Excited news stories say a network of tunnels has been found beneath the pyramids. In fact: nope. CC-licensed photo by Vincent Brown 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.
A selection of 11 links for you. Plentiful. 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.I. saved his life by discovering new uses for old drugs • The New York Times
Kate Morgan:
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A little over a year ago, Joseph Coates was told there was only one thing left to decide. Did he want to die at home, or in the hospital?
Coates, then 37 and living in Renton, Wash., was barely conscious. For months, he had been battling a rare blood disorder called POEMS syndrome, which had left him with numb hands and feet, an enlarged heart and failing kidneys. Every few days, doctors needed to drain liters of fluid from his abdomen. He became too sick to receive a stem cell transplant — one of the only treatments that could have put him into remission.
“I gave up,” he said. “I just thought the end was inevitable.”
But Coates’s girlfriend, Tara Theobald, wasn’t ready to quit. So she sent an email begging for help to a doctor in Philadelphia named David Fajgenbaum, whom the couple met a year earlier at a rare disease summit.
By the next morning, Dr. Fajgenbaum had replied, suggesting an unconventional combination of chemotherapy, immunotherapy and steroids previously untested as a treatment for Coates’s disorder.
Within a week, Coates was responding to treatment. In four months, he was healthy enough for a stem cell transplant. Today, he’s in remission.The lifesaving drug regimen wasn’t thought up by the doctor, or any person. It had been spit out by an artificial intelligence model.
In labs around the world, scientists are using A.I. to search among existing medicines for treatments that work for rare diseases. Drug repurposing, as it’s called, is not new, but the use of machine learning is speeding up the process — and could expand the treatment possibilities for people with rare diseases and few options.
Thanks to versions of the technology developed by Dr. Fajgenbaum’s team at the University of Pennsylvania and elsewhere, drugs are being quickly repurposed for conditions including rare and aggressive cancers, fatal inflammatory disorders and complex neurological conditions. And often, they’re working.
The handful of success stories so far have led researchers to ask: how many other cures are hiding in plain sight?
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OK, but then again, there’s only a limited number of rare diseases. Sometimes what’s needed is known, but drugs companies can’t be persuaded to make the treatment for a reasonable price.
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Research: streaming video services struggling for identity • Advanced Television
Hub Entertainment Research:
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Many viewers simply can’t identify where they can watch “signature” programmes. A clutter of original shows that could easily play across different services has made it hard for viewers to find specific shows.
While over half (58%) of consumers know that Stranger Things is on Netflix, less than half of consumers could correctly place where to watch signature shows like Game of Thrones (on Max), The Bear (on Hulu/Disney+) and Ted Lasso (on Apple TV+), among others.
In the blurry landscape of scripted content, live sports events have stood out as a key driver for new sign-ups and strengthening subscriber retention.
Netflix’s strong push into live sports with Christmas NFL games paid off well with big subscriber gains – nearly half (49%) of people agree that it increases their interest in both signing up for and keeping the service.
“Services that lean into broad-appeal scripted programmes may not be enough for viewers who struggle to identify what makes services distinct from one another,” commented Jason Platt Zolov, Senior Consultant for Hub. “Emphasising more brand-defining features and value drivers beyond just exclusive originals could have more upside for streamers looking to improve viewer loyalty.”
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So the streaming services are turning into channels which have scripted entertainment and distinguish themselves through live sports? Does this seem familiar?
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A sneaky phish just grabbed my Mailchimp mailing list • Troy Hunt
Troy Hunt:
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You know when you’re really jet lagged and really tired and the cogs in your head are just moving that little bit too slow? That’s me right now, and the penny has just dropped that a Mailchimp phish has grabbed my credentials, logged into my account and exported the mailing list for this blog. I’m deliberately keeping this post very succinct to ensure the message goes out to my impacted subscribers ASAP, then I’ll update the post with more details. But as a quick summary, I woke up in London this morning to the following message [a screenshot suggesting it’s from Mailchimp and that a “spam complaint” means “sending privileges” are restricted so you have to log in.. to the phishing site.]
I went to the link which is on mailchimp-sso.com and entered my credentials which – crucially – did not auto-complete from 1Password. I then entered the OTP [one-time password] and the page hung. Moments later, the penny dropped, and I logged onto the official website, which Mailchimp confirmed via a notification email which showed my London IP address:
I immediately changed my password, but not before I got an alert about my mailing list being exported from an IP address in New York.
And, moments after that, the login alert from the same IP.
This was obviously highly automated and designed to immediately export the list before the victim could take preventative measures.
…I’m enormously frustrated with myself for having fallen for this, and I apologise to anyone on that list. Obviously, watch out for spam or further phishes and check back here or via the social channels in the nav bar above for more. Ironically, I’m in London visiting government partners, and I spent a couple of hours with the National Cyber Security Centre yesterday talking about how we can better promote passkeys, in part due to their phishing-resistant nature. 🤦♂️
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Happens to the best of us; and here’s the proof.
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Apple can’t intervene in battle over Google search, court confirms • Mediapost
Wendy Davis:
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The ruling, issued Friday by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, upholds a decision by U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta in Washington, D.C., who said in January that Apple could submit written testimony and file friend-of-the-court briefs, but couldn’t present live testimony or cross-examine witnesses at the hearing, slated to begin in April.
The appellate ruling comes in an antitrust battle dating to 2020, when the U.S. Department of Justice and a coalition of states alleged that Google monopolized search.
In August, after conducting a trial, U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta in Washington, D.C. ruled that Google violated antitrust law by arranging to serve as the default search engine on browsers operated by Apple and Mozilla, as well as on Android devices.
The federal government in October proposed numerous remedies to Google’s monopoly, including that the company end a long-running revenue-sharing partnership with Apple. That deal involves Google serving as the default search engine for Safari, and paying Apple around 36% of search revenue for queries originating on Safari.
In late December, Apple sought to intervene in the hearing over remedies, arguing that it’s entitled to fully participate because it has a stake in the outcome of the case.
Mehta rejected that request as untimely.
Apple appealed, arguing that if it couldn’t fully participate in the hearing, it would “be a mere spectator” in a fight that could affect its multi-billion dollar partnership with Google. That deal resulted in an estimated $20bn payment from Google to Apple in 2022 alone.
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Pretty brutal to tell lawyers they’ve been too slow when they thought they were being methodical. But Tim Cook will be gazing at the spreadsheets with a big $20bn hole in them, wondering how to fill that gap.
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Signal founder: don’t be fooled by WhatsApp’s marketing fluff • Cybernews
Anton Mous:
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Last month, [Signal founder Meredith] Whittaker lashed out at WhatsApp’s data collection practices, saying that the messaging app collects too much sensitive metadata.
“It tells you exactly who you’re communicating with, at what time, how often, and where you are. You can derive so much from that. WhatsApp can link that information to Facebook, to Instagram and to payment data that they could buy into. Signal simply doesn’t have all that data,” she said.
Her comment didn’t go unnoticed. Will Cathcart, WhatsApp’s head, spoke to a handful of Dutch journalists last week and told them false rumors are circulating regarding WhatsApp’s security and privacy.
“We strongly believe in private communication,” he said, adding that WhatsApp uses the same security protocol as Signal. In addition, WhatsApp doesn’t keep track of whom and when people communicate, and location data and information about a user’s contact aren’t shared with other companies.
In a statement published on Monday, Whittaker says WhatsApp is making a mockery of things.
“In some ways, we’re amused to see WhatsApp stretching the limits of reality to claim that they are just like Signal – we take it as a bit of a compliment when a massive big tech platform strives to meet the bar we set and be cool like us. But the stakes of such marketing fluff are high, so we need to set the record straight,” she wrote.
Whittaker acknowledges that WhatsApp licenses Signal’s end-to-end encryption technology. Nevertheless, a lot of personal and intimate information isn’t protected. According to Signal’s president, this involves users’ location data, contact lists, when they send someone a message, when they stop, what users are in their group chats, their profile picture, and much more.
“These differences may be marketing gloss to Meta, but to us, they’re fundamental life or death issues that the public deserves to understand so they can make an informed choice,” Whittaker concludes.
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Days after the Signal leak, the Pentagon warned the app was the target of hackers • NPR
Quil Lawrence and Tom Bowman:
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Several days after top national security officials accidentally included [on March 11] a reporter in a Signal chat about bombing Houthi sites in Yemen, a Pentagon-wide advisory warned against using the messaging app, even for unclassified information.
“A vulnerability has been identified in the Signal Messenger Application,” begins the department-wide email, dated March 18 and obtained by NPR.
The memo continues, “Russian professional hacking groups are employing the ‘linked devices’ features to spy on encrypted conversations.” It notes that Google has identified Russian hacking groups that are “targeting Signal Messenger to spy on persons of interest.”
Moreover, a memo in 2023, obtained by NPR, warned of using Signal for any nonpublic official information.
A Signal spokesman said the Pentagon memo is not about the messaging app’s level of security, but rather that users of the service should be aware of what are known as “phishing attacks.” That’s when hackers try to gain access to sensitive information through impersonation or other deceptive tricks.
“Once we learned that Signal users were being targeted and how they were being targeted, we introduced additional safeguards and in-app warnings to help protect people from falling victim to phishing attacks. This work was completed months ago,” said Signal spokesman Jun Harada.
The March 18, 2025, Pentagon memo adds, “Please note: third party messaging apps (e.g. Signal) are permitted by policy for unclassified accountability/recall exercises but are NOT approved to process or store nonpublic unclassified information.”
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The whole Signal debacle is top to bottom illegal by all those in the administration, but the fact they were using an app which had a weakness on their personal phones (official phones can’t even download Signal) is just totally predictable.
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Notification summary miscues • One Foot Tsunami
Paul Kafasis:
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Since they were first enabled last year, I have frequently found Apple Intelligence’s notification summaries for emails to be something less than helpful. Here are some I spotted in just the past few days.
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These are all pretty egregious. Understandable – you can see how the machine processed the data to make the mistake – but the problem is, can you ever get rid of them? As I explained to some friends this evening, the trouble with LLMs is that they’re not deterministic, like computers as we usually think of them, but probabilistic: their output is inherently unpredictable. And that is a problem.
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Dubai’s drone show boom is creating jobs, despite instability • Rest of World
Amar Diwakar:
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On a chilly night in January, Ajay Sreekumar stood outside Dubai’s Museum of the Future and craned his head up to the sky. He watched a swarm of 600 drones whirl some 400 feet above in the dark, humming as they formed an LED-illuminated portrait of the city’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. Over the next nine minutes, the drones transitioned seamlessly between multicolored and animated 3D images, including a spinning globe and a scientist inspecting the DNA double helix.
Sreekumar was not only a spectator — he was also the spectacle’s lead designer. The drone show was part of the closing ceremony for the World Health Expo Dubai, and the company Sreekumar worked for, Skyvertise, had organized it. When the show concluded and the last drone touched down, Sreekumar felt a glow of satisfaction. His team had spent the previous two days designing, programming, and rehearsing the show, and it had gone off without a hitch, he told Rest of World.
Part of the thrill was seeing his work as a 3D artist come to life immediately. “You don’t have to wait months to see the product,” as with his former job in film and TV, he said. “Your portfolio can be seen in the sky in real time.”
Two years ago, Sreekumar was working at an Abu Dhabi media studio when he came across a job listing for Skyvertise. He had no experience with drones, but his 3D design skills were transferable. He soon found himself doing everything from operating the drones to changing the batteries to designing the show animations.
…In 2023, the global drone-show market was valued at $339m, with the Middle East accounting for about $41m. While North America is the largest market, the shows in the Middle East are more spectacular and use more drones, according to a report by SPH Engineering, a drone tech company. An average show in the region costs about $112,250 and has 401 drones. That’s far more expensive than a traditional fireworks show, which can range from $13,600 to $41,000. Drones, however, are reusable and more eco-friendly.
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Rest of World continues to capture the most fascinating stories. This one in particular might be the future of fireworks (which will make a lot of wild animals and domestic pets happy).
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Yahoo is still here—and it has big plans for AI • WIRED
Steven Levy:
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In September 2021, Jim Lanzone took over a company whose name once embodied the go-go spirit of the internet but had, over the years, become a joke: Yahoo. He accepted the CEO post from the new private-equity owner Apollo Global Management, which had bought the property from Verizon, the most recent and possibly most clueless caretaker (high bar alert) in a long series of management shifts. Visiting him at the company’s offices in New York City, I ask him why he took the job. “I love turnarounds,” he says.
Lanzone’s résumé confirms that. In 2001 he took over a sagging search property called AskJeeves—its share price was less than a dollar, down from a high of $196—and built it back to the point where Barry Diller’s IAC Corp bought it for $1.85bn. At CBS Interactive and then CBS’s chief digital office during the 2010s, he yanked the stuffy Tiffany network into the streaming age. Yahoo, celebrating its 30th anniversary this month, might be his biggest challenge yet.
…One of Lanzone’s canniest AI moves was acquiring Artifact, the AI-powered news aggregator created by Instagram cofounders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. When the pair decided it would not become a viable business, they announced its closure and Lanzone was among multiple suitors vying for the underlying technology. It became the centerpiece of the homepage that Yahoo relaunched earlier this year. “Instead of incorporating their technology into our product, we did it the other way,” Lanzone says. “Essentially Yahoo News is now Artifact.” Systrom approves. “We partnered with Yahoo because they made a strong offer, but also because they planned on deploying our hard work to many millions of people,” he says.
…When I suggest that Yahoo is less than the sum of its parts, Lanzone pushes back, saying that a Yahoo Finance user will get drawn into the Yahoo-sphere and use other services. Bolstering the effort is a nod to 2025 behavior: Yahoo has made deals with over 100 influencers to help establish it as a home for viral content. In a sense, he says, the company is returning to its early mission of delivering the bounty of the internet to a mass audience. In a symbolic reunion, he recently hosted cofounder Jerry Yang at an all-hands, implying a restored legacy.
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Each new CEO of Yahoo is another go-around of the Arrested Development meme: “it never worked for those people. But it might work for us.”
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Napster to become a music-marketing metaverse firm after $207m acquisition • Ars Technica
Scharon Harding:
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Infinite Reality, a media, ecommerce, and marketing company focused on 3D and AI-powered experiences, has entered an agreement to acquired Napster. That means that the brand originally launched in 1999 as a peer-to-peer (P2P) music file-sharing service is set to be reborn again. This time, new owners are reshaping the brand into one focused on marketing musicians in the metaverse.
Infinite announced today a definitive agreement to buy Napster for $207m. The Norwalk, Connecticut-based company plans to turn Napster into a “social music platform that prioritizes active fan engagement over passive listening, allowing artists to connect with, own, and monetize the relationship with their fans.” Jon Vlassopulos, who became Napster CEO in 2022, will continue with his role at the brand.
Since 2016, Napster has been operating as a (legal) streaming service. It claims to have over 110 million high-fidelity tracks, with some supporting lossless audio. Napster subscribers can also listen offline and watch music videos. The service currently starts at $11 per month.
Since 2022, Napster has been owned by Web3 and blockchain firms Hivemind and Algorand. Infinite also develops Web3 tech, and CEO John Acunto told CNBC that Algorand’s blockchain background was appealing, as was Napster’s licenses for streaming millions of songs.
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It’s so strange to see the brand names that were so enormous in shaping the web we have today turned into these weird contraptions for random conjugations of latter-day enthusiasms. How much competition is there to “market musicians in the metaverse”? I’m guessing zero.
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No credible evidence supports claims of vast underground structures found beneath Egyptian pyramids • Snopes.com
Joey Esposito:
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Claims that researchers discovered previously unknown structures beneath the Pyramid of Khafre — the pyramid situated in the center of the Great Pyramids of Giza — using radar technology circulated online in March 2025.
The purported discovery was that of “five identical structures near the Khafre Pyramid’s base, linked by pathways, and eight deep vertical wells descending 648 meters underground.”
Users took to social media to express their excitement over the alleged findings, posting on social media platforms like X (archived), Instagram (archived) and TikTok (archived). Some referred to the discovery as “a vast underground city.” One YouTube video sharing the claim stood at over 35,000 views as of this writing.
Despite the popularity of the claim, there is no evidence to support it. In addition, no credible news outlets or scientific publications have reported on this rumor.
Rather, this appears to be a spin on already questionable research conducted in 2022 that was subsequently embellished by a variety of right-wing content creators like conspiracy website Infowars contributor Greg Reese, who publishes The Reese Report, listed as a source for many of the claims pertaining to this topic. Infowars founder and well-known conspiracy theorist Alex Jones shared a version of the same claim on X (archived).
In short, the Reese Report theorized the alleged discovery supported the idea that the pyramids were not built as tombs but as a sort of ancient power plant
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Just in case you’d seen this claim repeated somewhere. The Jerusalem Post wrote a breathless writeup which also says, at the end, “The article was written with the assistance of a news analysis system.” Not increasing my trust in AI systems here, people.
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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 