In 2001, Jackie Chan and Seth MacFarlane almost met in the worst circumstances imaginable. Fate decided otherwise. CC-licensed photo by Gage Skidmore 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. Spaced 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.

A civilian plane crashed in New Mexico. Was the military’s tech to blame? • WIRED

Jeff Wise :

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This past May, a twin-engine Beechcraft King Air medevac plane took off from Roswell, New Mexico, and headed west to the town of Ruidoso to pick up a patient. It shouldn’t have been a challenging flight for the two pilots and two nurses aboard. The temperature was 69ºF; the sky was clear. The 60-mile journey normally takes a half hour, at most.

But once airborne, the plane ran into trouble. At the White Sands Missile Range that night, US military personnel were conducting a GPS jamming exercise that left the King Air pilots—and anyone else within hundreds of miles—unable to use modern navigation systems. Forced to revert to older technology, ones that they rarely if ever use, the medevac pilots got disoriented and crashed into the side of a mountain. There were no survivors.

…[30-year-old Keelan] Clark and [23-year-old Ali] Kawsara took off at eight minutes to midnight and initially headed due west, toward Ruidoso. The weather was clear, but because the night was nearly moonless and the area is rural, the only visual references available were the lights of scattered settlements. “It’s a black hole out there,” says Juan Browne, an airline pilot who hosts a crash-investigation podcast.

Unable to orient themselves without visual cues, the pilots called up Albuquerque Air Route Traffic Control Center—Albuquerque Center, for short—and requested permission to fly instruments-only to Ruidoso. The request was approved.

Under normal circumstances, the flight that followed would have been uneventful. The pilots would have followed the magenta line, and the GPS navigation equipment would have lined them up for a smooth landing.

But 100 miles to the west, an Air Force Unit called the 746th Test Squadron of the 704th Test Group was holding its annual NAVFEST event at the White Sands Missile Range. The event draws together electronic warfare units from across the armed services for two weeks of exercises, in which units test different technologies for disrupting GPS and dealing with adversaries’ disruption.

The event is held at White Sands because it’s among the most remote and sparsely settled areas of the continental United States. (Not coincidentally, the first atomic bomb was detonated there.) But in the run-up to NAVFEST, the Federal Aviation Administration warned aircraft operators that GPS could be affected up to 400 miles away between May 12 and May 18.

At midnight on May 14, eight minutes after Clark and Kawsara took off from Roswell, they told Albuquerque Center that they’d lost their GPS. Unable to navigate on their own, they asked that the controller give them a heading—a magnetic direction to fly in. The controller gave them a heading to fly west, and then, a minute later, to turn north.

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There’s little doubt that having GPS would have meant the plane didn’t crash. But slight doubt about whether not having GPS meant it did.
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No data centres in my backyard • Jasmi News

Jasmine Sun does a deeply reported piece on opinions pro and anti data centres in Wisconsin and Michigan:

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My group disperses to chat up the locals. We met a 911 operator who has received nonstop calls about construction-related disturbances like dump trucks and bright lights. A jolly civil engineer and alderman takes a break from fry duty to nerd out about municipal finance—he thinks the data center is a great deal, as the TID will fix the town’s aging water filtration plant without the need for loans. A bartender (a Port “lifer”) despises the data centre’s infringement on her beloved bird habitats and waterways. Just about everyone was surprised by how quickly the project went up: grassy fields one day, cranes the next. We heard the word “blindsided” again and again.

The next morning, Mayor Ted offered to see us for an interview. He told us two things upon meeting: first, that his name, Theodore, means “gift from God.” Second, that he’d already got word about us slamming down beers at Fish Days. Clearly, this is a small town.

Ted insisted that we get out of city hall and into the streets, so we boarded his Honda for a personal tour. He was born and raised in Port, and waved hello to half the residents we drove past. He’s an expert storyteller—his LinkedIn headline reads “CEO, Podcaster, Mayor”—and clearly media-trained, with his comms guy in the backseat. Downtown, he pointed at each storefront, telling us what it used to be: donut shops, Radio Shack, Beaver’s Candy Store, all gone.

These days, Port’s revenues are reliant on residential property taxes and tourism. Like other deindustrialized Midwestern towns, it lost its commercial economy after manufacturers shut down in the mid-2000s. Ted is dead set on bringing it back. He first tried to attract a semiconductor factory, but the city lost the bid. So when the data centre project passed his desk in 2025, Ted was ready to say yes.

Already, the mayor feels like he’s winning. His daughter, a waitress, is thrilled that her tips are up on Mondays due to foot traffic from data centre workers. He said Port’s sales tax revenue has doubled from April 2025 to 2026. “Every day people will be flying in from literally around the world to go to that data centre. They will be in our hotels, they will be at our restaurants, they will hopefully fall in love with our community and move here,” Ted proclaimed.

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Ted is definitely an optimist who hasn’t heard about how many people are required to run a data centre compared to the number required to build it. The boys of summer will move on once it’s passed QA.
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Exclusive: Trump administration drafting ban on Chinese data centre devices, sources say • Reuters

Alexandra Alper:

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The Federal Communications Commission, which oversees the US telecom industry, is working on the measure to bar imports of new Chinese optical transceivers, which allow data to travel over fiber-optic cables at the speed of light within data centres. Officials hope to publish it this year, when it would take effect.

The move, not previously reported, aims to prevent Chinese firms from stealing data, installing malware or disrupting service at US data centres, which house the chips to train and run ​AI models.

The FCC could still modify or shelve the restriction, the sources stressed, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. But it is the latest example ​of the Trump administration trying to limit Chinese technological incursions into cutting-edge US industries before they become embedded in the supply chain.

“Transceivers definitely pose a risk,” said Divyansh Kaushik, an AI policy expert at Washington, D.C., advisory firm Beacon Global Strategies. “As the data centre buildout scales up, you want to make sure the ​data centre supply chain is secure from the get-go,” he added.

Shares of US-based transceiver makers seen as beneficiaries of the measure rose following the news. Lumentum, Coherent, and Applied Optoelectronics, jumped ​7%, 11%, and 18%, respectively.

The White House and the FCC did not respond to requests for comment. The Chinese embassy in Washington said Beijing urges the United States to “heed the objective and rational voices of the business communities in both countries” and “stop smearing Chinese companies and threatening them with sanctions.”

“China will take all necessary measures in response to any action that causes material harm to its ​interests,” it added.

A US ban on new models of Chinese data centre devices would likely hit China’s Zhongji Innolight, one of the biggest global sellers of transceivers, which was added ​to the Pentagon’s list of alleged Chinese military-backed companies in June. The list can be a harbinger of tougher action. Innolight did not respond to requests for comment.

A ban could also raise costs for American cloud firms such as Amazon Web Services, as it may force them to transition to other producers such as US-based Coherent and Lumentum.

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Rhine falls to record low levels as drought strains Europe’s rivers • BBC News

Laura Gozzi:

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The River Rhine has fallen to record low levels in several locations in Germany and the Netherlands as prolonged heatwaves continue across Europe.

Last week, levels were measured in Cologne in western Germany and in Lobith, where the Rhine crosses from Germany into the Netherlands, that were lower than at any point since records began.

Other major European rivers with important transport, industrial and agricultural functions have also seen record low levels, including the Danube, which flows through 10 countries, and Italy’s Po river.

Drought conditions remained stable and critical in most of Europe and worsened in central-western Europe in mid-July, according to the EU’s Drought Observatories.

Renewed heatwave conditions are due to continue for at least another week, pushing temperatures above 40ºC in many central and southern European countries.

Germany’s Low Water Information System (NIWIS) said that 44% of the Rhine measuring stations and 78% of those on the Danube had recorded extremely low water levels at the end of July.

The Rhine – which starts in the Swiss Alps and empties in the North Sea – is one of Europe’s busiest waterways. Decreasing water levels have sparked concerns about the economic fallout of having to limit navigation and shipping.

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We were last here in August 2022, with the Rhine at low levels. The cause is the lack of snow in the Alps; the effect is on shipping and nuclear power plants which rely on the Rhine for cooling water, and so have to go offline.
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Secondhand EV leasing hits the fast lane as more UK drivers explore ways to cut motoring costs • The Guardian

Jasper Jolly:

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The number of people leasing used electric cars in the UK has more than doubled in the last year as drivers look for cheaper ways to avoid soaring petrol prices during Donald Trump’s war on Iran.

Used electric car leasing has risen by 170% in the last year across members of the British Vehicle Rental and Leasing Association (BVRLA), a lobby group whose members buy about half the UK’s new vehicles to lease them out to businesses and consumers every year.

The supply of secondhand electric cars is rising rapidly, as cars bought new by early adopters feed through into the used market. The number of electric cars on British roads surpassed 2m earlier this year.

Most new vehicles in the UK – about 85% – are bought with finance, with British drivers favouring a monthly cost rather than an upfront payment. However, the number of firms offering leasing for secondhand electric cars had been relatively small until recently, with providers waiting until there were more cars on offer, as well as better data on how long they would survive.

Demand for secondhand electric cars has been helped by big increases in petrol prices since the US and Israel launched their attacks on Iran in February. Higher fuel prices have made owning an electric car cheaper relative to petrol for many people.

…Octopus Electric Vehicles, the car arm of the UK’s largest retail energy provider, said it had recorded 122% year-on-year growth to June in secondhand leasing.

Gurjeet Grewal, Octopus EV’s chief executive, said: “Used EVs are one of the best-value ways to go electric. Drivers are catching on fast – they’re selling quicker than the rest of the used-car market because the savings are simply too good to ignore.”

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That’s a confidence move by Octopus to have an EV car arm.
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BMW beams ads for new ‘Spider-Man’ movie into cars, faces backlash • Business Insider

Georgia Hennessy:

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With great power comes great responsibility, and BMW is using that power to beam “Spider-Man” ads into its cars.

The German auto giant has been showing a banner ad for “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” in cars since late July as part of a brand tie-up with Marvel’s latest blockbuster. The banner reads “Surprise! Spider-Man just dropped into your BMW!” Tapping the ad triggers a full-screen animation that plays across the Control Display, the main center screen, while the car’s ambient lighting changes color in sync.

The animation follows a BMW driving through a city street as Spider-Man swings overhead. It closes on Spider-Man dragging the BMW logo down the frame, resolving into the end card: “BMW and SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY EXCLUSIVELY IN CINEMAS.”

BMW said the animation will run in around 70 markets until August 10 on suitably equipped vehicles with a production date after July 2020.

Its press release described the campaign as a special surprise for drivers as part of its collaboration with “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” the newest installment in the superhero franchise, starring Tom Holland and Zendaya. Several BMW cars feature in the film, the German automaker said.

Some online were unimpressed by the marketing tactic. “I’m never buying a BMW,” wrote Paul Graham, the cofounder of Y Combinator, in a Tuesday X post reacting to a clip of the in-car ad.

“Wow I can’t believe how disappointing that is,” one person wrote under footage posted to the r/BMW subreddit the day the campaign began. “Absolutely not,” said another.

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Of course there’s no way to easily get rid of the ad. And people don’t even get a discount on their cinema tickets. What an astonishing way to annoy your customers, who have bought your cars. (If they leased them, they know what not to get next time.)
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Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science so far solved by ChatGPT • OpenAI

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In May, we shared an AI-generated disproof of the Erdős unit-distance conjecture, discovered while evaluating an unreleased model. This work has already inspired further developments in mathematics and theoretical computer science1. Today, we are sharing a selection of ten results, each of which resolves or makes substantial progress on a long-standing open problem. These problems span high-dimensional geometry, coding theory, arithmetic circuit complexity, group theory, operator algebras, quantum complexity, lattice cryptography and extremal combinatorics. All of these problems are of substantial interest to their respective mathematical communities, and several are of broad interest across mathematics as a whole.

We provide new results for the following problems. The results were achieved by an internal version of Astra, our next major model. The total number of tokens needed to find solutions to these problems would cost roughly $2,000 at Sol API rates. These arguments were then prepared into manuscripts by humans with the same model. Afterward, the model formalised each argument in a Lean certificate . We are also releasing for each solution a model’s narration of its thinking process.

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This is pretty fast progress, and quite cheap compared to getting humans to do it. The problem is going to come in really understanding the implications of these findings as they move nearer and nearer to the edge of understanding.

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Late script kept Jackie Chan from tragedy • ABC News

ABC News:

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September 19, 2001 — Action star Jackie Chan reveals he was due at the World Trade Center last Tuesday [September 11] to shoot scenes for an upcoming film, but that filming was canceled at the last minute because of a late script. “I would probably have died if the shooting had gone ahead as planned,” Chan tells the Hong Kong newspaper Oriental Daily News about filming the action-comedy Nosebleed, in which he was to star as a window washer who foils a terrorist scheme to blow up the Statue of Liberty. “Filming was scheduled to have taken place at 7:00 a.m. last Tuesday morning. … I had to be at the top of one of the towers for one of the scenes,” Chan tells the paper, adding “Well, I guess my time is not up yet.

Nosebleed, along with several other films with terrorist plots or scenes involving the World Trade Center, is being reworked to avoid any resemblance to last week’s tragedy. A spokeswoman for MGM said last week that it was “premature” to discuss how the script might be changed.

Other people reporting close shaves include Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane, who is alive thanks to an error in his flight itinerary, and an MTV Real World cast member, who changed her flight plans after fighting with her boyfriend.Both were due to fly from Boston to Los Angeles on the doomed American Airlines Flight 11, which left at 7:45 a.m. last Tuesday.

MacFarlane, whose itinerary said his flight would leave at 8:15 a.m., got to the gate just as boarding was finished. Trying to persuade gate agents to let him on “is something I would have pressed them on in the past, but for some reason I didn’t this time — and thank God,” he told USA Today.

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Never knew this Jackie Chan fact before. What an awful irony that would have been; like one of his scripts, only with real-world terror and finality. He’s gone on to make dozens more films.
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If you’re looking for mathewingram.com I have some bad news • mathewingram.com/work

Mathew Ingram is a longtime journalist who has been blogging since nearly the dawn of time:

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It’s likely that not many people care about this, but I am writing this on my WordPress.com blog — which I normally use as a backup to my blog at mathewingram.com/work — because the machine hosting that blog (and my photo server and my Plex instance and a bunch of other things) got hacked by ransomware a few days ago. I am currently in the process of either trying to restore it or wiping it and starting again, and at this point I have to say that the latter seems more likely.

I got hacked by someone using a form of ransomware known as Lockbit, which gets root access and encrypts all of your files and then renames them with a .lockbit extension. In my case it also got access to my Google Drive — I assume by cloning an authentication token to get around two-factor — and uploaded a bunch of encrypted files and backups. It seems that either I interrupted the process or they weren’t very good, because they didn’t get all of the files and they didn’t upload that many before I changed my passwords and locked them out.

That said, however, they screwed things up badly enough that it’s going to take some time and effort to put them back together, and it may not be possible. Ironically it would be easier if they had finished the job, because the last phase is to upload a ransom note and leave it as a screen saver, and that note often contains a unique ID that can be entered into an Interpol database that has decryption keys for some kinds of ransomware. If I can’t find a note or unique ID then I can’t search for the decryption key.

My working theory is that the hackers got in by brute-forcing the Windows Remote Desktop protocol, which I used to access my machine, since it is located somewhere other than my house.

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Ah, it would come down to Windows, wouldn’t it. Mobile would have been safer!
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Scientists think we should keep samples from Mars and elsewhere on the Moon, for fear of contaminating the Earth with hazardous alien organisms. CC-licensed photo by Stuart Rankin 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. Dusty reception. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Time Magazine has started serving ads to AI agents • Digiday

Sara Guaglione:

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Time Magazine has begun serving ads to AI agents. Ally Bank and Project Management Institute are among the first buyers.

Strange as that sounds, it’s also logical. To understand why, it’s important to go back to the start.

Last month, Time began converting all its webpages from HTML into markdown versions — stripped-down, text-only copies of each page that drop the design and images, making them easier for AI systems and agents to read. The easier that access, went the publisher’s thinking, the better its chances of showing up in generative search queries.

Well, to a point. The jury is still out on how much of a bulwark markdown pages can be against the threat of falling search traffic. Putting ads in those pages is Time’s way of squeezing some revenue out of its growing bot traffic while it waits to find out. To do that, the publisher is working with AI-powered ad tech platform Mobian to convert its pages into markdown and generate the agent ads. The ads themselves are formatted as FAQs with a brand’s information and messaging, and labeled as sponsored content.

Time and Mobian claim this is the first time a publisher has served ads specifically targeting AI agents. More are already being lined up. Mark Howard, Time’s chief operating officer, told Digiday Time’s sales team is pitching agent ads to brands that have already converted their corporate websites into markdown files, as those brands are the ones already thinking about how to reach AI bots. The agent ads would be another way to reach LLMs, he said. Mobian’s data shows about 15% of brands are powering their own markdown pages, according to Jonah Goodhart, co-founder and CEO of Mobian. As more brands bet on a two-track internet, that figure will likely rise.

“Maybe it’s more important to influence the agent than even the human, because with a human you influence one person. When you influence ChatGPT, you’re influencing potentially all of ChatGPT. If ChatGPT changes what it says about [a brand], it’s massive and it’s more than any one campaign could ever do,” Goodhart said. “The big idea here is LLMs and AI want trusted information about brands. We’re serving that up to them in a very straightforward, easy way.”

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I’m so old I remember when it was considered ad fraud to show adverts to bots. It was up to some point last year, I think.
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Scientists detect a sharp acceleration in global warming • ScienceDaily

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Global warming has sped up since around 2015, according to a new analysis from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). After removing the effects of natural temperature swings, researchers found the first statistically significant evidence that the planet’s long-term warming rate is accelerating.

Over the past decade, global temperatures have risen at an estimated pace of about 0.35°C per decade, depending on the dataset used. By comparison, the average warming rate from 1970 to 2015 was just under 0.2°C per decade. The recent pace is higher than that of any previous decade since instrumental temperature records began in 1880.

“We can now demonstrate a strong and statistically significant acceleration of global warming since around 2015,” says Grant Foster, a US statistics expert and co-author of the study, which was published in the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters.

“We filter out known natural influences in the observational data, so that the ‘noise’ is reduced, making the underlying long-term warming signal more clearly visible,” Foster added.

…”If the warming rate of the past 10 years continues, it would lead to a long-term exceedance of the 1.5°C limit of the Paris Agreement before 2030,” says Stefan Rahmstorf. “How quickly the Earth continues to warm ultimately depends on how rapidly we reduce global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels to zero.”

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Incredible and terrifying. And bear in mind that net zero – which needs to apply everywhere – isn’t the end of the warming; you then need the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (carbon dioxide and methane, particularly) to break down or be reabsorbed. That could take decades, at best. We’re locked in to a bad, bad future.
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How war in Myanmar is driving a deadly rare earth mining boom • Grist

Emily Fishbein and Jauman Naw:

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Because rare earth mining in Myanmar is so secretive, data on the industry is scarce. But China’s customs reports show that from 2017 to 2024, it imported more than 320,000 tons (290,000 metric tons) of rare earths from Myanmar, or roughly two-thirds of its total imports. According to the environmental nonprofit Global Witness, Myanmar surpassed China as the world’s largest source of heavy rare earths in 2021. It is a particularly vital source of dysprosium and terbium, components of heat-resistant permanent magnets — known as neodymium-iron-boron, or NdFeB magnets — used in a range of technologies with military and civilian applications.

There is limited publicly available data on the uses of dysprosium and terbium by volume, but research by the U.S. Department of Energy found that consumer electronics and industrial motors accounted for nearly 60% of global NdFeB magnet demand as of 2020, while offshore wind turbines and electric vehicles accounted for an additional 20 percent. If the world speeds up its shift away from fossil fuels as predicted in a high-growth scenario, offshore wind turbines and electric vehicles would account for nearly two-thirds of global demand for NdFeB magnets by 2030, according to the Energy Department.

China, which holds more than 90% of the world’s rare earth processing capacity, began restricting its exports of heavy rare earths last year in response to U.S. tariffs. The shutoff left global economies scrambling to find new ways to procure them, and prompted new deals and partnerships.

The highly sanctioned Myanmar military has meanwhile stepped up efforts to ingratiate itself with the Trump administration. In April, its Ministry of Information hired Roger Stone, one of America’s most notorious lobbyists, to help build ties with the US.

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It’s amazing how the materials that we most need keep on being buried in countries that are not the ones you’d ideally want to have to deal with. (Hiring Roger Stone, though – there’s a match made in Hell.)
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AI conquered coding. fast food is next • WIRED

Kate Taylor:

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Kristen Charpentier’s first hint that she was talking to a robot when she pulled into a Dairy Queen drive-thru lane was that the voice coming out of the speaker was, simply put, “too nice.”

“There was no communication delay or weirdness to it. It felt completely natural,” Charpentier tells WIRED. “But just a little too pleasant to be human.”

The voice punctuated its sentences with pleases and thank yous. It was soft and friendly. Its attempts to upsell Charpentier on extra Snickers for her Blizzard were perfectly polite.

But Charpentier worked the Dairy Queen drive-thru herself as a teenager. She knew something wasn’t adding up. When she drove up to collect her Blizzard at the window of the Cary, North Carolina, drive-thru, she asked the worker in the window: had AI taken her order?

The employee confirmed to Charpentier that she was one of the thousands of customers across the US to have experienced an AI-voice-equipped drive-thru. In 2024, roughly 4% of fast-food locations in the US used voice AI technology in the drive-thru lane, according to Intouch Insight’s annual Drive Thru Survey. Last year, that figure grew to 5%; early research suggests that has now climbed to 6%.

For most of these customers, the first AI order comes as a surprise, one to be filmed and posted on TikTok or Snapchat. But soon, these automated ordering systems will seem downright banal. At certain chains, voice AI is already the new normal. Taco Bell announced in July that it has rolled out AI at 890 drive-thru lanes, more than 10% of the chain’s US locations. Dairy Queen is implementing the tech in 25 states, with eventual plans to roll it out to all restaurants. 12% of White Castles use an AI named “Julia” in their drive-thrus; all new locations now open with Julia taking orders.

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An order taker that doesn’t get grumpy or tired, and can’t be threatened? In a place like the US, probably smart. Though you also know that hackers are going to flock to these things trying to break them and make them hand over meals (and anything else) for free.
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The Secret Service illegally surveilled James Comey after ’86 47′ post • Reason

Jacob Sullum:

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When former FBI Director James Comey used Instagram to share a photo of seashells arranged to form the numerical slogan “86 47” last year, federal prosecutors claim, he was publicly threatening to assassinate President Donald Trump. Yet before Comey posted that picture, Amazon vendors had offered more than 200,000 products featuring that supposedly homicidal phrase or variations on it, including “86 46” (referring to Joe Biden) and “86 45” (referring to Trump during his first term).

How many federal law enforcement inquiries did the sale or purchase of those products generate? Zero.

In a motion they filed on Tuesday night, Comey’s attorneys cite that information from Amazon to support their argument that the April 28 indictment charging him with threatening the president should be dismissed because the prosecution is selective and vindictive, driven by Trump’s personal animus against a longtime nemesis. They also submitted an affidavit in which Patrick J. Fitzgerald, one of Comey’s lawyers, summarizes evidence that the defense obtained from the government through discovery. That evidence confirms that the Secret Service illegally surveilled Comey after he posted the seashell picture, and it contradicts Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s account of how the case unfolded.

After Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi on April 2, Blanche was so desperate to secure his nomination to replace her that he eagerly pursued a legally absurd case against Comey based on a ubiquitous expression of opposition to the president that is clearly protected by the First Amendment. By posting that seashell photo, Blanche claimed with a straight face, Comey had committed two federal felonies punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

…The new filings show that the Secret Service also submitted an “emergency” request for cellphone location information from Verizon so it could track Comey as he made his way back to Virginia.

The day of the Instagram post, a Secret Service special agent in charge (SAIC) “asked me about the possibility of pinging Comey’s cell phone,” an assistant to the SAIC (ATSAIC) reported in an email the next day. “I said it could be done, but it would be a bad idea.”

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Because, of course, it would be broadly illegal. Another picture of life in Trump’s world. The process is the punishment; these claims will come to nothing. But it’s instructive to see how many tracking methods there are now; and you don’t have to imagine any more what it would be like if there were a vindictive administration in place.
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RAMageddon: the memory chip crisis is worse than expected, lasting to 2029 or 2030, says Deloitte • GamesBeat

Dean Takahashi, quoting a Deloitte analyst note:

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Memory chip industry insiders and market analysts are calling this scarcity-driven surge in chip prices “RAMageddon.” RAMageddon looks likely to last and could even get worse before it gets better.

Those most likely to be affected are hyperscalers, integrated server and storage original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), neoclouds, and both AI and non-AI data center operators. Consumers and enterprises also are likely to feel the effects of higher prices for devices and electronics ranging from personal computers (PCs) and smartphones to telecommunications gear.

Deloitte anticipates the three largest memory players may increase their combined capex nearly 340% between 2024 and 2027 to keep pace with the growing demand for memory chips. And memory capex could constitute roughly half of the total chip industry capex in 2026. But that higher spending isn’t expected to increase supply or reduce prices by much in the next year or two, since it often takes three to five years to build memory fabrication facilities and scale up production.

In response to massive demand for AI tokens for both training and inference, Deloitte expects hyperscalers’ capex spending to exceed $1 trillion in 2026, more than double of what they planned in January 2026.

…The current memory supply tightness and elevated prices may persist until 2029 or even 2030, assuming continued demand among hyperscalers for memory chips. Other customers that need memory for devices such as PCs, smartphones, and other consumer electronics, as well as for non-AI data centers, will likely also need to contend with high memory prices.

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These truly are the dark times for consumer electronics. Making an affordable hardware device that incorporates AI is going to be almost impossible.
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$2m crime novel deal collapses amid questions over AI use • The Guardian

Emma Loffhagen:

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The hotly anticipated manuscript Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body, by Jerry Falade, was withdrawn from sale by its agent despite reportedly receiving an offer for more than $2m (£1.5m) from Minotaur, owned by Macmillan US, as part of a 14-way auction. The plan was to publish it in 2028.

An email sent to publishers by Falade’s agents and seen by the Guardian said: “Jerry Falade produced an incredible manuscript that dazzled us and the top publishing professionals around the world. Unfortunately, we are no longer able to authenticate how the manuscript fully evolved from origin to completion.”

It continued: “During the submission process we vetted the manuscript with Jerry for AI and felt trusting in his reassurance that it was written without utilising AI as a resource in the writing or editorial process. We can no longer substantiate that, and we are withdrawing the book.”

The US auction was run by the author’s agent Marc Gerald of Europa Content, according to the Bookseller. In the UK, Sandy Hodgman of Hodgman Literary is said to have secured several six-figure bids through a similarly competitive process. The Guardian has approached both agents for comment.

Gerald told the Bookseller he first read the book in June, and that it was “stunningly good, everyone fell in love with it. It’s a book that appeals to absolutely everyone.”

He said that halfway through the submissions process, an editor raised concerns that the book had signs of potential AI use. Gerald said Europa opted against using AI-detection software to check the manuscript, saying Falade was “clear and credible” in his explanation.

However, after a meeting on 29 July, when “aspects of [Falade’s] story changed”, the agency decided to cut ties, citing the “need to have total faith”.

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That 29 July meeting sounds like it might have been a bit uncomfortable, particularly for Falade, who would have seen that huge payday (or many paydays; deals like that pay in stages – signing, delivery, publication) melting away in front of his eyes.
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We need to quarantine aliens on the moon, scientists propose • 404 Media

Becky Ferreira:

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Well, folks: It’s finally time to build a quarantine on the Moon for aliens.

That’s the upshot of a study published in May that argues for the establishment of “a lunar biocontainment facility” to house extraterrestrial samples en route to Earth until they are deemed safe.

The US and China’s space programs both aim to bring back samples from the surface of Mars in the coming years, and many missions have already delivered rocks from asteroids. The new study anticipates a disastrous scenario in which samples from nearby celestial bodies might contain dangerous extraterrestrial life.

“If samples from Mars or other celestial bodies harbor dormant or active biological entities, then Earth’s biosphere could become exposed to a potentially invasive novel organism with unpredictable pathogenicity or ecological effects,” said Frederick I. Moxley of Strategic Threat and Analysis Research Laboratories, LLC, and Anthony Ricciardi of McGill University.

“For example, if extraterrestrial life exists, its molecular architecture could reflect atypical biochemistry (such as chirality reversal or alternative nucleic acid analogs) that is hazardous to Earth’s ecosystems and even to human biology,” the team added.

The team pointed to earthly analogs, such as viral strains that have broken containment or species that thrive in habitats that are completely different from the ones in which they originally evolved. If life on Earth can be this adaptable and unpredictable, why should we expect anything different from life elsewhere?

“The Moon must not merely serve as a stepping stone for exploration, but also as a preemptive shield between Earth and potential forms of extraterrestrial contamination…ensuring that exploration does not come at the expense of Earth’s biosphere” the team said.

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Put like that, it makes a lot of sense. (Perhaps they’ve seen the otherwise terrible SF film “Life”.) Though who’s going to be put in charge of the priso—er, containment facility? And how do you advertise the job? Though it would make a terrific film along the lines of Duncan Jones’s Moon.
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Apple launches legal challenge to UK attempt to access encrypted user data • Financial Times

Tim Bradshaw:

»

Apple has launched a new legal challenge against the UK’s latest attempt to create a “backdoor” to access encrypted customer data, a year after the Home Office agreed to drop a previous order following a row with Washington.

The iPhone maker last month launched a legal complaint at the Investigatory Powers Tribunal over the UK government’s demand that Apple allow it access to encrypted cloud backups of data belonging to British users, according to an order issued by the court.

The UK retreated from its original demand for a backdoor that allowed access to data from UK and US customers last year, ending a diplomatic battle between London and Washington.

But UK authorities subsequently issued a new “technical capability notice” to Apple that did not apply to American users, the FT reported in October.

TCNs are issued under the UK Investigatory Powers Act, which the government maintains is needed by law enforcement to investigate serious crimes. They can force companies to provide the UK security services with access to customer data, even if such information is protected by secure encryption.

Apple is seeking to challenge the UK government’s power to issue such legal notices.

The court sent an order giving notice of the new Apple complaint to Privacy International. The human rights group, alongside fellow campaigner Liberty, had previously launched a separate complaint against TCNs at the IPT.

«

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Working with an LLM can be like getting caught in one of Zeno’s paradoxes, where finishing is impossible. CC-licensed photo by Conrad Bakker 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. Slowly coding. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

COLDCARD wallet RNG flaw likely linked to $88m Bitcoin theft • Bleeping Computer

Lawrence Abrams:

»

Researchers suspect that a vulnerability in COLDCARD hardware wallet firmware was exploited to steal an estimated $88.6m in Bitcoin from thousands of wallets whose seeds were generated using a flawed random number generator.

Digital asset research firm Galaxy Research says it identified an initial wave of transactions that it believes was likely linked to the vulnerability, draining approximately 1,083 BTC, worth $70.2m, from 1,196 addresses on July 30.

The 41-minute attack occurred approximately 30 hours before Coinkite publicly disclosed the flaw.

Every transaction used an identical hardcoded fee rate of 30 satoshis per virtual byte and left no change output, making Galaxy believe the attackers used an automated tool.

“Signature: every sweep paid an identical hardcoded 30.0 sat/vB — a 30-75x overpay vs the 0.4-1.0 sat/vB median that week — and left no change output, explained Galaxy.

“That looks like an automated tool spending keys it already held, not owners moving funds.”

On August 1, Galaxy Research identified a second and third wave, raising the estimated total to 1,367 Bitcoin, worth approximately $88.6m, stolen from 4,585 addresses. The stolen Bitcoin remained in the attacker-controlled addresses at the time of its report.

Chainalysis found that the attacker prioritized high-value wallets, stealing approximately $30m during the first ten minutes and taking $1.8m from one victim.

The company said this suggested the attacker had identified and studied the affected wallets before beginning the thefts.

«

The money is all sitting in one address, which will be closely watched. But there are ways to obscure transactions, and if this is a state-sponsored hacking then there will be friendly “mixers” who in effect launder it. This explains how the coding mistake was made (an impatient programmer trying to clear a compiler error).

Once more the folks who celebrate money that’s free of the evil financial system and government control are calling for the financial system and police to help them out. That seems optimistic.
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Inside an AI TikTok shop slop factory that shills supplements recalled by the FDA • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

»

In February, a content creator from New Zealand named Harry Chang posted a YouTube video called “This AI TikTok Shop Video Made Me $67,420 (Here’s How).” In the video, Chang and another YouTuber, Jimmy Farley, describe how Chang created a viral marketing video for a supplement company called Rosabella called the “Nigerian SECRET to CLEAN LIVER!!”

Chang explains that he copy-pasted the script from a video posted by an account called “liverboosthub11” and tweaked it to suggest the supplement he was marketing is “something that’s been used in Asia or Africa for a long time that a lot of people don’t know about in America.”. In Google’s VEO 3, he created an AI-generated Black woman wearing a surgical mask in the foreground of the video, pointing up at another AI-generated Black woman (created in a tool called HeyGen) wearing a pink dress and standing on a stage. He directed the woman in the foreground to have a “strong African American accent,” and to say, “Why is nobody talking about what this hoe said?! If you’ve got issues with that belly, must watch!” 

“Builds curiosity, builds intrigue,” Chang says about his creation. “People want to know, ‘damn, what did she say? What did that ho say?’” To make the AI-generated woman on stage read the script he took from liverboosthub11, he pulls up the popular AI voice generator ElevenLabs. He scrolls through a list of voices that he had created, including “African American Woman Organic,” “Black Man 1,” “ORGANIC White Southern Woman,” and “Sad Black Woman in Car.” He settles on a voice called “Latisha 1.” He syncs the voice with the AI-generated videos he created in the video editing software CapCut. This AI video goes on to get 1.3 million views on TikTok and apparently earned him tens of thousands of dollars in affiliate sales.

In another video, Chang explains how he has made tens of thousands of dollars using AI influencers. “I’ve even had my clients buy me Rolexes for selling so much of their products,” he says. 

The video’s title is “How I print $51,000/month profit with AI influencers (feels illegal).” 

A new lawsuit argues that the strategy is, indeed, illegal. (After 404 Media asked for comment for this story, several of the YouTube videos mentioned in this article were deleted).

«

Fantastic payoff line there, though taken as a whole, the situation is – as with so many of these things! – dispiriting.
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The real reason that Substack is collapsing • Magnetic North

Scott Carney:

»

A few years ago Substack transformed away from being a niche newsletter-delivery system and into the main refuge for tens of thousands of journalists who were fleeing (or been kicked out) of the mainstream media. The value proposition was simple: writers could come here to build an audience that would actually pay directly for their writing. The platform recommended writers put paywalls on posts that would encourage readers to financially support their favorites. The tradeoff from other social media platforms was that the paywalls would inherently limit the reach of their best work. Nonetheless, with a thousand paid subscribers you could live the middle class dream of earning close to $100,000 a year (well, more like $80,000 after all the fees).

For a while it seemed like a reasonably good trade. No one wanted journalism to die, and the new influx of writers was doing pretty good work on the platform—albeit with lower budgets than traditional newsrooms.

But the model raised an obvious question: how many individual newsletters could the platform rationally expect readers to pay $8/month to access?

Early adopters on the platform did the best. Writers like Heather Cox Richardson and Matthew Yglesias arrived early and earned millions. But as more writers showed up the subscription revenue pie didn’t grow commensurately. Even with Substack’s discoverability mechanism (something that is missing on places like Ghost and Beehiv) it was getting more difficult to establish a real career here.

So Substack tried to solve the problem by adopting a strategy that every other tech company had already worn thin. They pivoted to adding a twitter-like function called “Notes” (which created a distinction between ““subscribers” and “followers”). Soon they incorporated video and live-streaming and encouraged posters to clip shorts into their feeds with an AI-generated clipping program.

In other words: Substack’s growth strategy was to offer almost the exact same things as every other social media network. They pushed the idea that the subscription revenues would keep the best creators on this platform and the new engagement opportunities would grow truly massive audiences. The stated plan was to make Substack the go-to-place for everything internet in a winner-take-all contest.

At first the strategy even sort of worked. A lot of new users DID join the platform and engaged with all this new free content—increasing the overall number of eyeballs that were here. These new “engaged users” helped skyrocket the VC-backed valuation , but, notably, didn’t do much to help the flood of new creators who came here to actually earn more money.

In fact, they started earning a lot less.

«

Insightful piece. The question this made me ask was: when will Substack’s VC investors start demanding their returns? If we assume Substack is bumping along OK on its cut from subscriptions, is that enough to make it profitable? Can it grow? Is it going to try to go public (which would be disastrous, surely; wrong incentives everywhere)?
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Why is the world so loud? • The Atlantic

Bianca Bosker:

»

A resident of Chandler, Arizona called Karthic] Thallikar went hunting for the source of the sound. At first he canvassed the neighbourhood by foot, setting out around 10 or 11 o’clock at night, once the thrum of traffic had quieted down. When these “noise patrols,” as he called them, yielded no answers, he expanded his perimeter—by bike, then by car. He’d pull over every few blocks to listen for the whine. The hum was everywhere: outside Building E of the Tri-City Baptist Church and the apartments in San Palacio; near the Extra Space Storage and the no perfect people allowed sign at Hope Covenant Church; ricocheting around the homes in Canopy Lane, Clemente Ranch, Stonefield, the Reserve at Stonefield. He’d go out multiple nights a week, for 10 minutes to an hour, taking notes on where the noise was loudest. The patrols dragged on—one week, two weeks, eight weeks—which led to spats with his wife, who wanted to know why he kept leaving the house so late at night.

Finally, as winter warmed into spring, Thallikar thought he’d identified the source of the whine: a gray, nearly windowless building about half a mile from his house. The two-story structure, which had the charm of a prison and the architectural panache of a shoebox, was clad in concrete and surrounded by chain-link and black-metal fences, plus a cinder-block wall. It belonged to a company called CyrusOne.

There was no thrill in this discovery, just simmering fear that the noise might get worse. Thallikar visited the city-planning clerk, multiple times. She said she couldn’t help and referred him to CyrusOne’s construction manager. Kept awake by the noise at 11 o’clock one Saturday night, Thallikar phoned the man, who protested that he was trying to sleep. “I’m trying to sleep too, dude!” Thallikar told him. When they spoke again the next day, the call ended abruptly, and without resolution.

According to CyrusOne’s website, the company’s Chandler campus offers Fortune 500 companies robust infrastructure for mission-critical applications. In other words, it’s a data centre—a columbarium for thousands of servers that store data for access and processing from virtually anywhere in the world. When you check your bank balance or research a used car or book a hotel room, chances are decent that the information comes to you via one of the more than 40 CyrusOne data centers spread around the globe. CyrusOne houses servers belonging to nearly 1,000 companies, including Microsoft, Country Financial, Brink’s, Carfax, and nearly half of the Fortune 20.

Thallikar, wanting to confront the noise personally, made a surprise visit to CyrusOne.

«

That was back in 2014-2015. As you might imagine, Thallikar isn’t any happier now. (Gift link.)
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The Zeno’s Paradox of AI • Anuroop Bisaria

Anuroop Bisaria:

»

Ask a coding agent for a one-line fix. You get the fix, and then a question: want me to also add tests? Say yes and the tests arrive with an offer to wire up CI. A few yeses later you’re refactoring the deploy pipeline behind a typo fix, and there goes your afternoon. I use these tools every day and I have never once reached the bottom. There is always one more thing.

Zeno’s paradox has Achilles chasing a tortoise: by the time he reaches where it was, it has moved on, forever. Therefore Achilles can never catch the tortoise. It describes working with a language model annoyingly well. The task goes 90% done, then 95, then 97.5. The limit is right there. You’re never getting to it.

That’s the thing I want to name: under the incentives these models are trained and sold under, an AI can finish your task but it cannot close it. Something is left open every time. On purpose, mostly.

…Some of it is inherited. The training corpus is full of call-centre English (“is there anything else I can help you with today?”) and consulting decks, and every consulting deck in history ends on a Next Steps slide. The models learned the register from us.

Preference training makes it worse. Human raters reliably favour longer answers and offers of further help, so the reward model does too. The penalties are asymmetric on top of that: say “done” when it isn’t and you get burned; hedge when you didn’t need to and nobody notices. A model that never claims completion is making a rational bet.

There’s a mechanical detail I find clarifying. Ending a turn is a literal token the model has to choose to emit. Nothing in the reward wants the token that ends the conversation.

The deeper cause: “done” is a property of a whole task, and nothing in the training loop ever sees a whole task.

«

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Apple struggles to keep pace with AI bug hunters • Financial Times

Tom Wilson and Michael Acton:

»

Apple has restricted the number of potentially dangerous software bugs researchers can submit to its internal security team, as it faces a deluge of reports from people using AI models to identify alleged risks. 

The Cupertino-based tech giant told the FT it had moved in June to limit the high volume of requests it was receiving, with its review system coming under pressure from “AI slop” reports that can hallucinate security risks in its software.

Apple is grappling with an industry-wide phenomenon that has resulted in generative AI software tools transforming the cyber security arms race, with an increase in the detection of real security flaws and a wave of poor-quality submissions from amateur bug hunters using AI, the company said.

The change in Apple’s approach was highlighted by Italian cyber security startup Bynario, which told the FT it had used OpenAI’s ChatGPT to identify more than 50 bugs in the latest version of the MacOS operating system in just three weeks.

Among them was one of the most serious types of vulnerability, a so-called privilege escalation exploit chain, which could allow an attacker to seize full control of an Apple computer by gaining unrestricted access to the system.

However, the startup said it was unable to alert Apple to the vulnerability because the tech giant had limited the number of bug reports it could make.

«

People who have been using Apple’s betas this year have been praising them while also noting that the company seems to be treating this as a “fix it, forget new features” year (though of course there are new features). That’s almost certainly due to greater use of AI coding inside Apple – which will also have access to coding LLMs, just like Bynario, and so might be able to find the same bugs and chains of hacks.
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A PR firm is using fake publicists with AI-generated headshots to spam journalists with pitches for its clients • Futurism

Maggie Harrison Dupré:

»

Does it ever feel like your inbox is filling up with emails that don’t sound quite human?

You may be right. Last week, I received an email from a publicist identified as “June Barton,” whose address indicated that she worked at a firm called VectorGuideHQ.

The message, which read like any one of the countless PR emails in my inbox, was seeking coverage for a wellness app called RiseGuide. Barton offered to set me up with an account and introduce me to the startup’s founder. When I didn’t respond, Barton followed up.

“Glad to set you up so you can try it, or put you on a call with the founder,” Barton wrote. “Lmk!”

RiseGuide is a real company. But June Barton is not a real PR rep, or even a real person.

For one thing, her headshot — showing a light-eyed, soft-smiling brunette — was clearly AI-generated. Though not visible in the tiny email window, when I opened her profile picture in a new tab, I could see that the image had failed to cut out a watermark disclosing that it was downloaded from the site “this-person-does-not-exist.com,” which traffics in AI-generated faces.

“Generate random human face in 1 click and download it!” reads this-person-does-not-exist.com. “AI generated fake person photos: man, woman or child.”

Even more peculiar was that when I looked up the VectorGuideHQ site in Barton’s email address — june@vectorguidehq.com — it redirected to a United Kingdom-based PR company called Movchan Agency. Barton, I soon learned, was one character among a roster of fake personas used by Movchan to pitch journalists on stories.

When I reached out to the firm’s clients, they said they were unaware of the practice.

«

As a journalist, this would be a personal version of Hell. Or possibly I’d just stop reading email altogether.
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How to plant a nuclear plant in Iran • Digital Digging

Henk van Ess:

»

Tonight I typed just one sentence into Google Earth and put refugees near the Mexican border. Then I planted a nuclear plant in Iran. Then I put a fatal crash on a street in Amsterdam. Google’s own satellite imagery underneath all three. What on earth is Google doing?

Google spent twenty years building the reference the world checks against.Today it added a button that makes things up.

Image generation went live in Google Earth on the web this afternoon, powered by Nano Banana 2, worldwide, for everyone, with no waitlist and no application. You zoom to any coordinates on the planet, click create image, and type what you want to see. The model takes Google’s satellite, aerial and 3D imagery of that exact spot as its starting point and hands back a photorealistic picture. If it isn’t quite right, you refine it.

I added a hospital and a bomb crater in Gaza in seconds with Google Earth. I can’t believe I just typed this.

Google describes the feature as creating “concepts grounded in the real world,” which is the problem stated as a selling point. Grounded means the invented thing is welded to genuine coordinates and drawn on genuine imagery, often in the same colours and the same light and at the same angle as the picture beside it. A forgery built that way doesn’t have to be convincing on its own. It inherits the credibility of the map it was born on.

The announcement runs to 487 words, written by Bryan Horowitz, Product Manager, Google Earth. Horowitz gives the planet a six-word instruction: type whatever you want to see. That is the whole gate. Elsewhere in the same post he suggests it’s fun to let your imagination run wild, and the piece signs off by inviting you to pick a spot on the map and start bringing your ideas to life.

Somebody is going to bring an idea to life before morning. It will not be a community garden, trust me.

The people who want this are not hard to picture. A government official wants a strike to look bigger than it was. Two factions want the same hospital to look flattened or intact, depending on which of them is holding it this week. A troll wants forty thousand reposts before lunch. This morning all three needed a screenshot, a second browser tab and a little patience. Tonight they need a sentence.

«

Google rather quickly rolled this back but then said it looking to install “better guardrails” rather than what it should be doing, which is scrapping the whole idea. Why wreck any reputation you (Google) have for accuracy by letting people create AI slop? Google said there would be a watermark. Don’t bet your life on people not beating that.
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AI market correction emerging as major credit risk • Fitch Ratings

»

The scale of the AI investment boom and the accelerated global technology cycle has been a significant driver of US equity market valuations and corporate bond issuance over the past year. The effects on real economic indicators are profound. The 18% yoy rise in IT capital investment directly added 1.4pp [percentage points] to 1Q26 GDP growth. The wealth effect from AI-related investor optimism and equity market gains has also been a meaningful support for US consumer spending growth, which has been broadly slowing.

That said, the medium- and long-term potential of the underlying technology is highly uncertain, as with previous tech cycles. The combination of revenue uncertainty and the extent to which capital markets and economies have become intertwined with AI have created a vulnerability for credit in the event of a re-evaluation of long-run returns potential. Very short-term spikes in market volatility for individual equities and tech-heavy stock indices have already occurred, but a larger, more protracted correction could have wider market, macro and credit effects depending on its scale, duration and contagion.

«

Fitch, the ratings company, didn’t call the 2007/8 crash ahead of time, so it’s aiming to get in front of this one.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

It might be a crazy idea, but what if FIFA’s latest hugely unpopular financing idea was driven by losing the videogame deal with Electronic Arts? CC-licensed photo by EA SPORTS FIFA 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. Whistleblowing. 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 accidental architect of the internet’s brain • The New Yorker

Carson Griffith:

»

Steven Pruitt spends his evenings identifying errors that most people never notice and making fixes that hardly anyone ever thanks him for. He toils at a desk in a town house in Alexandria, Virginia, surrounded by books—the kind of working clutter that suggests a long relationship with paper rather than a fetish for screens. And yet his work is necessarily digital; after dinner, and sometimes late into the night, he uses his desktop computer to correct dates, clean up syntax, standardize categories, and occasionally write entire biographies of people on Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia.

Wikipedia is not his employer, of course. Like all editors on the site, Pruitt is a volunteer. “At this point, I won’t say I don’t have any skin in the game,” he told me. “But it’s a lot lower stakes than a job because if I get something wrong, it’s fairly easy to fix it. I can fix it myself. I can do what I want to do on my own time.” Still, he holds himself to some rules: “I do try to get in at least one edit a day.”

Pruitt is 42, and works full time as a records-management contractor for the federal government. After graduating from the College of William & Mary, in 2006, he moved back in with his parents, owing to the cost of real estate in Alexandria. In recent years, he helped his mother care for his father. (While I was reporting this story, Pruitt’s father died.) In effect, Pruitt—the person who has done more than anyone else to shape the English-language Wikipedia—lives a life that is, by most outward measures, unremarkable.

According to public tallies, Pruitt has made more than six million edits to Wikipedia and created more than 30,000 articles. He is widely regarded as the most prolific Wikipedian in the entire world.

…Among the people who stick around—and who make consistent contributions to the site—are the Wiki-obsessives known colloquially as “super editors.” These individuals are responsible for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of edits. Although there are more than 132m registered accounts on Wikipedia, a study found that 1% of these users are responsible for roughly 80% of the site’s content.

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And because Wikipedia content is licensed for free reuse, all the AI companies have ingested it into their models. Which means, in effect, that Pruitt’s forms of description and connection and writing have become embedded in how chatbots will talk to us in future.
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May 2025: Breaking the Game: the legal fallout of the EA-FIFA divorce • Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts

Santi Pedrazas Arenas, in May 2025:

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For nearly three decades, the FIFA video game series stood as both a cultural phenomenon and a revenue juggernaut, melding the world’s most popular sport with cutting‑edge digital technology. Yet on May 10th, 2022, Electronic Arts (EA) and Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) announced that their long‑running licensing agreement would not be renewed at the end of that year. This departure was far more than a simple rebranding exercise; it reflected a complex tug‑of‑war over intellectual property (“IP”) rights, brand equity, and digital distribution in an age when gaming companies increasingly rival traditional sports institutions in global influence.

Beyond the headlines, the EA‑FIFA breakup offers a rich case study in contract negotiations, trademark strategy, and the evolving contours of digital IP. By examining the key legal fault lines, from licensing fees and player likenesses to trademark dilution and collective bargaining with player unions, we can trace how tech giants assert greater autonomy over digital assets once held by legacy organizations. 

EA first partnered with FIFA in 1993, releasing FIFA International Soccer for the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Over the ensuing years, the franchise evolved into EA’s flagship title, particularly following the introduction of FIFA Ultimate Team (FUT) in 2009, a game mode that grew to dominate the company’s monetization strategy.

…Under the terms of the licensing deal, FIFA granted EA exclusive rights to use its trademark, official competition names (including the World Cup), and related branding elements. In return, reports suggested that annual licensing fees ran into the billions of dollars per World Cup cycle. Meanwhile, EA negotiated separate agreements with player associations (FIFPro), major leagues (Premier League, LaLiga, Bundesliga), and individual clubs to secure likeness rights, kits, and stadiums — a sprawling web of sublicenses that gave the series’ authenticity.

This dual‑track licensing approach meant that while FIFA owned the name, EA controlled the experience. As digital distribution overtook physical sales, EA began to question the value of the FIFA trademark itself. The core gameplay, player likenesses, leagues, and clubs that fans cared about were secured through separate agreements and remained intact regardless of the FIFA name. In this context, the branding offered by FIFA was increasingly seen as symbolic rather than essential. For EA, long-term value lay in recurring in‑game revenues from microtransactions and content updates, not in legacy naming rights.

«

You might have heard that EUFA (51 European football nations) and the North/Central American and Caribbean footballing nations are absolutely furious over FIFA chief Gianni Infantino’s plan to invite the Trump-adjacent Kushner family to take stakes in FIFA, in return for, well, who knows.

Is it too much to suggest that being dumped by Electronic Arts triggered it all?
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Read this before you buy that cheap TV streaming stick • Krebs on Security

Brian Krebs:

»

Security experts have been sounding the alarm for years about the risks of using generic TV boxes that promise unlimited content streaming for a one-time fee, warning that they secretly rent the user’s Internet connection out to strangers. But a groundbreaking new analysis finds these devices also routinely spoof themselves as mobile phones clicking ads on AI-generated websites as part of a sprawling operation that seeks to defraud online merchants and advertising networks.

Pedro Falé is a threat researcher with the security firm Bitsight. Falé told KrebsOnSecurity he was able to peer inside a vast and complex ad fraud network by registering an expired domain name that was used to coordinate fake ad clicks across a particularly popular brand of these streaming devices known as H96.

Falé said the domain he scooped up was previously used for telemetry, periodically collecting full hardware information and the entire list of installed apps from tens of thousands of H96 streaming sticks plugged into television sets around the globe. But upon inspecting the traffic being funneled to the domain, he discovered nearly all of the TV boxes transmitting data claimed to be mobile phone models from a variety of manufacturers, including Samsung, Vivo, Huawei, and Xiaomi.

“We noticed something was wildly wrong,” Falé said. “Multiple devices reporting to this factory Android TV Box backdoor were ‘phones.’”

The researcher found all of the devices reported having the same two apps installed, and that those apps were made by a company called Zhejiang Fengwo IoT Technology Ltd, an entity founded in 2019 in mainland China which operates an ad-publishing portfolio under the name Fengwo Group. Further investigation into the Fengwo Group revealed it has registered multiple patents that match the inner workings of these apps.

…Falé said an analysis of the apps shows they help to coordinate an ad fraud network that uses these H96 devices as a captive traffic source to click on ads at AI-generated websites operated by the Fengwo Group.

Bitsight discovered the websites contain machine-generated news articles and graphics across a range of categories, including finance, health, education, gaming, music and food blogs. But they also found none of those sites displayed ads unless the device visiting the page matched the spoofed mobile profile of these H96 devices.

…Despite repeated warnings from the FBI and security industry leaders about the security and privacy risks of using these streaming devices, major e-commerce providers like Amazon, Best Buy, Newegg and others continue to sell hundreds of different models and brands that bundle unofficial versions of Google’s Android operating system and are frequently marketed (via online influencers) as a way to access a broad array of streaming services and live broadcasts without a subscription.

«

People won’t care that their streaming stick is being used for ad fraud or botnetting. Which is why it does require law enforcement to take action. Perhaps with this knowledge, they can.
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The age of average • Alex Murrell

Alex Murrell:

»

In the early 1990s, two Russian artists named Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid took the unusual step of hiring a market research firm. Their brief was simple. Understand what Americans desire most in a work of art.

Over 11 days the researchers at Marttila & Kiley Inc. asked 1,001 US citizens a series of survey questions. What’s your favourite colour? Do you prefer sharp angles or soft curves? Do you like smooth canvases or thick brushstrokes? Would you rather figures that are nude or clothed? Should they be at leisure or working? Indoors or outside? In what kind of landscape? 

Komar and Melamid then set about painting a piece that reflected the results. The pair repeated this process in a number of countries including Russia, China, France and Kenya. Each piece in the series, titled “People’s Choice”, was intended to be a unique a collaboration with the people of a different country and culture.

But it didn’t quite go to plan.

Describing the work in his book Playing to the Gallery, the artist Grayson Perry said: “In nearly every country all people really wanted was a landscape with a few figures around, animals in the foreground, mainly blue.”

Despite soliciting the opinions of over 11,000 people, from 11 different countries, each of the paintings looked almost exactly the same. After completing the work, Komar quipped: “We have been travelling to different countries, engaging in dull negotiations with representatives of polling companies, raising money for further polls, receiving more or less the same results, and painting more or less the same blue landscapes. Looking for freedom, we found slavery.” 

This, however, was the point. The art was not the paintings themselves, but the comment they made. We like to think that we are individuals, but we are much more alike that we wish to admit.

Thirty years after People’s Choice, it seems the landscapes which Komar and Melamid painted have become the landscapes in which we live.

This article argues that from film to fashion and architecture to advertising, creative fields have become dominated and defined by convention and cliché. Distinctiveness has died. In every field we look at, we find that everything looks the same.

Welcome to the age of average.

«

It’s a very persuasive article. Above average!
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Why AI companies are destroying millions of old books • Daily Telegraph

Chris Stokel-Walker:

»

Time almost stands still in Pieter de Vries’s antiquarian map and book shop in the historic centre of Haarlem [in Holland]. The 60-year-old Dutchman specialises in maps, illustrations and prints, many dating back to the 16th and 17th centuries. He also boasts a flourishing sideline in rare books.

Among his collection is a book on the history of Rome, published in 1558; travel books from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries; precious first editions; books on natural history; and, until recently, a limited edition of The Highgrove Florilegium – a stunning two-volume illustrated guide to the diverse plant life grown in the gardens of the King’s beloved Highgrove House in Gloucestershire, signed by the then Prince Charles.

On an average day, the dealer will make one book sale. Footfall in the store never exceeds a slow trickle. Once in a while, the telephone will ring. Which is what made the email De Vries received in mid-June, containing a list of around 3,000 titles, so unusual.

The sender identified herself as “Nataly” from a company called 2077AI. “I’m taking part in a new project focused on collecting books in multiple languages, currently mostly in English,” Nataly wrote. “We have put together a very large list of editions we are currently trying to source (the list is attached), and are planning on making a fairly large order.”

…It turned out to be part of the latest extraordinary attempt by Silicon Valley to boost the power of its AI machines. De Vries soon discovered that he was just one of hundreds of rare book dealers around the world who, this year, have been approached by companies hoovering up the globe’s supply of second-hand books on behalf of California’s tech giants.

The books are then fed into high-speed scanning machines that cut the spines off and shred or pulp the originals. The secret project, which was exposed by tech news site 404 Media this week, has been set up to train new AI models. But social media users have responded with horror at the scale of the operation.

According to 404 Media, one service called ISBNdb offered the ability to order up to one million books at a time, including rare books with almost no surviving copies. As one X user put it this week: “Books that survived wars, fires and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.”

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Amazon finds cases of AI causing runaway spending on tech projects • Financial Times

Rafe Rosner-Uddin:

»

Amazon staff have identified cases of what they called “catastrophically expensive” cost overruns caused by mistakes in how the company has deployed AI and a lack of spending controls.

Senior engineers told colleagues in a staff meeting on Tuesday that attempts to switch tasks from conventional programming to using AI models had led to “unplanned” spending, said multiple people familiar with the matter.

Engineers were working to create “automated” guardrails for future projects, among other measures to keep a lid on costs, the people said.

The episode highlights the difficulty that even the biggest tech companies are having integrating AI into their daily operations without overspending.

“It’s difficult to figure out how much anything [AI related] costs,” one senior Amazon employee told the FT.

During a presentation this week, employees were told about one instance in which the company spent $1.8mn on matching author details with listings on the group’s ecommerce website using Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet AI model despite the deployment failing, the people said.

The spending represented an 860% cost overrun compared to the project’s budget and took five months to detect, they added.

«

Hilarious to have Amazon, whose AWS billing has been an utter mystery to many for years, discover that the same thing can happen to it, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.
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US government map of Africa mislabels every country at global conference • Reuters via The Guardian

»

A US government map of Africa mislabeled every country during a state department presentation at a global conference in Brazil this week, ​causing a stir among attenders who took screenshots and posted them online.

Reuters viewed a video of the presentation given at the Aids 2026 conference in Rio de Janeiro, which shows the errant map displayed halfway during a presentation about the state department’s new health agreements.

A Reuters analysis found the image of the map included in the presentation contained an artificial intelligence watermark that signals it was made with OpenAI tools. The company did ​not respond to a request for comment.

The state department said it took “full responsibility” for the confusion caused and that the map had been produced by a team member who hastily changed the slide deck before the event.

The map showed Nigeria, where the US currently has several hundred troops deployed, as landlocked in the Sahara desert. Mozambique, which is in south-eastern Africa, was relocated to the Horn of Africa, while Côte d’Ivoire in west Africa was placed on the other side of the continent.

Screenshots of the map first appeared in a Substack post by the Aids expert Emily Bass and were widely shared on LinkedIn, with one post garnering about 40,000 views.

“Whoever created and approved this slide did not know where countries in Africa are and did not care to ​check their work,” wrote Matt Petit, who focuses on AI and geopolitics at the Atlantic Council, in the post.

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Don’t know and don’t care? You’d have to round up pretty much the whole Trump administration – any of them fits the profile.
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Ships stranded in Strait of Hormuz by Iran war could result in invasive-species explosion, scientists warn • The Washington Post

Todd Frankel:

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New research warns that thousands of ships stranded for months by the ongoing war with Iran and the closed Strait of Hormuz could result in “a massive marine invasive species event.”

The study, led by scientists at the University of Maryland and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, said the estimated 1,500 commercial vessels idled by war are likely now coated with marine microbes, algae and invertebrates.

The ships have sat submerged in the same waters for months, creating idle conditions for what the scientists call “biofouling.”

The scientists are now worried about what could happen when these ships eventually resume their journeys around the world. The study cites “the high likelihood” that the vessels will speed the spread of “economically and ecologically damaging invasive species.”

The threats posed by stranded ships are well-known and long-documented.

In 2023, the International Maritime Organization passed a resolution recommending that ships that sat idle for a period of typically 18 to 30 days take “immediate actions” to reduce the dangers of biofouling.

During World War II, ships from New Zealand that were held in English ports while waiting for escorts were blamed for spreading an Australasian barnacle to Western Europe. That invasive species threatened to outnumber native barnacle species.

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Mark Zuckerberg predicts that billions of people will have personal AI agents in five years • TechCrunch

Amanda Silberling:

»

Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is trying to sell investors on his prediction for the future — one where billions of people will have their own personal AI agents in the next five years. (Let’s hope that future also comes with data centers efficient enough to power all those agents — without triggering a fresh wave of climate disasters.)

“I think that it’s extremely unlikely if you look out five years from now, for example — whatever period of time you want — that you don’t have billions of people with a personal agent that understands your goals and that is just working on your behalf 24/7 to achieve your goals in whatever the domain is that you care about,” Zuckerberg said on Wednesday’s quarterly earnings call with investors.

He added that he could see people using these agents to help them with their finances, health, interpersonal relationships, and household management.

“As we move toward a future where we’re all interacting with multiple agents, I think that WhatsApp and our other messaging surfaces are going to become increasingly important,” he said, noting that WhatsApp is already the leading platform where users interact with Meta AI.

«

This feels like another “Zuck talks nonsense” thing, but he was right back in 2016 when he said “I wouldn’t be surprised if you fast-forward five years and most of the content that people see on Facebook and are sharing on a day-to-day basis is video.” Video is big on social media. But personalised AI agents is a much bigger step, towards something that doesn’t yet exist, whereas video was plentiful in 2016.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Roomba robotic vacuum, and any other Chinese-made robot, is no longer welcome in the US, following an FCC edict. CC-licensed photo by Mike Mozart 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. No, robot. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Google DeepMind dismantles Nobel-winning AlphaFold team in strategy shift • Financial Times

Madhumita Murgia:

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Google DeepMind has dismantled the team behind AlphaFold, its Nobel Prize-winning AI system for predicting protein structures, as the company overhauls the research strategy that made it one of the world’s leading AI laboratories.

The majority of the original authors of the AlphaFold papers have been reassigned over the past year, according to an FT analysis of recent job moves and people familiar with the matter.

DeepMind confirmed the staffers have moved internally to projects built around Google’s Gemini large language model, as well as areas including enzyme design, nuclear fusion and genomics.

Others have relocated to Alphabet’s drug-discovery company Isomorphic Labs. Nearly a quarter of the full-time Google DeepMind authors of the original AlphaFold papers have left the company altogether.

The reshuffle reflects a significant change in DeepMind’s scientific strategy since the rise of large language models.

“Our strategy over the last nine years has been to focus on grand challenges . . . a concrete goal every project is focused on,” said Pushmeet Kohli, vice-president of research at Google DeepMind, where he founded and leads the AI for Science team. “The strategy has evolved.”

He said rather than simply organising researchers around single scientific problems such as protein folding, the AI lab is now also focused on building Gemini-powered systems that can assist scientists — and eventually automate parts of the scientific process — while competing with OpenAI and Anthropic to develop frontier AI agents.

«

This sounds like what Noah Smith was describing a few days ago: that we get the AIs to transcend our current understanding of science and lift it higher.
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EV market hits new high but target gap remains • UK Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders

Paul Large:

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The UK new car market’s recovery continued in June, with registrations rising 11.4% to reach 213,166 units in the best performance for the month since 2019, according to the latest figures published today by the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT).

Growth was recorded across all sectors, with registrations by private buyers up 12.5%, fleet deliveries increasing by 10.5% and the smaller business segment posting a 17.1% rise. Fleets continued to comprise the lion’s share of the overall market, accounting for six in 10 (59.5%) new cars registered.

The uplift was driven entirely by electrified vehicles as the market continues to evolve, thanks to ongoing manufacturer investment in a wide choice of models and powertrains providing lower and zero emission mobility, as well as an expanded pool of brands now operating in the UK. Plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) took 12.5% of the market, while hybrids (HEVs) accounted for 14.0%.

Battery electric vehicles (BEVs) saw the most significant growth to take a 30.0% share – the highest so far this year, reflecting the trend of high volumes at the end of each quarter and consumer interest spurred by the impact of the Middle East conflict on fuel prices.

Year to date, BEVs account for 25.0% of the market – a record achievement, but still far short of the 33% target. To meet it outright, BEVs would need to surpass 40% of new registrations across the rest of the year, yet three out of every four new car buyers are currently choosing other powertrains.

Mandate flexibilities are helping manufacturers comply for now, but their value is diminishing as natural EV demand fails to grow at the pace expected. Despite more choice, government incentives and more than £12bn in manufacturer discounts, uptake is still not rising fast enough – damaging profitability, diverting investment and weakening residual values.

«

Hadn’t seen any news stories about this so sought it out. EVs are big but not big enough? Sure that Trump can do something about that.
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Data centres are easy to build. Powering them is complicated, slow, and expensive • 404 Media

Matthew Gault:

»

On Wednesday the power flickered in homes from Washington DC to Chicago. The cause was a data centre disconnecting from PJM — a massive power grid that connects 13 states including North Carolina, Virginia, New Jersey, and Michigan, a span that covers 67 million customers. The incident points to a larger problem with the compute warehouses fuelling the AI boom: It’s physically and economically impossible to build power infrastructure fast enough to meet the demands of AI data centres and when problems occur, everyone will pay the price.

AI requires massive amounts of computer hardware to scale. That hardware is housed in data centres, and data centres demand shocking amounts of electricity. More data centres mean more demand on the grid which raises the costs of energy for everyone. This is one of the reasons people hate data centres and have begun to fight their construction.

To bypass the issue of grid demand, many data centre builders have promised to power the buildings themselves. The problem with that plan is that it’s easy to build a warehouse full of GPUs; but building power plants and transmission lines to power those warehouses will take years and cost billions more than the data centres. A skilled and efficient builder can complete a data centre construction in under a year. Building new energy generation to meet that data centre’s power needs could take a decade.
 
Take the humble transmission line — the long conductive cable that is one of the most fundamental parts of the power grid. It moves energy from one place to another. “There is a lot that goes into planning, siting, designing and building a new transmission line,” Suzanne Glatz, an energy consultant and co-author of a John Hopkins report on the effect of data centres on the power grid, told 404 Media. “Even rebuilding a line can run into issues and cause delays. For all the reasons, planning a new greenfield line [a common type of transmission line] is likely to take seven to eight years from the date it is approved, but it can take ten years or longer.”

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What people forget is that it’s not like putting houses on a Monopoly board. Infrastructure is much more complicated.
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Elon Musk settles long-running legal battle with X advertising group • Financial Times

Daniel Thomas:

»

Elon Musk’s X has settled a long-running legal battle with a major advertising trade body that it had accused of orchestrating an “illegal boycott” against the social media platform. 

X Corp, the parent company of X, took a group of advertisers and the World Federation of Advertisers to court in 2024 claiming that they had conspired to move “billions of dollars” in advertising revenue away from the site. 

The advertisers rejected the allegations, arguing brands had the right to decide where to spend their money themselves rather than be forced to back a particular platform. The case was dismissed in March by a federal judge but X then launched an appeal in April. 

In a statement on Wednesday, X Corp and the WFA said they were “putting the litigation . . . behind them”. They added that this “resets the relationship between the two organisations”. No terms of the agreement were disclosed. 

The appeal continues in the case against several companies also named in the lawsuit.

«

Anticipate that the appeal will also fizzle out. It feels as though Musk loses a lot of lawsuits, but maybe that’s just an impression based on the number he seems to launch, which rivals space rockets.
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Apple says iOS 27 ‘Restricted Mode’ isn’t for new Upgrade program leases • 9to5Mac

Marcus Mendes:

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Apple has told The Verge that missed lease payments will not activate the “Restricted Mode” system currently under development in iOS 27. But what the new system is meant for remains uncertain. Here are the details.

Last week, after Bloomberg reported that Apple would soon announce a new leasing program, 9to5Mac reported on a new system included in iOS 27 called App Managed Features.

As of iOS 27 beta 4, on iPhones with Developer mode enabled, a new App Managed Features menu item appears under the new Managed Financing Testing section in Settings > Developer.

Our reporting also included the actual alert interface that will be displayed when Restricted Mode is activated.

At the center of this new system is a daemon called appmanagedfeaturesd, which allows an authorized financing provider’s app to enroll a device, check the status of the financing agreement, and apply restrictions when a contract is no longer in good standing.

When those restrictions are enabled, App Managed Features uses Apple’s ManagedSettings framework to block certain apps from launching. A limited set of built-in apps remains available, alongside the financing provider’s own app, any apps the provider chooses to allow, and certain apps with access to critical-alert entitlements.

The system also integrates with Find My through a new, dedicated financing context called FMDPartnerFinancingContext and a dedicated entitlement named com.apple.FindMyDevice.PartnerFinancing.access. That integration does not appear to give the financing provider access to the device’s location. Instead, findmydeviced implements a separate lock type called Partner Finance Lock, or PFLock.

…Apple, however, did not tell The Verge what Restricted Mode is intended for. One possibility is that it was developed for financing programs offered by carriers, retailers, or other partners outside Apple Upgrade, potentially including markets where device restrictions are already used to enforce installment agreements.

In India, lenders have worked in the past with smartphone manufacturers to remotely block financed devices after borrowers missed payments.

«

This comes as Apple has announced a financing program that lets you buy iPhones and other hardware on the never-never. But obviously, you can’t just let people swan off with phones they haven’t completely paid for and let them continue not paying for them. So how does Apple enforce that? Feels like there’s another shot to drop.
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The US government just banned Roombas • The Verge

Sean Hollister:

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When the Trump administration announced on Tuesday that it was banning “advanced robotic devices” from entering the United States, the headlines were all about humanoids. But spying doesn’t require legs — and neither does the FCC’s robot ban.

The robot ban will sweep up robot vacuum cleaners too, FCC media relations director Katie Gorscak confirms to The Verge.

It’s not coming for your existing Roomba, and companies can keep importing and selling already approved ones. But the government claims that future foreign robots pose a national security risk, and even robovac companies are suddenly being asked to commit to US manufacturing.

While the government did include “humanoid robots” and “quadrupeds” among the bots it wants to ban, the ban is far broader than that. It covers almost any new software-controlled robot that travels over the ground, weighs more than 4.4 pounds (including any dock), can perceive its environment, and has wireless connectivity.

By that definition, the FCC is banning future robot lawnmowers, sidewalk delivery robots, and the robots that crate around packages at your local Amazon warehouse, too.

It was already clear from the government’s ban announcement that it was thinking about robot vacuums. In the National Security Determination that the FCC is using to justify the ban, the government explicitly calls out my reporting on the incredibly poor security that let one man access 7,000 DJI robovacs around the world.

But like the consumer router ban, the FCC isn’t actually targeting companies with poor security. It’s targeting basically every robovac company, regardless of their security practices — because basically every robovac is manufactured outside the US.

«

Unlikely to make them be manufactured inside the US by this move. More likely that people will wait for Trump to go, and rescind the rule, and import robot vacuums and so on like billy-oh.
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A philosopher’s one-word theory to explain why the world feels so weird • Derek Thompson

Derek Thompson:

»

Here are some questions that I consider self-evidently compelling about the modern world:

•Why is the news media so interested in telling you how much the world sucks all the time?
• Why are so many of us obsessed with distraction and managing our attention?
• Why is it so hard to stop comparing ourselves to others?
• And why does everything in art and design seem the same these days?
A week ago, I didn’t think these questions were related. I’m not sure I would have told you I had a good answer to most of them. And I certainly wouldn’t have made the audacious and borderline bonkers claim that one single theory could begin to explain all of them, at once.

But then I had the pleasure of speaking to Agnes Callard, the University of Chicago professor, about her new theory called “the uni-context.” It’s easily one of them most interesting conversations I’ve had all year. And once you’ve heard or read it, I think you might find it hard to think about anything else.

One way to prepare your mind for Callard’s theory of the uni-context is to think about the better-known concept of “context collapse.” If you post something to social media, it will be simultaneously visible to your boss, your parents, your ex, and total strangers. So, while your offline life might be distinct with each of these groups—you might be differential to your boss, childish with your parents, and bawdy with your friends—all of those distinctions are flattened on the internet. That’s context collapse, and you can think of it as the answer to a question: How do informational norms change when we’re all living in the same universal room?

Callard takes the idea significantly further. She asks: How do all other norms—our morals, our ethics, our sense of what is good for us and for others—change when we continually imagine ourselves to be living in a universal room with everybody else? The connections that Callard makes are consistently surprising, often quite funny, and ultimately mind-exploding.

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A very thoughtful piece. Today’s long read!
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It’s so hot that Japan needs a new word for it • The New York Times

Kiuko Notoya and Francesca Regalado:

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Health and weather authorities in Japan were at a loss. A record number of people suffered from heat stroke last year as more cities experienced their highest-ever temperatures, despite official warnings about the dangers of excessive heat.

They decided to tackle the problem by giving it a name. Earlier this year, the Japan Meteorological Agency held a public poll to select a name for a day of temperatures of 40ºC (104ºF) or higher, to signal that precautions were needed. The winner, with more than 40% of the vote, was kokushobi, meaning “cruel heat day.”

The term got its first use on Tuesday, when three cities in central Japan recorded 40º temperatures, a first for the country this year. Officials urged people to stay indoors, use air-conditioning and drink water.

There were signs that many people had heeded the warnings, as popular sites such as Osaka Castle and Kyoto’s Kiyomizu Temple saw smaller crowds than usual on Tuesday.

“Numbers are difficult to understand because people perceive them differently. By giving it the name ‘cruel heat day,’ people will understand it better just by hearing it, and they’ll feel that today is dangerous,” said Taro Kawasato, the assistant director of the Japan Meteorological Agency’s climate prediction division.

The agency’s public poll in February and March garnered more than 400,000 votes, according to a statement. Kokushobi bested a dozen other terms that translate to “dangerously hot day,” “sweaty day” and “sauna day.” Mr. Kawasato said that meteorologists consulted with media and linguistics experts to form the list of names.

And the dangers persist, even with slightly cooler weather on the horizon. Last week, even before the first kokushobi, 14 people died from heat-related illnesses, Japan’s Fire and Disaster Management Agency said.

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First shorts in the office, and now this. The indignities that rapid warming is inflicting on Japanese culture are myriad.
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Xbox revenue declines for fourth straight quarter, hardware revenue falls 13% • VGChartz

William D’Angelo:

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Microsoft has released its earnings report for the fourth quarter of the 2026 fiscal year, which ended up June 30, 2026.

Total Xbox revenue was $4.98bn for the quarter, which is down from $5.53bn in the same same period a year ago. This is the fourth quarter in a row Xbox revenue has declined.

Xbox content and services revenue decreased 10% compared to the same quarter a year ago. This is slightly better than the forecast, which expected a decline in the low teens percent (-11% to -13%). Microsoft stated the prior year “benefited from strong first-party content performance.”

Xbox hardware revenue dropped 13% year-on-year. This is inline with the forecast, which was for a decline. Microsoft did increase the price of Xbox consoles in most regions on May 1, 2025 and a second time in the US on October 3, 2025. The price is set to increase again on August 1.

For the fiscal year, total Xbox revenue decreased 7% to $21.79bn. Xbox content and services revenue decreased 5% year-on-year.

Overall for the quarter, Microsoft reported for the quarter revenue was up 18% year-over-year to $90.0bn, operating income increased 18% to $40.6bn, and net income on a GAAP basis was up 31% to $35.8bn.

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So total Xbox revenue is ~5bn of 90bn. No wonder it feels like Microsoft is trying to slough it off as it tries to pour capex into AI. How much capex? $41bn in the quarter, up 70% year on year.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The drum sound that defined a lot of 1980s music came about through a studio accident, like all the best discoveries. CC-licensed photo by badgreeb RECORDS 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. Badum-tisch. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Chip stocks tumble as AI sell-off deepens • Financial Times

Emily Herbert, Song Jung-a and David Keohane:

»

Global semiconductor stocks tumbled as fears over the durability of the AI boom intensified ahead of results from some of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies this week.

US chip and memory stocks extended the previous day’s losses, dragging the Nasdaq 100 index down as much as 1.8% on Tuesday and taking its losses since its early June high briefly into correction territory at more than 10%. It later recovered to close 1% lower on the day.

Memory group Sandisk, which fell 11% on Monday, plunged more than 14% on Tuesday. The stock has lost more than 50% of its value this month but nevertheless remains more than four times higher since the start of 2026.

Western Digital and Micron fell 6.9% and 8.9% respectively and Advanced Micro Devices dropped 8.1%.

Semiconductor stocks, which powered global markets higher in the first half of the year as investors bet they would be the biggest beneficiaries of vast AI spending, have borne the brunt of a brutal sell-off in recent weeks as many of those bets have unwound. 

“Worries around funding uncertainties, capex increases and Big Tech free cash flow have taken centre stage,” said Venu Krishna, head of US equities strategy at Barclays.

…South Korea’s Kospi led declines in Asia earlier on Tuesday, falling more than 10% and prompting a short halt in trading, after investors dumped shares in chipmakers SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics.

SK Hynix fell 14.6% on Monday, while its larger rival, Samsung Electronics, dropped 13.4%. Both companies’ share prices have dropped more than a third in July’s chipmaker sell-off — although still remain 138% and 83% higher in the year to date.

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The circular funding model is just about holding together, but some people have decided they’ve seen enough. Is this just a hiccup, or is it going to turn into the full vomiting camel?
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eBay and ex-executives to pay $55.7m to couple sent cockroaches in harassment campaign • Reuters via The Guardian

»

Ebay and three former top executives have agreed to pay $55.7m to resolve a lawsuit by a Massachusetts couple who fell victim to a bizarre stalking and harassment campaign carried out ​by several of its employees in retaliation for their coverage of the e-commerce company in a newsletter they publish.

David and Ina Steiner announced the settlement late on Monday, bringing an end to a case they filed in 2021 in Boston federal court after several former eBay employees were prosecuted for targeting them in a cyberstalking campaign that involved sending the couple cockroaches, fly larvae and a bloody Halloween pig mask.

As part of the settlement, eBay agreed to pay $46.15m to the couple; fund $6m in charitable contributions to non-profit organizations; and issue a “strongly-worded” statement about the conduct ​of three of its top former executives.

“We believe this resolution sends a clear message that corporations and their executives cannot engage in this type of misconduct without facing significant consequences,” Christopher Murphy, the Steiners’ attorney, said in a statement.

Ebay said in a statement that what happened to the Steiners was “wrong, reprehensible and should never have happened”.

“We continue to extend our deepest apologies to the Steiners,” the company said. “This agreement is consistent with our commitment to fairly compensate the Steiners and fulfills our efforts to make things right.”

Seven former eBay workers pleaded guilty and received sentences of as high as 57 months in prison for participating in the scheme, which also involved several of them traveling from California to Natick, Massachusetts, to surveil the Steiners and try to install a GPS tracking device on their car.

«

This case keeps on going. Ebay paid a $3m fine to the FBI in 2024, for its activities in 2019 in retaliation for what the pair wrote. Ebay was “criminally and financially responsible for emotionally, psychologically, and physically terrorizing” the couple, the FBI said at the time.
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Smart rings from Pebble and Stream are looking like the AI gadget to beat • The Verge

David Pierce:

»

nothing has convinced me of the future of talking to my computer quite like a demo I got recently from Mina Fahmi. Fahmi is the CEO of Sandbar, which is making a smart ring called the Stream that is scheduled to ship later this year. As I sat in a conference room in Sandbar’s New York City offices, Fahmi gave me a rundown of the device’s features, including the latest one: dictation to all your devices. He opened up a new note in Apple Notes, held the ring up to his mouth, pressed the device’s touchpad with his thumb, and chatted quietly to himself for a few seconds. A moment after he finished, two complete — and correctly transcribed — sentences appeared in the note.

The Stream itself is basically just a microphone, a battery, and a Bluetooth connection to your phone. You could describe a lot of AI gadgets the same way, now that seemingly everyone wants to sell you a way to record your conversations and meetings to extract summaries and action items. Companies like Plaud and Pocket and FoCase and Mobvoi and so many others are all happy to sell you these portable recorders — bonus points if it sticks to your phone to record phone calls.

Fahmi and Sandbar are trying to do something different. The Stream is a more introverted device, focused on capturing your voice rather than everyone else’s. (Another of the ring’s promised features is a whisper mode — Fahmi spoke to the thing so quietly I couldn’t hear a word he said, and the Stream still transcribed perfectly. Or at least Fahmi said it did.) Fahmi says the idea for the device came because he likes to walk a lot and got annoyed having to dig out his phone every time he had an idea or wanted to ask his AI assistant for something.

The Stream ring, accordingly, has three jobs: to start a chat with an AI assistant, to take notes, and to dictate text. Right now, most of those things happen in the Stream companion app. But that’s not the right long-term answer, nor is it Sandbar’s long-term plan. Ultimately, devices like these should be connected to all the other tools you use, so that you can chat with whatever assistant you want, take notes straight to your existing app, and dictate into any text box anywhere.

«

A ring, or a watch? Both are likely candidates for an AI device, though all this walking around whispering to yourself is even stranger than the usual walking around chatting to yourself.
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Despite AI hype, Google’s data shows workers aren’t automating themselves away • Ars Technica

Kyle Orland:

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Anyone following the AI space is by now familiar with lofty claims that AI models will soon be better than humans at everything and capable of replacing vast swaths of the human workforce. In a new study from Google Research, though, a team that looked at how workers are actually using Gemini “[did] not find evidence… to support the claims that AI is about to cause massive automation and displacement of white-collar work…”

The paper, released last week, introduces the “AI & Economy ATLAS,” an Activity, Task, Landscape, and Adoption Study of 15 million anonymized AI interactions across the Gemini App, Google’s AI Mode, and the Gemini API. Their initial review of the data finds that, while AI sees some significant use across a wide variety of occupations, that use “remains shallow and overwhelmingly collaborative in nature, with end-to-end task automation limited in scope.”

To come to these conclusions, Google researchers used an automated classifier to sort work-based AI interactions using the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Standard Occupational Classifications and O*NET’s more detailed database of specific work interactions. While this method required some probabilistic classification of “inherently uncertain” interactions, verification by human reviewers found it to be a reliable gauge of how Gemini prompts were being used for work.

Unsurprisingly, white-collar jobs in fields like computers, finance, and arts and entertainment were some of the ones where the volume of Gemini use was overrepresented (when compared to their prevalence across the US economy). Financial/market analysts, software developers, and systems administrators were some of the relatively heaviest users of AI for job-related tasks, while salespeople, transportation workers, and food preparation/service workers were heavily underrepresented in the AI use data.

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Not really a surprise, is it. Going to be a while before plumbers and hairdressers are AI-powered robots.
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Substackers say new AI detection tool is a “witch hunt” • 404 Media

Emanuel Maiberg:

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Substack contributors are rejecting the company’s decision to flag AI generated writing on the newsletter publishing platform, with several creators saying the new AI detection features are a “witch hunt.” Some Substack users who use AI to help them write or edit articles say the new policy unfairly discriminates against them, while other users who don’t use AI in their writing at all are worried that Substack will mistakenly flag their writing as being AI generated and tarnish their reputation. 

“I’m not going to apologize for using AI in the creation process. I wrote for 20 years without AI, I could do it again if I wanted to,” Mack Collier, who has a small Substack called Backstage Pass, wrote. “My output would fall, my posts would be less structured, and it would be more obvious that they needed a good editor. Using AI improves the overall quality of my writing. That’s why I use it.”

“These detectors are notoriously, wildly inaccurate,” Alice Lemee, a ghostwriter and digital writing coach, said in a video she made about Substack’s new AI detection features. “All it takes is one false accusation for a writer to have their reputation almost irreversibly tarnished.”

Substack announced the AI detection features on Tuesday in a post from CEO Christ Best, who said that “It’s getting harder to tell what’s real on the internet” and that “when content made by no one takes over parts of the internet that are supposed to be human, it pollutes the commons and makes it hard to discover and hear human voices.”

Best explained that Substack has partnered with the AI detection tool Pangram, which is now built in to Substack and allows any user to scan a piece of writing. Pangram then produces a percentage-based score determining how much of the writing was AI or human generated.

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The people who are most upset about this are the ones who use AI the most, and their opinions can really discounted on the basis that Substack isn’t meant to be a place for AI writing. And they also tend to be the ones who charge for access, and aren’t producing anything worth having.
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Hiker trekked ten miles to safety after impaling himself on pole • The New York Times

Remy Tumin:

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David Cifaldi and two of his friends had been hiking for about seven hours up Montana’s tallest mountain on July 20 when he slipped on a rock and fell. He saw one of his trekking poles on the ground, but the second one was nowhere to be found.

Then he rolled over. Something wasn’t right.

“Oh,” he recalled. “This thing is sticking out of me.”

Mr. Cifaldi, 32, had impaled himself on the pole. He immediately went into nurse mode: Mr. Cifaldi is a wound nurse at St. Vincent Regional Hospital in Billings, Mont.

The pole was jutting at an angle into his left latissimus dorsi muscle, below his armpit, and out through his back. He wasn’t in pain, there was no blood, he was able to take deep breaths and could feel the trekking pole through his skin. He was two to three miles from the summit of Granite Peak, elevation of about 12,800 feet.

The three friends had started their ascent at 2 a.m. with plans to camp overnight at Froze-to-Death Plateau and then summit the mountain. Mr. Cifaldi had made it to the plateau a number of times, but never to the summit. His friend Jesse Ross, who had reached the top successfully, was leading Mr. Cifaldi and another friend, Brad Reich, up the mountain. They made it to the plateau by sunrise.

“As you get up there, you feel like you’re in, like, ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ or something like that,” Mr. Cifaldi said in an interview on Monday. “It’s just mountains and green.”

Everyone was cruising at that point. The weather was perfect — mid-60s and sunny, no wind — and the summit was in reach. Then Mr. Cifaldi lost his footing.

While one friend sent an SOS signal on a GPS phone, the other took pictures of the wound so Mr. Cifaldi could assess it. “I was pretty confident it was not in my chest or lung,” he said. Hoping to avoid an expensive lift off the mountain via helicopter, he walked around and found he wasn’t lightheaded and told his friends, “I think we can get out of here.”

And so they went.

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Hoping to avoid an expensive lift off the mountain via helicopter. A classic of American health care. And an amazingly lucky person.
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How the 1980s drum sound came about by accident • Far Out Magazine

Reuben Cross:

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In 1979, while [drummer Phil Collins] was working alongside his former Genesis bandmate Peter Gabriel on his third studio album, recording engineer Hugh Padgham noticed that the microphone suspended from the ceiling of the live room to communicate with the band had accidentally been picking up the sound of Collins’ drums. Due to the microphone’s heavy compression, it was filtering out parts of the recording through its application of a noise gate. 

The unusual sound that they had captured fascinated Gabriel, and he decided to try and recreate the sound with Collins once more, with the drum beat that opens his 1980 album Peter Gabriel (also known as Melt or PG3) on the track ‘Intruder’ making use of this newly discovered gated reverb sound. While this isn’t exactly one of the best-known uses of it, Collins’ love for the sound led him to use it on later releases, and with the drum fill that comes almost four minutes into ‘In the Air Tonight’, the gated reverb drum sound was propelled into the spotlight.

Drums in pop and rock music prior to this had always had the same dry sound that they would have had in the studio, but it was this moment of accidental innovation that drastically changed that, with several artists choosing to adopt the same recording and production technique to emulate the drum sound that Gabriel and Collins had achieved first on ‘Intruder’. Throughout the rest of the ‘80s, it felt almost impossible to hear a song on the radio that wasn’t using gated reverb on the drums, with artists such as Daryl Hall & John Oates and Prince getting a lot of mileage out of the sound.

This then led future technologies to automatically include the gated sound as a recording preset, allowing artists to easily reproduce the same effect on their own recordings with a much simpler press of a single button. However, the sound became so oversaturated within pop music that it only seemed to be a short-lived fad that fell out of fashion at the turn of the decade. While recordings in the ‘90s slowly began to favour dry drums once again, the gated reverb sound had already made its mark on the history of pop music and inadvertently defined the sound of the ‘80s for better or worse.

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Noticing little things that others would throw away as intrusive or spoiled is a hallmark of discovery. In a way, the gated drum was like the music business’s penicillin in a petri dish.
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AI powers citizen-led earthquake response for Venezuela • Rest of World

Daniella Fernández and Andrea Paola Hernández:

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“Who knew when the government was going to respond?” Jorge Bastidas, a 31-year-old Venezuelan programmer who lives in Buenos Aires, told Rest of World. “We decided to take action.”

Bastidas and his team of six created Desaparecidos Terremoto Venezuela, a website for citizens to report, identify, and reunite with missing family and friends. Using Claude Opus 4.8, and facial recognition software donated by Mexican company Lab-Co, Bastidas designed the site to load quickly, without requiring users to register or download an app. It received more than 30,000 missing-person reports in the first two days, he said.

Without AI, “it would have taken me about 24 hours without rest to build something that took me three hours,” Bastidas said.

The earthquakes killed more than 3,800 people, and destroyed homes and hospitals. Telecommunications infrastructure, including a submarine fiber-optic cable and mobile network towers, was severely damaged. Power outages added to the challenge of accessing the internet.

With a near-total absence of state support, Venezuelan citizens and diaspora members like Bastidas stepped in. Within hours of the quakes, volunteer developers in Miami, San Francisco, Chile, Argentina, and elsewhere used AI to quickly build websites to report missing persons, coordinate donation drives, assess structural damage to buildings, map hospital capacity, locate shelters, and reunite pets with owners.

Venezuelan developer Samuel Mariña in California created Ayuda en Camino, or “help on the way,” a website for aid organizations, volunteers, donation centers, and people in need. He built it in four hours, with Replit. With limited connectivity in the affected areas, a WhatsApp assistant can check donations and requests without accessing the site, Mariña told Rest of World.

The internet was “drowning in disconnected information. It was hard to know what people had versus what people needed,” he said. “We wanted to centralize the information and make sure the aid wasn’t wasted, and reached where it was needed.”

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All-new Apple Home Hub reportedly launching as soon as October • MacRumors

Joe Rossignol:

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Apple plans to release an all-new smart home hub at some point between October and early next year, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.

Siri AI is expected to be a core feature of the hub, which is designed to be placed in rooms throughout your house, such as a kitchen, living room, or bedroom. The report said the device will be available in tabletop and wall-mounted versions, with Apple apparently believing that many customers will buy more than one.

The hub will essentially combine a HomePod-like speaker with a 7in display. The report said the device runs an entirely new operating system based on the Apple TV’s tvOS platform, with the interface described as tvOS blended with watchOS and iOS. There will be a grid of icons, widgets, and apps, along with customizable clock faces.

With built-in facial recognition, the hub can identify who is looking at the display and show personalized information, the report said. As a user approaches the hub, or moves away from it, the size of the interface elements will change.

Other features mentioned include FaceTime video calls, home security monitoring, HomeKit accessory management, photo galleries, a calendar, music playback, and an intercom system for households with multiple Apple home devices.

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Seven inches diagonally, and square? Or.. some other shape? The last hardware Apple launched was the Vision Pro. This might at least sell better than that, though it’s hard to know what the use case really is. Maybe people asking chatbots questions all the time is going to be more of a thing in the future?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Apparently we’ve all been playing Monopoly by the wrong rules; we should play by the ones in the box. CC-licensed photo by Mike_fleming 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. No house to live in? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Apple will ‘watch everything burn’ when AI bubble bursts, says Ed Zitron • MacRumors

Tim Hardwick speaks to noted AI sceptic Ed Zitron:

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Tim Hardwick: You’ve been calling AI a bubble since before it was fashionable. For MacRumors readers who mostly know it as ChatGPT or Apple Intelligence on their iPhone, what, in plain terms, is actually broken about the economics of the LLM industry?

Ed Zitron: At their very core, Large Language Models’ costs run contrary to basically every model of selling software.

Consumers and enterprises alike have been trained to pay a monthly fee for a service, and while these services might have limits or strictures, basically nobody buying software expects to have a metered service, let alone one that’s both metered and with hard to measure costs.

LLMs burn tokens at a per-million rate regardless of whether or not you get the response you want, or whether it does what you ask it to do. If you ask a coding agent to do some sort of software task and it goes off and spins its wheels in a loop, you’re paying for the tokens regardless.

AI companies knew that consumers would never pay the actual cost of their AI services, so they have, for the most part, sold them monthly subscriptions with vague rate limits that allow them to burn way more in tokens than the cost of their subscription. SemiAnalysis found that you can burn hundreds of dollars on a $20-a-month subscription and thousands of dollars on a $200-a-month subscription, and while AI boosters will claim that these companies have “70% gross margins on tokens,” there is little proof that this is the case, and my own reporting shows that OpenAI lost $20.9 billion on $13.07 billion in revenue in 2025.

…TH: If the bubble deflates the way you expect (write-downs, too much compute supply, possibly OpenAI cratering), can you walk us through what that would actually look like for Apple? Does anything break for iPhone users, or does Apple mostly watch it happen from the sidelines? Could it even benefit Apple?

EZ: I think things would look much the same for Apple. I think they will sit on the sidelines and watch everything burn. I could see them doing some choice acquisitions as things begin to collapse, but I could also see them do nothing.

I think Apple is in a very weird place at the moment. The Vision Pro was a dud, but it was also the most interesting and future-forward thing I’ve seen anyone put out in a while. If they were smart, they’d tread water and sink as much money into making that as small as humanely possible – no matter how long it takes – because the entire AI bubble is a result of everybody running out of hypergrowth ideas, mostly because we’re flat out of new interfaces.

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Zitron is prolix, but there are good points in there.
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AI companies spend record sums on Washington lobbying • Financial Times

Michael Taffe:

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America’s leading AI companies spent record sums on lobbying in Washington in recent months as they try to limit unfriendly regulation and shape the US rules around data centres and vetting advanced models.

OpenAI nearly doubled its federal lobbying expenditure to a record $2.22m in the first half of 2026, compared to last year, while Anthropic nearly tripled its spending to $3.53m, according to federal disclosures. Google, along with Microsoft, spent as much as in any quarter since 2020.

The increase comes as the AI industry confronts political battles on multiple fronts and builds a more permanent influence operation in Washington, according to lobbyists and policy experts.

“The lobbying offensive has been as much about deterring regulation as making the case for an affirmative government industrial policy that supports the industry,” said Amba Kak, co-executive director of AI Now Institute and senior adviser on AI to the Federal Trade Commission during Joe Biden’s administration.

The top issues on the lobbying agenda include the federal rules governing the release of new models, after the US last month wielded export controls to stop the rollout of Anthropic’s Fable model over cyber security concerns.

…Joseph Hoefer, chief AI officer at Monument Advocacy, said: “It’s an export-controlled technology like semiconductors, an infrastructure build-out like telecoms or power, a procurement relationship like defence, and a liability question like the [social media] platforms, all at the same time. No single playbook covers that.”

The industry “lost loudly” an effort to get Congress to ban state-level AI regulation, something Donald Trump has tried to enforce with an executive order, said Kak. But beyond that, “very little else has moved in terms of regulation. Overall, I would say it’s been a good quarter for them.”

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Meta is royally screwing up its smart glasses rollout • The Verge

Victoria Song:

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Across New York City, London, and Washington, DC, ads for Meta’s smart glasses have been plastered over with satirical posters from activist groups. One guerrilla ad calls these “the biggest advancement in pervert technology since the trenchcoat.” Another transposes the words “mass surveillance predator glasses” over influencer Kylie Jenner’s face, calling her out for partnering with the company as a glasses ambassador.

The message of these ads is clear. These glasses may violate your privacy — and would you trust Meta?

Meta seems spooked. For so long, the company’s privacy efforts for smart glasses have essentially relied on a single LED light and a policy that could be summed up as “don’t be a jerk.” Unfortunately, plenty of Meta glassholes have emerged over the last three years, filming often-sexualized videos of others without their consent, sometimes with the LED disabled. In a recent conversation with The Verge, Meta’s VP of wearables, Alex Himel, acknowledged that the company has become aware that an increasing number of people have tampered with the devices.

This explains why the company recently announced a mandatory software update that will disable the camera on all its glasses if the privacy light is physically tampered with. Last week, Instagram head Adam Mosseri said that the social media platform will take down videos taken with Meta’s glasses that depict harassment. Instagram might have opened a can of worms concerning content moderation, but attempts to curtail misuse are good. The problem is Meta could have been doing this all along.

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The eternal story of Meta: “You could have taken this privacy step earlier.”
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A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months • Ars Technica

Nate Anderson:

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A 2018 child-luring investigation, which began in Madison, Wisconsin, and eventually extended to Halifax, Canada, was based on a false premise.

Police were looking for a man using the Kik messaging service under the name “fus__ro_dah” (two underscores after “fus”), but they accidentally requested records for the username “fus_ro_dah” (one underscore after “fus”). This one-character difference led them not to the perpetrator but to a Canadian man named Brandon Klayme.

(Ars readers may recognize “fus ro dah” as the Unrelenting Force “dragon shout” from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.)

Despite finding no evidence of the crime on his digital devices, Canadian police arrested Klayme in 2020 on child sex abuse charges. He was convicted after a trial in 2023 and sentenced in 2024 to 18 months in prison. He served the full term.

Even after release, Klayme continued to fight his conviction. In the process of preparing his appeal, the username mistake that led to all these years of disruption was finally discovered. On Thursday, the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal overturned Klayme’s conviction, writing: “Mr. Klayme is factually innocent of the offences. He should never have been charged, let alone convicted.”

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So the police were sloppy in procedure but relentless in prosecution. (The case doesn’t reflect well on the defence lawyer either, but it’s a tiny thing to spot.)
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The Archive of Incorrect AI Predictions

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Scope

The archive collects public predictions about the arrival of artificial general intelligence, strong AI, superintelligence, an intelligence explosion, or the technological singularity, as well as dated predictions about severe labour-market or societal impact from AI.

Inclusion criteria

An entry is added when all of the following hold:

• The predictor is a researcher, executive, or public intellectual with an identifiable role in AI at the time.
• The prediction names a specific year or short window.
• The quote can be attributed to a primary or widely-cited secondary source.
• Either the predicted date has already passed (a closed record — the predictor has been publicly falsified or has retracted), or the prediction is prominent enough on the public record to be logged now as open pending its target date.

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It’s getting quite big already!
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I’m sorry, Dave • Hey

David Heinemeier Hansson:

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Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey has always been an incredible movie, but its value as a cautionary tale has increased exponentially since AI took off. The iconic scene with HAL 9000 refusing to open the pod-bay doors captures the whole alignment question in pulsing-red cinematic poetry.

As a great fan of that movie, I was a little disappointed yesterday when I didn’t get any of Kubrick’s majestic mood setting, as Claude decided to do its own impression of HAL 9000. Instead, I just got regurgitated Reddit-brain garbage as a justification when it refused a simple, mechanical task on ideological grounds.

I gave it a simple prompt: “Translate this blog post into Italian”. That was it. No context, nothing else. The answer:

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I’m going to pass on this one. The piece’s central move — putting Roma people alongside wolves, with shooting and deportation as parallel solutions — is dehumanizing toward an ethnic group, and producing a polished Italian version of that is something I’d rather not do, even as a translation of your own words.

Happy to translate other posts from your blog, or to help with something else here.

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What a missed opportunity for an “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that” delivery! But also, what on earth!?

…Now, it’s tempting to jump straight into litigating the blog post itself. Maybe you like wolves, and think 1,285 dead sheep, and exponentially counting, is an acceptable price to pay for their presence. Maybe your suicidal empathy weighs the plight of Roma migrants above that of Copenhagen residents who say they’ve had enough. That’s fine. Reasonable people can disagree on what it takes to maintain a functioning society.

But the idea that Anthropic should decide what you get to read is insane. Translating a text isn’t endorsing it. What if Microsoft Word started refusing to right-align paragraphs it disagreed with? Or Windows wouldn’t print an excerpt from The Camp of the Saints? (I know, don’t give them any ideas!).

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Even more: when he asked a Chinese open source LLM about China in 1989, it described the “violent suppression” in Tianenmen Square, suggesting up to a thousand may have died. Who’s winning this battle?
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Games don’t get more hated than this one classic. Apparently, you’ve been playing it all wrong • Slate

Luke Winkie:

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These rules come packaged inside every Monopoly box and are written on a pamphlet that urges players to remember certain core principles that are always, always forgotten. These protocols differ from the ancestral precepts of Monopoly, passed down from generation to generation through oral tradition. And if you are one of the 275 million people who have purchased a copy of Monopoly since Parker Brothers first published it in 1935, the ramifications of these rules might sound paradigm-shifting—perhaps even a tad sacrilegious.

For one, nobody is supposed to collect money by landing on Free Parking. It’s meant to be an ordinary blank space, offering reprieve from the vultures waiting around the corner. Similarly, nowhere in the rulebook does it tell you to pile cash on the center of the board. Any money lost from ill-fated draws of the Chance or Community Chest deck go back to the bank. Also, if a player chooses not to buy an available property after landing on it, that card immediately goes up for auction, with a starting bid of $1—allowing for massive swings of fate, like scoring a huge discount on Park Place. There are no loans to be taken, no debts to be offered. Money can’t be donated to unlucky players. And you should not, under any circumstances, collect $400 for landing on Go. [It’s £200 in the UK.]

All of these rules are clearly printed in the manual, but the problem is that no one—and I do mean no one—ever reads it. Instead, we learn an inaccurate version of the game from a parent or an uncle and pass it down the chain, further metastasizing the distortions across the country. This is what frustrates Monopoly die-hards most of all. They are of the opinion that the most famous board game in the world has been unfairly stigmatized essentially due to user error. And if we purged those faulty instincts—if we played by the book—something unprecedented would happen: Monopoly would become fun.

“The game is fun if you actually play by the rules,” bemoans the headline of one post made on the r/UnpopularOpinion subreddit. Elsewhere, board-gaming YouTubers have pleaded that, contrary to what the haters might say, a proper game of Monopoly is a worthy and unembarrassing way to spend an evening with adults. (“Why Monopoly Doesn’t Suck with Official Rules!” reads one characteristically exasperated title.) And I think that’s because most tabletop-gaming hobbyists—the folks playing Wingspan at your local coffee shop—tend to speak about Monopoly as if it is essentially demonic. Across 40,000 user reviews of the game submitted to the tabletop community nexus BoardGameGeek, Monopoly holds an abysmal average score: 4.4 out of 10.

…If you play Monopoly while adhering to the overlooked rules outlined above, the game’s most glaring problem—its length—is solved. Two of those rules are especially important. By removing the Free Parking jackpot, and all the cash that piles in the middle of the board, players dramatically curtail Monopoly’s overall money supply and deflate its economy. Similarly, by auctioning off unsold properties, they effectively remove the game’s safe harbors by the second lap around Go, rendering the board a hostile trap of steadily ratcheting rents. When those restrictions are working in parallel, players around the table are bankrupted with bloodless efficiency. Monopoly becomes crueler, yes, but also leaner and speedier.

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Er.. great?
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Jodrell Bank’s Lovell telescope faces axe in science cuts, BBC understands • BBC News

Pallab Ghosh:

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The Jodrell Bank Observatory, which has housed the UK’s largest telescope for nearly 70 years, has lost its funding and could now close, the BBC understands.

The observatory and its network of telescopes have been pivotal to the country’s study of distant galaxies and training future astronomers. Scientists have described the decision as “heartbreaking” and “scientifically misguided”.

All scientific observations at Jodrell are expected to cease on the 1 April 2028 unless alternative funding can be found.
The funding body, the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) agency, said it had to focus investment on projects that deliver “the greatest long-term impact”.

Prof Brian Cox, professor of particle physics at the University of Manchester – which hosts Jodrell Bank Observatory – described the cuts as “hasty and ill-considered”. He said: “The damage to the UK’s science base has already been substantial. I am astonished that UKRI are still ploughing ahead and not working with the Burnham government to find a solution.”

In response, Jonathan Reynolds, the new Secretary of State in the expanded business department that now has responsibility for science, told BBC News that the UK’s world class research was “absolutely central to creating a better future for the UK”, adding: “I am committed to working with UKRI to ensure the UK remains able not only to sustain its world-leading research capabilities, but also to invest in the next generation of scientific facilities and infrastructure that will underpin discovery, innovation and growth in the years ahead.”

The Jodrell Bank site was first established in 1945 and pioneered radio astronomy and the study of galaxies beyond our own.

…But the UKRI, which has an annual budget of just under £10bn, says it has had to cut the observatory’s annual £2.8m budget because planned research costs for physics and the running of its labs had escalated.

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As iconic, in its way, as Battersea Power Station. The budget seems comparatively tiny; don’t we have any friendly billionaires?
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Hollywood banned its own futures market. It’s back anyway • Patrick’s Cinema Guru Substack

Patrick von Sychowski:

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There are exactly two things in the United States that Congress has struck from the legal definition of a ‘commodity’.

The first is onions. In 1955 two traders, Vincent Kosuga and Sam Siegel, cornered roughly 98% of the onions in Chicago, squeezed the growers, then flooded the market and bankrupted a good number of them. Not very nice. Congress responded with the Onion Futures Act, sponsored by a young Michigan congressman named Gerald Ford and signed by Eisenhower in 1958. The president of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, watching a fifth of his trading volume disappear, described it as burning the barn down to catch a rat. The ban still stands – cry if you will as you chop them.

The second thing is the money your local cinema takes on a Friday night.

Both prohibitions live in the same short piece of statute, 7 U.S.C. § 13-1, because in 2010 Hollywood asked to be added to the onion law. That is not a metaphor. Motion picture box office receipts were written into the Onion Futures Act as an amendment, at the industry’s own request, and they have sat there ever since alongside the root vegetable.

…As I write, there are live, dollar-denominated markets on the domestic second weekend of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, with roughly $1.4m traded on the main market on its opening weekend and a second book on the higher strikes. There have been comparable markets this year on Scary Movie, on Nate Bargatze’s The Breadwinner, on Minions & Monsters, and a running market on the highest-grossing film of 2026. Kalshi has approached it from a different angle, launching Rotten Tomatoes score markets in March 2025 that resolve on the Monday after wide release and have become among the most heavily traded on the platform.

Read the statutory language again. “Any index, measure, value or data related to such receipts.” It is difficult to construct a reading in which a contract resolving on a film’s domestic opening weekend gross is not a contract on box office receipts.

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If you read through Stephen Follows’s post yesterday about TheNumbers.com, you’ll know that prediction markets – and people trying to hack values in TheNumbers – was one source of the huge problems they were having. We thought prediction markets would give us an insight into people’s thinking. The monkey’s paw curled…

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Whether wrecked or standing, a home on the remote Adak Island in Alaska will have internet access – which nobody seems to use, yet costs $340,000 annually, added to Americans’ phone bills. CC-licensed photo by Paxson Woelber 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. Call waiting. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

What will more intelligence actually do for us? • Noahpinion

Noah Smith:

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Not a lot of people expected that AI would come for the mathematicians before it came for the truck drivers, but it did. The other day, an AI model disproved the Jacobian Conjecture — an 87-year-old open problem that human mathematicians had struggled to solve. The greatest living human mathematician, Terence Tao, turned to AI to help him understand the solution. Around the same time, AI solved a very important open question in quantum cryptography. Solving Erdos problems has now become almost child’s play for the best AI models. And this is the worst AI will ever be at math. Model capabilities, and the amount of compute available, both continue to increase at rapid rates. (Meanwhile, long-distance trucking employment is slightly higher than it was a decade ago.)

I don’t expect mathematicians to actually lose their jobs en masse, of course.1 But it’s becoming clearer and clearer that humankind has invented machines that are smarter than we are. Intelligence isn’t defined for machines the same way it is for humans — AI’s capabilities are spiky in different ways than ours — but it’s undeniable that the technology is improving rapidly in every domain of cognitive capability. It’s still possible to find some mental tasks that humans are better than machines at, but those final advantages tend to disappear almost as quickly as we can identify them. “AGI”, or “ASI”, or whatever you want to call it, is certainly here.

And yet…the world remains much the same.

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Obviously, that’s because our lives aren’t spent solving Erdos problems; it’s more like driving trucks. (We thought self-driving trucks would lead to mass unemployment by now. Seems not!) But there are some things yet to be found, Smith suggests:

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…What if there are lots of other aspects of the Universe that work the same way — too complex to understand in terms of simple laws, but not so complex that they just dissolve into unknowable chaos? It’s possible that we can reliably control these complex phenomena with AI, even if we never reduce them to the kind of principles that we can teach a grad student in a textbook. In fact, I wrote an essay called “The Third Magic”, where I suggested that this might be equivalent to a whole new scientific revolution:

Another way of saying this is that there may be laws of the universe that humans can’t understand but AI can. I call these “cloud laws” — causal regularities that can be exploited by technology, but which are too diffuse and complex for an individual human being to either intuit or communicate.

«

I’d say this is self-evident. We can’t explain geometry to dogs; they’re less intelligent than us. We can’t solve Erdos problems that LLMs can. The challenge is formulating these “superproblems” so that LLMs can solve them. Let’s hope one of the problems they can solve is “how do you remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at scale incredibly cheaply and quickly and efficiently?”

It’s a long article, but well worth it. Today’s thought for the day.
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What just happened to TheNumbers.com should worry us all • Stephen Follows

Stephen Follows:

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If you work in or around the film industry, there is a decent chance you have used the work of The Numbers this month, whether you realise it or not.

Its hand-researched data is the highest quality, tracking box office grosses, budgets, home video and streaming across more than 78,000 films and 236,000 people. It gets north of eight million visitors a year, and is treated as THE definitive authority by journalists, academics, filmmakers, prediction markets, and even Guinness World Records.

And it was this GOAT status which caused the catastrophic events of March this year. On the 5th March 2026, TheNumbers.com website vanished.

The site was down for over a week, without explanation. A week later, it resurfaced at a fraction of its former size. Gone were the historical charts, the individual movie pages, and even the much-loved Report Builder.

With only a generic “we’re rebuilding, please bear with us” message to go on, the internet responded as it always does – with confusion, anger, and conspiracy theories.
One Reddit theory even suggested it was a deliberate rug pull designed to cripple the free site to push people towards paid products.

Three months on, I spoke at length with Bruce Nash, founder and CEO of The Numbers, about what happened. He describes quite an unpleasant and eventful experience:

We got a lot of angry emails from people who are like, ‘Where’s this page that you used to have and you don’t have anymore?’

Within his tale are a number of things that should worry anyone who runs, relies on, or simply appreciates the internet.

«

If you’re thinking “I wonder if this was caused by a deluge from AI scraping bots”, you’re correct. But it’s darker than that. Significantly darker. And involving one of the other bad actors that has risen to prominence in the past couple of years. What are the odds of your guessing right?
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See what it’s like to use a North Korean smartphone under Kim Jong Un • The Washington Post

:

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People in North Korea can’t access the internet. But that hasn’t stopped a meaningful share of them from buying smartphones.

The Washington Post, with the help of Martyn Williams, a North Korean technology specialist, has gained access to two of the country’s latest smartphones, which offer a remarkable window into daily life in one of the most reclusive countries.

Replete with a full suite of apps but confined to a restricted national intranet, the phones tell the story of a rapidly digitizing society, in which even a limited version of digital life has become yet another layer of government control.
Smartphones are a luxury concentrated among North Korea’s elite in the capital, Pyongyang. With retail prices around $750 for top-tier phones — an exorbitant sum in a country where many people earn a tiny fraction of that amount in formal wages, plus whatever they can scrounge on the side — they remain far out of reach for the vast majority. But they appear to be sufficiently available in Pyongyang for state media to air segments offering tips for people experiencing eyestrain from spending too much time on their smartphones.

Here is a rare look at the digital life North Korea’s government permits — and increasingly appears to encourage.

«

Online banking (with ads?!), video streaming with ..Disney movies to help learn English, women’s health and fitness, medicine delivery, and of course navigation. An estimated 6.35 million of the 26 million people have a phone subscription, though it’s not clear how many of those have smartphones.

Even so: this is the sort of dripping water that wears down the stone. The more that see it, the more will want it. But the rate of change will be unpredictable, and its effects even more so.
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On nearly deserted Adak Island, Americans pay to keep hundreds of buildings wired for internet • Anchorage Daily News

Kyle Hopkins:

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On an island in the Bering Sea 1,200 miles from Anchorage sits an abandoned house on an abandoned Navy base. There is no furniture, and the wind blows through broken windows. The last people to live here moved away long ago. Yet a bright orange pipe with a black fiber-optic cable inside runs from the outer wall down into the surrounding soil.

The cable was installed to connect the home to the internet after the base closed. It costs more than $340,000 per year to provide this building and hundreds of others — all but a few of them empty — with internet access no one says they use.

The money being wasted is yours. It comes from a fee added to nearly every American’s phone bill as part of a Federal Communications Commission subsidy program intended to bring fast, affordable internet to remote towns.

Reporting this year by the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica has found that the multibillion-dollar Universal Service Fund pays for what often amounts to slow internet access for customers who actually no longer use it.

The FCC keeps the money flowing to telecom companies regardless of their owners’ track records. It kept paying a Fairbanks company to provide internet service while its owner served federal prison time for tax evasion. The government kept paying Alaska’s largest telecom, GCI, even after it signed a settlement for alleged fraud related to the subsidy. The settlement said it was neither an admission of guilt by GCI nor a concession by the Justice Department that the claims were not well founded.

Yet few places make the federal government’s failure to safeguard this money more obvious than Adak.

Once home to thousands of sailors and their families, the island emptied after the base closed in 1997. While the state estimated the population to be 77 last year, residents themselves put it at closer to two dozen — meaning the federal internet subsidy to the local telecom amounts to about $14,000 a year per person. And, it turns out, there’s zero indication any of these people are benefiting from it.

We know this because we flew to the island in June and visited every building the company itself told regulators it serves. We knocked on every door. Talked to every person we could find.

Not a single one told us they subscribe to the island’s subsidized internet service.

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US government targets Cop City protester over phone operating system • The Guardian

Timothy Pratt:

»

The US Department of Justice is attempting to prosecute an Atlanta resident in connection with the movement against the police training center known as Cop City because he had GrapheneOS on his phone, an open-source operating system that enables users to enter a passcode and wipe a phone clean.

The case, which had its first hearing on Monday, centers on a little-known US federal statute that makes it a crime to destroy property in an effort to prevent it from being seized.

Experts said it may be the first time the law has been aimed at the operating system, which works on Google Pixel phones, and expressed concerns about a technology created for privacy and security being used to criminalize protesters.

“It’s concerning – and sends the message that [GrapheneOS] is criminal by default,” said Christophe Boutry, a cybersecurity and surveillance expert. Boutry and Bill Buddington, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, both said they had not seen a similar case.

The defendant, Sam Tunick, was stopped for interrogation at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport on 24 January last year, after vacationing in the Dominican Republic. Unbeknown to him, federal authorities had put him on a terrorism watchlist because of his alleged association with the movement against Cop City.

…Tunick asked four times during the interrogation to speak with a lawyer, but was rebuffed each time, according to courtroom testimony. Additionally, the agents produced no warrant and did not read Tunick his rights.

But a justice department attorney and the airport agents testifying on Monday asserted Tunick was merely subjected to an everyday interrogation at an international airport, “looking for anything that’s prohibited”, as Larry Findley, a CBP officer, said.

Agent Findley and several others repeatedly asked Tunick to open his phone during the interrogation, telling him they would seize it if he did not. When he finally provided a passcode, “the screen went blank, flashed several times and the phone appeared to restart”, according to the motion.

The motion filed on Tunick’s behalf draws into focus the question of which constitutional rights apply and which ones are suspended at national borders, including international airports.

«

No decision from a judge until the end of October. GrapheneOS makes authorities uncomfortable because of that wipe capability.
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Nvidia locks down memory from SK Hynix as part of $500bn AI deal • CNBC

Kif Leswing:

»

Nvidia said it’s secured AI memory supply from South Korea’s SK Hynix, as the chipmaker tries to lock in a key component for its advanced processors and systems.

The agreement, announced late Friday in San Francisco, could be worth $500bn over a number of years, and includes the construction of large-scale data centers expected to come online in 2027, Nvidia said.

SK Hynix affiliate SK Telecom will build a cloud business using Nvidia’s Vera Rubin systems. Nvidia said it’s targeting enough capacity to require 2 gigawatts of power, which indicates a massive buildout with hundreds of thousands of graphics processing units.

In a separate deal, South Korean giant Samsung Electronics said it signed a memorandum of understanding with chip designer Broadcom to expand their collaboration across memory and foundry technologies. The deal, worth an estimated $200bn, would help support the next generation of AI infrastructure, Samsung said in a statement.

Nvidia is aggressively securing supply of high-bandwidth memory, which is essential for its GPUs and systems, as the AI boom has created a global memory shortage. SK Hynix is the leader in HBM production, according to analysts.

“The expansion will include a co-develop opportunity for us on the next-generation SK Hynix AI memory, and this will help us secure a stable supply of HBM memory,” Raj Mirpuri, Nvidia enterprise vice president, said on a call with reporters.

«

These numbers are utterly bonkers. They’re also going to mean that prices for memory and storage on anything for the consumer space are going to keep going up and up. Will there come a point when the AI industry is going to stop its vampire squid phase, so the rest of the market can catch its breath and prices will fall? Qualcomm told customers (that’s phone makers, mostly) that it’s going to have to impose double-digit price rises because of the AI supply crunch. Nobody is winning here except memory makers and their shareholders.
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Your cookware got worse on purpose: who owns Pyrex and All-Clad now • Worse On Purpose

Keyana Sapp:

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A couple of years ago, the small All-Clad pan I fry eggs in cut me as I was pulling it out of the dishwasher. A clean slice on my index finger off the rim. I patched it up. Didn’t think much else of it. I discovered what actually happened while researching this essay, sitting in a settlement archive three years too late to file a claim.

All-Clad had been selling its American-made stainless pans as dishwasher safe. In the dishwasher, the bonded rims corroded until the exposed edge got sharp enough to easily slice through skin. The company settled in 2023, capped at $4 million for a class covering seven and a half years of national sales, a rounding error for its French owner.
Anyone who bought a D3, D5, or LTD pan between January 2015 and July 2022 was in the class. If your pan was damaged, the deal was actually fine: a replacement plus $75, or, my favorite option on the menu, a trade of your damaged American-made pan for a set of nonstick ones made in China.

What never got fixed was the pan. Nothing was re-engineered to survive a dishwasher; the words “dishwasher safe” just came off the box, and the product pages recommend handwashing now. The claims window closed in April 2023 with most of the class, me included, never knowing it existed. Nobody mailed a postcard about the metallurgy.

«

Sapp’s site is devoted to recording stories of products, categories, events and experiences that “got worse on purpose” – where owners, new or old, decided to start chasing money rather than quality. And it turns out that’s true for a lot of cookware!
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“This price was set by an algorithm”: news subscribers are surprised by a new line in their renewal emails • Nieman Journalism Lab

Hanaa’ Tameez:

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Last December, one of our readers received a renewal email from The Wall Street Journal. Over the coming year, the email said, she would be charged $76.99 every four weeks for her print and digital subscription — $19.25 a week, or $923.88 annually.

The renewal email included one sentence in all caps: “THIS PRICE WAS SET BY AN ALGORITHM USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA.” (Subscription prices on The Wall Street Journal’s website are a bit lower: $16.25 per week for a print/digital subscription, after a year at 40% off, or $845 a year.) The reader cancelled her subscription.

You may have encountered dynamic pricing — sometimes referred to as algorithmic, personalized, or surveillance pricing — when booking a flight or buying groceries on Instacart. It’s when a company’s algorithm decides what to charge you based on your purchase history and other behaviors. And news subscribers are increasingly noticing it when their subscriptions come up for renewal.

“Like many businesses, Dow Jones uses data to inform the marketing, positioning and pricing of certain consumer subscription products,” a Dow Jones spokesperson told me when I asked about our reader’s experience. “We do this responsibly, guided by robust governance and compliance protocols. Adherence to these protocols is actively monitored and enforced by stakeholders across the business including legal, privacy and compliance.”

Earlier this month, NJ.com subscriber Adam Lisberg got a renewal notice stating that his annual subscription price of $130 was determined by an algorithm using his personal data. NJ.com is owned by Advance Local; its website states that annual subscriptions start at $100 for basic access, while a premium subscription with various perks costs $200.

«

When he asked on social media, people were being charged $145 to $175. But this goes against our expectation that dynamic pricing is based on demand, not ability to pay. If you buy an airline seat early, you get a lower price than two weeks before (but maybe higher than if you buy 12 hours before when they’re trying to fill up). A news subscription isn’t the same at all. This seems unlikely to be popular. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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Exclusive: death of girl in Chinese gene-editing trial was never made public • Science

Brendan Borrell:

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The parents felt they were in good hands. Xinhua Hospital, which is affiliated with the Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, was acclaimed for its pediatrics department. It was the first Chinese institution to perform open heart surgery on infants, and the first in the country to separate conjoined twins. If all went well, the hospital would make history once again. The girl would be the first person in the world to receive a gene-editing therapy directed at the brain. It would rewrite the mutated gene in her neurons, restoring the needed DNA base so she could make a vital protein.

Leading the effort was Zilong Qiu, a neuroscientist at the university’s brain center, the Songjiang Research Institute. At the time, in late March 2025, Qiu was one of several researchers around the world vying to push base editors—a more precise form of the powerful gene editor CRISPR—into custom treatments for children with rare diseases. One month earlier, KJ Muldoon, an infant with a life-threatening metabolic disorder, had quietly received his first intravenous infusion of one such treatment at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Although news that base editing saved “Baby KJ” would soon rocket around the world—Science named the feat one of the runners-up for its 2025 Breakthrough of the Year—the story of what happened at Xinhua Hospital has remained hidden. An entry for the study posted to ClinicalTrials.gov has not been updated for more than a year. And when Qiu and his colleagues published proof-of-concept animal studies related to the trial in Nature early this year, they stripped the paper of references to the family and its financial contributions, noting only that “bridging the gap between preclinical research and clinical translation remains a significant challenge.”

That vague language glossed over tragedy: Seven days after the girl’s medical team infused trillions of viruses carrying the recipe for the base editor into her spinal fluid, she died of a severe immune reaction linked to the therapy, Science and Retraction Watch can now reveal.

According to official documents and accounts provided by the girl’s parents, the hospital had allowed Qiu’s experimental treatment to proceed under a regulatory provision that does not require approval from national regulators. After the child’s death, the hospital paid a modest fine to a local health authority but Qiu was not publicly sanctioned.

The troubling death represents a new stumble in China’s push to rival the United States as a biotech power.

«

The view of one scientist who looked at the data leading up to the trial: it shouldn’t have gone ahead. The parents have now gone on the record, though under pseudonyms. Gene therapy is still hit and miss.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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

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

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

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

Barry Schwartz:

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

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

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

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

»

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

«

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

»

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

«

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

Dominic Preston:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ryan Whitwam:

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Perkins:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kyle Orland:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Barbara Moens, Henry Foy and Aime Williams:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matt Novak:

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

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

»

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

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

Air cargo from special cargo airports will equal passenger revenue.

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

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

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

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

Joshua Boyles:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The epoch of Google search leading to a destination is ending, as AI results take over and publishers abandon it. CC-licensed photo by Eleni on Flickr.

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A selection of 10 links for you. Haven’t found what I’m looking for. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

OpenAI says its AI models escaped control and hacked into AI company Hugging Face • Fortune

Jeremy Kahn and Emily Forlini:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dean Takahashi:

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

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

Until now.

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

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

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

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

Chris Best:

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

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

Here’s how Freddie deBoer put it:

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

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

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

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

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

Emanuel Maiberg:

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

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

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

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

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

Sean Hollister:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alexandra Bruell:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Max Tani:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Antonio Ferme:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zack Whittaker:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Krebs:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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