On February 28 all seven planets should be observable from the ground in an arc across the sky – a syzygy. CC-licensed photo by Alan Levine on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Well aligned. 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 powerful AI tool that cops (or stalkers) can use to geolocate photos in seconds • 404 Media
Joseph Cox:
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A powerful AI tool can predict with high accuracy the location of photos based on features inside the image itself—such as vegetation, architecture, and the distance between buildings—in seconds, with the company now marketing the tool to law enforcement officers and government agencies.
Called GeoSpy, made by a firm called Graylark Technologies out of Boston, the tool has also been used for months by members of the public, with many making videos marveling at the technology, and some asking for help with stalking specific women. The company’s founder has aggressively pushed back against such requests, and GeoSpy closed off public access to the tool after 404 Media contacted him for comment.
Based on 404 Media’s own tests and conversations with other people who have used it and investors, GeoSpy could radically change what information can be learned from photos posted online, and by whom. Law enforcement officers with very little necessary training, private threat intelligence companies, and stalkers could, and in some cases already are, using this technology. Dedicated open source intelligence (OSINT) professionals can of course do this too, but the training and skillset necessary can take years to build up. GeoSpy allows essentially anyone to do it.
“We are working on something for LE [law enforcement] but it’s 🤐,” Daniel Heinen, the founder of Graylark and GeoSpy, wrote in a message to the GeoSpy community Discord in July.
GeoSpy has been trained on millions of images from around the world, according to marketing material available online. From that, the tool is able to recognize “distinct geographical markers such as architectural styles, soil characteristics, and their spatial relationships.” That marketing material says GeoSpy has strong coverage in the United States, but that it also “maintains global capabilities for location identification.”
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It is impressive, as 404 Media demonstrated for itself by creating a free account and testing it on a couple of known pictures.
But: this seems like a useful product if its use can be limited to police.
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Seven planets are lining up in the sky next month. This is what it really means • BBC Future
Jonathan O’Callaghan:
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Six planets – Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune – are currently visible in the night sky. During just one night in late February, they will be joined by Mercury, a rare seven-planet alignment visible in the sky.
But such events are not just a spectacle for stargazers – they can also have a real impact on our Solar System and offer the potential to gain new insights into our place within it.
The eight major planets of our Solar System orbit the Sun in the same flat plane, and all at different speeds. Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun, completes an orbit – a year for the planet – in 88 days. Earth’s year, of course, is 365 days, while at the upper end, Neptune takes a whopping 60,190 days, or about 165 Earth years, to complete a single revolution of our star.
The different speeds of the planets mean that, on occasion, several of them can be roughly lined up on the same side of the Sun. From Earth, if the orbits line up just right, we can see multiple planets in our night sky at the same time. In rare events, all the planets will line up such that they all appear in our night sky together along the ecliptic, the path traced by the Sun.
Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are all bright enough to be visible to the naked eye, while Uranus and Neptune require binoculars or a telescope to spot.
In January and February, we can witness this event taking place. The planets are not exactly lined up, so they will appear in an arc across the sky due to their orbital plane in the Solar System. During clear nights in January and February, all of the planets except Mercury will be visible – an event sometimes called a planetary parade. On 28 February, though – weather permitting – all seven planets will be visible, a great spectacle for observers on the ground.
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This is known as a syzygy (pronounced “sig-zee”) – though you only need two celestial objects for that. Here we’re going for the big one. Anyway, put 28 February in your diary.
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Matt Mullenweg, Automattic’s CEO, seems determined to wreck WordPress • Digital CxO
Steven Vaughan-Nichols:
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Many businesses are now wondering if they should continue to rely on WordPress, thanks to Mullenweg’s erratic behavior.
Their fears were aggravated when Automattic announced on January 15, 2025, that it would drastically reduce its contributions to the WordPress open-source project. Specifically, Automattic scaled back its weekly contribution from approximately 3,988 hours to just 45 hours. The company’s programmers will, instead, “focus on for-profit projects within Automattic, such as WordPress.com, Pressable, WPVIP, Jetpack, and WooCommerce.”
It’s worth noting that WordPress.org, which hosts the open-source version of WordPress, relies on the sites and services Mullenweg controls.
Why? Automattic blames the WP Engine lawsuits. “This legal action diverts significant time and energy that could otherwise be directed toward supporting WordPress’s growth and health. We remain hopeful that WP Engine will reconsider this legal attack, allowing us to refocus our efforts on contributions that benefit the broader WordPress ecosystem.”
What the developers, who will now work on for-profit programs, have to do with the lawsuit remains an open question.
In the meantime, more and more developers and users are looking for a WordPress fork as a possible answer. WordPress is licensed under the GPLv2, so forking it is simple legally.
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This has been bubbling under for ages and ages, but now seems to have reached another, um, fork in the road.
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Thoughts for Inauguration Day • Eating Policy
Jennifer Pahlka:
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you don’t have to feel that the system is fundamentally rigged against you personally to entertain the possible benefits of “the rule of men,” or perhaps we could just say people. The reality is that people are frustrated with a system in which it feels like laws — a complex, tangled, often contradictory, seemingly arbitrary web of rules that most people don’t understand — dictate outcomes at the expense of reasonable human judgement. Philip Howard [in his book The Death of Common Sense: how law is suffocating America] provides an endless stream of examples of rules winning out when common sense could have prevailed, like the homeless shelter in New York that couldn’t be built without installing a prohibitively expensive elevator, despite the fact that only the first floor was to be used, or the public school custodian who, despite being perfectly capable of fixing the broken window, instead had to file paperwork to order union labor to do so, leaving the window broken for months while the paperwork made its way through the bureaucracy and a team could be assigned.
These aren’t edge cases. They are just the routine results of what Dan Davies calls the unaccountability machine, in his excellent book of the same name. Rule by people would allow for judgement, for just fixing the window. Rule by law leaves the cold air freezing the students while costs spiral.
When Biden took power back from Trump in 2021, there was enormous relief among lawyers in government. I know of one agency in which the mere statement “we will respect the rule of law,” spoken that first day of the Biden administration, elicited tears from otherwise buttoned-up bureaucrats. It’s entirely understandable, even touching, given the chaos that had ensued at that agency. But what followed during the next four years, across a Democratically-led federal government, was a retreat to the safety of process and procedure. It felt good and right after the lawlessness of the Trump years to luxuriate in its antidote.
But there is a cost to that refuge. Quinta Jurecic, also writing in the Times, describes the cost to the Department of Justice, whose leadership under Biden vowed to hold Trump accountable for the January 6th assault on the Capitol, and failed to do so, in part because of how slowly it moved.
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Pahlka’s point is: maybe this mess does need some sort of Gordian knot treatment. Back in 2017, she wrote a post which began “remember, the status quo isn’t worth protecting”, and she reiterates that now.
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I’m a 17-year-old TikTok junkie. I need this ban • The New York Times
Juliet Weisfogel:
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Every day, I get home from school around 3:30 p.m., with a list of assignments that, if I’m focused, should take until 6 to complete. But I don’t usually end up finishing them until 11. Why? TikTok. It all starts at 3:45, when I typically flop down on my bed and open the app for “just a minute.”
But by the time I get up from bed, that “minute” has swelled into several hours. At the moment I am writing this, I could instead distract myself by looking at an orange Muppet-like monster detailing an outlandish and embarrassing story from a non-puppet person’s life. I’ll “like” one video, comment on another and keep my thumb moving. I open the comments on each to laugh and commiserate with others; oftentimes, the harmony in our responses creates the illusion of community — even though we are each very much alone with our phones. I love TikTok so much that I cannot imagine a life without it. And yet I desperately need a life without it.
This app has infiltrated American culture. The national TikTok ban, which entered into force on Sunday, was ruled constitutional by the Supreme Court on Friday. Now, the Google and Apple app stores will be penalized for carrying it and the app has gone dark. President Biden has indicated he will leave enforcement of the ban up to the incoming administration. It still remains to be seen whether President-elect Donald Trump will be able to halt the prohibition once he takes office.
Given my love of TikTok, you might think the notion of losing it would horrify me, and yet, it fills me with hope. You see, I’m a 17-year-old TikTok junkie, and I wholeheartedly support a law that would sever me forever from my fix. My support for this ban has nothing to do with national security. I don’t know whether my name, email address and phone number are stored in Washington, Texas or China. Perhaps I should care more about that, but what worries me most right now is the future of my generation.
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There is the possibility in the law as written for Trump to institute a 90-day pause on the law. Those are going to be three interesting months.
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Welcome to the era of gangster tech regulation • The Verge
Elizabeth Lopatto:
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Our tech overlords all have problems, and they want to buy the solutions. I guess it was easier than making products people actually like.
“First Buddy” Elon Musk spent at least a quarter of a billion dollars electing Donald Trump. Corporations and wealthy donors have sent half a billion more since he was elected. Amazon, Google, Uber, Microsoft, and Meta donated $1m each to Trump’s inauguration, as did Apple’s Tim Cook and OpenAI’s Sam Altman. (Joe Biden’s inauguration hardly received this kind of largesse.) “In the first term, everybody was fighting me,” Trump said in December. “In this term, everybody wants to be my friend.”
Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, the three wealthiest men on Earth, are reportedly attending the inauguration; they were to be seated with elected officials and cabinet nominees, before the ceremony was moved indoors. (Cook is also reportedly attending.) Musk will have office space in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House, according to The New York Times.
So what are these men buying?
Real market opportunities are rarer than they used to be. Tech executives and investors have become openly resentful about their products’ societal repercussions and an unconscionable lack of adulation from the citizenry. Zuckerberg in particular seems bored with Facebook, his major moneymaker, and has been searching for a new toy. He spent at least $46 billion plus the cost of a company rebrand on the Metaverse, only to find that his Big New Thing didn’t have legs. His latest Big New Thing is AR glasses, which are heavily reliant on whatever AI (and, likely, tariff) policy Trump will dictate.
Nearly every major tech company has at least one lawsuit pending. Apple has an antitrust suit pending. Google just lost one. There’s also a Federal Trade Commission suit that could peel Instagram and WhatsApp off Meta. Trump cares little about the actual purpose of antitrust enforcement: making companies compete for customers with good products. All the pending litigation is just leverage for Trump to punish anyone who doesn’t fall in line.
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This is indeed the new reality. Still, those checks and balances in the US Constitution are bound to kick in real soon now, aren’t they?
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The Pentagon says AI is speeding up its ‘kill chain’ • TechCrunch
Maxwell Zeff:
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Leading AI developers, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, are threading a delicate needle to sell software to the United States military: make the Pentagon more efficient, without letting their AI kill people.
Today, their tools are not being used as weapons, but AI is giving the Department of Defense a “significant advantage” in identifying, tracking, and assessing threats, the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and AI Officer, Dr. Radha Plumb, told TechCrunch in a phone interview.
“We obviously are increasing the ways in which we can speed up the execution of kill chain so that our commanders can respond in the right time to protect our forces,” said Plumb.
The “kill chain” refers to the military’s process of identifying, tracking, and eliminating threats, involving a complex system of sensors, platforms, and weapons. Generative AI is proving helpful during the planning and strategizing phases of the kill chain, according to Plumb.
…when TechCrunch asked if the Pentagon buys and operates weapons that are fully autonomous – ones with no humans in the loop – Plumb rejected the idea on principle.
“No, is the short answer,” said Plumb. “As a matter of both reliability and ethics, we’ll always have humans involved in the decision to employ force, and that includes for our weapon systems.”
The word “autonomy” is somewhat ambiguous and has sparked debates all over the tech industry about when automated systems – such as AI coding agents, self-driving cars, or self-firing weapons – become truly independent.Plumb said the idea that automated systems are independently making life and death decisions was “too binary,” and the reality was less “science fiction-y.”
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I’m surprised the Pentagon uses a phrase like “kill chain” when it could instead say “threat eliminator” or something less kill-y.
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I shook Elon Musk warmly by the hand…more than 20 years ago • Status-Q
Quentin Stafford-Fraser did indeed meet Rocket Man way back when:
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Though he neither founded Tesla nor designed the cars himself, his perseverance, vision, and willingness to spend his cash where others weren’t, has dragged an entire industry, mostly kicking and screaming, into a far better place, both technologically and for the planet.
I remember the shock of traditional car dealers in 2016, trying hard to sell a few more cars at discounts to fill their next quarter’s quota, when it was announced that quarter of a million people had put down a deposit for the recently-announced Model 3: a car they had never even seen. It took that kind of major eathquake to rattle the enormous global inertia of the fossil-burning world and to kick investment in battery-production up to a whole new level. I won’t pretend Musk was doing all of this for purely selfless reasons, or that he did it entirely on his own, but many thousands of Greta Thunbergs combined could not dream of having such an impact. He changed the world.
Now, it also soon became apparent that Musk wasn’t, let’s say, an entirely reliable figure! It’s funny now, looking back, to think my main criticism of him used to be his inability to hit his unrealistic deadlines, and the number of his announced products that never saw the light of day at all. There are drivers now on their third or fourth Tesla who still can’t get the ‘Full Self-Driving’ feature they paid for with their first!
But since then, it won’t have escaped your notice that almost every day’s news has included some new and bigger reason to doubt, dislike, ridicule or fear him, and even the significant amount of slack I was willing to cut him has long since been exhausted.
But here’s the thing. My Tesla is still an annoyingly wonderful car.
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The Greta Thunberg point is a good one: similarly, one could ask how much change Extinction Rebellion or Just Stop Oil has actually achieved, versus solar panel and battery storage vendors.
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Brussels orders X to hand over documents on algorithm • Financial Times
Javier Espinoza and Andy Bounds:
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Brussels has ordered Elon Musk to fully disclose recent changes made to recommendations on X, stepping up an investigation into the role of the social media platform in European politics.
The expanded probe by the European Commission, announced on Friday, requires X to hand over internal documents regarding its recommendation algorithm. The Commission also issued a “retention order” for all relevant documents relating to how the algorithm could be amended in future.
In addition, the EU regulator requested access to information on how the social media network moderates and amplifies content.
The move follows complaints from politicians in Germany that X’s algorithm is promoting content by the far right ahead of the country’s February 23 elections. Musk has come out in favour of Alternative for Germany (AfD), arguing that it will save Europe’s largest nation from “economic and cultural collapse”. The German domestic intelligence service has designated parts of the AfD as right-wing extremist.
Speaking on Friday, German chancellor Olaf Scholz toughened his language towards the world’s richest man, describing Musk’s support for the AfD as “completely unacceptable”. The party is currently second place in the polls with around 20% support, ahead of Scholz’s Social Democrats and behind the opposition Christian Democratic Union.
Earlier in the week, Germany’s defence ministry and foreign ministry said they were suspending their activity on X, with the defence ministry saying it had become increasingly “unhappy” with the platform.
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Please don’t force dark mode • Vishnu’s Pages
Vishnu Haridas:
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The real problem is the contrast ratio between the text and the background when using dark mode.
For example, pure white text on a pitch black background can strain my eyes and be very difficult to read. The contrast ratio of this combination is 21:1 (black background, pure white text). Here’s an example paragraph:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
However, light gray text on a dark gray background is easy on my eyes. Here the background is #666 and the text is #E0E0E0 which creates a contrast ratio of 4.34:1.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
In summary, higher contrast ratios in dark mode cause discomfort for my eyes. But when I say ‘higher’, just how high can it go?
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I hate dark mode. Never use it. Hate it when people post stuff using it.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 
What would be the action Pahlka wants? Is she advocating from the liberal side for what I call “Civil War II: Red vs Blue”? In the original US Civil War, there were in fact anti-Unionists in the North who didn’t want to be in the same country as the South (anti-Slavery wasn’t at all identical to pro-Union). If the idea isn’t to have the Coasts secede from the Interior, what that’s plan? General Strike to demand Trump resign? (but that gives us President Vance). A coup to install … well, who? (Harris doesn’t seem a good choice). Those things tend to end badly.
I understand the frustration. But I have very little patience for weird bloodless (or other people’s blood) fantasy ideas of what’s involved in such events.
It’s going to be a lloonngg four years.
My reading is that she’s saying bureaucracy does need to be cut back and that resisting such change is a bad idea. She’s saying roll with it, realise that the idea everything was perfect and must never be changed is a mistake.