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.

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

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A selection of 9 links for you. 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.

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

Connor Jones:

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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.”

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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:

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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):

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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.

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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:

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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.

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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:

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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.”

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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:

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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.

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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”:

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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.

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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:

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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.)

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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:

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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.

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

Nicholas Carr:

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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.

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If you recognise where the title of the post comes from (clue: 🎪🌚) then you will absolutely love this blogpost.
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• Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified