Wounds in humans take three times longer to heal than those in primates. Why? It might be to do with hair. CC-licensed photo by j bizzie on Flickr.

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A selection of 9 links for you. Is this thing on? 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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Co-op confirms data theft after DragonForce ransomware claims attack • Bleeping Computer

Lawrence Abrams:

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The Co-op cyberattack is far worse than initially reported, with the company now confirming that data was stolen for a significant number of current and past customers.

“As a result of ongoing forensic investigations, we now know that the hackers were able to access and extract data from one of our systems,” Co-op told BleepingComputer.

“The accessed data included information relating to a significant number of our current and past members.”

“This data includes Co-op Group members’ personal data such as names and contact details, and did not include members’ passwords, bank or credit card details, transactions or information relating to any members’ or customers’ products or services with the Co-op Group.”

On Wednesday, UK retail giant Co-op downplayed the cyberattack, stating that it had shut down portions of its IT systems after detecting an attempted intrusion into its network.

However, soon after the news broke, BleepingComputer learned that the company did indeed suffer a breach utilizing tactics associated with Scattered Spider/Octo Temptest, but their defenses prevented the threat actors from performing significant damage to the network.

Sources told BleepingComputer that it is believed the attack occurred on April 22, with the threat actors utilizing tactics similar to the attack on Marks and Spencer. The threat actors reportedly conducted a social engineering attack that allowed them to reset an employee’s password, which was then used to breach the network.

Once they gained access to the network, they stole the Windows NTDS.dit file, a database for Windows Active Directory Services that contains password hashes for Windows accounts.

Co-op is now in the process of rebuilding all of its Windows domain controllers and hardening Entra ID with the help of Microsoft DART. KPMG is assisting with AWS support.

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There are only two sorts of organisations: those which have been hacked, and those which are going to be hacked. The spate of ransomware attacks in the UK against large high street chains has been greatly helped by Easter (four-day weekend) and two bank holidays close to each other. Long weekends make for excellent opportunities for hackers to nibble away at defences.
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DOJ confirms it wants to break up Google’s ad business • Ars Technica

Ryan Whitwam:

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We sometimes think of Google as a search company, but that’s merely incidental—Google is really the world’s biggest advertiser. That’s why the antitrust case focused on Google’s ad tech business could have even more lasting effects than cases focused on search or mobile apps. The court ruled against Google last month, and now both sides are lining up to present their proposed remedies in a trial later this year.

In Friday’s hearing, US District Judge Leonie Brinkema set the beginning of that trial for September 22 of this year. Just like the search case, the Department of Justice (DOJ) is aiming to hack off pieces of Google to level the playing field. Specifically, the DOJ is asking the court to force Google to sell two parts of the ad business: the ad exchange and the publisher ad server. The ad exchange is the world’s largest marketplace for bidding on advertising space. The ad server, meanwhile, is a tool that publishers use to list and sell ads on their sites.

While Google lost the liability phase of the case, it won on the subject of ad networks. The court decided that the government had not proven that Google’s acquisition of ad networks like DoubleClick and Admeld had harmed competition. So, Google won’t have to worry about losing those parts of the business.

The government’s proposed breakup would come in phases, beginning with a requirement that Google provide real-time access to bidding data to third-party vendors. Google objects to this as it would essentially force the company to develop systems that don’t currently exist and then release them as open source products. The timeline for such an effort, the company believes, makes this infeasible.

Following that move, the DOJ wants to see Google sell the aforementioned components of its advertising business. Naturally, Google opposes this as well.

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Naturally, Google is going to appeal this, and there’s no obvious reason why the case wouldn’t reach the Supreme Court. So be prepared to wait a few years for a decisive outcome.
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Firefox could be doomed without Google search deal, says Mozilla executive • The Verge

Lauren Feiner:

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while Firefox — whose CFO is testifying as Google presents its defense — competes directly with Chrome, it warns that losing the lucrative default payments from Google could threaten its existence.

Firefox makes up about 90% of Mozilla’s revenue, according to [Eric] Muhlheim, the finance chief for the organization’s for-profit arm — which in turn helps fund the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation. About 85% of that revenue comes from its deal with Google, he added.

Losing that revenue all at once would mean Mozilla would have to make “significant cuts across the company,” Muhlheim testified, and warned of a “downward spiral” that could happen if the company had to scale back product engineering investments in Firefox, making it less attractive to users. That kind of spiral, he said, could “put Firefox out of business.” That could also mean less money for nonprofit efforts like open source web tools and an assessment of how AI can help fight climate change.

Ironically, Muhlheim seemed to suggest that could cement the very market dominance the court seeks to remedy. Firefox’s underlying Gecko browser engine is “the only browser engine that is held not by Big Tech but by a nonprofit,” he said.

…On cross-examination by the DOJ, Muhlheim conceded that it would be preferable not to rely on one customer for the vast majority of its revenue, regardless of the court’s ruling in this case. And, he agreed, another browser company, Opera, has already managed to make more money from browser ads than it does from search deals.

…Judge Amit Mehta asked Muhlheim if he’d agree that it would benefit Mozilla if at least one other company that matched Google’s quality and ability to monetize searches existed. “If we were suddenly in that world,” Muhlheim said, “that would be a world that would be better for Mozilla.”

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The tide is going out, and we are indeed discovering who’s been swimming naked.
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Reddit issuing ‘formal legal demands’ against researchers who conducted secret AI experiment on users • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

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Reddit’s top lawyer, Ben Lee, said the company is considering legal action against researchers from the University of Zurich who ran what he called an “improper and highly unethical experiment” by surreptitiously deploying AI chatbots in a popular debate subreddit. The University of Zurich told 404 Media that the experiment results will not be published and said the university is investigating how the research was conducted.

As we reported Monday, researchers at the University of Zurich ran an “unauthorized” and secret experiment on Reddit users in the r/changemyview subreddit in which dozens of AI bots engaged in debates with users about controversial issues. In some cases, the bots generated responses which claimed they were rape survivors, worked with trauma patients, or were Black people who were opposed to the Black Lives Matter movement. The researchers used a separate AI to mine the posting history of the people they were responding to in an attempt to determine personal details about them that they believed would make their bots more effective, such as their age, race, gender, location, and political beliefs. 

In a post Monday evening, Lee said Reddit the company was not aware of the experiment until after it was run, and that the company is considering legal action against the University of Zurich and the researchers who did the study.

“What this University of Zurich team did is deeply wrong on both a moral and legal level. It violates academic research and human rights norms, and is prohibited by Reddit’s user agreement and rules, in addition to the subreddit rules,” Lee wrote.

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It’s very like the experiment that Facebook ran wayy back in 2014 to find out whether showing people sad content would make them sad, and happy content happy. (It did.) No explicit consent in either case, but this one is shinier because you can get chatbots to do some of the work.
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State Bar of California admits it used AI to develop exam questions • Los Angeles Times

Jenny Jarvie:

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Nearly two months after hundreds of prospective California lawyers complained that their bar exams were plagued with technical problems and irregularities, the state’s legal licensing body has caused fresh outrage by admitting that some multiple-choice questions were developed with the aid of artificial intelligence.

The State Bar of California said in a news release Monday that it will ask the California Supreme Court to adjust test scores for those who took its February bar exam.

But it declined to acknowledge significant problems with its multiple-choice questions — even as it revealed that a subset of questions were recycled from a first-year law student exam, while others were developed with the assistance of AI by ACS Ventures, the State Bar’s independent psychometrician.

“The debacle that was the February 2025 bar exam is worse than we imagined,” said Mary Basick, assistant dean of academic skills at UC Irvine Law School. “I’m almost speechless. Having the questions drafted by non-lawyers using artificial intelligence is just unbelievable.”

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This feels like the Homer/Bart meme of “so FAR”. You think that’s unbelievable? The year is young, we can do much worse.
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Apple changes US App Store rules to let apps link to external payment systems • TechCrunch

Ivan Mehta:

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Apple has changed its App Store rules in the U.S. to let apps link users to their own websites so they can buy subscriptions or other digital goods.

This change comes after a U.S. court ruled in favor of Epic Games in a case against the iPhone maker, ordering the latter not to prohibit apps from including features that could redirect users to their own websites for making digital purchases.

“The App Review Guidelines have been updated for compliance with a United States court decision regarding buttons, external links, and other calls to action in apps,” Apple said in a blog post for developers.

The lawsuit that Epic Games brought in 2020 concerned the amount of control Apple had over transactions done in apps hosted on its App Store. In 2021, the game studio won an injunction that ordered Apple to give developers more options to redirect users to their own websites so they could avoid paying the tech giant a 30% cut.

After its appeal against the injunction failed, Apple last year started allowing other apps to link out and use non-Apple payment mechanisms, but it still took a 27% commission and added what critics called “scare screens.”

This week’s ruling means Apple must stop showing these “scare screens,” and the company has already removed guidelines around how these screens and links should contain certain language.

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The court moved relatively quickly, and had a lot of absolutely damning evidence from internal emails. Plus Apple’s finance chief is accused by the judge of lying under oath, which is astonishing. If that were to be proven, rather than a matter of the judge’s opinion, you’d expect Apple to fire him.

So let’s see if the sky falls for Apple now that companies can link out untroubled. (It won’t.)
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Protecting Windows users from Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation • The Old New Thing

Raymond Chen:

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Some time ago, I retold a story from a colleague about how Janet Jackson’s song Rhythm Nation caused a specific model of laptop to crash due to the song containing a natural resonant frequency of the hard drive. (Part 2.)

One thing I wondered was how long this filter remained present.

I learned that the filter remained present at least until Windows 7, because it was then that Microsoft imposed a new rule on Audio Processing Objects (APOs), which is the formal name for these audio filter thingies, such as the one that filtered out the offending frequency. The new rule was that it must be possible to disable all APOs.

The vendor applied for an exception to this rule on the grounds that disabling their APO could result in physical damage to the computer. If it were possible to disable their APO, word would get out that “You can get heavier bass if you go through these steps,” and of course you want more bass, right? I mean, who doesn’t want more bass? So people would uncheck the box and enjoy richer bass for a while, and then at some point in the future, the computer would crash mysteriously or (worse) produce incorrect results.

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Janet Jackson: responsible not just for wardrobe malfunction (remember?) but also computer malfunction. Well played, madam.
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Our wounds heal slower than the cuts and scrapes of other primates • New Scientist

Chris Simms:

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Human wounds take almost three times as long to heal as the injuries of other mammals, including chimpanzees, which are among our closest living relatives. It isn’t clear why, but it may be an evolutionary adaptation connected to the loss of most of our body hair.

People have sluggish healing compared with other animals. To see just how slow this is, Akiko Matsumoto-Oda at the University of the Ryukyus in Japan and her colleagues turned to four other primate species: velvet monkeys (Chlorocebus pygerythrus), Sykes’ monkeys (Cercopithecus albogularis), olive baboons (Papio anubis) and chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes).

The researchers anaesthetised at least five of each kind of primate, shaved off a small patch of their hair and created a circular wound 40 millimetres across, which they treated with an antibiotic ointment and covered with gauze for a day to protect against infection.

Photographs and measurements of the wounds, taken every couple of days, revealed that they all the healed at about 0.61 millimetres per day.

Next, Matsumoto-Oda and her colleagues looked at 24 patients at the University of the Ryukyus Hospital after they had skin tumours removed, finding that these wounds healed at a rate of just 0.25 millimetres per day.

The researchers also conducted studies on mice and rats, and found pretty much the same healing rate as in the non-human primates. This suggests that there may be an evolutionarily optimal healing rate for most mammals, but not humans, says Matsumoto-Oda.

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Why? Nobody knows. More hair might mean more stem cells so faster healing. Or who knows?
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Ask Shrimsley: would I be better off speaking to a chatbot?

Robert Shrimsley (well, possibly):

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Funny you should ask. As part of this column’s constant efforts to improve our service (save money) and because the author quite fancied a long bank holiday weekend, this week’s column is being brought to you by our new AI chatbot service. We recognise this service is more useful to our online readers but, honestly, it could save us a packet . . . 

Hello. Please tell me in a few words how I can help you today? 

I’m sorry I don’t really have that option. Here is a menu of questions I can definitely help you with. Problems with children; problems with partners; problems with other family members; problems with colleagues; how to cancel an Amazon Prime subscription; how to get your kids off their phones; where are all the millionaires going; how to turn off the lights in a hotel room; who are yellow wine gums for?

I’m sorry, I do not have a head to boil. Would you prefer to speak to a human?

Sadly, all our human is tied up at the moment. Wait times on our human are currently running at seven days due to a high volume of good weather. Perhaps you can ask me something else.

OK, relationship advice, I can help you with that. I am knowledgeable of a number of relationships and they have all gone sour, so my generative AI has a lot of material to draw on. Please describe your relationship issues, likening it as much as possible to one of the following: Johnny Depp and Amber Heard; erm that’s about it at the moment.

Well I agree that your wife sounds awful but you married her so what did you expect? Also I would need to hear her account of this matter before I can offer genuinely helpful advice.

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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