If you have Warner Brothers DVDs pressed between 2006 and 2008, they may be unreadable due to layer rot. CC-licensed photo by Karl Baron on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Backed up. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Can the US switch off Europe’s weapons? • Financial Times
Charles Clover, Sylvia Pfeifer, Lucy Fisher and Richard Milne:
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A longtime US ally has kept a deadly insurgency at bay, helped by squadrons of American-supplied military aircraft.
However when US foreign policy abruptly changes, the aircraft remain — but contractors, spare parts and badly needed software updates suddenly disappear. Within weeks, more than half the aircraft are grounded. Four months later, the capital falls to the rebels.
This was the reality for Afghanistan in 2021. After a US withdrawal disabled most of Kabul’s Black Hawk helicopters, the cascade effect was swift. “When the contractors pulled out, it was like we pulled all the sticks out of the Jenga pile and expected it to stay up,” one US commander told US government researchers that year.
Today, a similar spectre haunts US allies in Europe. With the US cutting off military support to Ukraine in an abrupt pivot towards Russia, many European governments are feeling buyers’ remorse for decades of US arms purchases that have left them dependent on Washington for the continued functioning of their weaponry.
“If they see how Trump is dealing with [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy, they should be worried. He is throwing him under the bus,” said Mikael Grev, a former Gripen fighter pilot and now chief executive of Avioniq, a Swedish defence AI company. “The Nordic and Baltic states need to think: will he do the same to us?”
Such is the concern that debate has turned to whether the US maintains secret so-called kill switches that would immobilise aircraft and weapons systems. While never proven, Richard Aboulafia, managing director at consultancy AeroDynamic Advisory, said: “If you postulate the existence of something that can be done with a little bit of software code, it exists.”
In practice, it may not even matter because of how already reliant advanced combat aircraft and other sophisticated weapons — such as anti-missile systems, advanced drones and early warning aircraft — are on US spare parts and software updates.
“It is not as simple as a kill switch,” said Justin Bronk, senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi). “Most European militaries depend heavily on the US for communications support, for electronic warfare support, and for ammunition resupply in any serious conflict.”
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A graphic shows that the US has 2,951 fighter and ground attack aircraft, and the rest of NATO has 2,064 – of which 1,108 are of US origin. But things are going to change, no doubt about that. If I were tipping shares (I’m not), the European defence industry looks a good long-term bet.
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Hundreds of your Warner Bros DVDs probably don’t work anymore (updated with response from WB) • Joblo
Chris Bumbray:
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I’m a huge fan of old movies. Now, when I say old I don’t mean movies from ten, twenty, or even thirty or forty years ago. I love movies from the Golden Age of Hollywood, specifically the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s. I’ve always loved this period, and given how hard it is to find many of these movies on streaming, I’ve made an effort to buy as many of these movies on physical media as possible. As such, I have thousands of old movies on DVD, and among my most treasured titles are a few dozen DVD box sets Warner Bros put out in the mid-2000s, as they control the best library of classic film.
A few months ago, I dug into an old Humphrey Bogart box set to watch a favorite of mine, Passage to Marseille. After about an hour, the disc simply stopped working. The same thing happened with another movie from the set, Across the Pacific. I actually thought my old Blu-ray player was to blame, and given that I was in need of an upgrade anyway, I bought a new UHD player and just forgot about it.
Flash forward to about a week ago, when I decided to throw on an old Errol Flynn movie called Desperate Journey. The same thing happened. This was more concerning to me, as, unlike the other movies I mentioned, this has never gotten an HD release and was unavailable digitally. I did a little research online, and to my horror, I landed on several home theater forum threads (and a couple of good videos) confirming this was no fluke.
It turns out that virtually every Warner Bros DVD disc manufactured between 2006 and 2008 has succumbed to the dreaded laser rot, where discs simply stop working due to a rotting of the layers. Once it happens, it can’t be undone. This was a frequent problem with laserdiscs back in the 80s and 90s, but it wasn’t a huge problem with DVDs. The issue comes down to the way the discs were authored. Many of the titles affected, which range from classics like The Wild Bunch and The Shawshank Redemption to TV collections like The Dukes of Hazzard, have been reissued on Blu-ray or digital HD. Some of the titles, such as many of the titles in the Looney Tunes Collections and many of the Golden Age of Hollywood movies, have not, making them, in a lot of cases, lost media.
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Truly shocking. WB’s response is that it’s “aware” of this and is “actively working” with consumers to replace defective discs; “However, as some of the affected titles are no longer in print or the rights have expired, consumers have been offered an exchange for a title of like value.”
Which is rubbish! WB should be sourcing the discs, since it was the one responsible for selling bad ones.
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Global coffee trade grinding to a halt, hit hard by brutal price hikes • Reuters
Marcelo Teixeira:
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Global coffee traders and roasters say they have slashed their purchases to minimal levels, as the industry reels from a steep surge in prices that suppliers have yet to convince retail stores to accept.
At the U.S. National Coffee Association annual convention in Houston this week, attendees said they have been in shock at a 70% increase since November for Arabica coffee futures on the ICE exchange , the benchmark for coffee deals around the world.
Renan Chueiri, director general at ELCAFE C.A. in Ecuador, said this year is the first time the instant coffee maker hasn’t sold all of its expected annual production by March.
“We would usually be sold out by now, but so far we sold less than 30% of production,” he said. “The big price increase eats clients’ cash flow, they don’t have all the money to buy what they need.”
The coffee price hikes have stemmed from lower production in important coffee growing regions, particularly in top grower Brazil, reducing the availability of beans.
“Nobody wants to be exposed, nobody is buying for future delivery, it is all hand to mouth,” said one coffee broker, asking not to be identified due to the sensitivity of the issue. By “hand to mouth”, he was referring to the practice of buying only what is necessary for the moment and eschewing stockpiling.
Many recent deals in Brazil, he said, have been conducted in a very conservative manner. “You close a deal, and then you have seven days to go to the farm or warehouse and get your coffee. You check the quality, and if it is ok, you make the payment on the site and drive away with the coffee.”
A recent Reuters poll predicted that Arabica coffee prices could fall 30% by the end of the year, as high prices curb demand and early signs point to a bumper Brazilian crop next year.
But until prices drop significantly, much of the coffee industry could be in for a world of pain. A chief executive of a major roaster in the United States – the world’s largest market for coffee consumption, said some of his clients are not sure they can continue to be in business.
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I have for some time thought that the coffee business was in a mad bubble, given all the podcast adverts for weekly deliveries, and the coffee shops sprouting all over the place. Price changes come to us all, and this is likely to be rough.
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DOGE has deployed its GSAi custom chatbot for 1,500 federal workers • WIRED
Makena Kelly:
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Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency has deployed a proprietary chatbot called GSAi to 1,500 federal workers at the General Services Administration, WIRED has confirmed. The move to automate tasks previously done by humans comes as DOGE continues its purge of the federal workforce.
GSAi is meant to support “general” tasks, similar to commercial tools like ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude. It is tailored in a way that makes it safe for government use, a GSA worker tells WIRED. The DOGE team hopes to eventually use it to analyze contract and procurement data, WIRED previously reported.
“What is the larger strategy here? Is it giving everyone AI and then that legitimizes more layoffs?” asks a prominent AI expert who asked not to be named as they do not want to speak publicly on projects related to DOGE or the government. “That wouldn’t surprise me.”
In February, DOGE tested the chatbot in a pilot with 150 users within GSA. It hopes to eventually deploy the product across the entire agency, according to two sources familiar with the matter. The chatbot has been in development for several months, but new DOGE-affiliated agency leadership has greatly accelerated its deployment timeline, sources say.
Federal employees can now interact with GSAi on an interface similar to ChatGPT. The default model is Claude Haiku 3.5, but users can also choose to use Claude Sonnet 3.5 v2 and Meta LLaMa 3.2, depending on the task.
“How can I use the AI-powered chat?” reads an internal memo about the product. “The options are endless, and it will continue to improve as new information is added. You can: draft emails, create talking points, summarize text, write code.”
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OK, but looked at dispassionately: isn’t this making them work more efficiently (if it works)? That seems like a good thing. Though of course firing tons of people first and then seeing if it works isn’t the normal procedure. The UK government on Sunday hinted at something similar for 10% of civil service workers.
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Measles outbreak hits 208 cases as federal response goes off the rails • Ars Technica
Beth Mole:
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The measles outbreak in West Texas and New Mexico has reached 208 cases.
Texas officials reported 198 confirmed cases across nine counties as of Friday, with 23 people requiring hospitalization since the outbreak exploded at the end of January. Most of the cases continue to be in children and teens, with 153 of the 198 cases being between the ages of 0 and 17. Eleven cases have no confirmed age listed. All but five cases are in people who are unvaccinated or have no vaccination record.
Texas officials have so far reported one death in the outbreak in an unvaccinated school-aged child with no underlying health conditions. Media reports have identified the child as being a 6-year-old.
On Thursday, health officials in New Mexico reported a second death in a person with measles. The case was in an unvaccinated adult who didn’t seek medical care before dying. The person tested positive for measles only after death and the cause of the person’s death is still under investigation, the state’s health department reported.
Since the outbreak erupted in Texas, New Mexico has reported 10 measles cases, which includes the deceased adult. All of the cases—four children and six adults—are in Lea County, which sits directly across the border from Gaines County, Texas, the undervaccinated epicenter of the outbreak.
… [Health secretary] Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is a long-time anti-vaccine advocate… initially downplayed the outbreak, calling it “not unusual,” before penning an op-ed for Fox News, in which he failed to outright recommend vaccination and instead emphasized parental choice and endorsed “good nutrition” and supplements.
…In a yet more worrying sign, Reuters reported Friday afternoon that the CDC is planning to conduct a large study on whether the MMR vaccine is linked to autism. This taxpayer-funded effort would occur despite the fact that decades of research and numerous high-quality studies have already been conducted—and they have consistently disproven or found no connection between the vaccine and autism.
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I wonder how soon Trump can fire Kennedy, and on what pretext, so that the US doesn’t revert to the treatments – and diseases – of the 19th century.
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A million third-party Android devices have a secret backdoor for scammers • WIRED
Lily Hay Newman:
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Cheap TV streaming boxes seem like one of the most straightforward gadgets out there, but they can come with hidden costs. In 2023, researchers revealed that tens of thousands of Android TV boxes being used in homes, schools, and businesses were equipped with secret backdoors that allowed them to be used in a host of cybercrime and online fraud.
Now, the same researchers have found that the China-based ecosystem behind the compromised devices and the illicit activities they’re used for—collectively dubbed Badbox 2.0—is fueling a next-generation campaign that’s broader in scope and even more sneaky.
At least 1 million Android-based TV streaming boxes, tablets, projectors, and after-sale car infotainment systems are infected with malware that conscripts them into a scammer-controlled botnet, according to new research shared exclusively with WIRED by the cybersecurity firm Human Security. The compromised devices are used for a range of advertising fraud and in so-called residential proxy services, which allow their operators to use victim internet connections for routing and masking web traffic. And all of this activity happens behind the scenes without the owners of compromised devices having any idea of how their streaming boxes are being used.
“This is all completely unbeknownst to the poor users that have bought this device just to watch Netflix or whatever,” Gavin Reid, Human’s chief information security officer, tells WIRED. “Ad fraud including click fraud is all happening behind the scenes, but the main way they are monetizing the million devices is reselling this proxy service. Victims don’t know that they’re a proxy, they never agreed to be a proxy service, but they’re being used for that. Any bad thing you want to do, scraping, whatever it is, these proxy services are an enabler for that.”
The researchers found that the majority of infected devices are in South America, particularly Brazil.
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You can imagine that cheap stuff is going to be easily backdoored, either intentionally (for payment) or not (through bad security). Google detects devices that try to connect to its Play Services and are compromised, but it’s an uphill battle to get people to take any action. They just want to watch some TV, after all, not debug their streaming box. (Not to be left out: a million Windows devices targeted in hacking spree.)
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Apple’s smart home hub now ‘postponed’ due to delayed Siri features • MacRumors
Joe Rossignol:
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Apple has pushed back the launch of its rumored smart home hub due to delayed Siri features, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.
Gurman no longer expects the home hub to launch this month, but he has not provided a revised timeframe for the device’s release.
“At one point, the company had hoped to announce this product in March,” he said, in his Power On newsletter today. “But because the device, to an extent, relies on the delayed Siri capabilities, it has been postponed as well.”
In the meantime, he said Apple has started allowing select employees to test a pre-release version of the device at home.
This comes a few days after Apple said it needs more time to finish the more personalized version of Siri, which it previewed at WWDC 2024 last June. The promised Siri upgrades will be powered by Apple Intelligence, so you will need an iPhone 15 Pro or newer.
“We’ve also been working on a more personalized Siri, giving it more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps,” said Apple, in a statement shared with Daring Fireball’s John Gruber. “It’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year.”
Gurman said Apple was initially aiming to launch the more personalized Siri as part of iOS 18.4, which is already in beta and lacks any of the promised features. He then said that the features were delayed until iOS 18.5 in May, but Apple’s statement suggests the features will take even longer to arrive.
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A home hub that relies so heavily on an LLM-based Siri that Apple hasn’t been able to get working really is a hostage to fortune, isn’t it. And so it has transpired. Perhaps it’s a failure of my imagination, but I don’t know what they want a home hub to do that isn’t already handled by the Homepod (big or mini).
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How Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip failed me without actually breaking • The Verge
Sean Hollister:
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When the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 7 arrives, likely this July, it could be a pretty decent upgrade over the Z Flip 5 I own. It’ll reportedly have a slightly bigger battery than the Flip 6, which had a slightly bigger one than the Flip 5, plus a much bigger outer screen.
Unfortunately, I can’t wait a few more months. After a year and a half with a Flip, I’ve reached my breaking point.
To be clear, my phone never cracked. My folding Flip never even sprouted a green line of doom along its crease. The factory screen protector did begin to peel, but $30 and a trip to uBreakiFix made that problem go away.
No, the end came for my Flip when it stopped lasting the day and started waking me up at night. The battery is constantly dying faster than it should, and ever since the last big software update, the sleep and do-not-disturb modes no longer block notification sounds. I can’t figure out either one, and the Flip’s unique benefits no longer feel good enough for me to deal with them anymore.
On battery: I’ve seen this phone reach the 80% mark by 9 in the morning, and threaten to die by 9PM. I practically don’t even use the phone when I’m at work, and yet now I feel like it always needs to be plugged in.
…When people ask me what I actually prefer about the Z Flip, I’ve wound up saying it’s really about how it fits in my pocket, and how awesome it feels to fold. It’s a square when closed, so it stays put in my pocket and doesn’t jut out.
But it’s not actually a small phone, and it’s not a particularly good one-handed phone because there’s no one-handed way to open it. I mostly stopped trying after the tenth time I fumbled it to the ground.
And I do find myself opening it almost every time I use it, because it’s almost never worth bothering with the Flip’s cover screen. While it’s actually larger than the screens on early Android handsets, Samsung simply won’t let you use the outer screen like a proper Android phone.
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Flip phones: not all that, and not even some of that.
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The real reason Zelenskyy doesn’t wear a suit • POLITICO
Derek Guy writes about menswear (on Twitter/X he’s known for his deadly takedowns of bumptious people):
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s contentious Oval Office meeting with President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance didn’t just highlight a debate over geopolitics. It also kicked off an argument over clothes.
“Why don’t you wear a suit?” asked Brian Glenn, a correspondent for the conservative Real America’s Voice network, prompting a smirk from Vance. “You’re at the highest level in this country’s office, and you refuse to wear a suit.”
But the criticism of Zelenskyy’s lack of traditional tie-and-jacket attire misses an obvious question: Why does he dress like that? As it turns out, the black tactical gear he wore to the Oval Office — much like his now-iconic olive-green fleeces and combat boots — is part of a growing visual shift in Ukraine, marked by the war’s impact on the clothing industry and the military’s now central place in Ukrainian culture.
I spoke to Illia Ponomarenko — a Ukrainian journalist who has covered the war, written for the Kyiv Post and The Kyiv Independent and authored I Will Show You How It Was: The Story of Wartime Kyiv — about the real meaning behind Zelenskyy’s style. “The clothes are more than clothes,” he said. “They are part of a culture of people who are involved in this war.”
DG: There’s a lot of discussion in the U.S. about whether Zelenskyy should wear a suit on diplomatic trips. But the discourse is almost always filtered through American eyes. From a Ukrainian perspective, why do you think he dresses the way he does?
IP: Zelenskyy’s clothes are sending a soft, anti-elitist message. When he meets with prominent figures and power brokers, his clothes are basically asking, what are you about? Are you about the business of saving lives, or are you about fancy protocols? Even when he meets with kings, he dresses in a way that represents the average Ukrainian involved in this war effort. So it’s a message to say, “I’ve come to the corners of power as a representative of my humble people.”
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It’s a brief interview, but a good insight.
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Sony Music says over 75,000 items removed in battle against AI deepfakes • Financial Times
Daniel Thomas:
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Sony Music has revealed the scale of its battle with artificial intelligence fakes of its artists by saying it has taken down more than 75,000 examples of AI-generated material featuring its biggest stars, including Harry Styles.
The company, one of the three biggest labels in the music industry, gave the figure in a submission to a UK government consultation on copyright rules that Sony fears will worsen the damage to the music industry from AI.
Music executives say the detected fakes are probably only a fraction of the AI music fakes available online as teams working on the problem need to scour streaming services manually for them and demand their removal.
The ability of new, freely available AI software to generate vast quantities of convincing fake material has emerged as a significant concern for companies in the creative industries. Many fear the free availability of the material will undermine their ability to make money from legitimate recordings.
Sony said in its submission to the consultation, seen by the Financial Times, that AI-generated recordings in music streaming services resulted in “direct commercial harm to legitimate recording artists, including UK artists”.
Executives are concerned that any weakening of UK copyright law will only make this situation worse, especially for smaller artists who lack a large label to protect their interests.
A person familiar with Sony’s efforts said that, for most labels, the artists copied were their most popular — Harry Styles, Queen and Beyoncé, in Sony’s case.
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So they’re sort of AI tribute acts?
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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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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 