If you tell Strava you’re running in North Korea, it’ll delete your account. But why? CC-licensed photo by Roman Harak on Flickr.

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It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time. It’s about AI (as almost everything seems to be these days).

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A selection of 10 links for you. Motionless. 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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Strava bans user for running in North Korea • DC Rainmaker

Ray Maker:

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On the list of quirky things, I didn’t have “Strava bans user for running in North Korea” on my bingo card today. But here we are. I’ve just spent the last hour going down the rabbit hole that is the Pyongyang Marathon (in North Korea), and it turns out – it’s a thing. As in, as thing that outsiders come and run. There’s even an official website for it. In fact, there’s been 31 editions of it. And over 1,000 foreigners run in it and the affiliated running events each year, including plenty of diplomats such as the British Ambassador to North Korea.

The event has been happening for decades, but that’s actually not what got this person their account banned. Rather, they were there for a trip because they are working on their doctorate about North Korea, while there, went on a run, then came home (to a different country). After which, they upload run to Garmin Connect, which then synced it to Strava. Finally, Strava then sent them a note that their account was being terminated.

But wait, it gets better!

Last month, a person did a treadmill run where their virtual run location was set as North Korea. Guess what? Their account too was banned. Albeit, after contacting support, the company eventually re-instated it – but clearly Strava has some pretty funky rules in place around uploading activities related to North Korea. What’s strange here though is that it’s not simply hiding the workout, but straight-up deleting the account. Which obviously, makes no sense – so, I did what I do best: Dig into it.

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It turned out there was a lot of digging to do, and the hole was deep. (Thanks Peter R for the link.)
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Something is rotten in the state of Cupertino • Daring Fireball

John Gruber finds the scales falling from his eyes over Apple’s pulling back of the release of its Siri-AI-that-can-do-everything:

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Who decided these features should go in the WWDC keynote, with a promise they’d arrive in the coming year, when, at the time, they were in such an unfinished state they could not be demoed to the media even in a controlled environment? Three months later, who decided Apple should double down and advertise these features in a TV commercial, and promote them as a selling point of the iPhone 16 lineup — not just any products, but the very crown jewels of the company and the envy of the entire industry — when those features still remained in such an unfinished or perhaps even downright non-functional state that they still could not be demoed to the press? Not just couldn’t be shipped as beta software. Not just couldn’t be used by members of the press in a hands-on experience, but could not even be shown to work by Apple employees on Apple-controlled devices in an Apple-controlled environment? But yet they advertised them in a commercial for the iPhone 16, when it turns out they won’t ship, in the best case scenario, until months after the iPhone 17 lineup is unveiled?

…Who said “Sure, let’s promise this” and then “Sure, let’s advertise it”? And who said “Are you crazy, this isn’t ready, this doesn’t work, we can’t promote this now?” And most important, who made the call which side to listen to? Presumably, that person was Tim Cook.

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There’s a subtle hint that Gruber thinks it was John Giannandrea, SVP of machine learning and AI strategy, who was behind the overconfidence in pushing this. But clearly Cook bears responsibility for not demanding better proof it could be done.

More generally, I think – as I said earlier this year – the question is: how would we know if Apple was becoming sclerotic, and saying “no” to the wrong things? Here we have the opposite: saying “yes” to the wrong things. Both are destructive, though.
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OpenAI declares AI race “over” if training on copyrighted works isn’t fair use • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

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OpenAI is hoping that Donald Trump’s AI Action Plan, due out this July, will settle copyright debates by declaring AI training fair use—paving the way for AI companies’ unfettered access to training data that OpenAI claims is critical to defeat China in the AI race.

Currently, courts are mulling whether AI training is fair use, as rights holders say that AI models trained on creative works threaten to replace them in markets and water down humanity’s creative output overall.

OpenAI is just one AI company fighting with rights holders in several dozen lawsuits, arguing that AI transforms copyrighted works it trains on and alleging that AI outputs aren’t substitutes for original works.

So far, one landmark ruling favored rights holders, with a judge declaring AI training is not fair use, as AI outputs clearly threatened to replace Thomson-Reuters’ legal research firm Westlaw in the market, Wired reported. But OpenAI now appears to be looking to Trump to avoid a similar outcome in its lawsuits, including a major suit brought by The New York Times.

“OpenAI’s models are trained to not replicate works for consumption by the public. Instead, they learn from the works and extract patterns, linguistic structures, and contextual insights,” OpenAI claimed. “This means our AI model training aligns with the core objectives of copyright and the fair use doctrine, using existing works to create something wholly new and different without eroding the commercial value of those existing works.”

Providing “freedom-focused” recommendations on Trump’s plan during a public comment period ending Saturday, OpenAI suggested Thursday that the US should end these court fights by shifting its copyright strategy to promote the AI industry’s “freedom to learn.” Otherwise, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) will likely continue accessing copyrighted data that US companies cannot access, supposedly giving China a leg up “while gaining little in the way of protections for the original IP creators,” OpenAI argued.

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While I do think that what these systems do isn’t actually copyright infringement – they don’t regurgitate content, they “learn” from it – the special pleading sticks in the craw rather. Though one can’t help thinking that nothing would make Apple happier than hearing the AI race is over.
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AirPods getting live translation feature later this year • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

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Apple is working on feature that will let the AirPods translate in-person conversations from one language to another, reports Bloomberg. The functionality will be linked to iOS 19, and it will be introduced in an AirPods software update planned for later this year.

The AirPods will be able to provide a simpler translation process for people who are speaking different languages, though the process will rely on the Translate app on the iPhone.

If an English speaker with AirPods is talking to someone who is speaking Spanish, the iPhone will detect the audio, translate the speech, and relay it back in English to the person wearing AirPods. The person speaking English will then be able to respond and have their response translated to Spanish and spoken aloud by the iPhone . Apple’s iPhone Translate app can already be used for conversations like this, but having the function included in the AirPods will streamline the exchange.

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Nice. Though Google has been offering this between 40 languages through its Pixel Buds since late 2023. It’s not just AI where Apple has fallen behind what’s available.
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‘An ideal tool’: prisons are using virtual reality to help people in solitary confinement • The Guardian

Abigail Glasgow:

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ne Monday in July, Samantha Tovar, known as Royal, left her 6ft-by-11ft cell for the first time in three weeks. Correctional officers escorted her to the common area of the Central California Women’s Facility and chained her hands and feet to a metal table, on top of which sat a virtual reality headset. Two and a half years into a five-year prison sentence, Royal was about to see Thailand for the first time.

When she first put on the headset, Royal immediately had an aerial view of a cove. Soon after, her view switched to a boat moving fairly fast with buildings on either side of the water. In the boat was a man with a backpack, and it was as if she were sitting beside him. With accompanying meditative music and narration, the four-minute scene took Royal across a crowded Thai market, through ancient ruins, on a tuk-tuk (a three-wheeled rickshaw) and into an elephant bath with her backpacked companion. For Royal, these vignettes felt real enough to be deserving of a passport stamp.

Before Thailand, Royal had been held in the facility’s “restricted housing unit”, or solitary confinement. There, the only opportunity incarcerated people typically have to speak with each other is through cell vents or across the yard during recreation. Typically for this program, participants in solitary sit inside individual cells the size of phone booths known as “therapeutic modules”. In Royal’s facility, she and fellow participants were separated by plastic dividers, and each participant was shackled to a metal seat attached to a table.

The transformative scene for [Carlos] Ortega [since released, but who went through the program in March 2024] was sitting around the Eiffel Tower. “You see tourists, regular people going to and from work,” he said. “And that’s when it hit me: I want to live life like that. I deserve it. I owe it to myself.”

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What went wrong with Horizon Worlds? Former Meta devs share surprising insights – and a solution • New World Notes

Wagner James Au:

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For one thing, it helps explain why Horizon Worlds is floundering, with far less active users than Second Life (now 21 years old), let alone VRChat and Rec Room, which are far more popular on Meta’s own Quest headset. Despite billions spent in development and marketing, including a literal Super Bowl ad, Horizon Worlds has roughly 300,000 users, versus Second Life’s 500,000.

For another, it helps explain why the Metaverse “failed” in the general public’s eye, since most people assume Meta was the leading developer of the technology.

I’ve always believed the fundamental problem is that Meta leadership never truly understood the Metaverse, and simply treated it like a 3D version of Facebook. In interviews for the book, it also became clear to me that most of the people working on Horizon Worlds weren’t themselves experienced or passionate about virtual worlds.

Indeed, in 2022, Meta leadership sent out an internal memo requiring employees to dogfood Horizon Worlds more (i.e. actually play it).

It was actually worse than that, this ex-developer tells me. Required to dogfood their own virtual world, the engineer tells me, many Meta staffers automated their dogfooding:

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Before I left they were mandating that employees spend a certain number of hours per week in the game actively playing it. So therein started an automation war where all the people with 200 hours a week never actually played the game once. People just had to launch the game with an Android command over USB, then make sure the proximity sensor on the headset was taped to keep it on.

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Yes: Instead of playing Horizon Worlds, developers of Horizon Worlds at Meta figured out a hack where they could just pretend to do so.

As this anonymous developer further explains, Meta’s assumptions were evident even on the code level, with Meta treating the Metaverse as a 3D version of a mobile app…

…The guy that was put in charge of Horizon Worlds needed help learning how to don the headset and launch the game after being in charge of it for three months.

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Automating use, a boss who hasn’t used the product: no wonder Meta is losing billions on its metaverse gambit.
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Microsoft’s quantum breakthrough claim labeled ‘unreliable’ • The Register

Thomas Claburn:

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Microsoft’s claim of a quantum computing breakthrough has attracted strong criticism from scientists, though the software giant says its work is sound – and it will soon reveal data that proves it.

Redmond’s quantum claims were made in February when it announced its in-house boffins had created “the world’s first topoconductor, a breakthrough type of material which can observe and control Majorana particles to produce more reliable and scalable qubits, which are the building blocks for quantum computers.”

…The super-corporation has made big claims about Majorana particles before, but it didn’t end well: In 2021 Redmond’s researchers retracted a 2018 paper in which they claimed to have detected the particles.

Shortly after Microsoft’s recent announcement, scientists expressed concern that the claims in the company’s paper, published in Nature, lacked important details.

Microsoft researcher Chetan Nayak has reaffirmed Redmond’s claims and pointed out that the paper was submitted in March 2024 and published in February 2025. In the intervening months he said Microsoft has made even more progress that he will discuss at an American Physical Society (APS) meeting scheduled for next week in California.

While the quantum world waits for that update, critics have voiced their concerns about Microsoft’s paper.

Henry Legg, a lecturer in theoretical physics at the University of St Andrews in the UK, recently published a pre-print critique that argues the software giant’s work “is not reliable and must be revisited.”

Vincent Mourik, an experimental physicist at the German national research organization Forschungszentrum Jülich, and Sergey Frolov, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Pittsburgh in the US, took to YouTube to criticize “distractions caused by unreliable scientific claims from Microsoft Quantum.”

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Frolov goes even further in direct comments, say the project is essentially fraudulent, and “This is a piece of alleged technology that is based on basic physics that has not been established.”

There’s plenty more, and the scientists are dunking so hard on Microsoft it should change its name to Donuts.
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Revealed: how the UK tech secretary uses ChatGPT for policy advice • New Scientist

Chris Stokel-Walker:

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This week, Prime Minister Keir Starmer said that the UK government should be making far more use of AI in an effort to increase efficiency. “No person’s substantive time should be spent on a task where digital or AI can do it better, quicker and to the same high quality and standard,” he said.

Now, New Scientist has obtained records of Kyle’s ChatGPT use under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act, in what is believed to be a world-first test of whether chatbot interactions are subject to such laws.

These records show that Kyle asked ChatGPT to explain why the UK’s small and medium business (SMB) community has been so slow to adopt AI. ChatGPT returned a 10-point list of problems hindering adoption, including sections on “Limited Awareness and Understanding”, “Regulatory and Ethical Concerns” and “Lack of Government or Institutional Support”.

The chatbot advised Kyle: “While the UK government has launched initiatives to encourage AI adoption, many SMBs are unaware of these programs or find them difficult to navigate. Limited access to funding or incentives to de-risk AI investment can also deter adoption.” It also said, concerning regulatory and ethical concerns: “Compliance with data protection laws, such as GDPR [a data privacy law], can be a significant hurdle. SMBs may worry about legal and ethical issues associated with using AI.”

“As the Cabinet Minister responsible for AI, the Secretary of State does make use of this technology. This does not substitute comprehensive advice he routinely receives from officials,” says a spokesperson for the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), which Kyle leads. “The Government is using AI as a labour-saving tool – supported by clear guidance on how to quickly and safely make use of the technology.”

Kyle also used the chatbot to canvas ideas for media appearances, asking: “I’m Secretary of State for science, innovation and technology in the United Kingdom. What would be the best podcasts for me to appear on to reach a wide audience that’s appropriate for my ministerial responsibilities?” ChatGPT suggested The Infinite Monkey Cage and The Naked Scientists, based on their number of listeners.

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Let’s hope – I’m hoping very hard! – that Kyle used this as a comparator for the advice from his human civil servants, to see how far wrong ChatGPT is or was.
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Did Mars harbour life? One of the strongest signs yet is spotted in a peculiar rock • Nature

Alexandra Witze:

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NASA’s Perseverance rover has found possible hints of ancient life on Mars― one of the strongest signs yet of Martian life, according to planetary scientists. Dark-rimmed ‘leopard spots’ in a rock studied by the rover last year could be the remains of Martian microbial activity, researchers said at a conference today.

The announcement comes loaded with caveats. Yes, the spots look a lot like those produced by microbes on Earth. But the spots might have formed without the help of living organisms, researchers say, even if they don’t entirely understand the chemical and physical processes on Mars that would have been at work in that case.

For now, the discovery remains a 1 on the scale of 1 to 7 for evaluating claims of extraterrestrial life, where 1 represents the detection of an intriguing signal, and 7 is a slam-dunk confirmation. Jim Green, the former chief scientist at NASA who developed the scale, says he would like researchers to make additional confirming measurements to move it up another notch on the scale. Doing that would require bringing the leopard-spot rock back to Earth for analysis. A sample is sitting in Perseverance’s belly, awaiting a ride off Mars for precisely that purpose.

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Very exciiit.. oh no never mind. Every “life on Mars” story for the past 50 years has been like this.
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Correcting the record about Social Security Direct Deposit and Telephone Services • US Social Security Agency

Social Security Administration:

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Recent reports in the media that Social Security plans to eliminate telephone services are inaccurate. SSA is increasing its protection for America’s seniors and other beneficiaries by eliminating the risk of fraud associated with changing bank account information by telephone.

SSA continuously investigates and analyzes potential threats to strengthen and secure our programs and protect people who receive benefits. Approximately 40% of Social Security direct deposit fraud is associated with someone calling SSA to change direct deposit bank information. SSA’s current protocol of simply asking identifying questions by telephone is no longer enough to prevent fraud.

If someone needs to change their bank account information on SSA’s record, they will need to either:

• Use two-factor authentication with SSA’s “my Social Security” service; or
• Visit a local Social Security office to prove their identity.

These methods align with most major banks.

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What’s weird is that it’s taken until now, when Musk is turning it all upside down and shaking it really hard, to do this – which is an eminently sensible move. Of course fraudsters would pretend to be relatives or individuals and steal payments like this. The OIG recognised the problem in 2013. Yet it took 12 years to act?
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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