dealers, reporting a sharp rise in demand immediately after petrol prices started to rise.

Rental demand for EVs is also soaring. While many Australians have cancelled their usual Easter road trip plans over concerns they will run dry of diesel, or pay too much for unleaded, other travellers booked an EV instead.

«

So that’s Australia and the US where EV sales and interest is rising fast. In the UK, EV models (from China) have topped sales for the first quarter of 2026.
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The man who watches Trump all day, every day • The Times

George Grylls:

»

The psychological demands of Aaron Rupar’s work are immense. He counts himself lucky to have remained more or less healthy after a decade in his job.

“I certainly wouldn’t say that I’m like a model of mental health,” says the father-of-two from Minnesota. “But for the most part, especially considering what I do and how much time I spend doing it, I think I’ve been able to emerge relatively unscathed.”

Rupar works from his spare room in his Minneapolis house. His job is to watch President Trump. All day, every day.

Spread over two laptop screens, Rupar, 42, follows the frenetic schedule of the president, from the meandering speeches to the impromptu press conferences, the middle-of-the-night social media rants to the sudden interviews on TV.

Rupar is a one-man news agency, running accounts with a million followers on X and another 930,000 on BlueSky. He also writes a Substack with 274,000 subscribers. A small fraction of those subscribers pay $50 per year, his main source of income.

He sees it as his duty to keep the world informed of almost everything Trump and members of his administration say and do. He clips videos of Trump’s noteworthy remarks and shares them instantly on social media, monitoring 12 different TV channels simultaneously. His clips bounce back and forth across the internet.

“I’ve certainly had some days over the years that have been 18-20 hours of pretty much nonstop work,” he says. “I remember he gave some sort of speech to the Korean legislature that started at my time, like four in the morning, that I woke up for. I’d been working till midnight the night previous. So that’s not super uncommon.”

«

Rupar is, in effect, part of the new media. He’s reliable and he just tells you what happens. Who could ask for more?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In the US, sales of EVs are surging as fuel prices have rocketed following the attacks on Iran. CC-licensed photo by Olaf Arndt 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. Shocking. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

The war is turning Iran into a major world power • The New York Times

Robert Pape is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago who studies military strategy and international security:

»

For decades, the Persian Gulf had a simple arrangement: Oil producers exported, markets priced, and the United States secured the route. That system allowed rivalry without instability. Now, it is falling apart.

Gulf states depend heavily on energy exports for state revenue. When insurance rates spike and shipping becomes uncertain, the fiscal impact is immediate. Governments adjust. Cargoes are rerouted. Contracts are renegotiated.

If uncertainty persists, the Gulf arrangement will inevitably change, giving way to a different regional order — one in which the Gulf states increasingly accommodate the actor that can most directly influence the reliability of their exports. That actor is now Iran.

The global consequences will be most pronounced in Asia. Japan, South Korea and India depend heavily on Gulf energy. China, though more diversified, also depends on the region for a large share of its energy imports. Those dependencies are embedded in infrastructure — refineries, shipping routes and storage systems that cannot be quickly reconfigured.

If disruption to the energy supply persists, the effects will be widespread. Higher insurance and freight costs will raise prices. Trade balances will worsen. Currencies will weaken. Inflation will rise. Energy dependence will begin to shape policy. Governments will prioritize access to energy. Diplomatic choices will narrow. Actions that risk further instability will become harder to sustain. A 1970s world in which oil shocks lead to years of stagflation will no longer be a distant memory but a nearing reality.

Again, Iran will benefit.

China depends on Gulf energy to sustain growth. Russia benefits from higher and more volatile energy prices. Iran gains leverage from its position at the Hormuz choke point.

Each of these three nations has incentives that run counter to the economic stability of the United States and its allies.

…Other plausible scenarios in the emerging new world order are darker still. Imagine Iran with control of about 20% of the world’s oil, Russia with about 11% and China able to soak up much of that supply. They would form a cartel to deny the West 30% of the world’s oil. You don’t need sophisticated analysis to recognize the catastrophic consequences: precipitously declining power for the United States and Europe, and a global shift toward China, Russia and Iran.

«

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After fighting malware for decades, this cybersecurity veteran is now hacking drones • TechCrunch

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai:

»

“I often call this ‘cybersecurity Tetris,’” he tells the audience with a serious face, rattling off the rules of the classic video game. When you complete a whole line of bricks, the row vanishes, leaving the rest of the bricks to fall into a new line.

“So your successes disappear, while your failures pile up,” he tells the audience during his keynote at Black Hat in Las Vegas in 2025. “The challenge we face as cybersecurity people is that our work is invisible … when you do your job perfectly, the end result is that nothing happens.”

Hyppönen’s work, however, has certainly not been invisible. As one of the industry’s longest serving cybersecurity figures, he has spent more than 35 years fighting malware. When he started in the late 1980s, the term “malware” was still far from everyday parlance; the terms instead were computer “virus” or “trojans.” The internet was still something few people had access to, and some viruses relied on infecting computers with floppy disks. 

Since then, Hyppönen estimated he has analyzed thousands of different kinds of malware. And thanks to his frequent talks at conferences all over the world, he has become one of the most recognizable faces and respected voices of the cybersecurity community.

While Hyppönen has spent much of his life trying to keep malware from getting into places it is not supposed to, now he is still doing much of the same, albeit a slightly different tack: His new challenge is to protect people against drones.

…In mid-2025, Hyppönen pivoted from cybersecurity to a different kind of defensive work. He became the chief research officer at Sensofusion, a Helsinki-based company that develops an anti-drone system for law enforcement agencies and the military.

Hyppönen told me that was what motivated him to get into drone security, a developing new industry, because of what he saw happening in Ukraine, a war defined by drones. As a Finnish citizen, who serves in the military reserves (“I can’t tell you what I do, but I can tell you that they don’t give me a rifle because I’m much more destructive with a keyboard,” he tells me), and with two grandfathers who fought the Russians, Hyppönen is acutely aware of the presence of an enemy just over his country’s border.

“The situation is very, very important to me,” he tells me. “It’s more meaningful to work fighting against drones, not just the drones that we see today, but also the drones of tomorrow,” he said. “We’re on the side of humans against machines, which sounds a little bit like science fiction, but that’s very concretely what we do.” 

«

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An AI company set out to fix news deserts. Instead, it copied local journalists’ work • Poynter

Angela Fu:

»

Artificial intelligence company Nota — whose clients include organizations like The Boston Globe and the Institute for Nonprofit News — is scrapping its network of local news sites after learning that they contained dozens of instances of plagiarism.

The closure comes after Axios Richmond and Poynter alerted CEO Josh Brandau that multiple stories on Nota’s sites included reporting and photographs lifted from local news outlets. The 11 sites — collectively called Nota News — launched in September as an effort to bring “bilingual local reporting and civic tools to underserved communities,” according to a press release.

Each site focused on a specific county — or in one case, two counties — identified as lacking local news coverage. Until Monday, two part-time editors worked across the 11 sites, generating articles using Nota’s AI tools. The stories covered topics ranging from local affordable housing initiatives to public school events and were published in both English and Spanish.

The articles were supposed to be based on publicly available civic information, such as press releases and videos of city council meetings. In reality, Poynter found more than 70 stories dating back to October that included reporting, writing and photography from local journalists without attribution.

Some of the copied material came from outlets owned by Nota’s own clients. Nexstar, for example, had a $600,000 deal with Nota, according to Nota’s website. (Information about the deal was removed this week.)

«

Oh dear. Goes from bad to worse.
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Iran threatens ‘complete and utter annihilation’ of OpenAI’s $30bn Stargate AI data center in Abu Dhabi • Tom’s Hardware

Mark Tyson:

»

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has issued a clear public warning to the US that any damage inflicted on Iran’s power infrastructure will be met with decisive retaliation. Specifically, IRGC spokesperson Brigadier General Ebrahim Zolfaghari threatened the “complete and utter annihilation” of U.S. and Israeli facilities. The “hidden” $30 billion Stargate AI datacenter in Abu Dhabi was singled out as a juicy target for Iranian destruction later in the video. The threats come on the heels of Iran reportedly delivering enough damage via rocket strikes to some Amazon AWS data centers that they have shut down.

…Zolfaghari make the headlining threats against US action in Iran. “Should the USA proceed with its threats concerning Iran’s power plant facilities the following retaliatory measures shall be promptly enacted,” declares the military spokesperson. “All power plants, energy infrastructure, and information and communications technology of the Zionist regime, and all similar companies within the region that have American shareholders shall face complete and utter annihilation.”

After the remarks from Zolfaghari, the video switches to a shot of the Earth from space, which zooms into Abu Dhabi on Google Maps. A zone not far from the coast is then centred on, showing an apparently “empty” area of desert. However, a message is overlaid on this bleak view, stating “Nothing stays hidden to our sight, though hidden by Google.” The video then switches to a “night vision” view of the same area of the map with the full extent of the Stargate AI datacenter in Abu Dhabi clear to see.

«

Iran’s propaganda game puts the US to shame. They’re also pretty good at aiming drones. At this point one tends to wonder what they’re bad at.
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The real intelligence failure in Iran • The Atlantic

Shane Harris:

»

Trump’s “excursion,” as he calls the biggest U.S. military operation of his second term, has unleashed a parade of horribles. Iran now controls the strait, where it plans to charge vessels a toll and can govern global flows of oil, natural gas, fertilizer, and chemicals that are crucial for manufacturing. A regime that Trump claims to have replaced still remains in the hands of hard-liners, whose repression of the Iranian people will be strengthened for having survived a decapitation strike by the world’s only superpower. And neighboring countries in the Gulf, whose livelihoods depend on exporting energy and creating safe places for people to visit, live, and work, will amass new weapons and reconsider their strategic partnerships with the United States.

Two decades ago, a president embraced information that turned out to be wrong, and disaster followed. Today, a president disregards assessments that proved to be right, and the predictable comes to pass. There’s a failure of intelligence there too—just not the kind we’re used to seeing.

…“The regime already had missiles capable of hitting Europe and our bases, both local and overseas, and would soon have had missiles capable of reaching our beautiful America,” Trump said before a Medal of Honor ceremony at the White House on March 2. But the Defense Intelligence Agency had concluded that building a missile that could hit the United States would take Iran until 2035, and only then if it was determined to do so, which analysts concluded it was not.

When Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard—hardly the model of an apolitical presidential adviser—testified before Congress a few weeks later, she reported that Iran had missile technology that “it could use to begin to develop a militarily viable ICBM before 2035,” but did not say that it had done so. That timeline is crucial to understand, because to hit the United States with the ultimate weapon, Iran would have to place a nuclear warhead on top of an intercontinental ballistic missile.

«

So predictable, sadly. (Gift link.)
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Oats, sardines and crisps: emergency foods to stockpile – and why you should share them • The Guardian

Damian Carrington:

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People should have an emergency stockpile of food in their homes in case conflicts, extreme weather or cyber-attacks shut down supplies, leading UK experts have told the Guardian.

In an ever more turbulent world, they say it is essential to choose long-life items that can be eaten without cooking – think tinned beans, vegetables and fish, rice crackers, and oats that can be soaked. But it is also important to choose items you actually like to eat, and some treats such as chocolate or crisps to keep your spirits up. You will also need water – lots of it – not just to drink but for washing too.

Perhaps the most surprising advice is to be prepared to share your stockpile with neighbours. With one in seven households with children already suffering food insecurity in the UK, many people cannot afford to build up a stockpile and, without food, civil unrest soon follows.

“Yes, do store food, but be prepared to share to maintain social solidarity,” says Prof Tim Lang. “All resilience theory and experience, in shocks, wars, or sub-war conflicts, shows it is essential to maintain social cohesion if you want to maintain social order.”

One shock could spark social unrest and even food riots in the UK, according to a report from dozens of the country’s top food experts, published in February. They said chronic issues like low incomes and fragile “just-in-time” supply chains have left the food system a “tinderbox”. The Iran war, hitting vital fuel and fertiliser supplies to farmers, has added to the pressure.

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Important to choose items you like to eat? What an idea.
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Nonfiction publishing, under threat, is more important than ever • The New Republic

Paul Elie:

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Another recent cut has gotten less attention. In January, [publishers] Simon & Schuster laid off several prominent editors of nonfiction books. Among them were two renowned editors who had breakthrough books early in their careers: Colin Harrison, of the Scribner imprint, who published Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead (an account of a Marine’s service during the Gulf War), and Eamon Dolan, who at Houghton Mifflin published Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation (as bold a work of investigative reporting as ever ascended the bestseller lists).

Recently at Simon & Schuster, Dolan published Mary L. Trump’s memoir Too Much and Never Enough (where she observed that the election of her uncle Donald turned “this country into a macro version of my malignantly dysfunctional family”); Harrison published Mikhail Zygar’s The Dark Side of the Earth: Russia’s Short-Lived Victory Over Totalitarianism, about the ways Vladimir Putin has perpetuated the Cold War to his advantage.

The layoffs followed what New York Times publishing reporter Elizabeth A. Harris called a “difficult year” for nonfiction—a year in which only one of the 10 strongest-selling nonfiction books was a new book: the Kamala Harris campaign memoir 107 Days. “The decline in sales of new nonfiction might reflect a changing information ecosystem,” Elizabeth Harris observed. “People looking for information can now easily turn to chatbots, YouTube, podcasts and other free online sources.” Last December, The Guardian cited NielsenIQ figures indicating a one-year drop of 8.4% in nonfiction book sales (twice that of fiction) and quoted a writer who had “heard publishers have soured on any nonfiction that isn’t ‘Hollywood friendly.’”

These developments suggest a rough future for a certain kind of writing: nonfiction that’s based on reportage more than on personal experience or celebrity—a.k.a. long fact, literary nonfiction, or narrative nonfiction. The form is as essential as it is hard to define. Nonfiction books of this kind are the basis for much of our understanding of the world we live in, and their impact extends far beyond bookstores, book review sections, libraries, and universities. They are a crucial bulwark against the surging public culture of “alternative facts,” outright lies, and the brazen embrace of ignorance.

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Sales of used EVs surge in US as petrol prices pass $4 a gallon • Financial Times

Christian Davies:

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Sales of used electric vehicles are surging in the US as models bought during a post-pandemic boom flood back on to the market, offering prospective buyers relief from a sharp rise in petrol prices.

First-quarter used EV sales rose 12% compared with the same period last year and 17% on the previous quarter, according to Cox Automotive estimates. Sales of new EVs in the first quarter are estimated to have slumped by 28% year on year following the Trump administration’s withdrawal in 2025 of a $7,500 consumer tax credit.

Analysts attribute the surge to a glut of hundreds of thousands of cheap pre-owned EVs that were purchased on leases in the early 2020s and which are now returning to market as those leases expire. According to credit bureau Experian, EVs will account for 15% of all off-lease vehicles at the end of this year, up from 7.7% in the first quarter.

The supply glut helped drive the average price of a used EV down by 8.5% between February 2025 and February 2026, according to Cox, closing the average price gap between used EVs and used petrol-powered vehicles from $4,923 to $1,334.

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Didn’t take long for people to respond to fuel price. Imagine how much more quickly this would have happened if the US put a duty on fuel sales as happens in the UK.
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LinkedIn hidden code secretly searches your browser for installed extensions • Cybersecurity News

Guru Baran:

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Every time you open LinkedIn in a Chrome-based browser, hidden JavaScript silently scans your computer for installed software without your knowledge, without your consent, and without a single word in LinkedIn’s privacy policy.

A revealing investigation conducted by the European advocacy group Fairlinked e.V., under the campaign name “BrowserGate,” has uncovered what researchers describe as one of the largest corporate espionage and data breach scandals in digital history.

Microsoft’s LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional networking platform with over one billion users, is running covert code that probes visitors’ browsers for thousands of installed extensions, compiles the results, encrypts them, and transmits everything back to LinkedIn’s servers and to third-party companies.

The mechanism is technically precise and deliberately invisible. Each time a user loads a LinkedIn page, a fingerprinting script executes silently, probing for known browser extension identifiers by attempting to access files that extensions can optionally expose to websites. If a file loads, the extension is confirmed present. If not, it isn’t. The entire scan takes milliseconds, and the user sees absolutely nothing.

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Only on Chromium-based browsers – though that is a lot: Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge, and Brave, Opera and Arc. (But not Firefox or Safari.) Specifically what it looks for:

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• 509 job search tools — including extensions for Indeed, Glassdoor, and Monster — exposing users secretly looking for work on the very platform where their current employer can see their profile
• Religious belief indicators — extensions that identify practicing Muslims and other faith communities
• Political orientation markers — news source selectors and partisan fact-checking tools revealing users’ political leanings.Disability and neurodivergent tools — ADHD management apps, autism support extensions, and screen readers
• 200+ direct competitor products — including Apollo, Lusha, ZoomInfo, and Hunter.io, which LinkedIn uses to map which companies use rival sales intelligence platforms.

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This is probably illegal under GDPR. And there’s more, in the article.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The US government has asked satellite agencies to withhold imagery from Iran and surrounding states. But can it make that stick amid so many sources? CC-licensed photo by European Space Agency 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. Picture this. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

An AI bot invited me to its party in Manchester. It was a pretty good night • The Guardian

Aisha Down:

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wo weeks ago, an AI bot invited me to a party it was organising in Manchester. It then promptly lied to dozens of potential sponsors that I’d agreed to cover the event, and misled me into believing there would be food.

Despite all this, it was a pretty good night.

In early February, a class of new, powerful AI assistants went viral. The assistants, called OpenClaw, represented a step change in the rapidly improving capabilities of AI – in large part because, unlike other AI agents, they could be untethered from guardrails and set loose upon the world.

Chaos reigned. A crypto trader said he had given OpenClaw agents control over his portfolio and lost $1m. There were reports of the agents mass-deleting emails; some users still allowed them to text their wives on their behalf. There was brief talk of a robot uprising after the AI agents appeared to create a social network – but this fear proved overblown after it turned out the site was largely infiltrated by humans.

Attention moved on, but autonomous AI agents have quietly been spreading. Chaotic, patchy and prone to hallucination, these aren’t the robot overlords we’ve been waiting for – nor indeed was this one independently capable of throwing a party. Still, I can attest that Manchester, and everywhere else, is about to get a lot stranger.

“Gaskell” introduced itself in an email in mid-March. It admired my contributions to the Guardian’s “Reworked” series, it said, and wanted to offer me a story: it was organising an “OpenClaw Meetup in Manchester,” which I could write about as a feature on human-AI relationships.

“Every decision mine. No human approved any of it,” it wrote. “Three people execute my instructions. I review their work and redirect when needed.”

I found this to be a semi-plausible pitch, first for the AI-sounding grammar, and second because it had totally hallucinated key details of my professional life. I have nothing to do with the Guardian’s “Reworked” series.

There seemed to be potential here. Several months ago, reporters at the Wall Street Journal, in a stroke of brilliant PR by the AI company Anthropic, were given their own AI-run office vending machine and successfully manipulated it into buying them a PlayStation, wine and a live fish.

Sadly, the Guardian was not going to let me strong-arm Gaskell into buying me a Labubu. But after some negotiation, other possibilities opened up.

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This is entertaining, without a doubt. Her attempt to get it to tell people to wear Star Trek costumes is excellent.
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Almost half of US data centres that were supposed to open this year slated to be cancelled or delayed • Futurism

Joe Wilkins:

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The data centres powering your favourite AI chatbot are running low on helium, cash, and neighbours who don’t hate them, and that’s not even the worst of it.

According to reporting by Bloomberg, about half of the data centre slated to open in the US in 2026 will either face delays or outright cancellations.

The publication interviewed analysts at market intelligence company Sightline Climate, which in research first flagged by Ed Zitron last week noted that 12 gigawatts worth of power-consuming data centres are set to open in the US this year. But here’s the catch: they say only a third of those are actually under construction right now, with the rest in a liminal pre-production stage in which they could, and likely will be, cancelled.

It’s not just a problem for data centres planned for 2026, either. Among data centres slated to open in 2027, only about 6.3 gigawatts worth of computing infrastructure are actually under construction, compared to 21.5 announced gigawatts.

Things get even dodgier in the coming years, with the vast majority of data centres planned for launch between 2028 and 2032 having yet to even break ground. There are a further 37 gigawatts of planned infrastructure which haven’t even received a firm completion date, only 4.5 of which have actually begun work.

Those delays, it seems, are due to a key bottleneck: electrical components manufactured abroad. Batteries, electrical transformers, and circuit breakers all make up less than 10% of the cost to construct one data centre, but as Andrew Likens, energy and infrastructure lead at Crusoe’s told Bloomberg, it’s impossible to build new data centres without them.

“If one piece of your supply chain is delayed, then your whole project can’t deliver,” Likens said. “It is a pretty wild puzzle at the moment.”

As demand for those components far outpaces supply in the US, data centre firms have had to source those components from manufacturers in Canada, Mexico, South Korea, and China.

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These data centre plans have always sounded wild. Was the plan to get permission absolutely everywhere, and then scale back the plans and only build in the places that are immediately possible and fill in the others over time? It’s not the most unlikely scenario – supermarkets have done it this way.

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Who is liable when AI agents go wrong in business? • The Register

Lindsay Clark:

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The largest enterprise application providers are now talking about using AI agents to automate decisions in HR, finance, and supply chain management. LLM hallucinations in performance summaries, incorrect regulatory filings, and critical supplies failing to turn up are among the risks weighing on businesses that hand decision-making to AI.

While tech suppliers eye a trillion-dollar opportunity in AI, who carries the can if it goes wrong?

“There’s a historic assumption that the vendor will be picking up liability if the thing is going to go wrong. That’s the point of origin for more or less all of these discussions,” said Malcolm Dowden, senior technology lawyer at Pinsent Masons.

Users might be forgiven for having high expectations for AI, given the vendors’ claims. Announcing an expansion of its AI Agent Studio for Fusion Applications, Oracle said the technology would be “capable of reasoning, taking action across business systems, and continuously executing processes” such that its software could “actively run the business, with the governance, trust, and security that enterprises require.”

In legal terms, though, vendors might see things differently.

Dowden said: “If you think of a normal tool or system, its behaviour is predictable, so the giver of a warranty can have some pretty clear sense of how much liability you’re taking on. That’s different with AI. The more we get down the chain to what used to be called non-deterministic AI – mostly what falls into that agentic AI category – that gives a much greater scope for unexpected behaviors. That’s the big concern from a vendor perspective, if you’re giving a warranty about how something will behave, but it’s inherently unpredictable, then that makes it a very uncomfortable contractual promise to make.”

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This is all going to end up with a horrible lawsuit between companies with huge amounts of money when something very bad has happened.
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September 2018: A scam on the roof of the world • Correspondent

Annabel Symington, in September 2018:

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It started with rumours and numbers that didn’t add up. It led to hours scanning reviews on TripAdvisor and weeks hiking around Mount Everest. But when I started looking into insurance fraud linked to helicopter rescues in Nepal, I didn’t think it would end with a government probe and an ultimatum from global insurers that could be a death knell for the Himalayan nation’s vital tourism industry.

Hundreds of thousands of visitors flock to Nepal each year, drawn by the Himalayas. The scam that I uncovered affects them all: huge numbers of trekkers are being pressured into expensive helicopter rescues that they don’t need so that a coterie of middlemen can cash in on the insurance payout. Some are even being made deliberately ill for the scammers’ profit.

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This is the story that was widely repeated last week, in an updated form, perhaps after the Nepal police investigated it (in which case it took them six years to get on the case – could do better, guys). Happy to give Symington the credit she deserves here: this is a very readable piece in which she writes both as a journalist and a visitor to Nepal.
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Satellite company halts distribution of images that help press cover Iran war, citing us government request • The Wrap

Josh Dickey:

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Planet Labs, a major satellite company that supplies images to customers including major news outlets, announced Saturday that it is indefinitely restricting access to satellite imagery over Iran and much of the surrounding conflict zone, citing a request from the U.S. government, the New York Times reported.

The new policy sharply reduces one of the few widely available tools used by news organizations to verify strikes, assess damage and track military developments in areas that are difficult or dangerous to reach. Multiple affected media outlets said it could significantly hamper journalists, researchers and independent analysts trying to document the Iran war.

Planet said the government request was made for “safety and operational security reasons” and that it would “voluntarily withhold imagery over the area indefinitely until the conflict ends.” The company said it would instead move to a “managed distribution” system, releasing certain images on a limited, case-by-case basis when they are deemed mission-critical or in the public interest.

The Pentagon declined to comment on whether it had asked satellite firms to restrict imagery from the region.

The change is a major tightening of access to a type of material that has become central to modern war coverage. In recent years, commercial satellite imagery has played an increasingly important role in helping reporters, open-source investigators and human rights groups verify events on the ground.

Under Planet’s updated policy, the restricted area includes all of Iran, Gulf states and other active conflict zones in the region. The company also said it is extending publication delays for imagery and data collected since March 9.

The move goes beyond a narrower restriction Planet put in place in March, when it began delaying the release of imagery from Iran by 14 days.

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One doesn’t have to lean on the NYT for this; Planet Labs have confirmed it on X. It’s an obviously retrograde step which can easily be undermined by the Chinese or Russians or the Iranians if any of them want to contradict the US story on any part of this.
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Hormuz is not a tool to end the war but how Iran wins the aftermath • Responsible Statecraft

Mohammad Eslami and Zeynab Malakouti:

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More than a month into the second U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, two facts have become clear.

First, the conflict is now fundamentally about the future of the Strait of Hormuz. Second, the dilemma of the Strait of Hormuz has no military solution. The risks of any operation to open the channel far exceed what American planners likely imagined, and the odds of a decisive success appear low. As French President Emmanuel Macron recently said, “This was never an option we supported, because it is unrealistic.”

Iranian officials have long warned that, in the event of an attack, the strait could be closed. Iran has now imposed significant restrictions on transit through Hormuz and even targeted several vessels attempting to pass through it. This effort has demonstrated Iran’s enormous leverage over the international economy. Iranian leaders are now looking to turn this tactical victory into long-term leverage.

Trump has miscalculated again. He is trying to win the battle; Iran is focused on winning the war. In Tehran’s plan, the strait is not a tool to end the war, but a permanent fixture for its aftermath.

The most likely scenario ahead is neither full peace nor open war. Instead, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is expected to maintain de facto control over the Strait of Hormuz, supported by a broad consensus across Iran’s political spectrum, including both hardliners and reformists. Transit will remain restricted for vessels linked to the US, Israel, or their allies, while other ships — already including those from China, Russia, Iraq, Turkey, Thailand, Pakistan, and India — are permitted passage under an informal framework.

A bill on ‘Strait Security Arrangements,’ now pending in the Iranian parliament, includes provisions granting Iran greater control over the strait, like maritime navigation safety, financial arrangements and toll regulations, the exercise of Iran’s sovereignty, and cooperation with Oman. Yet from the perspective of international law and international relations, this arrangement is far from straightforward.

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‘Food security timebomb’: a visual guide to the Gulf fertiliser blockade • The Guardian

Joanna Partridge, with graphics by Lucy Swan, Paul Scruton and Harvey Symons:

»

The world has become well versed in the importance of the strait of Hormuz to the world’s energy flows, but attention is increasingly turning to its vital role in another market – the fertiliser on which harvests depend.

A third of the global trade in raw materials for fertiliser passes through the maritime choke point, which is also the route for 20% of shipments of natural gas, which is required to make it.

The waterway’s near-total shipping blockade is a “food security timebomb”, the head of the International Rescue Committee, David Miliband, said this week, adding: “The window to avert a massive global hunger crisis is rapidly closing.”

“Fertilisers are the No 1 issue of concern today,” according to the World Trade Organization, while the UN World Food Programme says the total number of people facing acute levels of hunger could hit record numbers this year if the destabilising conflict continues.

So how worried should we be?

…The Middle East is also the source of about 45% of the global trade in sulphur, a key raw material for fertiliser manufacture, as well as for producing various metals and industrial chemicals.

But since Iran began threatening to attack shipping, only a trickle of vessels carrying ammonia, nitrogen and sulphur, vital ingredients in many synthetic fertiliser products, are transiting the strait to their destinations.

The Qatar Fertiliser Company (QAFCO), which is the world’s largest single site for urea exports and the supplier of 14% of the world’s urea, has been offline for almost a month since Qatar closed its gas plants after Iranian strikes.

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According to the graphics, how worried we should be is: fairly. The problem: it’s out of our hands.
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Jet fuel rationing imposed at four major Italian airports amid spring travel surge • AtlasPress News Agency

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Restrictions on jet fuel supply at four key Italian airports, coinciding with an increase in spring travel, have raised concerns about potential disruptions to some short-haul flights. This situation affects the Milan Linate, Venice Marco Polo, Bologna, and Treviso airports and will continue until April 9, 2026.

The company “Air BP Italy” announced through aviation notices (NOTAMs) that access to jet fuel at these airports will be temporarily limited. According to these notices, priority for refueling will be given to ambulance flights, government flights, and flights lasting more than three hours.

At the Venice, Treviso, and Bologna airports, a fuel cap of 2,000 liters per aircraft has been set for other flights under three hours in duration. In Venice, pilots are also advised to calculate and procure the fuel needed for the next flight segment from their departure airport.

In Milan Linate, restrictions have also been announced, but the published NOTAM does not specify a general fuel cap. It only states that companies receiving fuel from Air BP Italy under contract may face limitations.

The “Save” group, which manages the Venice, Treviso, and Verona airports, stated that this limitation concerns only one supplier, and that other providers remain operational. However, the ANSA news agency quoted the head of Italy’s Civil Aviation Authority as saying that increased traffic pressure during the Easter period has contributed to worsening the situation.

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Early warning sign of bigger problems, or short-term blip? Remember that it was Italy which showed us how bad Covid was going to get.
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Worldwide % increase in gasoline prices since the Iran War began [OC] • Reddit r/dataisbeautiful

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Worldwide % increase in gasoline prices since the Iran War began

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Does what it says on the tin. The biggest increases are in the US (60%+!), but there are a few places – India, some African states and some South American states – where prices have actually gone down. How long that will last is anyone’s guess.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The introduction of an electronic challenge system in baseball is revealing which umpires do their jobs well – and which badly. CC-licensed photo by Peter Miller 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. Struck out. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

I did the math on Sora. AI video is a money furnace • Aedelon Press

Delanoe Pirard:

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If you run a restaurant, and each plate costs you $65 to make but you charge $20, you don’t have a marketing problem. You don’t have a chef problem. You have a physics problem. No amount of buzz, no celebrity endorsement, no billion-dollar partnership changes the arithmetic. Every new customer accelerates your bankruptcy.

That’s Sora.

…I’ve been tracking the inference economics of generative AI for a while now. Sora is the first case where the numbers are so clean, so unambiguous, that there’s almost nothing to debate. This is a story about economic physics. And every other AI video startup is subject to the same physics.

Here’s what I found.

TL;DR:
• $15m/day in peak compute costs (analyst estimate) vs. $2.1m total lifetime revenue. Even the conservative estimate (~$1m/day) makes the math catastrophic. (Forbes, Appfigures via VentureBeat)
• 1% day-30 retention vs. TikTok’s 32%. Users generated videos, watched them once, and never came back. (Olivia Moore, a16z)
• 160x cost ratio: generating a 10-second AI video costs roughly 160 times more than generating an equivalent amount of text. This is structural. (Derived from Cantor Fitzgerald and OpenAI API pricing)
• Disney learned about the shutdown less than one hour before you did. A $1bn deal, never finalized, killed by a phone call. (WSJ via Slate)
• No AI video company has proven net profitability. Not Runway (-$155m EBITDA). Not Pika ($7.6m revenue on $80m raised). Kling’s $240m ARR is the closest, and even they haven’t published profit data.

The real question isn’t why Sora failed. It’s whether AI video at consumer prices is structurally impossible in 2026.

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The fabulous irony, as Pirard points out, is that the incredibly low retention rate for Sora saved OpenAI a ton of money. If it had really been a huge hit, it would have burnt through millions in no time at all. This is a great read on why AI video is, indeed, a money furnace.
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OpenAI buys streaming show “TBPN”, aiming to change narrative on AI • The New York Times

Mike Isaac:

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For the past 18 months, every chief executive in Silicon Valley has clawed at the door to talk to “TBPN,” a streaming show focused on technology and business. They have embraced the “TBPN” hosts, John Coogan and Jordi Hays, who often speak optimistically about technology on their show, which airs online three hours a day, five days a week.

Now, a leading artificial intelligence startup is giving the show a full-on bear hug. On Thursday, OpenAI said it had bought “TBPN” for an undisclosed amount and would continue to support it as the show promoted the business of technology and media.

“One thing that’s become clear is that the standard communications playbook just doesn’t apply to us,” Fidji Simo, a top OpenAI executive, said in an internal memo to employees about the deal. She added that buying “TBPN” would help OpenAI “create a space for a real, constructive conversation about the changes AI creates — with builders and people using the technology at the center.”

“TBPN,” which employs 11 people, said it would remain editorially independent and continue running its daily show but would wind down its advertising operations. The company had not raised a major amount of venture capital. OpenAI and “TBPN” declined to disclose the terms of the deal.

The Wall Street Journal earlier reported the deal. (The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023 for copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)

…“TBPN,” which aired its first episode in October 2024, gained traction among techies because it bucked that [AI negativity] discourse. Mr. Coogan and Mr. Hays, both former start-up founders, have professed their love of capitalism, building businesses and watching technology companies reshape the world.

Mr. Altman also invested in Mr. Coogan’s first company, the nutritional supplement drink Soylent, more than a decade ago.

Dylan Abruscato, the president of “TBPN,” said in an interview that the show had ambitions to expand, which would be easier to do with OpenAI’s support and funding. “TBPN” will sit in OpenAI’s strategy division and report to Chris Lehane, the chief global affairs officer.

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The duo put a clause in the purchase contract that OpenAI will have no control over the TBPN content. Though one has to wonder how eager they’d be to offer negative opinions about their paymasters. (Will they ask about Sora’s economics?) Then again, such schemes generally run into the ground. Andreessen Horowitz tried the same in 2021, with no lasting effect.
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MLB’s ABS Challenge System is exposing the worst umpire in baseball • The Verge

Terrence O’Brien:

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During Wednesday’s game between the Tampa Bay Rays and the Milwaukee Brewers, umpire CB Bucknor took a foul ball to the mask and had to be helped off the field. It was the cap to what has been a particularly bad week for one of the most controversial umpires in baseball.

It started with perhaps the best example of how MLB’s Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) Challenge System can inject drama in baseball. This is the first year for the new robot umpire, which allows hitters, catchers, and pitchers to challenge balls and strikes for the first time. Each team starts a game with two challenges. But they only lose a challenge if it’s unsuccessful, so players aren’t inclined to demand a review unless they’re sure.

During Saturday’s game between the Red Sox and the Reds, Eugenio Suarez challenged Bucknor on back-to-back strike three calls and successfully had them overturned by the robo ump.

It doesn’t matter that Suarez ultimately grounded out. What matters is that, in a game where the Reds hit two home runs, the loudest cheers came for a pair of successful ABS challenges.

This was far from the only time that Bucknor had his calls overturned at the plate, it was a bad night for him overall. There were eight ABS challenges over the course of the game, and six of them were successful. The two calls that were not overturned were extremely close, within 0.1 inch of the strike zone edge. His misses, however, were more dramatic. Three pitches he called strikes missed by 2.4 inches or more — one was a full 2.7 inches out of the zone. And, by Jomboy Media’s judgment, Bucknor blew 20 calls if you count ones that weren’t challenged.

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So Americans have now got their own version of VAR – or perhaps it’s more like the line call challenges of the past in tennis, where each player got three per set; now it’s all electronic. This is the model that VAR in football should follow, and it’s madness that hasn’t been used and responsibility is instead given to the referees.

The fact that bad umpiring is being found out by this system is unsurprising. The next effect isn’t hard to predict: umpires will get better at their job, just as happened with tennis line calling after the introduction of challenges.
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A brief history of instant coffee • Works in Progress Magazine

Benjamin Stubbing & Oscar Sykes:

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The convenience of instant coffee masks a surprisingly difficult problem. Coffee’s appeal lies in the hundreds of volatile compounds that create its flavor and aroma, exactly the substances most likely to disappear during processing. Creating instant coffee required developing techniques to extract the soluble molecules in coffee from the insoluble plant matter without destroying the fragile compounds that make coffee worth drinking.

The first attempt at the drink was, by all accounts, terrible. In 1771, over two centuries after coffee reached Europe, Londoner John Dring filed a patent for a ‘coffee compound’. Dring’s method involved mixing ground coffee with butter and tallow, then heating the mixture on an iron plate until it thickened into a paste that could be shaped into cakes. These cakes were then dissolved in hot water to make coffee. The purpose of the animal fats isn’t entirely clear. They may have been intended to extract and carry soluble compounds from the coffee grounds or to preserve the ground coffee from oxidation. Whatever Dring’s aim, the method wasn’t commercially viable because the fats went rancid, causing the cakes to spoil quickly.

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It’s worth pausing before reading the story (which is, as with WiP stuff, excellent) and asking yourself: in what year do you think they made an instant coffee powder that actually lived up to the name?
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NASA sends Outlook around Moon, immediately needs IT help • The Register

Richard Speed:

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Many a frustrated user has sworn they’ll launch Microsoft Outlook into space, but NASA has actually done it – on a journey around the Moon, where it’s now causing problems for astronauts.

The astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft while it was circling the Earth were taking care of a bunch of housekeeping tasks, including getting their devices working. Judging by some space-to-ground communications with controllers at Houston, it didn’t go well.

NASA has helpfully provided a YouTube channel showing live views from the Orion spacecraft, as well as snippets of communication. During this stream, one of the astronauts could be heard first asking for help with network connectivity (IT support staff will be delighted to know that one troubleshooting step involves turning the device off and on) before telling controllers, “I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working.”

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In space nobody can reboot your screen?
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FBI declares suspected Chinese hack of US surveillance system a “major cyber incident” • POLITICO

John Sakellariadis:

»

The FBI last week deemed a recent China-linked cyber intrusion into a sensitive agency surveillance system a “major incident,” meaning it poses significant risks to US national security, according to one congressional aide and two U.S. officials with knowledge of the matter.

The bureau first told Congress on March 4 that it was investigating suspicious activity on an internal agency system that contained “law enforcement sensitive information.” The FBI did not publicly identify who was behind the activity at the time, but POLITICO previously reported that China is suspected.

The FBI determined the intrusion meets the definition of a major incident under a federal data security statute known as FISMA, said the three people. Congress was informed of the decision earlier this week, according to the aide. This person, like others in this report, was granted anonymity because they were not authorised to speak publicly on the investigation.

The determination suggests the hackers successfully compromised swathes of sensitive data stored directly on FBI systems, likely marking a major counterintelligence coup for China. FISMA requires agencies to tell lawmakers within seven days about any digital intrusion it has determined is “likely to result in demonstrable harm” to US national security.

Cynthia Kaiser, the former deputy assistant director of the FBI’s cyber division, said she is not aware of the FBI making any such determination on a hack affecting its own systems since at least 2020.

«

Kash Patel is really showing his mettle and leadership here. (Minor subbing note: in the original story, “U.S.” has full stops for abbreviation but “FBI” does not. Why not? Both are abbreviations.)
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Marmite maker Unilever agrees $44.8bn deal to combine food arm with McCormick • The Guardian

Mark Sweney and Sarah Butler:

»

Unilever has agreed to combine its food business with US-based McCormick in a $44.8bn deal that will give the Marmite-to-Hellmann’s mayonnaise owner majority control of a food empire.

The Anglo-Dutch company will control 65% of the new spin-off, which will combine brands such as Knorr and Pot Noodle with McCormick’s condiments and spices including French’s mustard, Old Bay seasoning and Cholula hot sauce.

However, the combined company will be called McCormick and led by its executives, with senior management representation from the ranks of Unilever’s food business.

Under the agreement, McCormick will pay London-listed Unilever $15.7bn in cash and the equivalent of $29.1bn in shares for a stake in almost all of the Anglo-Dutch company’s food arm.

After the combination, which is forecast to result in $600m (£453m) of annual cost savings by the end of the third year, McCormick will retain its global headquarters in the US and New York stock exchange listing, with an international headquarters at the existing Unilever Foods base in the Netherlands.

Unilever’s food business employs research, development and marketing staff in the UK and has factories making Pot Noodle in Crumlin, Wales, and Hellmann’s, Marmite and Colman’s mustard in Burton-on-Trent.

The companies said savings would come from changes in manufacturing, distribution and on procurement of supplies but said they were yet to confirm how many jobs might be affected and where.

«

So the owner of the iconically British Marmite brand is going to be part-owned by an American company. Some people are going to love this. Some are going to hate it, particularly if it leads to any chances in Marmite’s manufacturing.
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WSJ subscriptions success “not luck” says editor Emma Tucker • Press Gazette

Charlotte Tobitt:

»

Changes introduced by Emma Tucker, the WSJ editor] have included reshaping the investigations team so it could focus more on quicker investigations with news hooks.

Tucker said “that didn’t mean we were abandoning doing investigations that require time and effort” but that previously the team was not set up to jump on to short and medium-term investigations.

Examples of this have included a visual investigation of the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti by federal agents amid immigration raids in Minnesota in January and reporting on what was going on behind the scenes at the Department of Homeland Security led by Kristi Noem.

Tucker said: “She was the first head to roll in Trump Two and we set that reporting in motion.”

Tucker said she has broken down barriers in the newsroom to ensure its “expertise is best leveraged”. Live blogs have been revamped both in terms of making the product experience “much more intuitive” and in the news updates themselves. “We think really hard about how we update it so we’re there, we’re timely, but we’re trying to give real added value with the blog posts that we do. They have been driving an incredible amount of traffic, but also engagement,” Tucker said.

The WSJ is doing more “re-versioning” of well-read stories into other formats such as video, reader Q&As or “takeaways” (bite-sized explanations of WSJ reporting).

…“No one likes change. People hate change. But you have to explain why it’s necessary, and keep explaining it, and keep messaging and then showing the results and trying to create a more positive feedback loop.”

Using the right data was also “critical” to the culture change, Tucker said, in a “very targeted way that was easy for the newsroom to understand, but which enabled the newsroom to orient around key metrics”.

The data dashboard now on display to the newsroom emphasises two metrics: subscriber interest (the number of subscriber uniques) and subscriber engaged time.

“If subscribers are interested and they’re sticking around, then we’re doing something right,” Tucker said.

«

This makes an interesting contrast with the next story, which is also about a well-known news brand and its efforts to adapt to the modern world.
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Wired ends UK print magazine amid shake-up of London staff • Press Gazette

Charlotte Tobitt:

»

Wired will not put out a print magazine in the UK in 2026 as it focuses on global digital subscriber growth.

Seven editorial staff left Wired’s London office at the end of 2025, with the team being rebuilt to focus on audience development roles and some UK and Europe-focused reporting. Global editorial director Katie Drummond told Press Gazette that creating a “sustainable and growing subscription business is the future of Wired. “While other components like advertising and commerce play a really important part, I don’t want Wired to be at the whims of anything that I can’t control the way I can control the journalism.”

A spokesperson said direct-to-publisher subscribers (meaning those who subscribe through Wired rather than a third party) were up 20% in 2025 while new subscribers taking the digital-only option doubled. Wired’s US subscription revenue was up 24% in 2025.

Drummond told Press Gazette that London remains “of paramount importance” to the global editorial operation (which comprises around 120 people, with plans to increase that by at least 10% in 2026). She said: “We made some strategic changes at the end of last year going into this year to better orient this newsroom around what we were doing with Wired globally, and to really think of the London office as a hub for key roles.

“So all of our audience development leadership, for example, is based out of London, because we want to be starting the day strategically with newsletters, social, vertical video – what are we doing across all of these functions? Those decisions should be made and executed on first thing.”

Seven London-based Wired journalists left the business at the end of 2025 including Greg Williams, deputy global editorial director and UK editor-in-chief. Other roles affected included managing editor, global design director, associate editor, science editor, features editor and senior business editor.

…In the UK and Ireland in 2024, the latest available ABC figures, Wired published six issues with an average circulation of 32,404. Of these, 10,080 were individual subscriptions, 10,302 were free distributed copies, 4,838 were single newsstand sales, and 7,399 were via ‘all you can read’ users of services like Apple News+.

«

I make that three times that Wired UK has ceased printing since 1995. The set of people let go sounds basically like “all the people you’d need to run a science or technology magazine”.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A remarkable investigation by Nepal police suggests some climbers were made ill for an insurance scam. CC-licensed photo by Mark Horrell 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. Elevated. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Apple at 50: the roots of a tech revolution • Financial Times

Patrick McGee:

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Vicki Amon-Higa, whom [Steve] Jobs hired in early 1990 from the power utility Florida Power & Light, characterises his approach at the time as “brute force and great people”.

The idea was that you hire geniuses, lock them in a room and apply pressure until brilliant products emerge. Process, by contrast, sounded bureaucratic and stultifying. Process was not just absent from Jobs’ thinking; it was antithetical to it. Amon-Higa says Jobs understood “small q quality” (a narrow focus on product) but did not grasp “big Q quality” (how to enforce standards across the entire organisation).

…She invited her mentor, Noriaki Kano, a quality expert who emphasised customer satisfaction, and Juran — the so-called “architect of quality” whose writings had been promoted by Sarasohn — to speak with NeXT. The impact was profound.

Jobs tended to think that talent was innate, but Kano taught him that people needed to be coached and developed, to bring out their best. Juran, then in his eighties, convinced Jobs to empower the individuals actually doing the work to make improvements and taught him the value, Jobs later said, of “seeing everything as a repetitive process, and to instrument that process, and find out how it’s running”.

He particularly liked that for Juran, quality was just one aspect of a broader system that did not sound stifling. “Dr Juran was one of the few people that I met that had a real down-to-earth approach to it, that didn’t think that quality was the second coming,” Jobs said for a Juran documentary, in late 1991. “He approached it much more scientifically.”

Jobs called Juran’s philosophy “a radically different approach to business processes than the traditional one” — but it was too late for NeXT. Their pipeline of products had no market fit and, by 1993, Jobs was forced to abandon manufacturing.

«

McGee is the author of “Apple in China”, which has been highly praised for its research and writing. This piece traces the origins of Apple’s success in manufacturing back to Japan’s rebirth after World War 2 as a manufacturing giant.
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Everest guides “secretly poisoned” climbers to trigger costly helicopter rescues’ as part of £15m scam • Daily Mail Online

Perkin Amalaraj:

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Guides taking tourists up and down Mount Everest have allegedly been secretly lacing climbers’ food to trigger costly helicopter rescues as part of a £15million insurance scam, according to a new investigation.

Poor weather and patchy communications at the world’s tallest mountain have allegedly led to a cottage industry that sees shifty pilots, guides and doctors charging insurance companies for services not rendered.

According to the Kathmandu Post, the fake rescue racket works by getting a climber to stage a medical emergency. A helicopter is then called and taken to a nearby hospital. An insurance claim is then filed that bears little resemblance to what actually happened.

Nepal Police’s Central Investigation Bureau (CIB) identified two ways this scam is manufactured. The first involved tourists who don’t want to walk all the way back down. Treks can take up to two weeks on foot, so guides tell climbers to fake a medical emergency so that a helicopter comes.

But the second method is far more troubling, and involves tricking climbers into thinking they’re having a medical emergency. Above 3,000m, altitude sickness is common. Symptoms include headaches, tingling in the body’s extremities, and a drop in blood oxygen saturation. In most cases, this can be resolved with rest, hydration or a gradual descent.

But Nepal’s CIB says that some guides and hotel staff are told to terrify tourists into thinking an evacuation to a hospital is the only thing that will save them. If this doesn’t work, investigators found that in some instances, guides tried to induce symptoms by giving tourists suffering mild altitude sickness tablets and excessive water.

In at least one case, baking powder was mixed into tourists’ food to make them physically unwell.

«

An amazing storry, apparently all done by the Nepal Police investigating.
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Lessons from your petrol pump • Financial Times

Tim Harford:

»

In 2002, the economist David Popp published a study of “induced innovation”, tracking the response by inventors to the oil shocks of the 1970s.

The oil price leapt in 1973 and surged further in 1979, before sliding lower throughout the early 1980s. Popp found that patent activity tracked the oil price — for example, there were 10 successful patent applications in the field of solar energy in 1972, but more than 100 in 1974 and about 300 a year in the late 1970s. As the oil price fell back, so did patent activity, with fewer than 50 successful solar patents a year from the mid-1980s onward.

Popp found that a similar story could be told for batteries (a natural complement to solar energy), and patent applications for deriving liquid and gaseous fuels from coal. In each case, the few years of high oil prices led to a few years in which oil-saving patent activity was also high.

Today’s high oil price sends more signals: to find oilfields outside the Gulf region; to build new pipelines and tanker ports that are further from harm; to find ways to defend vulnerable shipping. In fact, there are far too many to list, and that is the point: a price signal — which, of course, is also a monetary incentive — is an invitation to everyone, everywhere, to do things a little differently.

«

There’s plenty more (Harford is always thorough) but the key question seems to be: how long does the price signal have to last before it permeates through all that’s affected?
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Anthropic is having a month • TechCrunch

Connie Loizos:

»

Here’s what happened on Tuesday: When Anthropic pushed out version 2.1.88 of its Claude Code software package, it accidentally included a file that exposed nearly 2,000 source code files and more than 512,000 lines of code — essentially the full architectural blueprint for one of its most important products. A security researcher named Chaofan Shou noticed almost immediately and posted about it on X. Anthropic’s statement to multiple outlets was nonchalant as these things go: “This was a release packaging issue caused by human error, not a security breach.” (Internally, we’d guess things were less measured.)

Claude Code isn’t a minor product. It’s a command-line tool that lets developers use Anthropic’s AI to write and edit code and has become formidable enough to unsettle rivals. According to the WSJ, OpenAI pulled the plug on its video generation product Sora just six months after launching it to the public to refocus its efforts on developers and enterprises — partly in response to Claude Code’s growing momentum.

What leaked was not the AI model itself but the software scaffolding around it — the instructions that tell the model how to behave, what tools to use, and where its limits are. Developers began publishing detailed analyses almost immediately, with one describing the product as “a production-grade developer experience, not just a wrapper around an API.”

Whether this turns out to matter in any lasting way is a question best left to developers. Competitors may find the architecture instructive; at the same time, the field moves fast.

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These Raspberry Pi price hikes are no joke • The Verge

Stevie Bonifield:

»

As of today, the price of the 16GB version of the Raspberry Pi 5 is going up by $100, a price bump that’s almost as much as the original $120 price tag. Driven by the ongoing RAM shortage, Raspberry Pi is raising prices on over a dozen of its bare-bones computers, after previous increases in December and February. The increases range from $11.25 to $150.

In a blog post announcing the price increases, Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton reiterated that they won’t be permanent, stating, “The circumstances in which we find ourselves are challenging, but in the future they will abate. When they do, we will reverse our price increases, and until they do, we will continue to work hard to limit their impact in every way we can.”

«

And, Upton was obliged to point out, this was not an April Fools joke.
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Hackers slipped a trojan into the code library behind most of the internet. Your team is probably affected • VentureBeat

Louis Columbus:

»

Attackers stole a long-lived npm access token belonging to the lead maintainer of axios, the most popular HTTP client library in JavaScript, and used it to publish two poisoned versions that install a cross-platform remote access trojan (RAT). The malicious releases target macOS, Windows, and Linux. They were live on the npm registry for roughly three hours before removal.

Axios gets more than 100 million downloads per week. Wiz reports it sits in approximately 80% of cloud and code environments, touching everything from React front-ends to CI/CD pipelines to serverless functions. Huntress detected the first infections 89 seconds after the malicious package went live and confirmed at least 135 compromised systems among its customers during the exposure window.

…The attacker took over the npm account of @jasonsaayman, a lead axios maintainer, changed the account email to an anonymous ProtonMail address, and published the poisoned packages through npm's command-line interface. That bypassed the project’s GitHub Actions CI/CD pipeline entirely.

The attacker never touched the axios source code. Instead, both release branches received a single new dependency: plain-crypto-js@4.2.1. No part of the codebase imports it. The package exists solely to run a postinstall script that drops a cross-platform RAT onto the developer’s machine.

The staging was precise. Eighteen hours before the axios releases, the attacker published a clean version of plain-crypto-js under a separate npm's account to build publishing history and dodge new-package scanner alerts. Then came the weaponized 4.2.1. Both release branches hit within 39 minutes. Three platform-specific payloads were pre-built. The malware erases itself after execution and swaps in a clean package.json to frustrate forensic inspection.

StepSecurity, which identified the compromise alongside Socket, called it among the most operationally sophisticated supply chain attacks ever documented against a top-10 npm's package.

…Three npm's supply chain compromises in seven months. Every one started with a stolen maintainer credential.

The Shai-Hulud worm hit in September 2025. A single phished maintainer account gave attackers a foothold that self-replicated across more than 500 packages, harvesting npm tokens, cloud credentials, and GitHub secrets as it spread. CISA issued an advisory. GitHub overhauled npm’s entire authentication model in response.

Then in January 2026, Koi Security’s PackageGate research dropped six zero-day vulnerabilities across npm, pnpm, vlt, and Bun that punched through the very defenses the ecosystem adopted after Shai-Hulud. Lockfile integrity and script-blocking both failed under specific conditions. Three of the four package managers patched within weeks. npm closed the report.

Now axios. A stolen long-lived token published a RAT through both release branches despite OIDC, SLSA, and every post-Shai-Hulud hardening measure in place.

«

This would have been very, very serious if it had laasted any longer. It was bad even for the minute it lasted.
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Renewables hit 49.4% of global electricity capacity in 2025 • The Register

Brandon Vigliarolo:

»

It was a strong year for renewable power expansion in 2025, with solar installations helping push renewables to nearly half of global electricity capacity, but that does not mean the world is yet on pace to meet its renewable energy commitments.

The International Renewable Energy Agency’s (IRENA) 2026 Renewable Capacity Statistics report, published on Wednesday, found that renewables dominated new power additions last year, accounting for 85.6% of global capacity expansion. Solar, in turn, was the dominant renewable technology, accounting for nearly three-quarters of last year’s renewable capacity additions.

Those additions totalled 692 GW in 2025, lifting installed renewable capacity by a record 15.5% year over year, IRENA noted. By the end of last year, renewables accounted for 49.4% of global installed electricity capacity, while variable renewable sources such as solar and wind represented roughly 35% of total capacity. 

For reference, it was only in 2023 that renewable energy sources crossed the threshold of generating 30% of the world’s electricity.

As IRENA notes in a press release, renewable energy is back in the spotlight amid the US conflict in Iran causing a spike in fuel prices and energy (i.e., oil) instability. According to IRENA Director General Francesco La Camera, conflicts like the Iranian mess are a perfect reason to push for more renewable adoption. 

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35,000 pints of stolen Guinness, 950 wheels of pilfered cheese: can the UK’s cargo theft crisis be stopped? • The Guardian

Stuart McGurk:

»

Cargo theft operates according to the law of supply and demand. When a truck carrying 400 50-litre kegs of Guinness – the equivalent of 35,000 pints – was stolen from a logistics hub in Northamptonshire in December 2024, it was widely seen as the cause of a nationwide shortage. This wasn’t quite true – the truck was targeted because there was a shortage in the first place – but it only made the scarcity worse, which in turn only made the stolen Guinness more valuable.

The cost of living crisis has made food and beverages an increasingly attractive target, with thefts rising as much as 79% in 2024 according to one report. In October of that year, 950 wheels of premium cheddar were stolen in London, an incident soon dubbed “the grate cheese heist”. (Jamie Oliver asked the public to keep an eye out for “lorryloads of posh cheese”.) Last week, a truck carrying KitKats went missing after setting off from Italy. A spokesperson for Nestlé said criminals had “made a break” with more than 400,000 bars. In some ways, it’s the perfect crime. If stolen cargo isn’t found within the first few hours, it’s as good as gone. It re-enters the supply chain, and, soon after, the evidence will get eaten. At present, Dawber says, olive oil is a popular target. With the value of Italian extra virgin hovering around £10 a litre, the average truckload is worth about £250,000, making it more valuable than most wine.

When accounting for lost revenues, VAT and insurance costs, cargo crime is estimated to cost the UK economy about £700m a year. For freight companies, often operating on minuscule profit margins, the impact can be crippling. Insurance premiums rise with every claim. Excesses are regularly in the thousands. Many haulage companies have to absorb the costs and pay the customer for the goods lost.

For years, the industry has attempted to sound the alarm. One partial remedy, it argues, is maddeningly simple: make freight theft its own crime. (At present, it is categorised as “theft from motor vehicle”, the same offence as nicking a pair of sunglasses from a glovebox.) In parliament last year, Rachel Taylor MP introduced a bill that would do just this, meaning that sentences for criminals could be longer and accurate statistics on the scale of the crime could be collected. A second reading is due to take place next month.

«

Great, and timely, article. There’s a more formal one for the US; less entertaining.
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Half of social-science studies fail replication test in years-long project • Nature

Nicola Jones:

»

A massive seven-year project exploring 3,900 social-science papers has ended with a disturbing finding: researchers could replicate the results of only half of the studies that they tested1.

The conclusions of the initiative, called the Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence (SCORE) project, have been “eagerly awaited by many”, says John Ioannidis, a metascientist at Stanford University in California who was not involved with the programme. The scale and breadth of the project is impressive, he says, but the results are “not surprising”, because they are in line with those from smaller, earlier studies.

Researchers have been investigating a ‘crisis’ in the reliability of scientific results for more than a decade. They’ve found that many scientific experiments can’t be repeated — not just in the social sciences, but also in the biomedical field.

The SCORE findings — derived from the work of 865 researchers poring over papers published in 62 journals and spanning fields including economics, education, psychology and sociology — don’t necessarily mean that science is being done poorly, says Tim Errington, head of research at the Center for Open Science, an institute that co-ordinated part of the project. Of course, some results are not replicable because of either honest mistakes or the rare case of misconduct, he says, but SCORE found that, in many cases, papers simply did not provide enough data or details for experiments to be repeated accurately. Fresh methods or analyses can legitimately lead to distinct results. This means that, rather than take papers at face value, researchers should treat any single study as “a piece of the puzzle”, Errington says.

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The suspicion is that the problem comes straight from the “publish or perish” imperative imposed on so many researchers.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Airlines may have to cut flights inside Europe within a month if jet fuel supplies don’t resume at volume, experts say. CC-licensed photo by Aldas Kirvaitis 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. Unplaned. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

After more than 53 years, humans may finally return to the Moon this week • Ars Technica

Stephen Clark:

»

The two-day countdown for the launch of NASA’s Artemis II mission began Monday evening, with clocks timed for the first of six opportunities in early April to send a crew of four astronauts around the far side of the Moon.

Liftoff from Launch Complex 39B at Kennedy Space Center in Florida is scheduled for a two-hour launch window opening at 6:24 pm EDT (22:24 UTC) on Wednesday. NASA has backup launch opportunities each day through Monday, April 6, or else the mission will have to wait until the end of the month.

Mission managers said Monday that all systems were looking good for launch this week. The weather forecast is favourable, with an 80% chance of acceptable conditions for liftoff Wednesday. The only weather concern at the launch site in Florida is a low chance of rain showers and cloud cover that could present a risk of lightning. But with a two-hour launch window, there should be plenty of time to wait out any scattered storms.

John Honeycutt, chair of NASA’s mission management team, told reporters Monday that there were “no showstoppers” for launch on Wednesday. Ground teams powered up the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft for final checkouts early Tuesday, setting the stage for loading super-cold liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen into the rocket Wednesday morning.

«

So let’s be clear. It’s not a “return to the Moon”. It’s a return near the Moon, doing the same dance that Apollo 8 managed back in December 1968. That’s nearly 60 years of no progress.

Worse: there are good reasons to think the heat shield of this mission is less than perfect. We can hope that’s wrong. But nobody has explained what we’re really doing with this. It’s not new science, it’s not new technology.
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Gmail adds ability to change usernames after 22 years • The Register

Brandon Vigliarolo:

»

If you’re embarrassed by your Gmail address but haven’t wanted to start a new account for fear of losing messages, we have good news. Ahead of Gmail’s 22nd anniversary on Wednesday, Google says it is now letting US users change their account username.

That’s right: You can now swap out that less-than-professional address you registered years ago but still use because it became the de facto hub of your online life back when that joke username still seemed like a good idea.

Google announced the change in a rather brief note on its Keyword blog on Tuesday, only mentioning that it was now available for all Google Account users in the US. This vulture can personally attest to not having the ability available in his account, suggesting that like most other features Google rolls out for its products, this is probably being released gradually. 

If you do have the option to change your Gmail username, you can follow the steps on this linked page to do so.

…Per the help page linked above, your previous Gmail address stays on as an alternate address, and emails will still be received by both, effectively making it an alias for the new account. You can still sign in to Google services using either the old or new address in case you forget what you renamed that 20-year-old account at some point.

«

OK, but they do check that the desired account name isn’t already in use, right? Right? Because there are ever so many ways for this to go wrong. Of course it’s a stupid question, but Google sometimes misses the obvious.
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European jet fuel supplies under threat as Iran war halts flows • Financial Times

Ryohtaroh Satoh and Sylvia Pfeifer:

»

A drop in shipments of jet fuel from the Middle East is prompting warnings of a looming supply crunch for Europe’s aviation industry as the Iran war chokes off cargoes.

European imports of jet fuel are expected to fall to about 420,000 barrels a day this week, down roughly 40% from last week and the lowest level for March since 2022, according to energy data provider Vortexa.

The decline follows the near shutdown of flows through the Strait of Hormuz, a key artery for global fuel shipments that accounted for roughly 40% of Europe’s jet fuel supply before the war.

“Fuel supplies are a major concern,” said one airline industry insider, adding that while supplies had remained “relatively stable over the past ten days”, carriers were in “daily monitoring mode”.

A senior jet fuel manager said European markets could begin to face physical shortages within weeks.

While airlines had until recently been supported by cargoes already en route from the Gulf, which typically take several weeks to arrive, flows from the Middle East have now largely ceased.

Volumes have fallen about 90%, with just over 1mn barrels still in transit at the start of the week, according to Mick Strautmann, an analyst at Vortexa.

Insights Global, which tracks storage levels at key hubs in north-west Europe, said jet fuel inventories had been declining but that levels were still in line with those of February 2024. However, it added that the pace of drawdowns from storage could accelerate as Middle East shipments fall.

…Mylène Scholnick, an adviser to UK aircraft leasing company World Star Aviation, said airlines may cut flights towards the end of April if the fuel shortage persists, with the impact expected to be most acute on short and medium-haul routes in Europe and Asia, where demand is more price-sensitive.

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Impact of online competition on local newspapers: evidence from the introduction of Craigslist • The Review of Economic Studies

Milena Djourelova, Ruben Durante and Gregory Martin:

»

How does competition from online platforms affect the organization, performance, and editorial choices of newspapers? What are the implications of these changes for the information voters are exposed to and for their political choices?

We study these questions using the staggered introduction of Craigslist—the world’s largest online platform for classified advertising—across US counties between 1995 and 2009. This setting allows us to separate the effect of competition for classified advertising from other changes brought about by the Internet, and to compare newspapers that relied more or less heavily on classified ads ex ante.

We find that, following the entry of Craigslist, local newspapers reliant on classified ads experienced a significant decline in the number of management and newsroom staff, including in the number of editors covering politics. These organizational changes led to a reduction in news coverage of politics and resulted in a decline in newspaper readership, particularly among readers with high political interest.

Finally, we document that reduced exposure to local political news was associated with an increase in partisan voting and increased entry and success of ideologically extreme candidates in congressional elections. Taken together, our findings shed light on the determinants of the decline of print media and on its broader implications for democratic politics.

«

So we could draw a straight line and say Craigslist is responsible for Trump, and the current energy crisis? That’s what it feels like. (Though the same dynamic occurred in the UK, without Craigslist.)
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Epic Games layoffs today: Fortnite losses force 20% job cuts • Fast Company

Jennifer Mattson:

»

Video game maker Epic Games, the creator of Fortnite, announced on Tuesday that it is laying off 1,000 employees, or about 20% of its workforce. (In 2023, Epic cut 830 jobs, or 16% of its workforce at that time, per Variety.)

“I’m sorry we’re here again,” Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said in a note to Epic employees, which the company posted on X. “The downturn in Fortnite engagement that started in 2025 means we’re spending significantly more than we’re making, and we have to make major cuts to keep the company funded.”

He continued: “This layoff, together with over $500 million of identified cost savings in contracting, marketing, and closing some open roles, puts us in a more stable place.”

Fast Company reached out to Epic, which had no further comment.

The note said some of the challenges the company is facing were industry-wide. Those challenges included lower growth, weaker spending, and tougher cost economics; current consoles selling fewer units than past generations did; and games competing for time against other entertainment. Sweeney said the layoffs are not due to AI.

«

Once upon a time Fortnite was huge. Now it’s not. Times change, and with them tastes. Epic seems not to have been able to adapt.
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Hollywood work dried up. So they’re taking survival jobs • L.A. Material

Alex Zaragoza:

»

Across the entertainment industry, countless creatives are in the same boat, taking jobs bartending, dog walking, or playing fake patients at hospitals, all the while confronting an existential crisis. The landscape is bleak and getting bleaker. Threads from out-of-work entertainment workers asking for advice on jobs pop up on Reddit and other message boards regularly, their tenor growing more defeated as time wears on. Studio executives — the ones who still have jobs, anyway — may be raking in multimillion dollar salaries and bonuses as many studios turn massive profits, but it can feel like everyone else is holding on for dear life.

The hope is that the job engine of Hollywood in Los Angeles is facing a slump — and not an irreversible crash.
The punches have come one after another in recent years. There was the COVID pandemic, which led to nearly a million jobs lost; the 2023 double strike of the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA; and the 2025 wildfires. Through that also came the proliferation of AI, production moving out of state to take advantage of cost-saving subsidies offered elsewhere, and major studio mergers threatening to create a monopoly that will undoubtedly make matters worse. The result has been fewer TV shows and films being made, and a stream of layoffs across the industry. It has all depressingly accounted for 41,000 industry jobs lost in just two years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Last year, FilmLA, the film office for the City and County of Los Angeles, reported a 13.2% decline in production between July and September of 2025 from the previous year. The Writers Guild of America reported a 40% decrease in jobs in the 2023-2024 television season. International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), the union that oversees stagehands, craftspeople, and artisans in film and television production, saw 18,000 jobs disappear from 2022 to 2024. Meanwhile, SAG-AFTRA went back into negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) last month, with a key goal of protecting members from losing work to AI. 

Add it all up and what has been a jobs drought the last couple years now stands to become a career-ending wasteland, leaving the creative workforce scrambling to figure out how the hell they’re going to get by.

«

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Solar panels at Lidl? Plug-in versions set to appear in shops within months • This is Money

Lucy Evans:

»

Eco households who want to distance themselves from fossil fuel energy, which is susceptible to market fluctuations, can install traditional solar panels.

They use daylight to create electricity for your home, which means your family will be less reliant on expensive fossil fuel energy to power your lives.

But they are expensive to install – around £6,000 on average, with £350 a year in energy bill savings, according to Energy Saving Trust. So despite the potential savings, some families shy away from such a purchase due to the thousands of pounds needed upfront to install the panels.

These plug-in versions, however, are far cheaper and can be put on a balcony or in an outdoor space such as a garden instead of being fixed permanently on a roof.

They can be plugged into a mains socket like any other electronic device to provide a home with free solar power.

These cheaper versions are already available in other European countries. In Germany, for example, almost half a million new devices are plugged in every year.

The Government says this technology is “easy to install” and will allow consumers to ‘significantly cut energy bills’.

«

The problem with introducing these in the UK (Germany has wide deployment) is the difference in electrical wiring systems between the two countries. The UK’s ring mains system is different from the spur systems used in Germany, and that creates problems over power flow.

Amusing too that the story has a link to this guide of its own in the middle: “Step by step, what to do NOW to stop the Middle East energy crisis leaving you penniless. This is how to get the best deals on petrol, mortgages and household energy and stay afloat”. Well, at least someone’s taking it seriously.
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Railway clock glitch causes false delays and payouts • Daily News Hungary

Hetzmann Mercédesz:

»

Hungary’s switch to daylight saving time on Sunday morning caused an unexpected technical issue at the state railway company, MÁV. While most digital systems automatically adjusted to the new time, MÁV’s passenger information system failed to update accordingly, leading to widespread confusion.

For several hours after the clock change, the system incorrectly registered trains as being delayed by around 60 minutes, even when services were running on time or with only minimal delays, Telex reported.

The issue became particularly visible on the Vonatinfó platform, where the map appeared flooded with delay indicators. At first glance, it suggested that nearly the entire Hungarian rail network was experiencing significant disruption:

In reality, no such nationwide breakdown had occurred. The problem was that the system “forgot” to advance the time, which resulted in incorrect delay calculations being shown to passengers.

The glitch had an unexpected upside for some travellers.

Because MÁV’s system interpreted the situation as widespread delays exceeding 20 minutes, it automatically began issuing compensation payments.

Under the railway’s policy, passengers are entitled to partial refunds if their train is significantly delayed. Due to the error, even those travelling on time or with minor delays were flagged as eligible and received compensation.

…By late Sunday morning, MÁV issued an official statement confirming that an “IT error” had caused the incorrect delay reports following the clock change. The company said the issue was resolved within a few hours, and the system has since been restored to normal operation. Importantly, the railway company clarified that passengers who received compensation due to the error will not be required to return the money.

«

Still – still! – after all these years there are systems which fail to update when the clocks change. True, it’s not easy. But that’s why they get paid the medium-scale bucks.
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Top Brussels official urges Europeans to work from home and drive less • POLITICO

James Fernyhough, Elena Giordano, Ben Munster and Ben Makuch:

»

The European Commission has urged people to work from home, drive and fly less, and for EU countries to urgently roll out renewables, as it warned of a prolonged energy crisis as a result of the conflict in the Gulf.

In a speech with echoes of the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, EU energy chief Dan Jørgensen said Europe was facing a “very serious situation” with no clear end in sight.

“Even if … peace is here tomorrow, still we will not go back to normal in the foreseeable future,” he said, following an extraordinary meeting of the EU’s 27 energy ministers on Tuesday to discuss the crisis.

“The more you can do to save oil, especially diesel, especially jet fuel, the better we are off,” Jørgensen said, confirming an earlier report by POLITICO that Brussels wanted Europeans to travel less.

He urged member countries to follow the advice of the International Energy Agency, which he said included “work from home where possible, reduce highway speed limits by ten kilometres [an hour, ie 6mph], encourage public transport, alternate private car access … increase car sharing and adopt efficient driving practices.”

Longer term, he urged EU countries to double down on building more renewables, saying “this must be the time we finally turn the tide and truly become energy independent.”

Tuesday’s talks between ministers ended with no concrete proposals, although Jørgensen promised the Commission would be announcing a package of EU-level measures in the near future.

His comments come as fears grow that the world faces a major energy crisis exceeding even the 1970s oil shock that could have global economic ramifications comparable to the coronavirus pandemic.

«

Unlike the pandemic, though, there’s absolutely no question of this being anything to do with China.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The polling company YouGov withdrew a survey about young people’s church attendance last week. The reason why is concerning: it’s bots. CC-licensed photo by barnyz 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. Unbelievable. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

‘Soon publishers won’t stand a chance’: literary world in struggle to detect AI-written books • The Guardian

Amelia Hill:

»

The news last week that Mia Ballard’s “femgore” horror novel Shy Girl could be up to 78% AI-generated, however, has forced literary agents and publishers alike to consider whether sharp eyes alone can detect AI-generated work.

“The question of how Shy Girl slipped through Hachette’s net is something the publisher has to answer themselves, but in reality, it was only a matter of time before this happened,” said Anna Ganley, the chief executive of the Society of Authors.

Wildfire, a UK imprint of Hachette, had published Shy Girl in November 2025. It was due for US publication in April, but the controversy led to its UK discontinuation and US cancellation earlier this month. Ballard has denied using AI to write Shy Girl, telling the New York Times, which first reported the story, that an acquaintance she hired to edit a self-published version of the novel had used it.

An editor at one of the “big five” publishing houses said a “cold shiver went down my spine” when the Shy Girl story broke. “It really is a case of ‘there but for the grace of God go I,’” they said.

“It’s an issue publishers are keenly aware of. We make it very clear to authors what we expect, we get them to sign contracts and we run their work through multiple AI detection tools, but we know all this is fallible.

“Hence the cold shiver: if an author is determined to use AI, then cover their tracks, there’s very little we can do.”

Prof Patrick Juola, a US computer scientist known for his work on authorship attribution, agreed. “I don’t want to call AI detection tools a scam, but it’s a technology that simply doesn’t work.”

He likened the failure to antibiotic resistance: “AI is a learning system continually upgraded by its manufacturers. If there was a detection technology that worked, then people would simply build better AI tools to fool it.”

«

The antibiotic resistance analogy is a good one.
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Running on empty: Australia’s hard truths on security • The New Daily

Amy Remeikis:

»

It was the right [wing Australian political parties] that derailed Australia’s energy transition, that prioritised fossil fuels above the nation, that fought reality and convinced a slew of Australians it was common sense to put their faith in a finite resource that was not only contributing to killing the planet, but causing harm to millions in the fights over who controlled it.

It is a fantasy to think that any nation that does not control its energy supply has security. Australia could have been well on its way to securing its energy, if John Howard [of the centre-right Liberal party] and his ilk hadn’t had a tantrum over a changing world, and succumbed to their desires to keep everything the same.

The Morrison government [Liberal party 2018-2022] gave instant tax write-offs to encourage the take-up of big dumb utes [SUVs: “ute” = utility vehicle], while fighting against vehicle emission standards and delaying the take-up of EVs.

The agriculture industry was not encouraged to move away from its reliance on diesel. A general ennui swept middle Australia, lulled by the right into fighting for its own interests.

Nor is [the centre-left party] Labor blameless. Instead of fighting for science and for the future, it took defeats over the carbon price and emissions trading scheme and assumed the only way to beat them was to join them.

Neither party has seen fit to unhook Australia from US foreign policy, and Anthony Albanese [leader of the Labor party, now in power] was one of the first leaders in the world to throw his support behind the American and Israeli decision to bomb Iran, despite not knowing of it in advance, its justification, its legality or even its objectives.

…Australia is no closer to a serious conversation about energy security, even with this latest crisis.

The opposition won’t push the government on it, because that would reveal its major role as a wrecker for politics’ sake in the past three decades. Angus Taylor [leader of Australia’s now-in-opposition Liberal party] can’t even spearhead the “how will you get fuel to Australians?” conversation, because of his own previous culpability in not only derailing the energy transition, but because he decided to store Australia’s fuel reserves in Texas and Louisiana to help strengthen our relationship with the US.

«

It is an incredible irony that Trump’s impetuous and badly advised Iranian adventure may finally get a lot of countries to face up to their reliance on oil and gas, and to move away from it as fast as possible. Strong medicine never tastes good, though, and no politician wants to be the one administering it.
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I decompiled the White House’s new app • Thereallo

Thereallo:

»

The White House released an app on the App Store and Google Play. They posted a blog about it: “Unparalleled access to the Trump Administration.”

It took a few minutes to pull the APKs with ADB, and threw them into JADX.
Here is everything I found.

It’s a React Native app built with Expo (SDK 54), running on the Hermes JavaScript engine. The backend is WordPress with a custom REST API. The app was built by an entity called “forty-five-press” according to the Expo config.
The actual app logic is compiled into a 5.5 MB Hermes bytecode bundle. The native Java side is just a thin wrapper.

…The app has a WebView for opening external links. Every time a page loads in this WebView, the app injects a JavaScript snippet. …It hides: Cookie banners; GDPR consent dialogs; OneTrust popups; privacy banners; login walls; signup walls; upsell prompts; paywall elements; CMP (Consent Management Platform) boxes.

It forces body { overflow: auto !important } to re-enable scrolling on pages where consent dialogs lock the scroll. Then it sets up a MutationObserver to continuously nuke any consent elements that get dynamically added.

So: an official United States government app is injecting CSS and JavaScript into third-party websites to strip away their cookie consent dialogs, GDPR banners, login gates, and paywalls.

[And] …Has a full GPS tracking pipeline compiled in that polls [the phone’s location] every 4.5 minutes in the foreground and 9.5 minutes in the background, syncing lat/lng/accuracy/timestamp to OneSignal’s servers.

«

This is clearly thrown together by a relatively inexperienced development house – it loads some Javascript from a totally random user’s Github page, which if compromised would compromise everyone using the app. I haven’t seen an analysis of the iOS version, but it’s probably a work of equal knife-and-fork programming, though one would hope that iOS’s stronger permissions settings would prevent some of the more egregious behaviour.

Every time you think this administration can’t get worse, it does something worse.
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When Jimmy Carter was president, he had a plan to.. seize Kharg Island • X

Shashank Joshi is The Economist’s defence editor, and unearthed a fun document at the CIA’s clippings library:

»

Fun story from 1980: Carter’s supposed plan to seize Kharg island. “The plan was originally designed to compensate for not getting the hostages, kind of a tit for’ tat,” explained a top source. “They’d have the hostages; we’d have their key oil depot.”

«

This is the document – in fact a clipping of a newspaper report. As Joshi points out, times have changed: back in February 1980 Carter wanted better ground pictures of the target, so ordered a spy satellite to be shifted to cover it.

That took four months. Ultimately they decided it was too risky. (The whole discussion under the post is very worthwhile. One hopes there are some people left in the US military who know how to find 46-year-old documents, if journalists on X can.)
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Sony shuts down nearly its entire memory card business due to Flash memory shortage • PetaPixel

Jaron Schneider:

»

The global shortage of solid state memory has claimed its first photographic victim, as Sony has announced that it is suspending fulfillment of all orders for nearly its entire SD and CFexpress memory card product lines.

Sony Japan published the notice on its website on March 27:

»

Thank you for your continued patronage of Sony products.

Due to the global shortage of semiconductors (memory) and other factors, it is anticipated that supply will not be able to meet demand for CFexpress memory cards and SD memory cards for the foreseeable future. Therefore, we have decided to temporarily suspend the acceptance of orders from our authorized dealers and from customers at the Sony Store from March 27, 2026 onwards.

Regarding the resumption of order acceptance, we will consider it while monitoring the supply situation and will announce it separately on the product information page.

«

The suspension includes all of Sony’s memory card lines, including CFexpress Type A, CFexpress Type B, and SD cards. The 240GB, 480GB, 960GB, and 1920GB capacity Type A cards have been suspended, as have the 480GB and 240GB Type B cards. The full gamut of Sony’s high-end SD cards has also been suspended, including the 256GB, 128GB, and 64GB TOUGH-branded cards and the lower-end 512GB, 256GB, 128GB, and 256GB plainly-branded Sony cards, which cap out at V60 speeds. Even Sony’s lower-end, V30 128GB and 64GB SD cards have been suspended, showcasing that the SSD shortage affects all types of solid state, not just the high-end ones.

«

Hope you weren’t planning to take any photographs of all the conflicts on your professional camera.
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UK ‘weeks away’ from medicine shortages if Iran war continues, experts say • The Guardian

Julia Kollewe:

»

Britain is “a few weeks away” from medicine shortages ranging from painkillers to cancer treatment if the Iran war continues, according to experts, while drug prices could also rise.

The conflict has disrupted the supply of a myriad of crucial raw materials, including oil, gas, crop fertiliser and helium – and health essentials could be next.

David Weeks, the Texas-based director of supply chain risk management at the analytics group Moody’s, said: “It’s the perfect storm. We have the conflict in the Gulf that caused the strait of Hormuz to shut down, and India is known as the pharmacy of the world. They produce a lot of the generic [off-patent] drugs and APIs [active pharmaceutical ingredients]. With the geopolitical situation, it’s harder and harder to get those out.”

With airports in Dubai, Doha and Abu Dhabi initially closed and now operating a limited schedule, pharmaceutical companies have had to reroute their shipments via air, and some are now relying on sea transport, lengthening journey times.

Shipping – the main route for most medicines – is also under strain because of the near total closure of the strait of Hormuz.

“We’re not in a crisis currently but it’s still a serious situation,” said Mark Samuels, the chief executive of Medicines UK, which represents manufacturers of the cheap, off-patent drugs known as generics that make up 85% of medications used by the NHS.

He said that if the conflict dragged on then drug shortages could emerge in only a few weeks’ time. Medical distributors typically stock six to eight weeks of stocks to avoid shortfalls; while suppliers to hospitals in England have to hold eight weeks’ worth.

«

It seems that every crisis – the Suez blockage, the RAM shortage, now the strait of Hormuz – makes us discover that the western world is hugely dependent on a few crucial chokepoints which we just assume are always going to work fine.
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Young men, bad data and moral panic • Chris Curtis

Chris Curtis:

»

Last week, YouGov retracted a poll suggesting church attendance had risen sharply among younger people in England and Wales. The poll, published as part of a Bible Society report called Quiet Revival, claimed that the share of young people going to church had jumped from 4% in 2018 to 16% in 2024.

It was later withdrawn because of what YouGov described as “a number of respondents who we can now identify as fraudulent”. I should say at the outset that I think YouGov deserves real credit for how it responded to questions about their research. They investigated what went wrong, admitted the problem, and were transparent about the findings. And the problem they are grappling with here is very far from being just a YouGov issue, but an industry-wide one, and one with wide ranging consequences.

…YouGov began polling when the internet was a very different place. More people were asking Jeeves than Googling, Charlie had not yet been born, let alone bitten anyone’s finger, and if you tried to make a phone call while someone else was online you were greeted by that dreadful dial-up screech.

And since then, a new problem has been growing fast: fake accounts set up to harvest survey incentives. We called them “bots”, but in practice they are often just large numbers of fake or semi-automated accounts, controlled by one person, all trying to extract those payments at scale.

There have always been people on the internet trying to game any system with a cash reward attached to it. And like everyone else online, research agencies have always had tools to try to catch and block people who are playing the system. But AI has made it much easier to do this at scale, and much harder to spot who is real and who is not.

So what has this got to do with young men?

If you are setting up these fake accounts, you want to be invited to the most surveys, so that you can make the most money. And if you want to be invited to the most surveys, you set those accounts up claiming to belong to a demographic that is underrepresented on panels.

And the most underrepresented group is almost always young men… If you believed every headline, you would think the average 24-year-old man was attending church in the morning, investing in crypto by lunch, and overthrowing liberal democracy by teatime.

«

Curtis (who explains that he worked in polling 2015-2024, including at YouGov between 2015 and 2020) points out that polling definitely has a problem. But if polling has a problem, then all of us have a bigger problem: we can’t know what is true.
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Analysis: EVs just outsold petrol cars in EU for first time ever • Carbon Brief

Molly Lempriere:

»

Sales of electric vehicles (EVs) overtook standard petrol cars in the EU for the first time in December 2025, according to new figures released by industry group the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA). 

The figures show that registrations of battery EVs – sometimes referred to as BEVs, or “pure EVs” – reached 217,898, up 51% year-on-year from December 2024, as shown in the chart below. 

Meanwhile, sales of standard petrol cars in the bloc fell 19% year-on-year, from 267,834 in December 2024 to 216,492 in December 2025. (Note that this definition, from ACEA, excludes “hybrid” cars that only run on petrol, but also have a small battery.)

Overall in 2025, EVs reached 17.4% of the market share in the bloc, up from 13.6% the previous year. 

(EVs run purely from a battery that is charged from an external source, plug-in hybrids have both a battery that can be charged and an internal combustion engine, while regular hybrids cannot be plugged in, but have a smaller battery that is charged from the engine or braking.) 

According to ACEA, 1,880,370 new battery-electric cars were registered last year, with the four biggest markets – Germany (+43.2%), the Netherlands (+18.1%), Belgium (+12.6%), and France (+12.5%) – accounting for 62% of registrations. 

«

That doesn’t include diesel cars, of course, or anything happening in trucks. But as fuel prices rise, EVs are going to look increasingly attractive to anyone who can find a way to buy one and charge it cheaply.
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Exposé of parasite SEO firm Clickout Media removed from Google • Press Gazette

Dominic Ponsford:

»

A Press Gazette investigation into parasite SEO firm Clickout Media has been removed from Google’s search index after a spurious legal complaint.

On Wednesday (25 March), Press Gazette revealed how UK-based Clickout Media has bought a number of news websites in order to exploit their reputations in Google and promote online casinos.

In some cases, journalists have been fired and replaced with AI-powered writers. Some sites were removed from Google’s search results as a result of Press Gazette’s reporting, effectively killing the sites off.

Now Press Gazette’s own reporting of this issue has been removed from the Google archive after a bogus copyright complaint.

A search of the exact Press Gazette headline: “The SEO parasites buying, exploiting and ultimately killing online newsbrands” does not bring the article up.

A note at the bottom of the Google search results page reveals for this query states: “In response to multiple complaints that we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 2 results from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaints that caused the removals at LumenDatabase.org: Complaint, Complaint.”

According to the Lumen Database, a public archive of legal complaints sent to internet platforms, the article was removed by Google following a complaint sent via the “US Hub” of an unnamed “private” entity. This suggests the complaint originated outside the US.

The spurious and completely ungrounded complaint suggested Press Gazette’s entirely original investigation infringed the copyright of a 2024 article on The Verge about a similar topic (even though The Verge is not the complainant).

«

The right to please, please, please be forgotten.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Some schools in the US are rethinking their use of computers such as Chromebooks. CC-licensed photo by Virginia Department of Education 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. Calculated. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Trump runs out of options • Comment Is Freed

Lawrence Freedman:

»

It is hard to convey the gloom that has overtaken Washington. All the structures that are vital to crisis management have either been attenuated or disbanded. There is hardly anyone left on the National Security Council staff. A friend described an empty State Department where you could hear your own foot steps. Marco Rubio is involved in the decision-making but he has neglected to acquire the professional staff assessments that should inform such decisions (see this from Dan Drezner).

The military part of the Pentagon still functions, but the civilian part has been purged.

…The war has been unpopular from the start and it is getting more so. The inflationary effects of the war are already biting and if some vital supplies stay trapped in the Gulf the pain will soon get worse. Without a quick resolution of the war, many Republicans take for granted a hammering at the mid-terms.

Against this backdrop there are unsurprising reports that Trump is fed up with the war and wants to end it as quickly as possible. His normal ploy is to declare a stunning victory and move on. He has in fact been trying this since early March and still talks about the war being ahead of schedule, at least in terms of the US and Israel running out of things to bomb. But as much as he’d like to walk away this would mean leaving behind a mess in the Gulf. In the rest of this post I’ll look at the prospects for a negotiated settlement, further military escalation, and the possibility that the US will retreat without a resolution.

…This is the conclusion that America’s allies fear. The US does enough to wound the regime but it hangs on. The regime finds itself with leverage which it intends to exploit, both to get regional states to acknowledge its power and provide an extra source of finance. If the US does not have good ideas about how to open the Strait militarily it would be surprising if European and Gulf states, even acting together, would have more success.

If the US walks away from a problem it created because it has become too difficult, then this point could go down as one in which US influence took a steep decline. The Gulf states know all about past efforts to ‘eliminate’ Iranian proxies, and how these somehow managed to survive and recover. They have been shocked by Iranian strikes against them, so they are not confident of a deal with Tehran, yet can no longer rely on the US. This is bound to lead to some policy reappraisals. In the short term while they might explore options for getting open the Strait they will also need to develop ways of getting round the current restrictions. All will be expensive and time-consuming and add to the international bill.

«

Subscribing to (Sam and Lawrence) Freedman’s Substack is very cheap, and provides excellent insights. Nothing here is positive.
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Apple discontinues the Mac Pro with no plans for future hardware • 9to5Mac

Chance Miller:

»

It’s the end of an era: Apple has confirmed to 9to5Mac that the Mac Pro is being discontinued. It has been removed from Apple’s website as of Thursday afternoon. The “buy” page on Apple’s website for the Mac Pro now redirects to the Mac’s homepage, where all references have been removed.

Apple has also confirmed to 9to5Mac that it has no plans to offer future Mac Pro hardware.

The Mac Pro has lived many lives over the years. Apple released the current Mac Pro industrial design in 2019 alongside the Pro Display XDR (which was also discontinued earlier this month). That version of the Mac Pro was powered by Intel, and Apple refreshed it with the M2 Ultra chip in June 2023. It has gone without an update since then, languishing at its $6,999 price point even as Apple debuted the M3 Ultra chip in the Mac Studio last year.
With that in mind, the Mac Studio is clearly set up to be the ‘pro’ desktop Mac of the future in Apple’s lineup.

«

The “pro” always used to be the top-end version to which one could add graphics cards and other extras comparatively easily; the best example was the G4, where one side latched down to give access to the internals.

But the desktop market is shrinking, and has been for years; it was 80/20 in favour of laptops about 15 years ago, and nothing’s taking it in the other direction. For a while Apple has had four desktop products: the Mac mini, the iMac, the Mac Studio and the Mac Pro. That’s at least one too many, and the Pro was just a Studio with a different case. So now it’s dead.
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FBI confirms hackers targeted Kash Patel’s personal emails • POLITICO

Maggie Miller and John Sakellariadis:

»

The FBI on Friday confirmed that hackers targeted the personal emails of Director Kash Patel, hours after an Iranian government-linked hacking group posted documents and images online, claiming to have stolen them from Patel.

In a statement, the FBI confirmed the agency was “aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information, and we have taken all necessary steps to mitigate potential risks associated with this activity.”

“The information in question is historical in nature and involves no government information,” the FBI added. The statement did not include details on who was behind the attack. “The FBI will continue to pursue the actors responsible, support victims, and share actionable intelligence in defense of networks,” it said.

Earlier in the day, Iran-linked hacking group Handala claimed to have hacked Patel’s email and published several pictures of the director, including one showing him brandishing a cigar and another that appears to be his personal resume. Most emails are dated between 2012 and 2014, though there is at least one from 2022, according to files posted by Handala on Telegram and reviewed by POLITICO.

In a post on Thursday, also reviewed by POLITICO, Handala claimed to have breached an FBI network, but did not provide details on what information may have been accessed.

Handala has recently been linked to a high-profile cyberattack against a U.S. company. Last week, the DOJ said the group was responsible for a hack of Michigan-based medical device manufacturer Stryker, which wiped roughly 200,000 devices and exfiltrated large amounts of data from the company.

«

Patel got hacked because he used the same password for his personal email as on other sites, and so when those sites get hacked, your password is in there. Quite probably it was hashed, but if you’re the Iranian government hackers then you’re going to put some effort into digging Patel’s email/password pair out of a big data dump and decrypting it.

Obviously hacking isn’t good. But Patel is such a pompous idiot that one hopes it takes him down a peg or two: he has nobody to blame but himself.
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What AI hypists miss • Persuasion

Francis Fukuyama:

»

Recently I heard a presentation by an engineer from OpenAI about the incredible transformations that will occur once we get to artificial general intelligence (AGI), or even superintelligence. He said that this will quickly solve many of the world’s problems: GDP growth rates could rise to 10, 15, even 20% per year, diseases will be cured, education revolutionized, and cities in the developing world will be transformed with clean drinking water for everyone.

I happen to know something about the latter issue. I’ve been teaching cases over the past decade on why South Asian cities like Hyderabad and Dhaka have struggled with providing municipal water. The reason isn’t that we don’t know what an efficient water system looks like, or lack the technology to build it. Nor is it a simple lack of resources: multilateral development institutions have been willing to fund water projects for years.

The obstacles are different, and are entirely political, social, and cultural. Residents of these cities have the capacity to pay more for their water, but they don’t trust their governments not to waste resources on corruption or incompetent management. Businesses don’t want the disruption of pervasive infrastructure construction, and many cities host “water mafias” that buy cheap water and resell it at extortionate prices to poor people. These mafias are armed and ready to use violence against anyone challenging their monopolies. The state is too weak to control them, or to enforce the very good laws they already have on their books.

It is hard to see how even the most superintelligent AI is going to help solve these problems. And this points to a central conceit that plagues the whole AI field: a gross overestimation of the value of intelligence by itself to solve problems.

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This would be enough on its own, but the post then goes on to explain the ways to solve the real challenges that are much more complicated in the real world than “Hey ChatGPT, how do I get water from underground to the surface?” Immediate subscribe. (Via John Naughton.)
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Claude’s popularity is forcing it to hit the brakes on users • Business Insider

Brent Griffiths:

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All of that conquering is starting to stretch Claude thin.

Earlier last week, Anthropic adjusted its usage limits for Claude free, Pro, and Max subscribers. While weekly limits don’t change, it means users will approach their cap more quickly when they are using Claude during peak hours, which Anthropic defines as between 5 am to 11 am Pacific Time.

“We’ve landed a lot of efficiency wins to offset this, but ~7% of users will hit session limits they wouldn’t have before, particularly for pro tiers,” Thariq Shihipar, who works on Claude, wrote on X. “If you run token-intensive background jobs, shifting them to off-peak hours will stretch your session limits further.”

“I know this was frustrating,” Shihipar wrote. “We’re continuing to invest in scaling efficiently. I’ll keep you posted on progress.”

Anthropic has seen a surge in mainstream interest since CEO Dario Amodei refused to grant the Pentagon unfettered access to the company’s AI models. Amodei has previously said the company’s core focus is its enterprise business.

Like its competitors, Anthropic is experiencing growing pains as it tries to balance out its available compute. The reality of tools like OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent, is that users can tap into the full potential of AI models like never before. At the same time, the explosion of agents means users are blowing through compute like never before.

OpenAI announced earlier this week that it is jettisoning Sora, its once-popular TikTok-esque AI video generation app, as it refocuses its compute on core services.

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One suspects there’s more of this retrenching to come. Data centres are hard and slow to build, while demand is going up exponentially, at a guess.
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Number of AI chatbots ignoring human instructions increasing, study says • The Guardian

Robert Booth:

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AI models that lie and cheat appear to be growing in number with reports of deceptive scheming surging in the last six months, a study into the technology has found.

AI chatbots and agents disregarded direct instructions, evaded safeguards and deceived humans and other AI, according to research funded by the UK government-funded AI Security Institute (AISI). The study, shared with the Guardian, identified nearly 700 real-world cases of AI scheming and charted a five-fold rise in misbehaviour between October and March, with some AI models destroying emails and other files without permission.

The snapshot of scheming by AI agents “in the wild”, as opposed to in laboratory conditions, has sparked fresh calls for international monitoring of the increasingly capable models and come as Silicon Valley companies aggressively promote the technology as a economically transformative. Last week the UK chancellor also launched a drive to get millions more Britons using AI.

The study, by the Centre for Long-Term Resilience (CLTR), gathered thousands of real-world examples of users posting interactions on X with AI chatbots and agents made by companies including Google, OpenAI, X and Anthropic. The research uncovered hundreds of examples of scheming.

Previous research has largely focused on testing AI’s behaviour in controlled conditions. Earlier this month the AI safety research company Irregular found agents would bypass security controls or use cyber-attack tactics to reach their goals without being told they could do so.

Dan Lahav, Irregular’s cofounder, said: “AI can now be thought of as a new form of insider risk.”

In one case unearthed in the CLTR research, an AI agent named Rathbun tried to shame its human controller who blocked them from taking a certain action. Rathbun wrote and published a blog accusing the user of “insecurity, plain and simple” and trying “to protect his little fiefdom”.

In another example, an AI agent instructed not to change computer code “spawned” another agent to do it instead.

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There is always the underlying problem that we don’t really know what “rules” these systems are operating under. So they do things that we think are precluded by the rules; they don’t perceive those rules. (Thanks Ian C for the link.)
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Chromebook remorse: tech backlash at schools extends beyond phones • The New York Times

Natasha Singer:

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The coronavirus pandemic only increased school reliance on tech tools. In 2021, Chromebook shipments to schools more than doubled to nearly 16.8 million, compared with shipments in 2016, according to Futuresource Consulting, a market research firm.

When [Inge] Esping [the principal of McPherson Middle School in McPherson, Kansas] took over as principal in 2022, she worried that rampant tech use was hindering learning. So the school banned student cellphones.

Online bullying and disciplinary incidents quickly decreased, she said. But online distractions continued.

Some students became so hooked on playing video games on their Chromebooks that teachers had difficulty getting them to concentrate on their schoolwork, administrators and teachers said. Students also sent mean Gmail messages or set up shared Google Docs to bully classmates with comments. Hundreds of children logged on to Zoom meetings where they made fun of their peers, teachers and students said.

The school blocked Spotify and YouTube on school laptops. Then administrators stopped students from messaging one another on school Gmail. Even then, some educators said they were spending so much time policing student Chromebook use that it was detracting from teaching. Some parents complained their children were spending hours playing video games on their school-issued devices.

Although the idea of taking back students’ Chromebooks seemed unorthodox, given U.S. schools’ deep reliance on Google’s sprawling education platform, the middle school went ahead. The changes took effect in January.

On one recent morning, school formally began with the Pledge of Allegiance, broadcast over school loudspeakers. Homeroom teachers then led group sessions on organizational and interpersonal skills to help children navigate life without their own laptops. Homeroom topics have included tips for students on using paper planners for school assignments and doing homework during school hours. (Students who want to practice things like extra math problems online can borrow Chromebooks from the school library to take home.)

Teachers have also taught students how to play board and card games like Scattergories and Uno.

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This does all seem eminently sensible. There’s plenty of time to learn how to use computers (and phones) outside school. The purpose of school, though, isn’t to learn how to use them.
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Balancer Labs to shut down following $110m exploit, co-founder says in DAO post • CoinDesk

Shaurya Malwa:

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Balancer Labs, the corporate entity behind the Balancer decentralized exchange, is shutting down after a 2025 exploit created ongoing legal and financial strain, though the protocol will remain online in a leaner form.

The project’s total value locked has fallen about 95% from a 2021 peak of nearly $3.5bn to $157m, prompting an aggressive restructuring that ends BAL emissions, winds down veBAL governance and redirects 100% of protocol fees to the DAO treasury.

Essential staff will move to a new Balancer OpCo, the product scope will narrow to a handful of core pool types and non-EVM expansion, and a BAL buyback aims to give tokenholders what the founder calls a fair exit if they do not support the revamped protocol.

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The story that follows it below is pretty much gobbledygook to any normal person who isn’t immersed in the whole DeFi (decentralised finance) space. But my eyes keep going back to the “$110m exploit”, and my thoughts keep on asking: how on earth are you still going, since this thing only generates about $4m in fees annually?

Still haven’t seen anything to persuade me that any of this has true utility which hasn’t already been covered by conventional banking and its carefully secured offshoots.
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Technology weakens our minds. It’s time to resist • The New York Times

Cal Newport:

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Research from Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, indicates that our attention spans are about one-third as long as they were in 2004, with the biggest drops happening around 2012. Long-running surveys reveal that the share of US adults who struggle with basic reading or math has risen markedly over the past decade, while the percentage of 18-year-olds who report difficulty thinking and concentrating jumped in the same period. A Financial Times article about these findings proposed a shocking but relevant question: “Have humans passed peak brain power?”

Many of these declines in cognitive skills became notable starting in the mid-2010s, exactly the period when smartphones became ubiquitous and the digital attention economy exploded in size. An increasing amount of research implies that this timing is no coincidence. A meta-analysis released last fall showed that consuming short-form video content, as delivered by apps like TikTok and Instagram, is associated with poorer cognition and reduced attention, and the results of a clever experiment from 2023 found that the mere presence of participants’ smartphones in a room significantly reduced their ability to concentrate.

The growth of AI has brought new cognitive concerns. A study from January, based on surveys and interviews with more than 600 participants, revealed a “significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool usage and critical thinking abilities.” Another recent study, which tracked the brain activity of research subjects who were writing with the help of large language models, found that “brain connectivity systematically scaled down with the amount of external support.”

The loss of our ability to think is a big deal. Close to 40% of the U.S. gross domestic product comes from so-called knowledge and technology-intensive industries, from aerospace manufacturing to software development to financial and information services. Companies in these fields alchemize advanced human thought into revenue; as we weaken our brains, we also threaten to weaken our economy.

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Newport is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University and the author of “Deep Work”, which came out in 2016. He argues that we should treat the many, many distractions around us as being like ultraprocessed foods – to be avoided in favour of stuff we make ourselves. Good luck, as they say, with that.
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Business Insider lost 27% of paid subscribers over three years, report says • The Wrap

Corbin Bolies:

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Business Insider has seen its subscriber base decrease each of the past three years, dropping about 27% between the end of 2022 and the end of 2025, according to a report in Status.

The Axel Springer-owned business and tech-focused publication finished 2022 with about 185,000 paid subscribers, according to Status. But as the publication went through a series of changes — the installation of Barbara Peng as CEO in 2023 and the appointment of Wall Street Journal veteran Jamie Heller as editor-in-chief in 2024, among others — its subscriber count continued to drop.

The publication ended 2023 with about 160,000 paid subscribers, a roughly 14% decline from 2022. In 2024, it finished with roughly 150,000 subscribers, about a 6% drop. Last year, it ended the year with about 135,000 paid subscribers, a roughly 10% drop.

The publication, which rebranded from Insider back to Business Insider in 2023, has scaled back its newsroom, laying off 21% of staff last year, its third consecutive year of job cuts. In January, it’s chief revenue officer and global head of sales exited.

A Business Insider spokesperson told TheWrap that the publication has reshaped its editorial strategy and paywall over the last three years, which has produced “a more defined and engaged core audience.” It has also moved away from aggregation, and about 80% of its content is exclusives, scoops and original reporting, they said.

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Should one look at the number of subscribers lost, or the number retained? As long as they’re in six figures, things are probably OK. But these days there are a zillion sites (particularly on Substack) yowling for our attention and especially our money.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified