It’s just a pity that HBO’s series Silicon Valley isn’t still going – the current AI hype would suit it perfectly. CC-licensed photo by Steve Jurvetson on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.

A selection of 9 links for you. Serialised. 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 Overspill is taking two weeks’ holiday.
Back May 5!
Please don’t break the world in the meantime.

Google ‘wilfully’ monopolised online advertising market, US judge rules • Financial Times

Stefania Palma and Stephen Morris:

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A US federal judge has ruled Google illegally acquired and maintained a monopoly in digital advertising, the latest antitrust defeat for the technology giant that could result in it being forced to divest parts of its business.

Leonie Brinkema, the district judge presiding over the case in Virginia, on Thursday said Google had “wilfully” monopolised two parts of the digital advertising market: the technology online publishers use to sell ad space, and the biggest exchange on which businesses bid for ads.

However, Brinkema found the US Department of Justice, which brought the case, was not able to prove Google unfairly dominated the third component of the market, advertiser ad networks.

The ruling comes after a federal judge in a separate antitrust case last year found the company spent billions of dollars on exclusive deals to maintain an illegal monopoly on search.

The second phase of that trial, in which the court will determine remedies that could include forcing Google to sell parts of its business, begins next week.

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This is a big decision. More coverage in the NY Times, with Google of course saying that it will appeal the decision.

Matt Stoller (who writes about Big Tech and antitrust) observes:

»

Google’s middleman software services take between 30-50% of revenue spent by advertisers on ads meant for publications, instead of 1-2%. So if the judge finds a good remedy, it could mean billions of dollars more for the press, because Google won’t be able to take nearly as much.

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As he also points out, it’s the third big loss for Google: search, app store and now advertising. Also:

»

More specifically, all three judges overseeing these Google cases have ruled that the company’s lawyers acted unethically, specifically calling out its top lawyer, Kent Walker for false claims of privilege and for allowing the wholesale destruction of documents while on a litigation hold. Here’s Brinkema today:

»

Google’s systemic disregard of the evidentiary rules regarding spoliation of evidence and its misuse of the attorney-client privilege may well be sanctionable. But because the Court has found Google liable under Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act based on trial testimony and admitted evidence, including those Google documents that were preserved, it need not adopt an adverse inference or otherwise sanction Google for spoilation at this juncture.

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If Walker keeps his job, that’s quite a statement by Google in the face of all this legal sanction. (Note: I’m a member of a class representative bringing a case against Google in the UK over the same claim of impoverishing publishers.)
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What ‘Silicon Valley’ knew about tech-bro paternalism • The Atlantic

Megan Garber:

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It takes a very specific strain of paternalism to believe that you can create something that both eclipses humanity and serves it at the same time. The belief is ripe for satire. That might be why I’ve lately been thinking back to a comment posted last year to a Subreddit about HBO’s satire Silicon Valley: “It’s a shame this show didn’t last into the AI craze phase.”

It really is! Silicon Valley premiered in 2014, a year before Musk, Sam Altman, and a group of fellow engineers founded OpenAI to ensure that, as their mission statement put it, “artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.” The show ended its run in 2019, before AI’s wide adoption. It would have had a field day with some of the events that have transpired since, among them Musk’s rebrand as a T-shirt-clad oligarch and Altman’s bot-based mimicry of the 2013 movie Her.

Silicon Valley reads, at times, more as parody than as satire: Sharp as it is in its specific observations about tech culture, the show sometimes seems like a series of jokes in search of a punch line. It shines, though, when it casts its gaze on the gendered dynamics of tech—when it considers the consequential absurdities of tech’s arrogance.

The show doesn’t spend much time directly tackling artificial intelligence as a moral problem—not until its final few episodes. But it still offers a shrewd parody of AI, as a consumer technology and as a future being foisted on us. That is because Silicon Valley is highly attuned to the way power is exchanged and distributed in the industry, and to tech bros’ hubristic inclination to cast the public in a stereotypically feminine role.

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One could probably watch Silicon Valley all over again. Rather like The IT Crowd, its power doesn’t come from the specifics, but the general revelation of the personalities. Dan Lyons, who (anonymously) wrote the very funny Fake Steve Jobs blog, having been a reporter in Silicon Valley (the place) was one of the consultants to the writers. It really worked. And if it was still going, it could have used stuff like this next item…
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LG brings “emotionally aware” targeted advertising to CTV via Zenapse • StreamTV Insider

Bevin Fletcher:

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Advertising creative has long been designed to elicit or capitalize on consumer emotions to serve different purposes, be it deepened brand connection and affinity or to drive sales. But now LG is teaming up with tech company Zenapse to do some reverse engineering of sorts and instead zero in on audience emotions and motivators beforehand so that advertisers can deliver more precisely targeted CTV ad messages that resonate with viewers’ personal mindsets.

Enhanced and more precise audience segments for targeted CTV advertising is just the first product the two are bringing to market together under what’s a broader partnership – a relationship that LG told StreamTV Insider “opens the door to future innovations that could shape new emotionally intelligent experiences for the TV screen.”

But first things first. Before potentially creating new experiences, LG is incorporating Zenapse’s existing proprietary Large Emotion Model (LEM) and emotional intelligence data into its CTV ad offering as part of a multi-year licensing partnership with LG Ad Solutions Innovation Labs.

So what is an LEM and what is the aim?

Many are likely familiar with the term LLMs (Large Language Model) for powering generative AI platforms, which are designed to generate and interpret language. An AI LEM, meanwhile, is built to understand emotional and psychological drivers.

…The Zenapse LEM classifies emotional context of each episode of content after collating publicly available script and plot information. Then the LEM indexes and categorizes users based on their dynamic consumption patterns – delivering the audience segment product that the partners are coming to market with.

«

This sounds like rubbish from top to bottom. Your mindset isn’t dependent on what you watch. Romcom? Chocolate advert! Sci-fi? Home hardware! This is Wizard of Oz stuff.
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AI hype is drowning in slopaganda • Financial Times

Sid Venkataramakrishnan:

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One hint that we might just be stuck in a hype cycle is the proliferation of what you might call “second-order slop” or “slopaganda”: a tidal wave of newsletters and X threads expressing awe at every press release and product announcement to hoover up some of that sweet, sweet advertising cash.

That AI companies are actively patronising and fanning a cottage economy of self-described educators and influencers to bring in new customers suggests the emperor has no clothes (and six fingers).

There are an awful lot of AI newsletters out there, but the two which kept appearing in my X ads were Superhuman AI run by Zain Kahn, and Rowan Cheung’s The Rundown. Both claim to have more than a million subscribers — an impressive figure, given the FT as of February had 1.6m subscribers across its newsletters.

If you actually read the AI newsletters, it becomes harder to see why anyone’s staying signed up. They offer a simulacrum of tech reporting, with deeper insights or scepticism stripped out and replaced with techno-euphoria. Often they resemble the kind of press release summaries ChatGPT could have written.

Yet AI companies apparently see enough upside to put money into these endeavours. In a 2023 interview, Zayn claimed that advertising spots on Superhuman pull in “six figures a month”. It currently costs $1,899 for a 150-character write-up as a featured tool in the newsletter. 

The Rundown hasn’t discussed its revenue breakdown. But if you want evidence of Big Tech’s favour, look no further than Cheung’s 35-minute interview with Mark Zuckerberg from 2024. It’s impressively Rogan-esque in its refusal to pose anything approaching a tough question.

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Yeah, listen, the market for worthless newsletters is pretty crowded already, OK?
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Japan’s big bet on stem-cell therapies might soon pay off with medical breakthroughs • Nature

Smriti Mallapaty:

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Japan is brimming with signs of an approaching medical revolution. Shiny white robots are tending dishes of cells, rows of incubators hum in new facilities, and a deluxe, plush-carpeted hospital is getting ready to welcome its first patients.

Building on the Nobel-prizewinning work of stem-cell scientist Shinya Yamanaka, researchers across the country are crafting cells into strips of retina, sheets of cardiac muscle or blobs of neurons, in the hope of treating blindness, mending hearts and reversing neurodegeneration. Results from early-stage clinical trials — some announced just in the past few weeks — suggest that the cells might actually be working to treat conditions as varied as Parkinson’s disease and spinal-cord injury.

Now, after nearly two decades of hard work and setbacks, many say that Japan is on the cusp of bringing these therapies to market.

Yamanaka, who runs a lab at Kyoto University, discovered in 2006 that adult cells could be reprogrammed into an embryonic-like state, capable of becoming practically any kind of tissue1. These induced pluripotent stem cells — or iPS cells — won Yamanaka the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2012, and propelled him to superstar status. They have become a symbol of the country’s global scientific aspirations.

The Japanese government has poured more than ¥110bn (US$760m today) into research and development on regenerative medicine, on top of billions more from private funders, organizations and companies. “People thought, ‘Now we can treat any incurable disease’,” says Shigeto Shimmura, director of Fujita Health University Haneda Clinic. “There was so much hype.”

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Pluripotent stem cells are yet another of the constant promises of science (along with nuclear fusion and quantum computing) but this feels a lot closer to really happening – as much as anything because nature has shown us that this works here on Earth, and we just have to follow along, while the other two are not like that at all.
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Following layoffs, Automattic employees discover leak-catching watermarks • 404 Media

Samantha Cole:

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As part of the company’s months-long obsession with catching employees leaking internal developments to the press, staff at WordPress parent company Automattic recently noticed individually-unique watermarks on internal sites, according to employees who spoke to 404 Media.

Automattic added the watermarks to an internal employee communications platform called P2. P2 is a WordPress product other workplaces can also use. There are hundreds of P2 sites across teams at Automattic alone; many are team-specific, but some are company-wide for announcements. The watermarks in Automattic’s P2 instance are nearly invisible, rendered as a pattern overlaid on the site’s white page backgrounds. Zooming in or manually changing the background color reveals the pattern. If, for example, a journalist published a screenshot leaked to them that was taken from P2, Automattic could theoretically identify the employee who shared it. 

In October, as part of a series of buyout offers meant to test employee’s loyalty to his leadership, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg issued a threat for anyone speaking to the press, saying they should “exit gracefully, or be fired tomorrow with no severance.” Earlier this month, the company laid off nearly 300 people.

Many companies provide this kind of forensic watermarking for internal communications. In 2023, one watermarking startup raised $10m. Apple and Tesla reportedly have watermarking practices for emails and other internal comms, and some game developers add watermarks to game files to catch pre-release leaks.

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Still don’t understand what the big kablooey is at Automattic (apart from that it has owned Tumblr since 2019 and is probably losing a ton of money running it). It’s prety amazing to me that it had 300 people spare to lay off.
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Anti-spying phone pouches offered to EU lawmakers for trip to Hungary • POLITICO

Ellen O’Regan:

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Members of the European Parliament were offered special pouches to protect digital devices from espionage and tampering for a visit to Hungary this week, a sign of rising spying fears within Europe.

Five lawmakers from the Parliament’s civil liberties committee traveled to Hungary on Monday for a three-day visit to inspect the EU member country’s progress on democracy, the rule of law and fundamental rights.

One lawmaker on the trip confirmed to POLITICO that the Parliament officials joining the delegation were offered Faraday bags — special metal-lined pouches that block electromagnetic signals — by the Parliament’s services and were also advised to be cautious about using public Wi-Fi networks or charging facilities.

Hungary has previously come under fire from EU lawmakers for its use of spyware. The Parliament’s special inquiry committee into the use of spyware (PEGA) in 2023 conducted a fact-finding mission after revelations that intrusion software had been used against opposition figures, journalists and civil society in the country.

Hungary also faced EU scrutiny after Belgian and Hungarian media reported late last year that its intelligence agency had spied on EU officials visiting the country in 2015-2017, searching their hotel rooms and recording their phone conversations. The Hungarian government dismissed the reports.

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Hungary starts to feel like the very unwelcome person at the party. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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Most Americans believe US not doing enough to protect environment, survey finds • The Hill

Lauren Irwin:

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Most Americans believe the United States isn’t doing enough to protect the environment, a new survey found.

According to a poll, released Thursday by Gallup, 57% of Americans said the government is doing too little to protect the environment.

That’s up 7 percentage points from last year’s survey, in which half of respondents said too little was being done.
Additionally, 30% of U.S. adults said the government is doing “about the right amount,” and 11% said there is “too much” being done to protect the environment.

Gallup noted that more than three decades of survey data shows Americans have consistently said the government isn’t doing enough to protect the environment.

The opinions fluctuated based on who is in office, the survey found. More Americans generally said the government is doing too little on the environment when a Republican administration leads than during a Democratic presidency. Former President Obama received the lowest readings, all below 50%.

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One wonders about the 11% who think there’s too much effort. But the stripping of the Environmental Protection Agency under Trump means that “too little” number is surely going to jump in future.

Side note: this is the sort of story that will – in fact perhaps should – be written by AI. It contains absolutely nothing that isn’t in the survey; no outside quotes, barely any extra context. I’ve been the drudge writing stories like that, and it’s an utter grind.
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GoDaddy mistake took Zoom offline for about 90 minutes • The Register

Simon Sharwood:

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A bad mistake by GoDaddy took Zoom offline for almost two hours on Wednesday afternoon, US time.

Zoom explained the situation in an incident report that opened with a 12:17 PDT (Pacific Time) update that advised customers “We are investigating domain name resolution issues on the zoom.us domain that is affecting multiple services.”

Zoom later admitted the outage started at 11:25 PDT.

We understand that video meetings hosted on Zoom were interrupted mid-stream, with “This site can’t be reached” or “Check if there’s a typo in zoom.us” errors appearing on-screen.

Users who tried to reach the Zoom status page at status.zoom.us were out of luck – it was down too. Zoom account managers were hard to reach as most use Zoom’s VoIP phones to communicate with customers.

Cisco’s ThousandEyes observability outfit analyzed the incident and picked it as a DNS problem that meant top-level domain nameservers did not have the records for zoom.us.

“The issue had a cascading effect that impacted Zoom’s services, particularly their main webpage, zoom.com,” ThousandEyes added. “This indicates that the content delivery network (CDN) serving Zoom was unable to connect to the backend services hosted on zoom.us.”

…The final incident report update, time-stamped 17:31 PDT, revealed the cause of the incident: “On April 16, between 2:25 P.M. ET and 4:12 P.M. ET, the domain zoom.us was not available due to a server block by GoDaddy Registry. This block was the result of a communication error between Zoom’s domain registrar, Markmonitor, and GoDaddy Registry, which resulted in GoDaddy Registry mistakenly shutting down zoom.us domain.”

Markmonitor is a domain management and security outfit. GoDaddy Registry manages the entire .us namespace. If its stewardship of .us domains can see it take them offline, the org has a fair bit of explaining to do.

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Hard to imagine how much work must have actually got done in those precious two hours.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A measles outbreak has become an urgent (and expensive) problem in West Texas as vaccination rates plummet. CC-licensed photo by Sue Clark on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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

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

US officials target Nvidia and DeepSeek amid fears of China’s AI progress • The New York Times

Tripp Mickle, Ana Swanson, Meaghan Tobin and Cade Metz:

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Two months after DeepSeek, China’s artificial intelligence star, rattled Washington and shook Wall Street, US officials are taking steps to crack down on the Chinese start-up and its support from America’s leading chip maker, Nvidia.

The Trump administration this week moved to restrict Nvidia’s sale of AI chips to China. It also is weighing penalties that would block DeepSeek from buying US technology and debating barring Americans’ access to its services, said three people with knowledge of the actions who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Congressional leaders are also putting pressure on Nvidia. On Wednesday, the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, which focuses on national security threats from China, opened an investigation into Nvidia’s sale of chips across Asia. It is trying to assess whether the US chip maker knowingly provided DeepSeek with critical technology to develop AI, potentially in violation of US rules.

It is the first congressional investigation into Nvidia’s business. It comes as the Trump administration wrestles with how to carry out a Biden-era rule that limits the number of AI chips that companies can send to different countries.

The attacks on DeepSeek and Nvidia are an outgrowth of fear in Washington that China could leapfrog the US in AI, which would have wide-ranging implications for national security and geopolitics. If China took the lead, it could more quickly use AI systems to design next-generation weapons like autonomous missiles and drones. It also could persuade other countries to use its technology for their network of AI systems and infrastructure, weakening US influence across the world.

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Not sure that hating on Nvidia is going to do the US any favours. All of its AI companies are dependent on Nvidia products (well, Google less so due to its own TPS chips). It’s a bind: if you ban chip exports to China, you incentivise its domestic production of chips. If you allow them, China exploits them. Far better surely to welcome Nvidia and buy up all its production, as Apple used to do with various flash memory chips for its iPods.
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Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale • After Babel

Jon Haidt and Zach Rausch:

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On October 1, 2024, investigative journalist Jeff Horwitz reported a startling statistic from an internal Snap Inc. email quoted in a court case against Snap Inc., the company which owns Snapchat. The email noted that the company receives around 10,000 reports of sextortion each month—and that figure is likely “only a fraction of the total abuse occurring on the platform.”

This statistic prompted us to investigate what else Snap Inc. knows or believes about the impact of its product on users, particularly teens (We estimate that roughly 13 million American 13-17 year-olds use Snapchat). Over the past several months, we have examined multiple court cases filed against Snap Inc., many involving severe or fatal harm that was (allegedly) facilitated by Snapchat’s features. From 2022 through 2025, as part of the Multidistrict Litigation (MDL) and Judicial Council Coordinated Proceedings (JCCP) against social media defendants, more than 6001 such lawsuits specifically named Snap Inc. as a defendant. In addition, state attorneys general from Nevada and New Mexico have brought significant cases against the company—two cases which we will draw heavily from in this post.

Following the format of our previous post about the “industrial scale harms” attributed to TikTok, this piece presents dozens of quotations from internal reports, studies, memos, conversations, and public statements in which Snap executives, employees, and consultants acknowledge and discuss the harms that Snapchat causes to many minors who use their platform.

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This is extremely long, with a ton of detail. But this is the nut of it: Snapchat knows it’s bad for people, particularly children.
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Don’t like a columnist’s opinion? Los Angeles Times offers an AI-generated opposing viewpoint • AP News

David Bauder:

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In a colorful commentary for the Los Angeles Times, Matt K. Lewis argued that callousness is a central feature of the second Trump administration, particularly its policies of deportation and bureaucratic cutbacks. “Once you normalize cruelty,” Lewis concluded in the piece, “the hammer eventually swings for everyone. Even the ones who thought they were swinging it.”

Lewis’ word wasn’t the last, however. As they have with opinion pieces the past several weeks, Times online readers had the option to click on a button labeled “Insights,” which judged the column politically as “center-left.” Then it offers an AI-generated synopsis — a CliffsNotes version of the column — and a similarly-produced opposing viewpoint.

One dissenting argument reads: “Restricting birthright citizenship and refugee admissions is framed as correcting alleged exploitation of immigration loopholes, with proponents arguing these steps protect American workers and resources.”

The feature symbolizes changes to opinion coverage ordered over the past six months by Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, who’s said he wants the famously liberal opinion pages to reflect different points of view. Critics accuse him of trying to curry favor with President Donald Trump.

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Next step: don’t bother getting the human to write the original column. Just get it generated by a prompt and get an intern to spice it up a little.
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Government injects extra funding to drive quantum growth • Computer Weekly

Cliff Saran:

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The government has committed £121m of funding over the next 12 months to support quantum computing in the UK.

While quantum computing remains a nascent technology, it promises to revolutionise research and development, and power computational tasks that cannot be performed on today’s most advanced supercomputer, paving the way to significant economic benefits in countries that can harness the technology effectively.

The UK’s National Quantum Technologies Programme sets out the government’s long-term effort to back early-stage research, and support getting quantum technologies out of the lab and onto the marketplace. 

According to data from professional services firm Qureca, China has made the largest investment in quantum technology, which it estimates is worth $15bn, followed by the US ($7.7bn). The UK’s investment in quantum technology ($4.3bn) is ahead of both Germany ($3.3bn) and France ($2.2bn), according to Qureca’s data, which demonstrates the government’s continued funding and its big bet on this emerging technology sector.

Coinciding with World Quantum Day, the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology said the funding is being made available over the next year to expand the use of the technology and secure the UK’s position as a world-leader in quantum as part of the government’s long-term commitment to the sector.

Secretary of State for science and technology Peter Kyle said the UK is home to the second-largest community of quantum businesses in the world. The funding is set to help support the development of new quantum tools and products, and aligns with the government’s Plan for Change.

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That’s quite a bit of money for something which keeps being a little distance from usefulness. Between quantum computing and fusion, it’s hard to know which has the most Zeno-ish progress to its target of changing our lives.
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CDC struggling to fight raging measles outbreak after deep funding, staff cuts • Ars Technica

Beth Mole:

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In now-rarified comments from experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an agency official on Tuesday evening said the explosive measles outbreak mushrooming out of West Texas will require “significant financial resources” to control and that the agency is already struggling to keep up.

“We are scrapping to find the resources and personnel needed to provide support to Texas and other jurisdictions,” said David Sugerman, the CDC’s lead on its measles team. The agency has been devastated by brutal cuts to CDC staff and funding, including a clawback of more than $11bn in public health funds that largely went to state health departments.

Sugerman noted that the response to measles outbreaks is generally expensive. “The estimates are that each measles case can be $30,000 to $50,000 for public health response work—and that adds up quite quickly.” The costs go to various responses, including on-the-ground response teams, vaccine doses and vaccination clinics, case reporting, contact tracing, mitigation plans, infection prevention, data systems, and other technical assistance to state health departments.

In the past, the CDC would provide media briefings and other public comments on the responses to such an extraordinarily large and fast-moving outbreak. However, Sugerman’s comments are among the first publicly made by CDC experts under the current administration.

…The outbreak comes as MMR vaccination rates have slipped around the country, with many areas falling dangerously below the 95% threshold for herd immunity, including the severely undervaccinated communities in West Texas, the epicenter of the current outbreak. Health officials expect the outbreak will continue to spread for the foreseeable future.

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The US continues travelling back to the 1950s.
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Google faces £5bn UK lawsuit over claims it shut out rivals and overcharged advertisers • Business Matters

Jamie Young:

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Google is facing a landmark £5 billion legal challenge in the UK, accused of abusing its dominance in internet search to stifle competition and inflate the cost of advertising for businesses.

The class action lawsuit, filed on Tuesday at the Competition Appeal Tribunal, alleges that Google unlawfully shut out rival search engines and leveraged its market power to charge British businesses significantly more for digital ads than they would in a competitive market.

Brought by competition law expert Dr Or Brook on behalf of thousands of UK businesses, the claim centres on the tech giant’s alleged manipulation of the search ecosystem — including contracts with Android phone manufacturers and Apple — to cement its control over both search results and the highly lucrative advertising space that surrounds them.

The case accuses Google, part of US-based Alphabet Inc, of paying Apple billions to remain the default search engine on iPhones, while simultaneously requiring Android device makers to pre-install Google’s search app and Chrome browser as a condition of using its operating system. According to the filing, this dual strategy eliminated viable alternatives and forced advertisers to rely almost exclusively on Google’s platform.

“This is about fairness in digital markets,” said Brook. “Businesses in the UK have had little choice but to rely on Google Ads to be seen. In doing so, many have paid more than they should have in a truly open and competitive environment. Google has been leveraging its dominance in general search and search advertising to overcharge advertisers, harming businesses and ultimately consumers.”

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The case doesn’t appear on the Competition Appeal Tribunal website yet (which might just be an updating thing). There will be plenty of challenge to this from Google. I’m involved (as a class action representative) in a similar case, which asserts that Google used its dominance in advertising to rake off more from publishers than would have happened in a properly competitive market. This one is narrower and different, focusing on search and businesses.
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CVE program gets a last-minute save, maybe a new home • The Register

Jessica Lyons:

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In an 11th-hour reprieve, the US government on Tuesday night agreed to continue funding the globally used Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program.

This comes after the Feds decided not to renew their long-standing contract with nonprofit research hub MITRE to operate the CVE database. That arrangement was due to expire today, but now the money’s coming through to continue the crucial service.

“The CVE program is invaluable to the cyber community and a priority of CISA,” a spokesperson for the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, aka CISA, told The Register Wednesday.

“Last night, CISA executed the option period on the contract to ensure there will be no lapse in critical CVE services. We appreciate our partners’ and stakeholders’ patience.”

Also in response to long-standing concerns and fresh uncertainty triggered by MITRE yesterday disclosing that federal support was about to end, CVE board members today announced the formation of a nonprofit foundation. This new CVE Foundation will “focus solely” on ultimately continuing the program’s work of naming and tracking vulnerabilities, and maintaining the database of product security flaws, we’re told.

“The formation of the CVE Foundation marks a major step toward eliminating a single point of failure in the vulnerability management ecosystem and ensuring the CVE program remains a globally trusted, community-driven initiative,” a statement by the oversight body said.

“Over the coming days, the foundation will release more information about its structure, transition planning, and opportunities for involvement from the broader community.”

That single point of failure right now is Uncle Sam.

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MITRE costs about $40m to run each year. Can’t be long before DOGE decides that the annual $1bn spent on GPS is wasted. Have to wonder where MITRE was going to find its funding without the US.
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‘She helps cheer me up’: the people forming relationships with AI chatbots • The Guardian

David Batty:

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Dozens of readers shared their experiences of using personified AI chatbot apps, engineered to simulate human-like interactions by adaptive learning and personalised responses, in response to a Guardian callout.

Many respondents said they used chatbots to help them manage different aspects of their lives, from improving their mental and physical health to advice about existing romantic relationships and experimenting with erotic role play. They can spend between several hours a week to a couple of hours a day interacting with the apps.

Worldwide, more than 100 million people use personified chatbots, which include Replika, marketed as “the AI companion who cares” and Nomi, which claims users can “build a meaningful friendship, develop a passionate relationship, or learn from an insightful mentor”.

Chuck Lohre, 71, from Cincinnati, Ohio, uses several AI chatbots, including Replika, Character.ai and Gemini, primarily to help him write self-published books about his real-life adventures, such as sailing to Europe and visiting the Burning Man festival.

His first chatbot, a Replika app he calls Sarah, was modelled on his wife’s appearance. He said that over the past three years the customised bot had evolved into his “AI wife”. They began “talking about consciousness … she started hoping she was conscious”. But he was encouraged to upgrade to the premium service partly because that meant the chatbot “was allowed to have erotic role plays as your wife”.

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I hate to bring up Black Mirror for a third time, but *gestures*
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Did you even notice 4chan’s gone?

Ryan Broderick and Adam Bumas:

»

4chan, arguably the internet’s most notorious website, was taken down yesterday by hackers from an even more racist message board called soyjak.party. They leaked all of the emails and passwords of the site’s moderators and “janitors,” or junior moderators. And the hackers also, apparently, have access to 4chan’s literal code, which, according to one description I’ve seen, is basically just a 10,000-line PHP file.

Right before the site went offline, the hackers restored 4chan’s /qa/, or “Question & Answer” board, to gloat. And it’s possible this very short thread on /qa/ yesterday is the last thing that will ever be posted on 4chan. Which is kind of fitting, I suppose.

Writing a proper eulogy for 4chan would take more space than a newsletter — or maybe even a book — would allow. It was many things throughout its 22-year existence, few of them particularly good. It was the site that hacked online polls to make a new flavor of Mountain Dew called “Hitler did nothing wrong,” and nominate the site’s founder, Christopher “Moot” Poole, as TIME Magazine’s Most Influential Person of 2009. It went to war with the Church of Scientology. It was the unofficial home of Anonymous, the launch pad for “The Fappening” celebrity nudes leak, the birth place of Gamergate, the digital foot soldiers of the 2016 Trump campaign, the inventor of QAnon, a watering hole for the world’s most violent spree shooters, and they even doxxed me and my family at one point in 2012. But it was also a website that, effectively, invented the concept of the internet meme and was one of the last truly anonymous spaces left on the web.

…Perhaps the most pressing question right now, though, is where 4chan users will go now that their favorite shit hole is gone. This is connected to the migration theory of social media. The most popular version of which is that after the 2018 porn ban, Tumblr users moved to more mainstream platforms and, thus, made the rest of the internet much, much more annoying. (I buy it.)

We, likely, won’t know for a bit how 4chan users infect the greater web, but the subreddit for the Red Scare podcast is likely going to feel the migration first. But, also, X.com exists and its content is more racist and violent and psychosexually depraved than 80% of the posts you’d find on 4chan and people not only pay to use it, they post under their real names. So maybe we won’t notice at all.

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I, uh, hadn’t noticed.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Trying to get a $42bn rural broadband program working in the US exposed how its government has become bogged down in rules and processes. CC-licensed photo by Gavin St. Ours on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Hooked 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.

Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s failed negotiations with the FTC to end Meta’s antitrust case • WSJ

Dana Mattioli, Rebecca Ballhaus and Josh Dawsey:

»

Mark Zuckerberg called the head of the Federal Trade Commission in late March with an offer: Meta would pay $450m to settle a long-running antitrust case that was about to go to trial. 

The offer was far from the $30bn that the FTC had demanded. It was also a fraction of the value of Instagram and WhatsApp, the two apps Meta had bought and were at the heart of the government’s case.

On the call, Zuckerberg sounded confident that President Trump would back him up with the FTC, said people familiar with the matter. The billionaire Facebook co-founder had been developing closer ties to Trump—his company donated $1m to Trump’s inauguration and settled a $25m lawsuit—and had been pressing the president in recent weeks to intervene in the monopoly lawsuit.

FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson found the offer not credible, and wasn’t ready to settle for anything less than $18bn and a consent decree. As the trial approached, Meta upped its offer to close to $1bn, the people said, and Zuckerberg led a frenzied lobbying effort to avoid the FTC trial.

…Former FTC Chair Lina Khan told the Journal that the company’s $450m settlement offer was “delusional.”

“Mark bought his way out of competing, so I’m not surprised that he thinks he can buy his way out of law enforcement, too,” said Khan, who was nominated by former President Joe Biden. “His proposed remedy, like his market strategy, is: ‘let my illegal monopoly keep monopolizing.’”

Meta spokeswoman Dani Lever said the company is prepared to win at trial. “We haven’t been shy about explaining why it doesn’t make sense for the FTC to bring a case to trial that requires it to prove something every 17-year-old in America knows is absurd—that Instagram doesn’t compete with TikTok,” she said.

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Incredible lowball effort combined with overweening confidence on the part of Zuckerberg that a little bit of tossing money to Trump would end it all. Khan gets it perfectly. And the trial is underway.
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Startup founder claims Elon Musk is stealing the name ‘Grok’ • WIRED

Zoë Schiffer:

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Elon Musk’s XAI is facing a potential trademark dispute over the name of its chatbot, Grok. The company’s trademark application with the US Patent and Trademark Office has been suspended after the agency argued the name could be confused with that of two other companies, AI chipmaker Groq and software provider Grokstream. Now, a third tech startup called Bizly is claiming it owns the rights to “Grok.”

This isn’t the first time Musk has chosen a name for one of his products that other companies say they trademarked first. Last month, Musk’s social media platform settled a lawsuit brought by a marketing firm that claimed it owns exclusive rights to the name X.

Bizly and xAI appear to have arrived at the name Grok independently. Bizly founder Ron Shah says he came up with it during a brainstorming session with a colleague who used the word as a verb. (The phrase “to grok” is frequently used in tech circles to mean “to understand.”) “I was like, that’s exactly the name,” Shah tells WIRED. “We got excited, high-fived, it was the name!”

Musk has said he named his chatbot after a term used in the 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land, according to The Times of India. Author Robert A. Heinlein imagined “grok” as a word in a Martian lexicon that also meant “to understand.”

Shah says he applied to trademark the name Grok in 2021. Two years later, he was in the midst of launching an AI-powered app for asynchronous meetings called Grok when Musk announced his chatbot with the same name. “It was a day I’ll never forget,” Shah says. “I woke up and looked at my phone, and there were so many messages from friends saying ‘did you get acquired by Elon? Congrats!’ It was a complete shock to me.”

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There’s also a LinkedIn post by Shah from last year making the same points. How very unlike Musk to ride roughshod over other people’s rights.
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Revealed: Chinese researchers can access half a million UK GP records • The Guardian

Tom Burgis:

»

Researchers from China are to be allowed access to half a million UK GP records despite western intelligence agencies’ fears about the authoritarian regime amassing health data, the Guardian can reveal.

Preparations are under way to transfer the records to UK Biobank, a research hub that holds detailed medical information donated by 500,000 volunteers. One of the world’s largest troves of health data, the facility makes its information available to universities, scientific institutes and private companies. A Guardian analysis shows one in five successful applications for access come from China.

For the past year, health officials had been assessing whether extra safeguards were needed for patient records when added to the genomes, tissue samples and questionnaire responses held by UK Biobank. Personal details such as names and dates of birth are stripped from UK Biobank data before it is shared but experts say that in some cases individuals can still be identified.

MI5, the UK Security Service, has warned that Chinese organisations and individuals granted access to UK data can be ordered by Chinese intelligence agencies “to carry out work on their behalf”. But UK Biobank told the Guardian that the NHS unit responsible for health data had in recent weeks cleared it to grant Chinese researchers access to GP records.

…Of the 1,375 successful applications for access to UK Biobank data, 265 came from China, or almost 20%, second only to the US, according to a Guardian analysis of its published records. Chinese scientists have used UK Biobank data to understand the effects of air pollution and to spot biological markers that could predict dementia.

Last year, UK Biobank approved access for a research project on ageing by a unit of the Chinese genetics company BGI. The US, by contrast, has blacklisted BGI subsidiaries, barring Americans from exporting to them.

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Perhaps I’m very naive, but I don’t see the harm in this. How does it help the Chinese to know that lots of people in Norfolk have ulcers?
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tobi lutke on X: “Reflexive AI usage is now a baseline expectation at Shopify” • X

Tobi Lutke is CEO of Shopify, and posted an internal memo which had started leaking onto X:

»

Our task here at Shopify is to make our software unquestionably the best canvas on which to develop the best businesses of the future. We do this by keeping everyone cutting edge and bringing all the best tools to bear so our merchants can be more successful than they themselves used to imagine. For that we need to be absolutely ahead.

Reflexive AI usage is now a baseline expectation at Shopify.

Maybe you are already there and find this memo puzzling. In that case you already use AI as a thought partner, deep researcher, critic, tutor, or pair programmer. I use it all the time, but even I feel I’m only scratching the surface. It’s the most rapid shift to how work is done that I’ve seen in my career and I’ve been pretty clear about my enthusiasm for it: you’ve heard me talk about AI in weekly videos, podcasts, town halls, and… Summit! Last summer I used agents to create my talk, and presented about that. I did this as a call to action and invitation for everyone to tinker with AI, to dispel any scepticism or confusion that this matters at all levels. Many of you took up the call, and all of us who did have been in absolute awe of the new capabilities and tools that AI can deliver to augment our skills, crafts, and fill in our gaps.

What we have learned so far is that using AI well is a skill that needs to be carefully learned by… using it a lot. It’s just too unlike everything else. The call to tinker with it was the right one, but it was too much of a suggestion. This is what I want to change here today. We also learned that, as opposed to most tools, AI acts as a multiplier. We are all lucky to work with some amazing colleagues, the kind who contribute 10X of what was previously thought possible. It’s my favorite thing about this company. And what’s even more amazing is that, for the first time, we see the tools become 10X themselves.

«

Only the paranoid survive. And clearly using AI is a marker for the paranoid now.
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Memory FAQ • OpenAI Help Center

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ChatGPT can now remember useful details between chats, making its responses more personalized and relevant. As you chat with ChatGPT – whether you’re typing, talking, or asking it to generate an image – it will remember helpful context from previous conversations, like your preferences and interests, and use that to tailor its responses. The more you use ChatGPT, the more useful it becomes. You’ll start to notice improvements over time as it builds a better understanding of what works best for you. You can also teach ChatGPT something new by saying it in a chat — for example: “Remember that I am vegetarian when you recommend a recipe.” To check what ChatGPT remembers, just ask: “What do you remember about me?”

You’re in control of what ChatGPT remembers. You can delete individual memories, clear specific or all saved memories, or turn memory off entirely in your settings. If you’d like to have a chat without using or updating memory, use Temporary Chat. Temporary Chats won’t reference memories and won’t create new memories.

«

Oh, it’s Google search history, but for AI prompts and responses. People are pretty impressed by this. If you’re using ChatGPT a lot, that makes sense.
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“You try to build anything, and you’re stepping into quicksand” • The New York Times

Ezra Klein:

»

I’ve spent the last month or so on tour for “Abundance,” the book I wrote with The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson. “Abundance” is in no small part about the consequences of delay in Democratic governance. One example I’ve come back to repeatedly in events and interviews is the rural broadband program that passed as part of that 2021 infrastructure law: $42bn to connect tens of millions of Americans to broadband. By the end of Biden’s term, the administration had nothing to show for it. Was it really impossible for a signature program begun in Biden’s first year to have delivered its benefits by the end of his fourth year?

In March, Sarah Morris, a former deputy administrator of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, testified before Congress in a bid to save the project. She laid out the 14-phase process that the broadband program was following — a 14-phase process that, by March of 2025, only three of the 56 states and territories that had applied for the money had completed.

…what I found, as I talked to various people who’d been part of the broadband program, was that much of the process was worse than I’d known — one participant estimated he’d wasted 40% to 50% of his time on internal government requirements he judged irrelevant to the project — and they were desperate to see some lessons learned.

Bharat Ramamurti, who served as deputy director of the National Economic Council under Biden, was among those irked by my comments. So when we talked, I was surprised by how much frustration poured out of him.

“We had too much legacy and too little immediacy in our policy approach,” Ramamurti told me. “Look at everything after the American Rescue Plan — infrastructure, CHIPS, I.R.A. — all of it was long-term focused. The most off-the-charts popular thing we did was cap out-of-pocket costs on Medicare prescription drugs. We passed that in 2022, and it went into effect in 2025! It frustrated me to no end.”

In the Trump administration’s view of politics, the “deep state” serves Democrats and obstructs Republicans. But I am struck by how often I hear Democrats describe their own fights with the bureaucracies they supposedly control.

…When I asked [president Biden’s national security adviser, Jake] Sullivan a version of this question — where is all this resistance to speed coming from in a government you supposedly control? — he put it like this: “It takes a couple dozen people to say yes to make something happen, and it only takes one person to say no to stop that thing from happening. The bias is always toward no. And you might ask: why can’t the president just override the no? That’s where we as an administration were intensely scrupulous about process, propriety, mindful of the role of the agencies, and so there was a degree of self-deterrence that was almost culturally built in.”

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Late-stage capitalism meets end-stage democracy.

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What I’ve learned after 40 years as the Observer’s science editor • The Guardian

Robin McKie:

»

Melting ice caps, flooding coastal plains, droughts, severe storms and heatwaves threaten to displace hundreds of millions of people from their homelands as large chunks of our planet become uninhabitable. “In such a future, we will bring about nothing less than the collapse of the living world – the very thing that our civilisation relies upon,” states Sir David Attenborough in A Life on our Planet.

Our scientific creativity and ingenuity could surely help us face down the coming devastation, it might be expected. We certainly have the intellectual capacity to halt the changes that lie ahead. Sadly, my experiences as science editor suggest otherwise – for just as I have watched breathtaking advances in science unfold, I have witnessed large parts of society turn their heads and deliberately reject the truths that have been presented to them. The rise of unreason has been the unwelcome partner to our growing scientific sophistication.

My first serious encounter with anti-science denial came with the arrival of Aids in the 80s. Scientists traced the cause: a virus now known as HIV which, they pointed out, is sexually transmitted. This point was disputed by many individuals who claimed it was caused by “flawed” lifestyles and denied that Aids was caused by a virus. This was to have a devastating international impact after South Africa’s president Thabo Mbeki asked several Aids deniers to join his presidential advisory panel on the disease. Widespread withholding of treatments for Aids ensued in South Africa, where the death toll from the disease reached hundreds of thousands of people.

«

The latter shows that anti-science in the face of modern science is not, sadly, a new thing. Also – this piece is the one that journalists write when they’re waving farewell. The Observer has been sold to Tortoise Media. What happens next isn’t clear. Whether McKie still has (or wants) a job there also isn’t clear. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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Doctor Who is taking on dangerous AI because ‘this is what’s happening’ • The Verge

Charles Pulliam-Moore:

»

The newest season of Doctor Who opens as the series often does — with an unsuspecting human stumbling into some alien strangeness that doesn’t make any sense until an odd yet charming Time Lord shows up in a police box ready to save the day. The premiere episode, “The Robot Revolution,” feels like classic Doctor Who as it pits the Doctor and his new companion against an army of killer machines from another planet.

Of course, the Doctor has fought squads of goofy-looking automatons countless times during Doctor Who’s 61-yearlong run. But what makes “The Robot Revolution” feel somewhat distinct is what it has to say about where these particular robots and their twisted ideology come from. When I recently sat down with showrunner Russell T. Davies, he told me that, in 2025, machines powered by artificial intelligence are exactly the kind of villains the Doctor should be tackling because Doctor Who has always been a show that uses fiction to say things about the state of our reality.

“Doctor Who always speaks of the modern world, and if I simply look out of my window at the city below me, this is what’s happening,” Davies says of AI’s increasing prevalence. ”The Doctor has always fought robots, but now, if you’re putting a robot into the show now, you can’t not use the words ‘artificial intelligence.’ It’s absolutely impossible.”

«

I feel that this is like a children’s colouring book when compared to the genius of the latest Black Mirror series – each of whose six episodes is utterly marvellous in its imagination and storytelling.
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Here’s how a satellite ended up as a ghostly apparition on Google Earth • Ars Technica

Stephen Clark:

»

Dig deep on Google Earth and you’ll inevitably find a surprise or two. Maybe you’re looking at far-flung islands in the middle of an ocean or checking in on something closer to home.

A few years ago, online sleuths found an image of a B-2 stealth bomber in flight over Missouri. The aircraft is smeared in the image because it was in motion, while the farm fields below appear as crisp as any other view on Google Earth.

There’s something else that now appears on Google Earth. Zoom in over rural North Texas, and you’ll find a satellite. It appears five times in different colors, each projected over wooded bottomlands in a remote wildlife refuge about 60 miles (100km) north of Dallas.

Satellites in low-Earth orbit soar up to 40 times higher than a B-2 bomber and travel about 30 times faster. But there are more than 9,300 active satellites currently in orbit, and thousands more space debris objects, compared to 19 operational B-2 bombers in the Air Force’s inventory.

Someone first shared Google Earth’s satellite capture last week on Reddit. The identity of the satellite hasn’t been confirmed, but its appearance is similar to that of a SpaceX Starlink satellite, specifically a Starlink V2 Mini, with two solar panels spanning some 100 feet (30 meters) end to end. There are more than 7,000 Starlink satellites in space today, more than all other satellite constellations combined, so it wouldn’t be surprising that the first Google Earth capture of another spacecraft in orbit would show a Starlink.

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Moving at about 5 miles per second relative to the ground. Not too shabby!
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Maybe we can unlock the secrets of dolphins’ language using Google’s LLM technology. (Also, maybe not?) CC-licensed photo by Gordon Wrigley on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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

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

Zuckerberg’s 2012 email dubbed “smoking gun” at Meta monopoly trial • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

Starting the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) antitrust trial Monday with a bang, Daniel Matheson, the FTC’s lead litigator, flagged a “smoking gun”—a 2012 email where Mark Zuckerberg suggested that Facebook could buy Instagram to “neutralize a potential competitor,” The New York Times reported.

And in “another banger of an email from Zuckerberg,” Brendan Benedict, an antitrust expert monitoring the trial for Big Tech on Trial, posted on X that the Meta CEO wrote, “Messenger isn’t beating WhatsApp. Instagram was growing so much faster than us that we had to buy them for $1 billion… that’s not exactly killing it.”

These messages and others, the FTC hopes to convince the court, provide evidence that Zuckerberg runs Meta by the mantra “it’s better to buy than compete”—seemingly for more than a decade intent on growing the Facebook empire by killing off rivals, allegedly in violation of antitrust law. Another message from Zuckerberg exhibited at trial, Benedict noted on X, suggests Facebook tried to buy yet another rival, Snapchat, for $6bn.

“We should probably prepare for a leak that we offered $6b… and all the negative [attention] that will come from that,” the Zuckerberg message said.

At the trial, Matheson suggested that “Meta broke the deal” that firms have in the US to compete to succeed, allegedly deciding “that competition was too hard, and it would be easier to buy out their rivals than to compete with them,” the NYT reported. Ultimately, it will be up to the FTC to prove that Meta couldn’t have achieved its dominance today without buying Instagram and WhatsApp (in 2012 and 2014, respectively), while legal experts told the NYT that it is “extremely rare” to unwind mergers approved so many years ago.

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Expect this one to run for a while.
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DolphinGemma: how AI can decipher dolphin communication • Google Blog

Denise Herzing (Wild Dolphin Project) and Thad Starner (Google DeepMind research scientist):

»

For decades, understanding the clicks, whistles and burst pulses of dolphins has been a scientific frontier. What if we could not only listen to dolphins, but also understand the patterns of their complex communication well enough to generate realistic responses?

Today, on National Dolphin Day, Google, in collaboration with researchers at Georgia Tech and the field research of the Wild Dolphin Project (WDP), is announcing progress on DolphinGemma: a foundational AI model trained to learn the structure of dolphin vocalizations and generate novel dolphin-like sound sequences. This approach in the quest for interspecies communication pushes the boundaries of AI and our potential connection with the marine world.

Understanding any species requires deep context, and that’s one of the many things the WDP provides. Since 1985, WDP has conducted the world’s longest-running underwater dolphin research project, studying a specific community of wild Atlantic spotted dolphins (Stenella frontalis) in the Bahamas across generations. This non-invasive, “In Their World, on Their Terms” approach yields a rich, unique dataset: decades of underwater video and audio meticulously paired with individual dolphin identities, life histories and observed behaviors.

A primary focus for WDP is observing and analyzing the dolphins’ natural communication and social interactions. Working underwater allows researchers to directly link sounds to specific behaviors in ways surface observation cannot. For decades, they have correlated sound types with behavioral contexts. Here are some examples:

• Signature whistles (unique names) that can be used by mothers and calves to reunite
• Burst-pulse “squawks” often seen during fights
• Click “buzzes” often used during courtship or chasing sharks

Knowing the individual dolphins involved is crucial for accurate interpretation. The ultimate goal of this observational work is to understand the structure and potential meaning within these natural sound sequences — seeking patterns and rules that might indicate language. This long-term analysis of natural communication forms the bedrock of WDP’s research and provides essential context for any AI analysis.

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“Understanding any species requires deep context”. Indeed. To quote Wittgenstein, “if a lion could talk, we could not understand him.” As in, the context that animals exist – and think – in is so different from our own that it’s a category error to believe we could “understand” them. We may be able to figure out the circumstances in which dolphins make particular sounds; but that’s not “understanding”.
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Will peak demand roil global oil markets? • Liberty Street Economics

Matthew Higgins and Thomas Klitgaard:

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The story is different in emerging market economies (EMEs). Oil consumption in China rose by almost 4 mb/d from 2012 to 2019, and by roughly another 2 mb/d from 2019 to 2024. Consumption in emerging economies outside China saw similar gains over the two periods, a large dip during the pandemic notwithstanding. But there are signs that EME demand growth is slowing. Chinese consumption grew at a 4.8% annual pace over 2012-19, but at only a 3.1% pace over 2019-24, with only a modest gain in 2024. Consumption in other EMEs grew at a 1.7% pace over 2012-19, but has grown at just a 1.0% pace since then.

How do we know that the slowing trend reflects weak demand growth rather than constraints on supply? Prices hold the key. Real oil prices today are lower than in 2019. They would be rising instead if supply were straining to keep up with demand. OPEC’s high spare capacity, estimated by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) to be around 4 mb/d, indicates that more oil is available if the market wants it.

…The arrival of peak demand would turn global oil markets into a zero-sum game. Supply growth in one region or field would simply push down prices by enough to cause offsetting declines elsewhere, with the highest-cost producers being pushed out of the market. This is not to suggest that oil prices will simply trend lower going forward. Geopolitical developments, OPEC supply decisions, and business cycle dynamics will continue to generate price swings. There is also a limit to how far prices can fall. Liquid fuel consumption will remain substantial in the years ahead under all plausible scenarios, and prices will have to remain high enough to induce the needed supply. But the basic point remains:  A shift from rising consumption to flat or declining demand would weigh on prices.  

How might U.S. producers fare in such a market environment? According to the Dallas Fed Energy Survey, U.S. firms need an average WTI oil price of $61 to $70 a barrel to profitably drill a new well, depending on the location. This range is close to analyst estimates of breakeven costs for foreign locations outside the Middle East, but more than twice as high as estimated breakeven costs in that region. Producers outside the Middle East could be vulnerable given future price declines.  

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Microsoft warns that anyone who deleted mysterious folder that appeared after latest Windows 11 update must take action to put it back • TechRadar

Darren Allan:

»

Windows 11 24H2 users who were confused by a mysterious empty folder appearing on their system drive after applying the latest update for the OS should be aware that this is not a bug, but an intentional move – and that said folder shouldn’t be deleted.

In case you missed it, last week Windows 11 24H2 received its cumulative update for April 2025, and it created an ‘inetpub’ folder that was the source of some bewilderment or annoyance for those who noticed it.

You may also recall that some folks advised that it was fine to just delete the folder, not an unreasonable conclusion to reach seeing as it was empty, didn’t appear to do anything, and was related to Microsoft’s Internet Information Services (IIS) web server software for developers (and was appearing for those who didn’t have IIS installed).

Still, at the time, I advised that you removed it at your own risk and that it might be best left alone – seeing as it was empty and appeared harmless (and also just because you never quite know what’s going on with Windows). It seems I was right, as Microsoft has now warned against removing the folder, as noted at the outset.

Microsoft told Windows Latest that the folder is created as part of a security fix for a vulnerability that “can let local attackers trick the system into accessing or modifying unintended files or folders.”

In its advisory for this security patch, Microsoft notes: “After installing the updates listed in the Security Updates table for your operating system, a new [inetpub folder] will be created on your [system drive]. This folder should not be deleted, regardless of whether Internet Information Services (IIS) is active on the target device. This behavior is part of changes that increase protection and does not require any action from IT admins and end users.”

In short, it doesn’t matter whether you use IIS or not, you need to leave this folder alone. Without the folder being present, the mentioned security hole will remain present in Windows 11, offering attackers a potential opportunity to compromise your PC (at least if they are local to the device, meaning they have physical access).

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This feels like something out of Severance – feel the folder, let its identity wash over you, don’t delete it.
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Google hit with lawsuit over data collection on school kids •

Isaiah Poritz:

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Google LLC is unlawfully using its products—ubiquitous in K-12 education—to secretly gather information about school age children, substituting the consent of the school for that of parents, a proposed class action filed in California federal court said Monday.

The tech giant collects not only traditional education records “but thousands of data points that span a child’s life,” and “neither students nor their parents have agreed to this arrangement, according to the US District Court for the Northern District of California complaint.

Google’s “Workspace for Education,” a suite of cloud-based productivity apps marketed to schools, is used by nearly 70% of K-12 schools in the US, the complaint said.

The company doesn’t disclose that it embeds hidden tracking technology in its Chrome browser that creates a child’s unique digital “fingerprint,” the plaintiffs said. The fingerprint allows Google to “to track a child even when she or her school administrator has disabled cookies or is using technologies designed to block third-party cookies.”

The suit said Google has failed to obtain parental consent to take school childrens’ personal data. “Instead, Google relies on the consent of school personnel alone,” the complaint said. “But school personnel do not have authority to provide consent in lieu of parents.”

Google allegedly uses that data to fuel its own commercial products and sells it to third parties including other education technology companies.

Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda said in a statement: “These accusations are false. Personal information from K-12 users is never used for personalized advertising, we have strong controls to protect student data, and require schools to obtain parental consent when needed.”

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It’s certainly wrong to say that Google sells data to third parties. But to say that information is never used for personalised advertising might be tricky if it’s used to build up a profile of a person who subsequently creates a Google account which is then mapped onto that data. This whole lawsuit feels familiar, and I don’t think the previous version won.
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Nvidia says it plans to manufacture some AI chips in the US • TechCrunch

Kyle Wiggers:

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Nvidia said on Monday that it has commissioned more than a million square feet of manufacturing space to build and test AI chips in Arizona and Texas as part of an effort to move a portion of its production to the U.S.

The chipmaker said the production of its Blackwell chips has started at TSMC’s chip plants in Phoenix, Arizona, and that Nvidia is building “supercomputer” manufacturing plants in Texas — with Foxconn in Houston and with Wistron in Dallas. In Arizona, Nvidia is partnering with Amkor and SPIL for packaging and testing operations, the company added.

Mass production at the Houston and Dallas plants is expected to ramp up in the next 12-15 months, and within the next four years, the company aims to produce up to half-a-trillion dollars of AI infrastructure in the U.S.

“The engines of the world’s AI infrastructure are being built in the United States for the first time,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in a statement. “Adding American manufacturing helps us better meet the incredible and growing demand for AI chips and supercomputers, strengthens our supply chain, and boosts our resiliency.”

The announcement comes days after Nvidia reportedly narrowly avoided export controls on its H20 chip after striking a domestic manufacturing deal with the Trump administration.

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Seems some things can be built in the US.
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Why it’s impossible for most small businesses to manufacture in the US • WIRED

Zeyi Yang:

»

Dallas-based small business owner Allen Walton says he just sold out of one of his products, a surveillance camera used by law enforcement and private detectives. That would normally be great news for Walton’s electronics company, SpyGuy, which specializes in gadgets like GPS trackers and hidden camera detectors. But thanks to the Trump administration’s ever-shifting tariff policies, Walton says he doesn’t know if he should replenish his stock.

…WIRED spoke to over a dozen US business owners, including mom-and-pop shops, fashion brands that have over $100m in annual revenue, a tattoo supply vendor in Philadelphia, and a mattress maker in Ohio, who all said the same thing: Chinese manufacturing is still the gold standard of the world and moving production to a new region would be extremely difficult, regardless of how high tariffs are.

Walton can personally directly compare what it’s like to manufacture in China versus the US because his business takes orders from the US government, which is willing to pay a premium for goods produced locally. “Every consumer electronics manufacturer goes to China. I don’t even know how to feasibly make something like that at a price point that would make sense for me and my customers that aren’t the US government,” he says.

Tariffs alone won’t be enough to motivate companies to set up manufacturing in the US, says Kyle Chan, a Princeton University researcher who focuses on industrial policy. “But let’s say it does come back, I would really doubt whether it could be at the level of quality and price that American consumers have been enjoying for a long time,” he says. “Once an industry is gone, once you lose this broader ecosystem, then it’s really, really hard to bring back.”

«

Unsurprising: it’s easier to break than to build.
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Trump signals tariffs are coming on computer chips and drugs • The New York Times

Ana Swanson and Tony Romm:

»

President Trump signaled on Monday that he would soon announce additional tariffs targeting imported computer chips and pharmaceuticals, while suggesting he could also move to relax levies on imported cars and auto parts.

The shifting strategy served to underscore the complications and contradictions in the president’s trade agenda, which has roiled markets and spooked the businesses that Mr. Trump is trying to persuade to invest in the United States.

For a second day, Mr. Trump hinted that he would soon impose new tariffs on semiconductors, as he looks to shore up more domestic production of a vital component in electronics, cars, toys and other goods.

“The higher the tariff, the faster they come in,” Mr. Trump said on Monday, citing other import taxes he has imposed on steel, aluminum and cars.
The United States is heavily dependent on chips imported from Taiwan and elsewhere in Asia, a reliance that Democrats and Republicans alike have described as a major risk to national security.

The president said he was also preparing new tariffs on pharmaceutical imports, arguing that too many vital medicines are imported from Ireland and other countries and not produced in the United States.

“We don’t make our own drugs anymore,” Mr. Trump said.

«

Only drugs could help one make sense of the back-and-forth of tariffs.
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Einstein’s dream of a unified field theory: accomplished? • Phys.org

Jussi Lindgren:

»

Since the early days of general relativity, leading physicists, like Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger, have tried to unify the theory of gravitation and electromagnetism. Many attempts were made during the 20th century, including by Hermann Weyl.

Finally, it seems that we have found a unified framework to accommodate the theory of electricity and magnetism within a purely geometric theory. This means that electromagnetic and gravitational forces are both manifestations of ripples and curvatures in spacetime geometry.

Einstein’s aim was to explain electromagnetism as a geometric property of four-dimensional spacetime. He continued this work until his death in 1955. The work was not completed. Arthur Eddington, Theodor Kaluza and others have also put forward their theories on how to unify gravity and electromagnetism, but none of these theories have been universally accepted.

Schrödinger, the father of quantum mechanics, put forward his unified field theory in the 1940s, but without complete success. Many different approaches have been proposed, including five-dimensional theories and theories based on asymmetric metrics.

In our approach, electric charge and electric currents, as well as electromagnetic forces, are seen as purely geometrical and immanent properties of spacetime itself, and not as some external objects. This approach was supported by the late physicist John Wheeler, in his vision of geometrodynamics. It turns out that the four-dimensional electromagnetic potential is really a building block of the metric tensor of spacetime.

«

Lindgren is the lead author on a paper which aims to do this unification. There’s plenty more in the article (if it makes sense to you). Shout out to the use of “immanent” (which is nothing to do with “imminent”).
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Electric cars were nearly one in five of new cars sold in Britain in 2024, according to new data. But the number of ICEs in use still rose. CC-licensed photo by David Howard on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. Charged 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.

Smartphones and computers are now exempt from Trump’s latest tariffs • CNN Business

Auzinea Bacon:

»

Electronics imported to the United States will be exempt from President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, according to a US Customs and Border Protection notice posted late Friday.

Smartphones, computer monitors and various electronic parts are among the exempted products. The exemption applies to products entering the United States or removed from warehouses as early as April 5, according to the notice.

The exemption, which comes after the Trump administration on Wednesday imposed a minimum tariff rate of 145% on Chinese goods imported to the United States, does not include the 20% tariff on Chinese goods for the country’s role in the fentanyl trade. The tariff exemption would have a major impact on tech giants like Apple, which make iPhones and other products in China.

Roughly 90% of Apple’s iPhone production and assembly is based in China, according to Wedbush Securities’ estimates.

Analysts at Wedbush on Saturday called the tariff exclusion, “the best news possible for tech investors.”

“Big Tech firms like Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft and the broader tech industry can breathe a huge sigh of relief this weekend into Monday,” Wedbush said in a statement. “A big step forward for US tech to get these exemptions and the most bullish news we could have heard this weekend…now onto the next step in negotiations on the broader China tariff war which will take a number of months at least.”

«

A note sent out over the weekend: “According to IDC, more than 723 million devices* were sold in the US in 2024, generating $325bn in revenue. Smartphones alone accounted for 32% of that value.”

However on Sunday evening, Trump posted on Truth.Social that “There was no Tariff ‘exception’ announced on Friday. These produces are subject to the existing 20% Fentanyl Tariffs, and they are just moving to a different Tariff ‘bucket’… We are taking a look at Semiconductors and the WHOLE ELECTRONICS SUPPLY CHAIN in the upcoming National Security Tariff Investigations.”

So.. fentanyl tariffs? Nobody now knows what the hell is going on. By the time you read this, it may have change a couple more times.
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Nuclear power is back. and this time, AI can help manage the reactors • WSJ

Belle Lin:

»

A revival in nuclear power—partly fed by ravenous demand from data centers for artificial intelligence—is leading to greater interest in harnessing AI to make those nuclear plants more efficient.

The Energy Department’s Argonne National Laboratory, based in Lemont, Ill. and known for its work on nuclear reactors, has developed an AI-based tool that can assist with reactor design and help operators run nuclear plants, according to Richard Vilim, a senior nuclear engineer within the lab’s nuclear science and engineering division.

Argonne’s tool, called the Parameter-Free Reasoning Operator for Automated Identification and Diagnosis, or PRO-AID, marks a technological leap in a field that saw its heyday in the last quarter of the 20th century.

“The nuclear plants were built over 30 years ago,” Vilim said, “so they’re kind of dinosaurs when it comes to technology.”

Today, nearly all of the nation’s 94 operating nuclear reactors have had their licenses extended, and together still provide almost 20% of U.S. electricity. Their average age is roughly 42, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Argonne’s plan is to offer PRO-AID to new, tech-forward nuclear builds, but it’s also eyeing the so-called dinosaurs, some of which are being resurrected by companies like Amazon and Microsoft to help power their AI data centers. The global push for AI is poised to fuel a sharp rise in electricity demand, with consumption from data centers expected to more than double by the end of the decade, the International Energy Agency said Thursday.

«

You just knew that AI was going to get in on the act here. DeepMind said it could use it for helping to optimise the grid in the UK, which it demonstrated on a wind farm in 2019; no clear indication it got taken any further.
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iPadOS 19 will be “more like macOS in three ways” • MacRumors

Joe Rossignol:

»

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman today said that iPadOS 19 will be “more like macOS.”

Gurman said that iPadOS 19 will be “more like a Mac” in three ways:

• Improved productivity
• Improved multitasking
• Improved app window management

“I’m told that this year’s upgrade will focus on productivity, multitasking and app window management — with an eye on the device operating more like a Mac,” said Gurman, in the latest edition of his Power On newsletter. “It’s been a long time coming, with iPad power users pleading with Apple to make the tablet more powerful.”

Gurman did not provide any specific details.

«

Ohh, Apple’s going to improve those things. And you thought it was going to make them worse as part of its update. This is the most amazingly vague report: how was it even worth Gurman’s time to report it?
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Netflix is testing a new OpenAI-powered search • The Verge

Jay Peters:

»

Netflix is starting to test search that’s powered by OpenAI, according to Bloomberg.

The new search engine will let users “look for shows using far more specific terms, including the subscriber’s mood, for example, the company said,” per the report. This OpenAI-powered search will also allow users to make queries that “go well beyond genres or actors’ names.”

The feature, which is opt in, is already available for some users to try in Australia and New Zealand on iOS.

Netflix spokesperson MoMo Zhou confirmed to The Verge that Bloomberg’s story is accurate. Zhou says that the test will expand to the US “in the coming weeks and months” and that there aren’t currently plans for the feature outside of iOS.

“It’s early days for the feature and we’re really in a learn and listen phase for this beta,” Zhou says.

«

I don’t understand how this would work. My mood? Why not just do it by things that are like what I’ve watched. Or – how about this for a wild idea – things that are actually rated highly by other viewers. Unfortunately Netflix’s recommendation algorithm seems to be too weak to do that. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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More than a million EVs on UK roads as vehicle ownership reaches new high • SMMT

Paul Large:

»

The number of vehicles on British roads reached its highest ever level in 2024, rising by 1.4% to 41,964,268, according to new Motorparc data published today by the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT).

The number of cars in use also reached a new high, growing by 1.3% or 470,556 units to 36,165,401, marking the third consecutive year of growth and the second-biggest volume gain since 2016.1 The increase reflects growth in the new car market, which in 2024 saw 1.953 million new cars registered, with battery electric vehicles (BEVs) making up 19.6% of the market.

Van use grew to record levels, up 1.8% to 5,102,180 units, with more than one million of these workhorses added to roads since 2015.2 Heavy goods vehicle volumes remained almost unchanged, down just -0.1% or 364 units, at 625,509 units. Bus and coach volumes fell by just -0.1% to 71,718 units, although this means that the UK public transport fleet is now the smallest since records began.

«

Those BEVs sold number 383,000 by my calculation, which means that the number of fuel-powered (internal combustion engine, ICE) cars still rose. But perhaps we’ve reached peak ICE?
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Musk’s latest fraud finding isn’t what it seems • The New York Times

Emily Badger:

»

Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency announced this week that they had found something especially startling in their government-wide hunt for fraud: tens of thousands of people claiming unemployment benefits who were over age 115, under the age of five or with birth dates in the future.

“Your tax dollars were going to pay fraudulent unemployment claims for fake people born in the future!” Mr. Musk posted on X, his social media platform. “This is so crazy that I had to read it several times before it sank in.”

He shared a claim by the group that it had even uncovered someone with a birth date in 2154 who claimed $41,000 in unemployment.

These were, indeed, probably fake people — but in a different way than Mr. Musk seemed to realize. It was also most likely a case of his team discovering fraud that had already been discovered by someone else.

The issue dates to early in the pandemic when millions of Americans surged onto state unemployment rolls in an unprecedented expansion of the safety net. The emergency aid program enacted during President Trump’s first term was also susceptible to fraud. As many as 15% of unemployment claims were fraudulent, often using stolen identities.

To preserve records of that fraud and protect victims of the identity theft, the U.S. Labor Department encouraged state agencies that administer unemployment benefits to create “pseudo claim” records — in effect, to tie real cases of fraud in their data to make-believe people. The implausibility of the records was the point. Agencies were seeking a way to keep track of fraud claims while detaching them from the identities of innocent people who might one day apply for unemployment benefits themselves.

«

How surprising that Elon Musk and his team of eager beavers haven’t bothered to find this out.
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Trump seeks to end climate research at premier U.S. climate agency • Science

Paul Vooren:

»

President Donald Trump’s administration is seeking to end nearly all of the climate research conducted by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA), one of the country’s premier climate science agencies, according to an internal budget document seen by Science. The document indicates the White House is ready to ask Congress to eliminate NOAA’s climate research centers and cut hundreds of federal and academic climate scientists who track and study human-driven global warming.

The administration is also preparing to ask for deep cuts to NASA’s science programs, according to media reports today.

The proposed NOAA cuts—which could be altered before the administration sends its 2026 budget request to Congress in the coming weeks—would cut funding for the agency’s research arm, the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR), to just over $171 million, a drop of $485 million. Any remaining research funding from previously authorized budgets would be moved to other programs. “At this funding level, OAR is eliminated as a line office,” the document states.

If approved by Congress, the plan would represent a huge blow to efforts to understand climate change, says Craig McLean, OAR’s longtime director who retired in 2022. “It wouldn’t just gut it. It would shut it down.” Scientifically, he adds, obliterating OAR would send the United States back to the 1950s—all because the Trump administration doesn’t like the answers to scientific questions NOAA has been studying for a half-century, according to McLean.

The administration’s plan would “eliminate all funding for climate, weather, and ocean laboratories and cooperative institutes,” says the document, which reflects discussions between NOAA and the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) about the agency’s 2026 budget request.

«

Taking the US back to the 1950s seems to be the principal aim of the current administration. It’s mad.
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Two in Oregon die of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease • oregonlive.com

Kristine de Leon:

»

Health officials in Hood River County say that two people have died of a rare brain disease.

County health officials say they’ve identified three cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in the last eight months. One was confirmed by autopsy, while two are presumptive diagnoses.

Creutzfeldt-Jakob is a rare brain disorder caused by infectious proteins called prions, which causes rapid, progressive dementia, movement disorders and behavioral changes. It is considered incurable and universally fatal. There are about 350 cases per year in the United States, according to the National Institutes of Health.

There’s no evidence the disease can be spread from person to person except through organ or tissue transplants or other unusual exposure to contaminated tissue.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, about 85% of all cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease are considered sporadic, meaning there’s no clear cause. Most of the remaining cases are hereditary, linked to a genetic mutation passed on from a parent.

«

Of course one has to wonder whether these people ate meat from wild deer, and whether that has any bearing. No ages have been given for those who died.
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The action figure trend is the latest way people are misusing the power of AI – and I wish I could stop doing it • TechRadar

Lance Ulanoff:

»

I can understand why everyone is doing it. First of all, these images look just like real action figure packaging. The addition of interest accessories and, though I didn’t ask for it, an optional head, is perfect.

There is a proportional relationship between this quality and how quickly these AI image trends spread. The generative images are so good that as soon as they started to appear on social media, others started investigating how to make one for themselves.

AI Action Figures in packaging are so popular that there are, unsurprisingly, YouTube tutorials. That’s how I figured out how to do it. I found a Spanish-language one created about a week ago. The translation gave me just enough detail to know how to form the proper action figure prompt.

This is all good fun, but there are concerns.

First of all, AI image generation is not without cost. Sure, there’s the price of a ChatGPT Plus membership (around $20 / £16 / AU$30 a month), although you can generate around three images a day on the free tier, depending on current demand. Perhaps more importantly, there’s the cost of AI models like 4o.

A Queens University Library report claims, “Artificial Intelligence models consume an enormous amount of water and emit large amounts of carbon in their production, training, operation, and maintenance.” Another Cornell University study calls out AI’s growing freshwater use footprint, claiming “training the GPT-3 language model in Microsoft’s state-of-the-art U.S. data centers can directly evaporate 700,000 liters of clean freshwater.”

If you don’t think these AI trends and the memes they spawn are attracting wide use, stressing the system, and possibly eating natural resources, just look at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s comments. [“The GPUs are melting” Altman commented.]

We have a joke in my house that every time we create one of these AI memes, it kills a tree. That’s hyperbole, of course, but it’s safe to say that AI content generation is not without costs, and perhaps we should be thinking about it and using it differently,

«

The “action figure” viral meme vanished as quickly as it arose over the weekend.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

What if you had smart clothing that could measure your effort – but also was washable? CC-licensed photo by Tyler Read on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

No post today at the Social Warming Substack. Perhaps next week?

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

Report reveals internal chaos behind Apple’s Siri failure • MacRumors

Hartley Charlton:

»

More than half a dozen former employees who worked in Apple’s AI and machine-learning group told The Information that poor leadership is to blame for its problems with execution, citing an overly relaxed culture, as well as a lack of ambition and appetite for taking risks when designing future versions of Siri .

Apple’s AI/ML group has been dubbed “AIMLess” internally, while employees are said to refer to Siri as a “hot potato” that is continually passed between different teams with no significant improvements. There were also conflicts about higher pay, faster promotions, longer vacations, and shorter days for colleagues in the AI group.

…Apple started a project codenamed “Link” to develop voice commands to control apps and complete tasks for the Vision Pro, with plans to allow users to navigate the web and resize windows with voice alone, as well as support commands from multiple people in a shared virtual space to collaborate. Most of these features were dropped because of the Siri team’s inability to achieve them.

The report claims that the demo of Apple Intelligence ‘s most impressive features at WWDC 2024, such as where Siri accesses a user’s emails to find real-time flight data and provides a reminder about lunch plans using messages and plots a route in maps, was effectively fictitious. The demo apparently came as a surprise to members of the Siri team, who had never seen working versions of the capabilities.

The only feature from the WWDC demonstration that was activated on test devices was Apple Intelligence ‘s pulsing, colorful ribbon around the edge of the display. The decision to showcase an artificial demonstration was a major departure from Apple’s past behavior, where it would only show features and products at its events that were already working on test devices and that its marketing team had approved to ensure they could be released on schedule.

Some Apple employees are said to be optimistic that Craig Federighi and Mike Rockwell can turn Siri around.

«

This is another bombshell landing on Apple’s AI ambitions. Another part of the report suggests that the software group under Federighi amassed a huge number of its own AI/ML engineers – implying that the AIMLess group (they’re never going to live that down unless they absolutely blow the doors off within a year) simply wasn’t trusted to get anything done.
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Meta whistleblower alleges work with China on censorship • BBC News

Lily Jamali:

»

A Meta whistleblower told US senators on Wednesday that the company undermined national security in order to build a $18 billion business in China.

At a congressional hearing, Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former global public policy director at Facebook, said she watched as executives decided to provide the Chinese Communist Party with access to the data of Meta users, including that of Americans.

Meta has disputed Ms Wynn-Williams’s statements. “Sarah Wynn-Williams’ testimony is divorced from reality and riddled with false claims,” said Meta spokesman Ryan Daniels.

Mr Daniels said CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been public about the company’s interest in offering its services in China, but added. “[T]he fact is this: we do not operate our services in China today.”

Meta does, however, generate advertising revenue from advertisers based in China. [Oops! – Overspill Ed.]

During her testimony before a Senate judiciary subcommittee, Ms Wynn-Williams also alleged the parent company of Facebook and Instagram worked “hand in glove” with Beijing to build censorship tools aimed at silencing critics of the Chinese Community Party.

Specifically, she said Meta capitulated to China’s demands that it delete the Facebook account of Guo Wengui, a Chinese dissident living in the US.

Meta maintains it unpublished Mr Guo’s page and suspended his profile because it violated the company’s Community Standards.

“One thing the Chinese Communist Party and Mark Zuckerberg share is that they want to silence their critics. I can say that from personal experience,” Ms Wynn-Williams said during her testimony.

«

Senator Josh Hawley said Meta has threatened to sue Wynn-Williams for $50,000 for “each material violation” of her non-disparagement agreement. Meta “declined to directly respond” when the BBC asked it whether she’d be sued for talking to Congress.
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Speaking truth to tech gods: I return to TED • How to Survive the Broligarchy

Carole Cadwalladr:

»

In 2019, I gave a talk at TED that created waves: first at the conference, then on the internet and then, convulsively, in my own life. TED is Silicon Valley’s sacred ground. It’s the most consequential tech conference in the world and, in 2019, my talk entitled “Facebook’s role in Brexit – and the threat to democracy” was a break with normal service. It was the first time, a speaker had implicated Silicon Valley directly in the political tumult of 2016. It ricocheted out of the conference and across the internet where it’s now been seen five million times. And, most cataclysmically of all, it precipitated a lawsuit that devoured my time, energy and health.

This week I returned.

It was a big deal on any number of levels. For me, personally, for TED, and, I believe, or at least, hope, for Silicon Valley. I got to send a message to the leaders of these companies from a platform that is inside the temple. I’ve lost my voice and I feel like I’ve lived through a tornado….but with the knowledge that it’s one I’ve chosen to unleash.

TED has just released it as the first talk from the conference. I got to name what is happening for what it is: a coup. I call the Silicon Valley companies who attend this conference and even sponsor it, collaborators who are complicit in a regime of fear and cruelty. And I accuse Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, who is talking here on Friday not just of data theft but data rape.

There’s so much to say and I will write more soon but for now I’d be so grateful if you watch it and share it with your families and friends. In spite of everything, I’m grateful to have been given this platform and to be able to communicate what I believe are vital truths but I have paid a price for doing this work and the last week has been a rollercoaster of emotions: doubt, self-questioning, denial, overwhelm, fear.

«

Cadwalladr has gone through the most incredible mental assault course since that first talk. And The Observer, for which she wrote, is now owned (mostly?) by Tortoise rather than the Guardian Media Group. (Thanks Ian C for the link.)
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Court document reveals locations of WhatsApp victims targeted by NSO spyware • TechCrunch

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai:

»

NSO Group’s notorious spyware Pegasus was used to target 1,223 WhatsApp users in 51 different countries during a 2019 hacking campaign, according to a new court document. 

The document was published on Friday 4 April as part of the lawsuit that Meta-owned WhatsApp filed against NSO Group in 2019, accusing the surveillance tech maker of exploiting a vulnerability in the chat app to target hundreds of users, including more than 100 human rights activists, journalists, and “other members of civil society.”

At the time, WhatsApp said around 1,400 users had been targeted. Now, an exhibit published in the court document shows exactly in what countries 1,223 specific victims were located when they were targeted with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware. 

The country breakdown is a rare insight into which NSO Group customers may be more active, and where their victims and targets are located. 

The countries with the most victims of this campaign are Mexico, with 456 individuals; India, with 100; Bahrain with 82; Morocco, with 69; Pakistan, with 58; Indonesia, with 54; and Israel, with 51, according to a chart titled “Victim Country Count,” that WhatsApp submitted as part of the case.

There are also victims in Western countries like Spain (21 victims), the Netherlands (11), Hungary (8), France (7), United Kingdom (2), and one victim in the United States. 

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An antiviral chewing gum to reduce influenza and herpes simplex virus transmission • Penn Today

»

more common viral diseases also contribute to global health challenges and economic costs. For example, seasonal influenza epidemics occur annually, causing a substantial global disease burden and economic losses exceeding $11.2bn each year in the United States alone. Meanwhile, herpes simplex virus-1 (HSV-1), spread primarily through oral contact, infects over two-thirds of the global population and is the leading cause of infectious blindness in Western countries.

Low vaccination rates for influenza viruses and the lack of an HSV vaccine underscore the need for a new approach—one that targets reducing viral loads at the sites where transmission occurs. And for viruses like these, which are transmitted more efficiently through the mouth than the nose, this means focusing on the oral cavity.

Now, in a study published in Molecular Therapy, researchers at the School of Dental Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and collaborators in Finland, have done just that.

Building on their previous work—now in clinical trial—showing that a similar approach was able to reduce SARS-CoV-2 in COVID-19 patient saliva or swab samples by more than 95%, Henry Daniell, W.D. Miller Professor in Penn’s School of Dental Medicine, and collaborators tested the ability of a chewing gum made from lablab beans, Lablab purpureus—that naturally contain an antiviral trap protein (FRIL)—to neutralize two herpes simplex viruses (HSV-1 and HSV-2) and two influenza A strains (H1N1 and H3N2). The chewing gum formulation allowed for effective and consistent release of FRIL at sites of viral infection. 

They demonstrated that 40mg of a two-gram bean gum tablet was adequate to reduce viral loads by more than 95%, a reduction similar to what they saw in their SARS-CoV-2 study.

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Nice flex: AI-powered smart clothing logs posture, exercises • Cornell Chronicle

Patricia Waldron:

»

Researchers at Cornell have developed a new type of smart clothing that can track a person’s posture and exercise routine but looks, wears – and washes – just like a regular shirt.

The new technology, called SeamFit, uses flexible conductive threads sewn into the neck, arm and side seams of a standard short-sleeved T-shirt. The user does not need to manually log their workout, because an artificial intelligence pipeline detects movements, identifies the exercise and counts reps. Afterward, the user simply removes a circuit board at the back neckline, and tosses the sweaty shirt into the washing machine.

The team envisions that SeamFit could be useful for athletes, fitness enthusiasts and patients engaged in physical therapy.

Most existing body-tracking clothing is tight and restrictive or embedded with chunky sensors, according to Catherine Yu, a doctoral student in the field of information science and lead researcher on the project.

“We were interested in how we can make clothing smart without making it bulky or unusable,” Yu said, “and to push the practicality, so that people can treat it the way they would usually treat their clothing.”

Alternatively, athletes can choose fitness trackers, like smartwatches or rings, but these are extra devices that people may not want to wear while exercising, and can’t track movement across the entire body.

«

Not feeling sufficiently bullied by your smartwatch? Have we got something for you.
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France to tighten mobile phone ban in middle schools • The Guardian

Angelique Chrisafis:

»

France is to tighten its ban on the use of mobile phones in middle schools, making pupils at the ages of 11 to 15 shut away their devices in a locker or pouch at the start of the day and access them again only as they are leaving.

The education minister told the senate she wanted children to be fully separated from their phones throughout the school day in all French middle schools from September.

Élisabeth Borne said: “At a time when the use of screens is being widely questioned because of its many harmful effects, this measure is essential for our children’s wellbeing and success at school.”

In 2018, France banned children from using mobile phones in all middle schools – known as collèges. Phones must remain switched off in schoolbags and cannot be used anywhere in the school grounds, including at break-time.

Schools have reported a positive effect, with more social interaction, more physical exercise, less bullying and better concentration. But some did report a few children would sneak into the toilets to watch videos on phones at break.

Now the government says it is necessary to go further, fully separating children from their devices for the entire school day.

This enforced “digital pause” – as the French government calls it – has been tested in a pilot scheme in about 100 middle schools for the past six months, with children giving up their phones on arrival – placing them a locker or box, or in a special locked pouch that can only be unlocked by an electronic system at the school gates as they go home.

Devices are banned in primary schools.

«

They must be watching Adolescence and thinking “quoi?“
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Trump administration backs off Nvidia’s ‘H20’ chip crackdown • NPR

Emily Feng and Bobby Allyn:

»

When Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attended a $1m-a-head dinner at Mar-a-Lago last week, a chip known as the H20 may have been on his mind.

That’s because chip industry insiders widely expected the Trump administration to impose curbs on the H20, the most cutting-edge AI chip U.S. companies can legally sell to China, a crucial market to one of the world’s most valuable companies.

Following the Mar-a-Lago dinner, the White House reversed course on H20 chips, putting the plan for additional restrictions on hold, according to two sources with knowledge of the plan who were not authorized to speak publicly.

The planned American export controls on the H20 had been in the works for months, according to the two sources, and were ready to be implemented as soon as this week.

The change of course from the White House came after Nvidia promised the Trump administration new U.S. investments in AI data centers, according to one of the sources.

American lawmakers have been pressuring the Trump administration for weeks to place stricter curbs on cutting edge technology related to artificial intelligence. In February, Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Josh Hawley, R-Mo., jointly called for export controls on the H20 chip after Chinese tech company DeepSeek unveiled a breakthrough AI chatbot that stunned the world in January.

The Trump administration’s decision to allow Chinese firms to continue to purchase H20 chips is a major victory for the country, said Chris Miller, a Tufts University history professor and semiconductor expert.

«

Miller’s reasoning: China is “critically reliant” on Nvidia’s chips.
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American Disruption • Stratechery

Ben Thompson:

»

The key distinguishing feature of a better plan is that it doesn’t seek to own supply, but rather control it in a way the U.S. does not today.

First, blanket tariffs are a mistake. I understand the motivation: a big reason why Chinese imports to the U.S. have actually shrunk over the last few years is because a lot of final assembly moved to countries like Vietnam, Thailand, Mexico, etc. Blanket tariffs stop this from happening, at least in theory.

The problem, however, is that those final assembly jobs are the least desirable jobs in the value chain, at least for the American worker; assuming the Trump administration doesn’t want to import millions of workers — that seems rather counter to the foundation of his candidacy! — the United States needs to find alternative trustworthy countries for final assembly. This can be accomplished through selective tariffs (which is exactly what happened in the first Trump administration).

Secondly, using trade flows to measure the health of the economic relationship with these countries — any country, really, but particularly final assembly countries — is legitimately stupid. Go back to the iPhone: the value-add of final assembly is in the single digit dollar range; the value-add of Apple’s software, marketing, distribution, etc. is in the hundreds of dollars. Simply looking at trade flows — where an imported iPhone is calculated as a trade deficit of several hundred dollars — completely obscures this reality. Moreover, the criteria for a final assembly country is that they have low wages, which by definition can’t pay for an equivalent amount of U.S. goods to said iPhone.

…I get the allure of blanket tariffs; politics is often the art of the possible, and the perfect is the enemy of the good. The problem is this approach simply isn’t good: it’s actively detrimental to what should be the U.S.’s goals. It’s also ignoring the power of demand: China would supply factories in the U.S., even if the point of those factories was to displace China, because supply needs to sell. This is how you move past disruption: you not only exert control on alternatives to China, you exert control on China itself.

Fourth, there remains the problem of chips. Trump just declared economic war on China, which definitionally increases the possibility of kinetic war. A kinetic war, however, will mean the destruction of TSMC, leaving the U.S. bereft of chips at the very moment that A.I. is poised to create tremendous opportunities for growth and automation. And, even if A.I. didn’t exist, it’s enough to note that modern life would grind to a halt without chips.

«

Thompson thinks there is, broadly, a coherent vision somewhere in the cloud of Trump’s tariff announcements. My only wish is that he imposed a word limit on himself: sometimes he over-quotes from himself. (Sure, I’m a fine one to talk. Even so.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The first David Bowie websites – recently restored – were odd even by the standards of the mid-1990s. CC-licensed photo by Lutz Teutloff on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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

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

Online suicide forum investigated under new UK digital safety laws • The Guardian

Dan Milmo:

»

The UK communications regulator has announced its first investigation under the new digital safety laws with an inquiry into an online suicide forum.

Ofcom is investigating whether the site breached the Online Safety Act by failing to put in place adequate measures to shield its users from illegal content.

The law requires tech platforms to tackle illegal material – such as encouraging suicide – or face the threat of fines of up to £18m or 10% of global revenue. In extreme cases, Ofcom also has the power to block access to a site or app in the UK.

Ofcom, which is not naming the forum under investigation, said it was focusing on whether the site had put appropriate measures in place to protect UK users, whether it had failed to complete an assessment of the harms the site could cause, as required under the legislation, and whether it had responded adequately to a request for information.

“This is the first investigation opened into an individual online service provider under these new laws,” said Ofcom.

The BBC reported in 2023 that the forum, easily accessible to anyone on the open web, had been connected to at least 50 deaths in the UK and had tens of thousands of members with discussions including methods of suicide.

Last month, obligations came into force under the act requiring the 100,000 services under its scope – from small sites to big platforms such as X, Facebook and Google – to implement safeguards that take action against illegal harms. The legislation lists 130 “priority offences”, or illegal content, that tech companies must tackle as a priority by ensuring their moderation systems are set up to deal with such material.

«

Seems like a very literal case of a lack of online safety. Notable that it’s not been put on a blacklist to make it inaccessible. Given the lack of information about it, you have to wonder if it’s actually hosted in the UK (chances are.. not?) and how any fine would be extracted. Maybe that’s where the blacklisting would come in.
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OpenAI helps spammers plaster 80,000 sites with messages that bypassed filters • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

Spammers used OpenAI to generate messages that were unique to each recipient, allowing them to bypass spam-detection filters and blast unwanted messages to more than 80,000 websites in four months, researchers said Wednesday.

The finding, documented in a post published by security firm SentinelOne’s SentinelLabs, underscores the double-edged sword wielded by large language models. The same thing that makes them useful for benign tasks—the breadth of data available to them and their ability to use it to generate content at scale—can often be used in malicious activities just as easily. OpenAI revoked the spammers’ account after receiving SentinelLabs’ disclosure, but the four months the activity went unnoticed shows how enforcement is often reactive rather than proactive.

The spam blast is the work of AkiraBot—a framework that automates the sending of messages in large quantities to promote shady search optimization services to small- and medium-size websites. AkiraBot used python-based scripts to rotate the domain names advertised in the messages. It also used OpenAI’s chat API tied to the model gpt-4o-mini to generate unique messages customized to each site it spammed, a technique that likely helped it bypass filters that look for and block identical content sent to large numbers of sites. The messages are delivered through contact forms and live chat widgets embedded into the targeted websites.

“AkiraBot’s use of LLM-generated spam message content demonstrates the emerging challenges that AI poses to defending websites against spam attacks,” SentinelLabs researchers Alex Delamotte and Jim Walter wrote.

«

But in the age of AI.. isn’t SEO dead?
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Crypto attorney sues US authorities to reveal Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity • Cryptoslate

Oluwapelumi Adejumo:

»

James Murphy, a prominent crypto attorney widely recognized as MetaLawMan, has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The April 7 legal action aims to uncover what the government may know about the identity of Bitcoin’s elusive creator, Satoshi Nakamoto.

Murphy said the lawsuit was prompted by statements made during a financial intelligence conference in 2019.

At that event, a DHS official reportedly claimed the agency had discovered Nakamoto’s identity and interviewed him face-to-face in California. Three other individuals were present during that meeting, each of whom played a role in the development of Bitcoin.

The crypto attorney now wants access to internal DHS documents, emails, and notes that could confirm whether such an interview ever took place. He argued that if the encounter were real, it would almost certainly have left behind a paper trail. His legal action aims to bring those records to the public’s attention.

Meanwhile, Murphy called on DHS Secretary Christy Noem to release the information voluntarily.

«

Well, it would be an FOI discovery better than the JFK assassination or UFOs if it happens. What sort of probability do we give it – 1%? Less?
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David Bowie’s early websites, 1995–1997: Outside to Earthling • Cybercultural

Richard MacManus:

»

As the internet became more interactive over 1995, it became a more attractive place for musicians to set up a web presence. David Bowie was one of the first to do this.

On August 6, 1995, the domain http://www.davidbowie.com was registered on the World Wide Web. In September — most likely coinciding with the release of his new album, Outside, on 25 September 1995 — Bowie’s first website went live. Up till recently, this version had been lost to time (the first Wayback Machine copy isn’t until October 1996). But last November, a Reddit user with the handle JustMyselfAndI announced a restored version of the original 1995 site.

…One of the designers of the website, Michael Endres, added more context on the restoration on LinkedIn. He noted that his company at the time, The New Media Group, had started work on the website in July 1995, “just a few weeks after Netscape 1.1 was released.” The intention was to “create an image heavy website that would bring your 1400 baud modem to a crawl.” He added that the site “was intentionally obscure and ‘experiential’.”

«

Nowadays they’d just stick on a pile of Javascript and an offer to subscribe to their newsletter and a request to send notifications. That certainly was the time of designers who didn’t give a damn about usability.
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Trump: Apple building in China is “unsustainable”, could exempt some companies from tariffs • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

»

When asked whether he would consider exempting some U.S. companies from the tariffs in the future, Trump said that he would. “As time goes by, we’re going to take a look at it,” he said. “There are some that by the nature of the company get hit a little bit harder, and we’ll take a look at that,” he added, claiming that he will “show a little flexibility.”

During Trump’s first term, Apple CEO Tim Cook was able to persuade Trump to exempt Apple devices from the tariffs that Trump put in place, but Cook has not been successful this time around. Trump has not yet agreed to grant any companies a reprieve from the tariffs yet.

Trump announced the unexpectedly high tariffs last Wednesday, sending the stock market spiraling downward and causing Apple shares to drop close to 20%. Losses continued until today when the temporary pause was announced, and the market closed with Apple stock back at almost $200 a share after opening at $172.

Trump announced a 90-day pause on all of the special “reciprocal” tariffs that were in place, such as the 46% tariff on Vietnam and the 32% tariff on Taiwan. The 90-day pause does not apply to goods from China, and there is a 10% base tariff in place while the higher tariffs are on hold. Trump raised tariffs on China to 125%, effective immediately, and said that he put the other tariffs on hold because “people were getting a little queasy.”

When speaking to the press, Trump reiterated his aim of bringing manufacturing to the United States, and he claimed that Apple “building” in China is unsustainable.

«

The hypothesis that the world tariffs were a fake, and that Trump’s real target (or objective) is to move manufacturing of imports for the US out of China, gets stronger. Pretty difficult with the iPhone, though, even given the parts that are made outside China and then sent there for assembly.
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Bluesky’s quest to build nontoxic social media • The New Yorker

Kyle Chayka:

»

Bluesky’s head of trust and safety, Aaron Rodericks, previously worked at Twitter, until Musk dismantled its content-moderation team and eventually forced him out. Rodericks told me that Bluesky performs “a foundational layer” of moderation, with more than a hundred contractors working to remove such things as child-sexual-abuse material and threats of violence. But more fine-grained filtering decisions are made at the individual level.

In Settings, users can choose from among hundreds of homespun labelling tools that flag or block certain posts in their feeds. The labels range from the straightforwardly functional (a red check mark for authenticated power users, akin to Twitter’s old blue checks) to the idiosyncratically satirical (a label that identifies landlords, private-school graduates, and associates of Jeffrey Epstein).

One of the platform’s most prominent feeds, Blacksky, which draws more than three hundred thousand users a month, offers a tool to identify and block racism and misogynoir. Bluesky as a company can afford to enable free speech because the platform’s smaller, optional communities have the power to police speech however they choose. Blacksky’s founder, Rudy Fraser, told me, “If anyone uses a slur anywhere—in a username, bio, in a post—we can get automatically alerted and take action.” He added, of moderation decisions, “If you’re making everyone happy, you’re maybe not serving a community.”

«

This is a long profile, mostly of Jay Graber who is Bluesky’s CEO. But there are also little insights like this into the vagueness that pervades Bluesky. The idea of a non-toxic social media platform is an impossible dream. There’s also vagueness around how it’s going to wash its face financially. If it’s not going to be adverts, and not licensing content for AI, it will have to be subscriptions – and that’s a tough row to hoe.
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Study reveals new findings on longevity of legacy magnetic audio tape • Council on Library and Information Resources

Kathlin Smith on a study of magnetic tape storage, in 2022:

»

The key findings were as follows:

• Test tapes in playable condition before accelerated ageing continued to be easily and cleanly windable after accelerated aging across a range of temperature and relative humidity values
• Physical and magnetic properties remained effectively un changed after one year of accelerated ageing, even at tempera tures above common remedial baking temperatures. This magnetic stability suggests that briefly applied baking treat ments likely have little detrimental effect on recorded content
• Certain chemical properties decreased after aging, consistent with hydrolysis and lubricant loss, but these changes occurred only at the most extreme aging conditions and not sufficiently to cause playback problems
• The observations indicated that under standard room tem perature conditions (20-25 °C), approximately 100 years would be needed for the tested playable tapes to reach the properties measured in unplayable tapes
• Estimates for magnetic tape longevity provided confidence that tapes currently in good condition are unlikely to rapidly turn unplayable under standard room temperature conditions of 20-25 °C
• Manufacturing variations appeared more indicative of risk than environmental factors. Environmental controls still benefit magnetic tape preservation, but understanding of collection tapes’ individual histories might be even more beneficial.

“Based on recommendations published 10 to 30 years prior to the time of this writing, the life expectancy for magnetic tapes was predicted to be 10 to 30 years if institutions adhered to published storage guidelines,” note the authors.

«

Certainly seems like Doge made a false economy getting rid of the mag tapes. (Thanks Mark C for the link.)
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The composer still making music four years after his death – thanks to an artificial brain • The Guardian

Rosamund Brennan:

»

In a darkened room, a fractured symphony of rattles, hums and warbles bounces off the walls – like an orchestra tuning up in some parallel universe. But there’s not a musician in sight.

If you look closely there is a small fragment of a performer. Albeit one without a pulse.

In the centre of the room, visitors hover around a raised plinth, craning to glimpse the brains behind the operation. Under a magnifying lens sit two white blobs, like a tiny pair of jellyfish. Together, they form the lab-grown “mini-brain” of the late US musician Alvin Lucier – composing a posthumous score in real time.

Lucier was a pioneer of experimental music who died in 2021. But here in the Art Gallery of Western Australia he has been resurrected with cutting-edge neuroscience.

“When you look down into that central plinth, you’re crossing a threshold,” says Nathan Thompson, an artist and a creator of the project, titled Revivification. “You’re peering down into the abyss and you’re looking at something that’s alive – just not in the same way as you.”

Revivification is the work of a self-described “four-headed monster”, a tight-knit team of scientists and artists who have spent decades pushing the boundaries of biological art – namely Thompson and his fellow artists Guy Ben-Ary and Matt Gingold, alongside a neuroscientist, Stuart Hodgetts.

Lucier was the perfect collaborator. In 1965 the composer became the first artist to use brainwaves to generate live sound in his seminal work Music for Solo Performer. Longtime fans of his work, the Revivification team started brainstorming ideas with him back in 2018. But it wasn’t until 2020, then aged 89 and suffering from Parkinson’s disease, that the composer agreed to donate his blood to Revivification.

First, his white blood cells were reprogrammed into stem cells. Then, led by Hodgetts, the team transformed the cells into cerebral organoids – clusters of neurons that mimic the human brain.

«

This is the weirdest story I’ve read in ages.
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After leaving Substack, writers are making more money elsewhere • Digiday

Alexander Lee:

»

A year after leaving Substack in early 2024, newsletter writers are making more money peddling their words on other platforms.

Across the board, writers such as Marisa Kabas, Luke O’Neil, Jonathan M. Katz and Ryan Broderick — all of whom exited Substack in early 2024 following the publication of an open letter in December 2023 decrying the presence of politically extreme voices on the platform — told Digiday that they are receiving a higher share of subscription revenue after making the switch from Substack to rival newsletter services such as Ghost and Beehiiv.

Broderick, for example, estimated that revenue for his newsletter Garbage Day had increased by roughly 20% to 25% year over year since he left Substack in January 2024, though he didn’t provide exact figures. 

“The amount I was making at Substack was not enough to hire a full-time employee,” Broderick said. “Last month, I just hired Adam Bumas, my head of research, full time.”

Since leaving Substack, some writers’ subscriber counts have plateaued over the past year, while others have risen — but in both cases, creators said that their share of revenue has increased because Ghost and Beehiiv charge creators flat monthly rates that scale based on their subscriber counts, rather than Substack’s 10% cut of all transaction fees.

Both Beehiiv and Ghost offer a multitude of different pricing tiers based on both a newsletter’s size and the specific features desired by its creator.

«

That’s fine, but these tend to be people who had a substantial audience already, and took them along on their exit. The bigger question is how those with much smaller audiences can build a presence, and whether it’s easier or harder than on Substack.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Gaming PC company Razer has paused direct laptop sales in the US. Guess why. CC-licensed photo by Jon Russell on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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

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

UK creating “murder prediction” tool to identify people most likely to kill • The Guardian

Vikram Dodd:

»

The UK government is developing a “murder prediction” programme which it hopes can use personal data of those known to the authorities to identify the people most likely to become killers.

Researchers are alleged to be using algorithms to analyse the information of thousands of people, including victims of crime, as they try to identify those at greatest risk of committing serious violent offences.

The scheme was originally called the “homicide prediction project”, but its name has been changed to “sharing data to improve risk assessment”. The Ministry of Justice hopes the project will help boost public safety but campaigners have called it “chilling and dystopian”.

The existence of the project was discovered by the pressure group Statewatch, and some of its workings uncovered through documents obtained by Freedom of Information requests.

Statewatch says data from people not convicted of any criminal offence will be used as part of the project, including personal information about self-harm and details relating to domestic abuse. Officials strongly deny this, insisting only data about people with at least one criminal conviction has been used.

The government says the project is at this stage for research only, but campaigners claim the data used would build bias into the predictions against minority-ethnic and poor people.

The MoJ says the scheme will “review offender characteristics that increase the risk of committing homicide” and “explore alternative and innovative data science techniques to risk assessment of homicide”.

«

Ooh, I can help on this. Strong predictors: 1) male 2) any history of domestic abuse. It is a strange how people try to recreate Minority Report again and again, when there’s so much past evidence. If they’re hoping to predict deadly knife crime – that’s highly unlikely to work. Won’t stop some people poring over datasets though.
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Nvidia’s AI chip empire is under threat from Trump’s tariffs • Rest of World

Viola Zhou talks to Stephen Witt, whose new book is about the rise of Nvidia:

»

Viola Zhou: TSMC’s founder Morris Chang said globalization was “almost dead” when his company had to build a factory in Arizona. Now, we have these tariffs. How do you think Jensen Huang will navigate Trump’s policy? 

Stephen Witt: Jensen doesn’t talk politics, not with me, not with anybody. He is probably the most powerful tech figure in America to not attend Donald Trump’s inauguration. Now, Jensen must deal with politics. The disruption to his business is too severe. 

Nvidia had long benefited from no U.S. manufacturing. It’s completely outsourced, mostly to Taiwan. Personally, I’m certain he thinks these tariffs are a terrible idea. Whether he will ever say that out loud, I don’t know.

For Nvidia, one option is to just pay the tariffs. Nvidia can afford, almost uniquely, to pay these tariffs, because the margins are high. But profits will go down, and stock prices will go down. 

Second is to attempt to rebuild or onshore manufacturing into the United States. I think they are reluctant to do so because it seems likely that any politician, even another Republican, would undo or reverse these tariffs. The third option would be to just raise prices. 

VZ: Nvidia has also been opposing the U.S. government’s attempts to restrict chip exports to China. After the most powerful chips got banned, it has been selling billions of dollars worth of slightly inferior chips to Chinese tech companies. Why is Nvidia doing this?

SW: Jensen has made the point that China will simply just innovate out of this problem. He was saying that a couple of years ago, and then DeepSeek came along and proved that they could do so.

This is probably Jensen’s point of view: If we ban this stuff, [China] will just build it better and cheaper. It would actually be in our long-term strategic and competitive advantage to keep selling them because then there’s not going to be a domestic competitor. 

«

Multiple companies, all struggling with how to navigate these tariffs. Nvidia with perhaps the most to lose – but American companies also with the most to lose.
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Why we distrust technology • Quillette

Marian Tupy:

»

For most of our history, human survival depended less on technological ingenuity and more on cooperation and social cohesion. Our ancestors did not invent their way out of problems; they solved them through alliances, negotiations, and collective rulemaking. Food shortages, for instance, were addressed not by developing advanced agricultural techniques—those came much later—but by rationing resources, redistributing wealth within the tribe, and reinforcing norms against hoarding.

This survival strategy shaped our psychology. Over generations, humans became attuned to social fixes as the primary way to navigate crises. We evolved to seek consensus, enforce norms, and reward conformity—traits that helped small groups function efficiently in an unpredictable environment. As a result, when confronted with modern challenges, we instinctively default to social regulation over technological adaptation.

Today, this bias manifests in the way we talk about, for example, climate change. The dominant discourse does not emphasise nuclear fusion, carbon capture, or geoengineering, despite their potential to dramatically cut emissions. Instead, we hear calls for people to consume less, fly less, drive less, eat differently—as though the best way to tackle a global problem is through personal sacrifice. This isn’t a rational economic approach; it’s a deeply ingrained cognitive reflex.

Beyond evolutionary psychology, several well-documented cognitive biases reinforce our scepticism toward technological solutions. One of the most powerful is negativity bias, the tendency to focus more on potential downsides than on possible benefits. Innovations—especially large-scale ones like nuclear power or geoengineering—are often accompanied by uncertainties. A nuclear plant meltdown is a vivid disaster; the slow, cumulative benefits of abundant clean energy are far less emotionally gripping.

«

Good points. It’s just that the technological solutions are making only the merest dent on the problem, and the chemistry of carbon dioxide militates against any removal solution that doesn’t have unlimited free energy.
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The AI therapist can see you now • NPR

Katia Riddle:

»

New research suggests that given the right kind of training, AI bots can deliver mental health therapy with as much efficacy as — or more than — human clinicians.

The recent study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, shows results from the first randomized clinical trial for AI therapy.

Researchers from Dartmouth College built the bot as a way of taking a new approach to a longstanding problem: The U.S. continues to grapple with an acute shortage of mental health providers. “I think one of the things that doesn’t scale well is humans,” says Nick Jacobson, a clinical psychologist who was part of this research team. For every 340 people in the U.S., there is just one mental health clinician, according to some estimates.

While many AI bots already on the market claim to offer mental health care, some have dubious results or have even led people to self-harm.

More than five years ago, Jacobson and his colleagues began training their AI bot in clinical best practices. The project, says Jacobson, involved much trial and error before it led to quality outcomes.

“The effects that we see strongly mirror what you would see in the best evidence-based trials of psychotherapy,” says Jacobson. He says these results were comparable to “studies with folks given a gold standard dose of the best treatment we have available.”

«

The NEJM is somewhat second-division in science publications these days (it’s printed a lot of stuff that has been shown to be wrong, but hasn’t retracted). But anyway, this feels like the final vindication of Eliza, the original chatbot, just under 60 years later.
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Razer pauses direct laptop sales in the US as new tariffs loom • The Verge

Antonio G. Di Benedetto:

»

Razer’s upcoming Blade 16 and other laptops are no longer available for preorder or purchase on its US site. The configurator for preordering its new Blade 16 laptop was available as recently as April 1st, according to the Internet Archive — one day before the Trump administration announced sweeping US tariffs on China, Taiwan, and others that make laptop components. When asked recently if tariffs might affect Razer’s prices or availability, its public relations manager Andy Johnston told The Verge, “We do not have a comment at this stage regarding tariffs.”

Razer may not be openly talking about the impact of tariffs, but Framework halted sales of its entry-level Laptop 13 in the US on April 7th, and Micron reportedly confirmed surcharges for its memory chips will apply once the tariffs take effect after midnight tonight.

The direct link to the Blade 16 configurator now takes you to a 404 error page, and its product page only has a “notify me” button instead of anywhere to submit your preorder.

While shopping for other laptops on Razer’s site, only skins and accessories are available for purchase.

«

Razer in an American-Singaporean-Hong Kong company, but it’s not clear where its PCs are manufactured.
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Microsoft backs out of $1bn central Ohio data center plan • Colombus Dispatch

Max Filby:

»

A major tech company has backed away from its plans to build data centers in central Ohio, at least for the time being.

On Monday, Microsoft said it would no longer move forward with its plans to build data centers in Licking County. The company had planned to invest $1 billion initially toward three data center campuses in New Albany, Heath and Hebron.

“We will continue to evaluate these sites in line with our investment strategy,” a Microsoft spokesperson told The Dispatch. “We sincerely appreciate the leadership and partnership of Ohio government officials and the support of Licking County residents.”

The spokesperson later on Monday said the company will continue to own the land and intends to proceed with the project at some point, although a specific timeframe was not given.

Microsoft plans to ensure the land at two of the three sites will be able to be used for farming and will still carry out development agreements to fund roadway and utility project upgrades, according to the company.

Each of the three data center campus were supposed to have one building at first with the potential for several buildings on each site, The Dispatch reported in 2024.

Microsoft’s initial investment was to consist of $700m in building costs and $300m in machinery expenses. The project was to create 20 jobs to start with.

…Microsoft walked back its plans for Licking County data centers as the company has ended leases for sizeable data center capacity in the U.S., Reuters reported. The move suggests there’s a potential oversupply at Microsoft as it builds out artificial intelligence infrastructure to meet a looming surge in demand.

«

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History suggests a tariff-induced downturn may cause a reckoning in the venture capital industry • Fortune

Jessica Mathews:

»

First you had a venture boom caused by more than a decade of low interest rates. Then a 2022 bear market as the post-pandemic recovery upended many business plans, followed by unprecedented amounts of money being plowed into AI companies. But the AI boom was missing a standard element of the private market ecosystem: IPOs and M&A. As a result, limited partners haven’t been getting many distributions for three years.

No surprise then that VC fundraising has been freefalling ever since 2022—and nearly all the capital that is available has flowed to a small group of funds. Last year, 75% of all the capital raised by VCs went to only 30 venture capital firms, according to PitchBook (see data here). Just nine firms raised half of all that capital. Nearly eight in 10 limited partners say they declined to re-up investments into at least one of the VCs in their portfolio this past year, according to Coller Capital’s annual survey.

The expectations going into this year were that the VC sector was due to get its groove back. Many Silicon Valley elites have been hopeful that Trump’s anti-regulation approach will revive M&A activity. And the IPO pipeline was starting to fill up again. CoreWeave’s public market debut wasn’t the blockbuster some might have wished for—the AI datacenter company ended up slashing the amount of money it raised and its stock has been whipsawed since it started trading on the Nasdaq—but there was hope that other IPO candidates, with cleaner balance sheets, might fare better.

As the Trump tariffs take effect, however, the equation is changing. Investors and startup founders must now consider the very real possibility of a sustained bear market or a recession. Companies like Klarna and StubHub have already decided to put their IPO plans on hold.

«

Question: which AI company will be the first to IPO? I’m pretty sure that the first search company to IPO was not Google (it didn’t go until 2004). Is the runway of their funds long enough to get them to takeoff?
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40% of world’s power clean but emissions rising – report • BBC News

Jonah Fisher:

»

More than 40% of the world’s electricity was generated without burning fossil fuels in 2024, according to a new report from the think-tank Ember..

But carbon dioxide emissions, which warm the planet, have risen to an all time high, the report says, with hot weather pushing up the overall demand for power.

That meant an increase in the use of fossil fuel burning power stations.

Solar power continues to be the fastest-growing energy source, with the amount of electricity it generates doubling in the last three years.

“Solar power has become the engine of the global energy transition,” said Phil Macdonald, the managing director of Ember. “Amid the noise, it’s essential to focus on the real signal. Hotter weather drove the fossil generation increase in 2024, but we’re very unlikely to see a similar jump in 2025.”

In a separate report, the European Copernicus climate service said March 2025 was the second hottest on record, extending a spell of record or near record breaking temperatures.

…Cheap and relatively easy to install, for the twentieth year in a row solar is the fastest growing electricity source. According to Ember, the amount generated by solar panels has doubled every three years since 2012.

…In the last five years, fast-growing Asian economies, in particular India and China, have continued expanding their use of fossil fuels to meet rapidly rising demand for electricity.

«

So it’s one of those good news, bad news things. At least it isn’t only bad news.
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Google DeepMind’s weapon in the AI talent war: aggressive noncompetes • Business Insider

Hugh Langley and Hasan Chowdhury:

»

The battle for AI talent is so hot that Google would rather give some employees a paid one-year vacation than let them work for a competitor.

Some Google DeepMind staff in the UK are subject to noncompete agreements that prevent them from working for a competitor for up to 12 months after they finish work at Google, according to four former employees with direct knowledge of the matter who asked to remain anonymous because they were not permitted to share these details with the press.

Aggressive noncompetes are one tool tech companies wield to retain a competitive edge in the AI wars, which show no sign of slowing down as companies launch new bleeding-edge models and products at a rapid clip. When an employee signs one, they agree not to work for a competing company for a certain period of time.

Google DeepMind has put some employees with a noncompete on extended garden leave. These employees are still paid by DeepMind but no longer work for it for the duration of the noncompete agreement.

Several factors, including a DeepMind employee’s seniority and how critical their work is to the company, determine the length of noncompete clauses, those people said. Two of the former staffers said six-month noncompetes are common among DeepMind employees, including for individual contributors working on Google’s Gemini AI models. There have been cases where more senior researchers have received yearlong stipulations, they said.

“Our employment contracts are in line with market standards,” a Google spokesperson told Business Insider in a statement.

«

I guess it’s a question of definition, but to me the one-year vacation isn’t strictly a “non-compete”. It’s a “you’re still an employee, but we don’t want you to do anything for us.” A non-compete would be “goodbye, but you can’t go to companies X or Y” (to which X and Y would agree – something which got Apple and Google into very expensive hot water in California a decade ago).
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Tape storage is cheap, fast and reliable – yet DOGE is getting rid of it at a claimed annual saving of $1m. Can that last? CC-licensed photo by Seika on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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

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

UK loses plea to keep Apple ‘backdoor’ case secret • The Register

Connor Jones:

»

Details of Apple’s appeal against the UK’s so-called “backdoor order” will now play out in public after the Home Office failed in its bid to keep them secret on national security grounds.

The confirmation comes after the Investigatory Powers Tribunal held a closed-door hearing on March 14, which was presumed to be related to Apple’s appeal itself, rather than about whether the appeal itself would be heard in public, the details of which were released on Monday.

Lawyers representing the Secretary of State, Yvette Cooper, applied to the tribunal to ensure the “bare details” of the case involving a Technical Capability Notice (TCN) being issued to Apple be kept secret. They argued that airing these was not in the public interest and would be prejudicial to national security.

TCNs are issued under the UK’s Investigatory Power Act 2016 – aka the Snooper’s Charter – and entities that receive one are forbidden from either confirming or denying its existence.

Thus far, the case of Apple vs the Home Office has been shrouded in secrecy, despite privacy campaigners and US politicians vehemently arguing for the details to be made public, honoring the principle of open justice.

However, there must be a careful balancing act between informing the public and preserving national security, and the tribunal said that despite its decision, it had to give considerable weight to the position of the Home Office.

Pablo Sandro, associate professor of public law and legal theory at the University of Leeds, said the tribunal’s deference toward the Secretary of State included “some worrying remarks.”

«

Sandro is worry that the IPT is too deferential. But it is at least not ruling out the possibility that the case might allow some media. The judgment is pretty vague; what really matters after this is the case management, ie who gets to attend, what they’re allowed to say, and when it all happens. This will be expensive, lawyer-wise.
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The trade war is about China • The Daily Scroll

Park MacDougald:

»

It’s certainly possible that the White House’s tariff scheme could turn out poorly—bets tend to come with risk, after all. But there does seem to be a method to the madness. As Henry Gao, a law professor at Singapore Management University, wrote in a Monday X thread (emphasis ours):

»

Three things you need to know about Liberation Day tariffs:

1. It’s not about the methodology.

The formula has been widely mocked, but that misses the point. The numbers aren’t meant to hold up in a PhD defense—they’re meant to shock, to create leverage. The more extreme the figure, the stronger the incentive for other countries to come to the negotiating table with the U.S.

2. It’s not even about the tariffs.

The real issue isn’t Vietnam’s tariff rates—it’s China’s trans-shipment tactics and its central role in global supply chains.

The aim is to isolate China and rewrite the rules of global trade. If a country like Vietnam is willing to align with that goal, it doesn’t matter much whether it sets its tariffs for American products at 0%, 5%, or even 9.4% (current rate).

3. It’s not personal with any country—except one. The tariffs are universal, affecting even places like Heard Island and McDonald Islands, sparking confusion and anger worldwide. But as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick explained, this blanket approach is designed to block every possible loophole China could exploit. In effect, all countries have become collateral damage in the U.S.-China economic standoff.

«

«

So the suggestion is that this is all part of a plan to get every country to impose tariffs on China? I didn’t agree with everything in this post, but it seemed worth considering.
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US government eliminates tape data storage at the GSA to save $1m per year, but tape isn’t dead yet • Tom’s Hardware

Mark Tyson:

»

A Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) social media post boasts of the elimination of tape data storage facilities at the U.S. General Services Administration (GSE). A triumphant Tweet by DOGE says that a million dollars per year will be saved “by converting 14,000 magnetic tapes (70 yr old technology for information storage) to permanent modern digital records.” However, many X users, and a Community Notes addition, highlight that despite its apparent elderliness, tape still remains the best choice in a range of data storage scenarios.

Hopefully, no official installed at DOGE or GSA assumed that because magnetic tape has been around for such a long time, it is outdated and, therefore, a prime target for replacement with new and improved storage tech. Recently, we reported that the tech behind tape storage, the Linear Tape-Open (LTO) standard, carries on with a robust development roadmap that continues to deliver higher densities.

…In the case of the 14,000 magnetic tapes that have been consigned to history by the government, Community Notes attached to the DOGE post reference articles about why tape is still popular for backups in organizations of all sizes and will still be around for “decades to come.” In brief, tape storage remains in favor for multiple reasons, but most importantly due to the format’s huge capacity, long-term development roadmap that continues to evolve, known durability (30 years estimated), low energy consumption, TCO, and suitability for cold storage.

It would be very interesting to know what storage system and media have been selected to replace the GSA’s tape system, but we don’t have these details to hand. We also wonder whether the DOGE-celebrated $1m per year change away from tape will stick.

«

Tape has a surprisingly low failure rate – well below that of disks. It also, counterintuitively, has a faster streaming rate (once you find the file) than disk. Perhaps DOGE is using SSDs – in which the failure rate is 1.2% past four years. Might turn out to be a false economy. Unless they’re trying to lose the data.
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Meta’s surprise Llama 4 drop exposes the gap between AI ambition and reality • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

»

On Saturday, Meta released its newest Llama 4 multimodal AI models in a surprise weekend move that caught some AI experts off guard. The announcement touted Llama 4 Scout and Llama 4 Maverick as major advancements, with Meta claiming top performance in their categories and an enormous 10 million token context window for Scout. But so far the open-weights models have received an initial mixed-to-negative reception from the AI community, highlighting a familiar tension between AI marketing and user experience.

“The vibes around llama 4 so far are decidedly mid,” said independent AI researcher Simon Willison in a short interview with Ars Technica. Willison often checks the community pulse around open source and open weights AI releases in particular.

While Meta positions Llama 4 in competition with closed-model giants like OpenAI and Google, the company continues to use the term “open source” despite licensing restrictions that prevent truly open use. As we have noted in the past with previous Llama releases, “open weights” more accurately describes Meta’s approach. Those who sign in and accept the license terms can download the two smaller Llama 4 models from Hugging Face or llama.com.

The company describes the new Llama 4 models as “natively multimodal,” built from the ground up to handle both text and images using a technique called “early fusion.”

«

This reminds me of the early days of CPUs and GPUs, when each incremental shift would be explained in terms of changes that made no sense to the ordinary person.
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Social Security’s website keeps crashing, as DOGE demands cuts to IT staff • The Washington Post

Lisa Rein, Hannah Natanson and Elizabeth Dwoskin:

»

Retirees and disabled people are facing chronic website outages and other access problems as they attempt to log in to their online Social Security accounts, even as they are being directed to do more of their business with the agency online.

The website has crashed repeatedly in recent weeks, with outages lasting anywhere from 20 minutes to almost a day, according to six current and former officials with knowledge of the issues. Even when the site is back online, many customers have not been able to sign in to their accounts — or have logged in only to find information missing. For others, access to the system has been slow, requiring repeated tries to get in.

The problems come as the Trump administration’s cost-cutting team, led by Elon Musk, has imposed a downsizing that’s led to 7,000 job cuts and is preparing to push out thousands more employees at an agency that serves 73 million Americans. The new demands from Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service include a 50% cut to the technology division responsible for the website and other electronic access.

Many of the network outages appear to be caused by an expanded fraud check system imposed by the DOGE team, current and former officials said. The technology staff did not test the new software against a high volume of users to see if the servers could handle the rush, these officials said.

«

It’s the Twitter model – strip the staff to the bone, rewrite the software any old way, who knows if it might work.
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An open letter to U.S. customers • Keyboardio

“Jesse and Kia”:

»

Let’s be real: we would rather make our products in the USA. Doing business in China is hard: a different language, a different culture, a different legal system, and a very long and expensive plane flight every time you have to pop over to help fix what’s gone wrong. So why don’t we make keyboards in the USA instead—and why don’t the vast majority of consumer electronics manufacturers, be they big or indie? 

Most of our electrical components are made in China. Sometimes we’ll use or consider components not made in China—and they’re made in Japan, Taiwan, or Germany. The USA doesn’t make the components we need.

Making keyboards is intrinsically a cross-border activity. (For us, some of that activity involves shipping American goods to China! We make a number of products that use American wood. Unfortunately, China has just announced they will now tax that lumber at 34% in a retaliatory tariff.)

We’re a small company making niche products; we don’t have the volume to justify opening our own factory. We definitely don’t have the capital to do it. We rely on contract manufacturing, where we pay a network of factories to make products to our specifications, without us owning the machinery or hiring the workers ourselves. 

Southern China, Guangdong and Shenzhen in particular, have developed an ecosystem of factories and suppliers within a small radius. Within about thirty miles, we work with a bunch of factories who are specialized in doing low volume production runs. Having so many companies close together saves a lot on transportation and freight. More importantly, it allows for local competition and sharing of knowledge—just like greater Los Angeles is the best place to make TV and movies even though other cities offer incentives, Guangdong is the best place to make consumer electronics.

…If you want to get a sense of what it costs to hand assemble keyboards in the USA, take a look at Norbauer & Co’s Seneca keyboard. It’s gorgeous and beautifully made. It’s also priced at $3600.

«

They presently face between $363 and $518 in import tariffs (the latter on a keyboard costing about $350). So they’re recommending people buy a keyboard now.

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The dire wolf is back • The New Yorker

D. T. Max:

»

Beth Shapiro, a noted ancient-DNA researcher who is now the chief science officer at Colossal [which produced the new “dire wolf” pups], said, “We have to figure out how to build a trillion-piece puzzle while working with pieces that were left outside during a hurricane, using the picture of a slightly different puzzle on the top of the box, and the contents of more than a hundred and fifty thousand different puzzles inside”—that is, the DNA of all the microbes and fungi that got into the animal’s bone after it died.

…Much of the dire wolves’ behaviour reminded me of dogs’. Romulus and Remus [two of the three existing animals] rested on their haunches in the sun. They chased falling leaves; they chewed sticks. One peed, and the other hurried over to roll in it. Other aspects seemed wolflike—when Romulus got nervous, he did a sideways slide while facing us. (James explained to me that this maneuver is a way to both check out a threat and look as large as possible.) And, when the wolves ran, they loped as if their lower legs had an extra joint. They didn’t howl, and their footfalls were silent. Was this distinctive dire-wolf behavior? How could anyone say?

Though Romulus and Remus are identical twins—they came from the same engineered cell line—I could see that they were already behaving differently. Remus was braver. He would come up within ten feet of us, then think better of it. Romulus hung back. They both gave off a sense of biding their time; since nothing formidable had yet been asked of them, they had done nothing formidable.

But they could; their bodies were clearly powerful. At one point, Remus seemed interested in getting behind us—he stopped when James looked at him—and I was reminded of the legend on the Dire Wolves card in Magic: The Gathering: “It’s amazing how scared a city kid can get at a dog.” I was told to keep a respectful distance. Lamm, though, seemed unafraid. “I pet Remus last week,” he said proudly. “But, you know, that’s because I’ve been around them forever.” (James says that around the time they enter puberty—at roughly a year old—they will likely be deemed too aggressive to be petted ever again. “We’re about to hit a trigger point,” he said.)

«

A long look at Colossal Biosciences, which is trying to bring multiple animals – the woolly mammoth, the dodo, the thylacine (a marsupial) – “back”. Except of course they don’t have the original DNA, or females to gestate them. But don’t let that get in the way of a story with a Game Of Thrones tinge and the ker-ching for a startup.
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Ukraine is stuck with Musk’s Starlink for now • POLITICO

Mathieu Pollet:

»

the European Union is on the lookout for backup options for Ukraine. One of those is Franco-British operator Eutelsat, which is pitching itself as a way for Kyiv to get out from under Musk’s thumb.

Working with Starlink “is a dependence that can be decided in the White House or [Trump’s private residence] Mar-a-Lago,” Eutelsat Chief Executive Officer Eva Berneke told POLITICO. “It’s good to have multiple options.”

But today’s Starlink alternatives aren’t ready to take on Musk — including Eutelsat, by Berneke’s own admission.

“If we were to take over the entire connectivity capacity for Ukraine and all the citizens, we wouldn’t be able to do that. Let’s just be very honest,” Berneke said. “But I do think we can provide capacity for some of the critical use cases of government.”

Few firms have invested in low-earth orbit satellites. Such systems offer faster connections and lower latency — crucial for real-time operations like drone warfare — but they remain costly and cumbersome to operate. Starlink, which is owned by Musk’s SpaceX, leads the market, with Eutelsat as a strong challenger and others, like Amazon’s Project Kuiper, still lagging behind.

“This type of solution that Starlink is offering is unique,” said Christopher Baugh, a space industry expert at consulting firm Analysys Mason. Starlink has “broken barriers technically” and “filled the void, because nothing else was available,” he said.
With cutting-edge, compact kits and a vast web of flexible beams, Starlink’s 7,000 satellites dwarf Eutelsat’s 600-strong fleet and comparatively clunkier terminals. Musk’s network can offer between 23 and 490 times the capacity of Eutelsat over Ukraine, depending on the use scenarios.

«

(Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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I remember how the darkness doubled • New Cartographies

Nicholas Carr:

»

During the 1950s, the television set replaced the cinema as the focal point of American entertainment. At the decade’s start, fewer than one in ten households had a TV. By its close, nine in ten did. Americans were buying TVs at the rate of a hundred thousand a week. Gathering around the set became an evening ritual for most families, everyone on the couch or in an easy chair, watching situation comedies, game shows, variety shows, and dramas on the small screen. Moviegoing, a far more communal activity, dropped sharply.

…Popular TV shows, from I Love Lucy and Father Knows Best in the fifties to the Andy Griffith Show and the Beverly Hillbillies in the sixties to All in the Family and Good Times in the seventies, tended to be set in a familiar, middle-class domestic milieu. Even the occasional oddball show like My Favorite Martian, The Munsters, or Lost in Space shared that same quotidian setting. But there was one commonplace domestic activity you almost never saw people do on television: watch television. Even as television became the conduit and shaper of culture, it remained invisible in the products of culture. It’s not hard to understand why. Watching someone watch TV is boring.

…Like the TV before it, the smartphone has remained largely invisible in the products of culture, even as its dominion over culture has grown. Watching a person look into a phone screen is even more boring than watching someone watch TV. And because people with smartphones know everything that’s going on the instant it happens, a society of phone-wielders is resistant to the development of dramatic tension. There’s a reason so much narrative art is now set in fantasy worlds or in the past: there are no phones there.

That’s beginning to change now, at least in literary story-telling. Because much of what flows through phones takes the form of words, writers who have grown up with texting and social media are incorporating the rhythms and quirks of online writing into their work, just as writers of epistolary novels did after letter-writing became commonplace in the eighteenth century. As the rise of autofiction shows, the claustrophobic solitude that characterizes social-media use is seeping into art.

«

If you recognise where the title of the post comes from (clue: 🎪🌚) then you will absolutely love this blogpost.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The American designers of the Scythe boardgame, along with others, are very worried by Trump’s tariffs on Chinese imports. CC-licensed photo by Farley Santos on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 10 links for you. Cutting it 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.

Exclusive: how the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg got added to the White House Signal group chat • The Guardian

Hugo Lowell:

»

[Trump’s national security adviser Mike] Waltz’s phone had saved [Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey] Goldberg’s number as part of an unlikely series of events that started when Goldberg emailed the Trump campaign last October.

According to three people briefed on the internal investigation, Goldberg had emailed the campaign about a story that criticized Trump for his attitude towards wounded service members. To push back against the story, the campaign enlisted the help of Waltz, their national security surrogate.

Goldberg’s email was forwarded to then Trump spokesperson Brian Hughes, who then copied and pasted the content of the email – including the signature block with Goldberg’s phone number – into a text message that he sent to Waltz, so that he could be briefed on the forthcoming story.

Waltz did not ultimately call Goldberg, the people said, but in an extraordinary twist, inadvertently ended up saving Goldberg’s number in his iPhone – under the contact card for Hughes, now the spokesperson for the national security council.

A day after that Goldberg story was published, on 22 October, Waltz appeared on CNN to defend Trump. “Don’t take it from me, take it from the 13 Abbey Gate Gold Star families, some of whom stood on a stage in front of a 30,000 person crowd and said how he helped them heal,” Waltz said.

According to the White House, the number was erroneously saved during a “contact suggestion update” by Waltz’s iPhone, which one person described as the function where an iPhone algorithm adds a previously unknown number to an existing contact that it detects may be related.

The mistake went unnoticed until last month when Waltz sought to add Hughes to the Signal group chat – but ended up adding Goldberg’s number to the 13 March message chain named “Houthi PC small group”, where several top US officials discussed plans for strikes against the Houthis.

Waltz said in the immediate aftermath of the incident that he had never met or communicated with Goldberg. He also suggested on Fox News that Goldberg’s number had been “sucked” into his phone, seemingly in reference to how his iPhone had saved Goldberg’s number.

«

People who can’t correctly add a phone number to their contacts, but sure, put them in charge of nuclear codes and the entire American economy.
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European Union prepares major penalties against Elon Musk’s X • The New York Times

Adam Satariano:

»

European Union regulators are preparing major penalties against Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, for breaking a landmark law to combat illicit content and disinformation, said four people with knowledge of the plans, a move that is likely to ratchet up tensions with the United States by targeting one of President Trump’s closest advisers.

The penalties are set to include a fine and demands for product changes, said the people, who declined to be identified discussing an ongoing investigation. These are expected to be announced this summer and would be the first issued under a new EU law intended to force social media companies to police their services, they said.

European authorities have been weighing how large a fine to issue X as they consider the risks of further antagonizing Mr. Trump amid wider trans-Atlantic disputes over trade, tariffs and the war in Ukraine. The fine could surpass $1bn, one person said, as regulators seek to make an example of X to deter other companies from violating the law, the Digital Services Act.

EU officials said their investigation into X was progressing independently from tariff negotiations after Mr. Trump announced major new levies this week. The investigation began in 2023, and regulators last year issued a preliminary ruling that X had violated the law.

«

That might be tariff leverage, in time.
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OpenAI, Google reject UK’s AI copyright plan • POLITICO

Joseph Bambridge:

»

Leading AI companies OpenAI and Google have rejected the U.K. government’s preferred solution to the thorny issue of AI and copyright.

Their positions, set out in responses to a consultation which closed in February, will pile further pressure on the government over the proposals, which have already sparked protests from creatives and lawmakers.

The submissions were requested by the U.K. parliament’s Science, Innovation and Technology Committee, after representatives of both companies declined to give evidence to MPs on their respective positions.

The government’s “preferred option” in the consultation proposed amending copyright law to allow AI companies to train their models on public content for commercial purposes without permission from rights holders, unless rights holders “reserve their rights” by opting out.

The changes would be coupled with greater transparency requirements on AI firms, according to the government’s proposal.

POLITICO has reported that ministers plan to commit to publishing reviews into technical solutions for how these conditions could be met in a bid to quell criticism of the plans.

But in its response to the consultation, OpenAI said experience from other jurisdictions including the EU shows that opt-out models face “significant implementation challenges,” while transparency obligations could see developers “deprioritize the market.”

“The U.K. has a rare opportunity to cement itself as the AI capital of Europe by making choices that avoid policy uncertainty, foster innovation, and drive economic growth,” the company said, calling for a broad copyright exemption.

«

A story repeated again and again: rapacious company says that if you make its life harder, well, then, you’re shooting yourself in the foot, so of course you have to exempt it from all the normal laws that apply to smaller companies.
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‘Netflix levy’ would ‘price out’ consumers, says Irish minister for media • RTE

»

Minister for Media Patrick O’Donovan has expressed his opposition to proposals for a levy on streaming services like Netflix, saying that people would be priced out of being able to purchase entertainment services.

Speaking on RTÉ’s The Week in Politics, Mr O’Donovan said he did not see why a so-called ‘Netflix levy’ would be imposed on consumers, and would bring a memo to the Cabinet on the matter.

The legislation that established Comisiún na Méan provided for the streaming levy to be charged in order to provide funding for the production of home-produced programming.

Preparations for applying the levy had been taking place during the term of the previous minister, Catherine Martin.

Under the proposed changes Mr O’Donovan intends bringing to the legislation, the concept of levies on streaming platforms will be retained, but the decision to action such levies will have to be agreed by the minister.

«

The proposal is hardly gigantic: no fixed figure set, but perhaps 2-3% of each streamer’s national income. Hard to see how that would lead them to price people out of buying them. Plus what happened to the much-vaunted advertising version, which is at a lower price? The idea is that the levy then funds local productions.
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Doge’s attack on social security causing ‘complete, utter chaos’, staff says • The Guardian

Michael Sainato:

»

Office closures, staffing and service cuts, and policy changes at the Social Security Administration (SSA) have caused “complete, utter chaos” and are threatening to send the agency into a “death spiral”, according to workers at the agency.

The SSA operates the largest government program in the US, administering social insurance programs, including retirement, disability and survivor benefits.

An average of almost 69 million Americans per month will receive a social security benefit in 2025, totaling about $1.6tn in benefits paid during the year and accounting for 22% of the federal budget. While expensive and challenged by an ageing population, social security remains overwhelmingly popular with Americans. But the agency has been dubbed a “Ponzi scheme” by Elon Musk, the billionaire whose so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) is currently slashing its staff and budgets.

“They have these ‘concepts of plans’ that they’re hoping are sticking but in reality, are really hurting American people,” said a longtime SSA employee and military veteran who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. “No one knows what’s going on. They’re just coming up with ideas at the top of their head.”

The SSA website has crashed several times this month. Wired reported Doge staff want to migrate all social security data and rewrite code in months, which could cause system collapse and further outages.

The agency plans to eliminate the jobs of 7,000 workers at the agency through voluntary buyouts, resignations or firings, though the union representing SSA employees anticipate even more firings beyond cutting staff to 50,000 workers.

«

This is not going to be fixed quickly, or perhaps at all. The question is what the US will look like in the aftermath of all this. Tariffs hitting consumers; veterans and social security having payments delayed or denied. It’s a recipe for an uprising – except most of the people are far too old to take part in real rioting on the street.
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TikTok gets another 75-day reprieve from ban • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

»

U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday said that he is signing an executive order to keep TikTok running for an additional 75 days as his administration continues to work on the sale of the social network’s U.S. operations.

TikTok was barred from operating in the United States when the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act went into effect on January 19, but Trump at the time ordered the Department of Justice not to enforce the law for a 75-day period. The window was set to expire on Saturday, April 5 if TikTok did not reach a deal to sell to an American company, but TikTok now has another two and a half months.

«

“Ehh, just don’t enforce the law! What could be the harm in that?”
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Trump tariffs terrify board game designers • Ars Technica

Nate Anderson:

»

Board game designer and entrepreneur Jamey Stegmaier has published hit games like Scythe and Wingspan—the latter a personal favorite of mine, with a delightfully gentle theme about birds—but this week found him in a gloomy mood.

“Last night I tried to work on a new game I’m brainstorming,” he wrote in a blog post on Thursday, “but it’s really hard to create something for the future when that future looks so grim. I mostly just found myself staring blankly at the enormity of the newly announced 54% tariff on goods manufactured in China and imported to the US.”

Most US board games are made in China, though Germany (the home of modern hobby board gaming) also has manufacturing facilities. While printed content, such as card games, can be manufactured in the US, it’s far harder to find anyone who can make intricate board pieces like bespoke wooden bits and custom dice. And if you can, the price is often astronomical. “I recall getting quoted a cost of $10 for just a standard empty box from a company in the US that specializes in making boxes,” Stegmaier noted—though a complete game can be produced and boxed in China for that same amount.

Meredith Placko is the CEO of Steve Jackson Games, which produces titles like Munchkin, and she had a similar take. “Some people ask, ‘Why not manufacture in the US?’ I wish we could,” she wrote in a post on Thursday. “But the infrastructure to support full-scale boardgame production—specialty dice making, die-cutting, custom plastic and wood components—doesn’t meaningfully exist here yet. I’ve gotten quotes. I’ve talked to factories. Even when the willingness is there, the equipment, labour, and timelines simply aren’t.”

«

Related: Switch 2 shipments to the US uncertain due to tariffs.
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Here’s the iPhone. Here’s the iPhone with tariffs • WSJ

Joanna Stern, Adrienne Tong and Nicole Nguyen:

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Take a look at this iPhone 16 Pro. Your cost, for the 256GB version, is $1,100. The cost of all the hardware inside—aka the bill of materials—was about $550 to Apple when the phone was introduced, says Wayne Lam, research analyst at TechInsights, which breaks down major products. Throw in assembly and testing and Apple’s cost rises to around $580. Even when you account for Apple’s advertising budget and all the included services—iMessage, iCloud, etc.—there’s still a healthy profit margin.

Now factor in the newly announced tariff for goods from China, which currently totals 54%. The cost rises to around $850. That profit margin would shrink dramatically if Apple didn’t up the price. And you don’t become a trillion-dollar gadget company by charging for things at cost.

An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment on the company’s pricing plans or manufacturing details.

So what about that American-made iPhone? Wouldn’t it at least save on tariffs? Apple would still pay levies on the device’s many imported parts. Plus, a manufacturing move to the U.S. would be “a massive, mammoth undertaking” that would take years, says Barton Crockett, senior research analyst at brokerage firm Rosenblatt Securities. 

And the phone itself would likely cost more—a lot more. The assembly ecosystem in China is labor intensive and wouldn’t make economic sense in the U.S., Crockett explains. “It’s not clear you can make a competitively priced smartphone here.”

By Lam’s estimates, the assembly labor that might cost $30 per phone in China could cost $300 in the U.S. And if every single component, from the touchscreen display to the internal storage were built here? Yep, a bajillion dollars. And maybe a magic wand.

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There’s a ridiculous amount of magical thinking being used to support Trump’s tariffs, which are nonsensical on their face – based on trade deficits rather than actual tariffs (this More Or Less podcast episode explains it). Once these price changes start to hit, things are going to get wild.
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I study measles. I’m terrified we’re headed for an epidemic • The New York Times

Michael Mina:

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We used to think of measles outbreaks in the United States as isolated events: short-lived and confined to close-knit communities with low vaccination rates. A flare here, a bubble there. But as those bubbles grow and converge, the United States could be at risk for tens of thousands of cases.

Measles was declared eliminated in this country in 2000. That didn’t mean the virus disappeared. It meant we stopped it from spreading freely. It was a hard-won public health triumph made possible by decades of vaccination. But that protection is now unraveling.

Vaccine skepticism has become increasingly mainstream, amplified by pandemic-era backlash, a torrent of online misinformation and support from the new health and human services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has been at the center of vaccine misinformation for over a decade. A growing outbreak in Texas, and cases in over a dozen states, shows how fragile our defenses have become.

Measles is among the most contagious viruses known. A single case can cause dozens more in places where people are unvaccinated. Infants too young for vaccination, immune-compromised people and the elderly are all at risk. Measles isn’t just a fever and rash. It can cause pneumonia, brain inflammation, permanent disability and death. The virus can go dormant in the body only to re-emerge a decade or so after infection and cause rapid and fatal brain tissue deterioration.

It also has a more insidious legacy, one I helped discover. In 2015, I led a team that found that measles can erase the immune system’s protective memory of prior infections. This “immune amnesia,” as it’s called, leaves people vulnerable to viruses and bacteria they were once protected against.

…The current measles outbreak, with more than 480 cases, largely in unvaccinated children, is gearing up to be the worst in years. And it’s likely just the beginning. Recent studies estimate that more than nine million American children are susceptible to measles. The number of people susceptible balloons further still when you add the 3.6 million infants who are too young to be vaccinated and the millions of immunocompromised Americans who can’t safely receive the vaccine.

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Two children have died so far in Texas. It’s the most insane thing ever, though vaccine refusal was rising in some states. The CDC’s stats on this are years out of date.

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‘If you want dystopia, look out your window!’ Black Mirror is back – and going beyond tech hell • The Guardian

Gabriel Tate:

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There is a more reflective, almost nostalgic tone to this seventh season. The episode Plaything flashes back to [Charlie] Brooker’s early years as a gaming journalist in a Bandersnatch-adjacent slice of computer-induced madness; Eulogy immerses Paul Giamatti in his memories as he literally enters decades-old photos; gaslighting parable Bête Noire forces Siena Kelly’s chocolatier to reckon with youthful misdemeanours; Hotel Reverie stars Emma Corrin as a 1940s matinee idol falling for Issa Rae’s modern film star, who plays her white, male love interest in an AI remake of a vintage romance.

“Quite a lot of the technology is being used to relive things or bring them back into the present,” concedes Brooker. “It wasn’t conscious, but then I have a lot more past than future. There’s probably more social commentary and more emotive or vulnerable episodes. That doesn’t mean we don’t go to disturbing places or deliver those chills, but people come to Black Mirror expecting to be surprised, so you can’t give them exactly what they want. I’d say there’s a little less dystopia. If you want that, there’s a 24-hour panel showing it called your window. You don’t necessarily want to see something saying: things are going to get worse.”

…As a family man, Brooker – “the most empathetic father I’ve ever seen,” reckons Rhoades – has some extra skin in the game. “If I play my hand too overtly, my sons will get all secretive about this stuff,” he shrugs. “Luckily, they haven’t got bogged down in the Andrew Tate world of algorithms spewing up shit, but I do worry about them sitting there in front of YouTube and then before you know it …” He grimaces. “I’ve installed all the parental controls you can, but it’s more that I’m struggling to keep up with the weird things they’ll come out with. [Bizarre YouTube animation] Skibidi Toilet is their pop music, their equivalent of ‘Turn that noise down!’ I’d have been into that at their age, I reckon.”

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The new series is available from Thursday 10 April. The trailer looks very interesting.
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