Budget airline Ryanair has got cold feet over ending its physical boarding passes – used by 40 million passengers annually. CC-licensed photo by Tnarik Innael on Flickr.

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There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

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

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U.S. pauses intelligence sharing with Ukraine used to target Russian forces • The Washington Post

Warren P. Strobel, Siobhán O’Grady, Ellen Nakashima, Missy Ryan and Kostiantyn Khudov:

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The United States has paused major portions of its intelligence-sharing with Ukraine, squeezing the flow of vital information that Kyiv has used to repel invading Russian forces and strike back at select targets inside Russia, according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials.

The rupture in intelligence-sharing includes a halt in targeting data that U.S. spy agencies supply to Kyiv so it can launch American-provided weapons and Ukrainian-made long-range drones at Russian targets, Ukrainian officials said. Some Ukrainian missile operators say they are no longer receiving information needed to hit targets inside Russia.

The pause comes amid a decision early this week by President Donald Trump to freeze future deliveries of weapons to Ukraine, to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into peace negotiations with Russia.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe confirmed the latest move Wednesday, telling Fox Business that the United States has paused both intelligence-sharing and weapons systems in the aftermath of a contentious Oval Office meeting last week between Trump and Zelensky. Ratcliffe said the pauses would “go away” once it was clear Zelensky was committed to peace.

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So the systems to hit targets inside Russia will come back online once Zelensky commits to peace? This is not just senseless, it’s evil. This will mean Ukrainian troops will die on the frontline.
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Ryanair delays move to paperless boarding passes • Travel Weekly

Samantha Mayling:

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Budget carrier Ryanair has delayed its move to 100% paperless boarding passes to the start of its winter schedule on November 3.

Media reports had suggested that the change could come in May, ahead of the busy summer season.

But the implementation will now begin at the start of the winter season in November, and means Ryanair passengers will no longer download and print a physical paper boarding pass. Instead they will use the digital boarding pass generated in their ‘myRyanair’ app during check-in.

Currently almost 80% of Ryanair’s 200 million annual passengers already use this digital boarding pass.

As a result of this initiative, Ryanair expects to eliminate almost all airport check-in fees from November, as all passengers will have checked-in online or in-app to generate their digital boarding pass.

The airline said it will also reduce passengers’ carbon footprint by eliminating unnecessary paper, saving more than 300 tonnes in paper waste each year. The app also has features such as live flight information and updates from Ryanair’s operations centre during disruptions.

Dara Brady, Ryanair chief marketing officer, said: “This move to 100% paperless boarding passes from November 2025 will allow us to deliver an enhanced travel experience for customers, streamlined through the myRyanair app during our less busy winter schedule.”

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So that’s 40 million passengers (perhaps fewer, if some people travel twice on paper passes) who aren’t using digital passes at the moment. One can imagine they’re of a demographic – older and/or less computer-savvy – who don’t take eagerly to the digital life, but almost certainly are summer travellers. Is Ryanair hoping they’ll all have died by May 2026 when that summer travel season starts?
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Google urges DOJ to reverse course on breaking up company • Bloomberg via The Japan Times

Josh Sisco and Davey Alba:

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Google is urging officials at the U.S. Justice Department to back away from a push to break up the search engine company, citing national security concerns, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Representatives for the Alphabet unit asked the government in a meeting last week to take a less aggressive stance as the U.S. looks to end what a judge ruled to be an illegal online search monopoly, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing the private deliberations.

The administration of former U.S. President Joe Biden in November had called for Google to sell its Chrome web browser and make other changes to its business, including an end to billions of dollars in exclusivity payments to companies including Apple.

Although Google has previously pushed back on the Biden-era plan, the recent discussions may preview aspects of the company’s approach to the case as it continues under the administration current U.S. President Donald Trump. A federal judge is set to rule on how Google must change its practices following hearings scheduled for next month. Both sides are due to file their final proposals to the judge on Friday.

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Unsurprising. When George W Bush took over from Bill Clinton in 2001, Microsoft sought to not be broken up too. And it succeeded. At this point, it would almost be surprising if Google didn’t succeed in getting this rolled back. (Not that the Chrome sale ever made any sense.)
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Scientists aiming to bring back woolly mammoth create woolly mice • The Guardian

Nicola Davis:

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A plan to revive the mammoth is on track, scientists have said after creating a new species: the woolly mouse.

Scientists at the US biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences plan to “de-extinct” the prehistoric pachyderms by genetically modifying Asian elephants to give them woolly mammoth traits. They hope the first calf will be born by the end of 2028.

Ben Lamm, co-founder and chief executive of Colossal, said the team had been studying ancient mammoth genomes and comparing them with those of Asian elephants to understand how they differ and had already begun genome-editing cells of the latter.

Now the team say they have fresh support for their approach after creating healthy, genetically modified mice that have traits geared towards cold tolerance, including woolly hair. “It does not accelerate anything but it’s a massive validating point,” Lamm said.

In the research, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, the team used a number of genome editing techniques to either genetically modify fertilised mouse eggs or modify embryonic mouse stem cells and inject them into mouse embryos, before implanting them into surrogates.

The team focused on disrupting nine genes associated with hair colour, texture, length or pattern or hair follicles. Most of these genes were selected because they were already known to influence the coats of mice, with the induced disruptions expected to produce physical traits similar to those seen in mammoths, such as golden hair.

However, two of the genes targeted in the mice were also found in mammoths, where they are thought to have contributed to a woolly coat, with the changes introduced by the researchers designed to make the mouse genes more mammoth-like.

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Lots of scientists, such as Adam Rutherford (who should know), are highly critical of this, because it won’t bring back mammoths. It might give you elephants which have thick woolly coats, but they won’t be mammoths, and are likely to die prematurely for all sorts of reasons. It’s a monstrously pointless idea.
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Even the crypto bros don’t love Trump’s proposed crypto reserve • CNN Business

Allison Morrow:

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The crypto industry is getting everything it wanted under President Donald Trump. The regulators that crypto firms have blamed for all of their problems have been gutted or made over with friendlier faces who are eager to drop lingering legal challenges. The White House is even hosting an industry roundtable this week. That’s the kind of attention the industry could only have dreamed about under the Biden administration.

But a surprising backlash emerged from some prominent tech and crypto leaders after the president promised Sunday to establish a “Crypto Strategic Reserve,” which would direct the government to stockpile bitcoin, ethereum and three other tokens.

Some commentators don’t like the idea of potentially using taxpayer funds to backstop the price of crypto, a speculative digital asset with limited (some would say nonexistent) underlying value. Others questioned the motive behind including three relatively obscure tokens — Solana, XRP and Cardano — some of which have been backed by Trump’s own crypto czar (more on that in a moment). And investors across the board appeared unhappy with the lack of detail in Trump’s brief social media announcement, as crypto assets, which trade 24/7, fell Monday following a brief spike on Sunday.

…The US has a strategic petroleum reserve because oil is limited and extremely useful to keep the US economy humming. But, as Hilary Allen, a law professor at American University and a prominent crypto skeptic told me, crypto has nothing backing it.

A digital token’s price is entirely dictated by supply and demand, she said. Having Uncle Sam buy a bunch of bitcoin artificially jacks up the price. On top of that, a reserve sets up a situation where the United States would at some point have to offload some of its holdings.

“The second you start to sell, the price is going to start tanking,” Allen said. “It just shows how pointless the whole thing is if you have any goal other than to essentially provide exit liquidity for existing holders.”

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It is indeed a fabulously stupid idea, which doesn’t mean that the Trump administration won’t put it into effect because it will make someone on the inside rich beyond their dreams.
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Rising coffee prices keeping you up? Blame tariffs and climate change • The Washington Post

Ben Brasch:

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Government data in January showed that the retail price of ground coffee hit a record high of $7 a pound, up from $4 in January 2020.

Behind these surging prices is a complicated mix of drivers. Disastrous growing seasons in the world’s two biggest coffee producers, Brazil and Vietnam, have meant fewer beans on the market. But demand is growing, too: Coffee consumption in China, where a tea culture has reigned for millennia, has surged 150% in 10 years, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, with its coffee drinkers moving from lower-quality soluble coffee to higher-quality green coffee. Geopolitical turmoil and new deforestation regulations also are contributing to the squeeze.

And now, the escalating trade wars in the opening weeks of the Trump administration are poised to make it even worse. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump warned that his threats of 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico — paused last month — are “going forward” next week. A levy on Mexico, whose top coffee export market is the United States, would probably ratchet prices even higher.

All this has caused ripples throughout the production chain: 60% of the world’s coffee comes from more than 12 million farmers, many in poverty, growing on plots smaller than 12 acres, according to an initiative from Cornell University and World Coffee Research. And with fewer beans on the market, farmers are either hoarding them or charging a higher price to make up for losses, noted a recent report from CEPEA, the University of São Paulo Center for Advanced Studies on Applied Economics, which tracks and analyzes domestic coffee trade.

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Personal liberties and free markets being the byword for the neo-Washington Post on its opinion pages, it’s just as well that this story pointing out that tariffs interfere with free markets appeared in the news section.
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Elon Musk also has a problem with Wikipedia • The New Yorker

Margaret Talbot:

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Tamzin Hadasa Kelly, a 28-year-old Wikipedia administrator who has been contributing to the site since 2012, told me, “The vast, vast majority of content on the site is produced completely volunteer. We don’t have ranks, we don’t have editorial structure, we don’t have assigned topics.” Wikipedia does have an arbitration committee, a sort of supreme court that adjudicates rule-violating conduct on the site, but to a great extent, Kelly says, “it’s just us.” If she has to block people from editing because their work is consistently subpar—maybe they don’t plagiarize but they tend to paraphrase too closely or chronically fail to cite sources—at least, she says, “I’m not worrying that I’m taking away their livelihood.”

…Since the content is not monetized, and the site accepts no advertising, the articles rarely devolve into mere clickbait. What the Internet scholar Yochai Benkler calls Wikipedia’s “nonmarket utility” has helped insure its integrity. At a time when other social-media sites have abandoned whatever safeguards they had in place against mis- and disinformation—Meta has eliminated fact checking, X has been flooded with free-floating dreck of murky provenance and purpose, ChatGPT obligingly spits out hallucination-filled answers like a student who hasn’t done the reading—Wikipedia is a bastion of transparency, punctiliousness, and accessible knowledge.

So maybe it should come as no surprise that Elon Musk has lately taken time from his busy schedule of dismantling the federal government, along with many of its sources of reliable information, to attack Wikipedia. On January 21st, after the site updated its page on Musk to include a reference to the much-debated stiff-armed salute he made at a Trump inaugural event, he posted on X that “since legacy media propaganda is considered a ‘valid’ source by Wikipedia, it naturally simply becomes an extension of legacy media propaganda!” He urged people not to donate to the site: “Defund Wikipedia until balance is restored!”

…The Heritage Foundation, the think tank behind the Project 2025 policy blueprint, has plans to unmask Wikipedia editors who maintain their privacy using pseudonyms (these usernames are displayed in the article history but don’t necessarily make it easy to identify the people behind them) and whose contributions on Israel it deems antisemitic. (That story was reported by the Forward in January, and was based on leaked Heritage documents. Mike Howell, of Heritage, told me that this “investigation” of Wikipedia, which, he said, “is where information is laundered,” will be “shared with the appropriate policymakers to help inform a strategic response.”)

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Wikipedia doesn’t actually make a judgement about Musk, because people like Kelly are too careful about it. But the point of view that now prevails in the US is that nothing useful may remain. (Kelly, in passing, must have been 15 when she started contributing to Wikipedia.)
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Justice Department charges Chinese hackers-for-hire linked to Treasury breach • TechCrunch

Carly Page:

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The Department of Justice has announced criminal charges against 12 Chinese government-linked hackers who are accused of hacking over 100 American organizations, including the U.S. Treasury, over the course of a decade.

The charged individuals all played a “key role” in China’s hacker-for-hire ecosystem, a senior DOJ official said on a background call with reporters, including TechCrunch, on Wednesday. The official added that those charged, which includes contract hackers and Chinese law enforcement officials, targeted organizations in the U.S. and worldwide for the purposes of “suppressing free speech and religious freedoms.”

The DOJ also confirmed that two of the indicted individuals are linked to the China government-backed hacking group APT27, or Silk Typhoon. 

The two individuals, named as Yin Kecheng and Zhou Shuai, are accused of carrying out “multi-year, for-profit computer intrusion campaigns” dating back to 2013.

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Seems a little bad to admit that you’ve been being hacked for more than a decade.
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The return of Digg, a star of Web 2.0 • The New York Times

Mike Isaac:

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In the summer of 2005, Alexis Ohanian, a tech entrepreneur, sent an email to his colleague Steve Huffman with an ominous subject line: “Meet the enemy.”

The body of the email contained just one line — a link to Digg, a community-focused social message board where people shared and discussed news articles and links to other sites they found interesting. Mr. Ohanian and Mr. Huffman, who had founded a similar effort called Reddit, set their competitive sights on Digg and its founder, Kevin Rose.

In the 20 years since, these entrepreneurs have gone onto other projects and, in true Silicon Valley fashion, dipped into other parts of tech. Along the way, Digg, which went from popular to not, all but died.

On Wednesday, Mr. Rose announced that he had bought back Digg for an undisclosed sum from Money Group, a digital media company, and would rebuild it to take on Reddit. And he is doing it with an unlikely ally: Mr. Ohanian.
“This is the perfect time to revisit this idea with fresh eyes,” Mr. Rose, 48, now a venture capitalist at True Ventures, said in an interview. He said social media had become so ubiquitous that “it doesn’t need to be winner take all,” adding that “we don’t need to take down Reddit to win.”

Mr. Rose and Mr. Ohanian, 41, are relaunching Digg when social media is in tumult.

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I think this is Digg’s third time around the block. The first one was killed by social media, the second was killed by.. social media. I wonder what will knock it out this time.
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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.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified