A team of ex-military friends aim to climb Everest using a dramatically different acclimatisation method for its thin oxygen levels. CC-licensed photo by Mário Simoes on Flickr.
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A selection of 11 links for you. Noble effort. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Welcome to the age of paranoia as deepfakes and scams abound • Wired via Ars Technica
Lauren Goode:
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These days, when Nicole Yelland receives a meeting request from someone she doesn’t already know, she conducts a multistep background check before deciding whether to accept. Yelland, who works in public relations for a Detroit-based nonprofit, says she’ll run the person’s information through Spokeo, a personal data aggregator that she pays a monthly subscription fee to use. If the contact claims to speak Spanish, Yelland says, she will casually test their ability to understand and translate trickier phrases. If something doesn’t quite seem right, she’ll ask the person to join a Microsoft Teams call—with their camera on.
If Yelland sounds paranoid, that’s because she is. In January, before she started her current nonprofit role, Yelland says, she got roped into an elaborate scam targeting job seekers. “Now, I do the whole verification rigamarole any time someone reaches out to me,” she tells WIRED.
Digital imposter scams aren’t new; messaging platforms, social media sites, and dating apps have long been rife with fakery. In a time when remote work and distributed teams have become commonplace, professional communications channels are no longer safe, either. The same artificial intelligence tools that tech companies promise will boost worker productivity are also making it easier for criminals and fraudsters to construct fake personas in seconds.
On LinkedIn, it can be hard to distinguish a slightly touched-up headshot of a real person from a too-polished, AI-generated facsimile. Deepfake videos are getting so good that longtime email scammers are pivoting to impersonating people on live video calls. According to the US Federal Trade Commission, reports of job and employment related scams nearly tripled from 2020 to 2024, and actual losses from those scams have increased from $90m to $500m.
Yelland says the scammers that approached her back in January were impersonating a real company, one with a legitimate product. The “hiring manager” she corresponded with over email also seemed legit, even sharing a slide deck outlining the responsibilities of the role they were advertising. But during the first video interview, Yelland says, the scammers refused to turn their cameras on during a Microsoft Teams meeting and made unusual requests for detailed personal information, including her driver’s license number. Realizing she’d been duped, Yelland slammed her laptop shut.
These kinds of schemes have become so widespread that AI startups have emerged promising to detect other AI-enabled deepfakes, including GetReal Labs and Reality Defender.
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No doubt AI-powered. Everyone’s selling shovels to each other in the new gold rush.
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They want to climb Everest in a week using an anesthetic gas. Critics warn it’s dangerous • CNN
Amy Woodyatt:
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It started in the pub, over a couple of beers. Four ex-military friends had been speaking about taking on an adventurous trip to raise money for a veterans’ charity, when one brought up the prospect of summiting Everest.
“We’re all busy people. My response was, ‘No way I can spend four to six, maybe even eight weeks out climbing Everest — it’s just almost impossible,” Al Carns, a British lawmaker told CNN. [The multi-week period would be spent acclimatising to the high altitude at base camp and higher.]
But one of his friends had a counter challenge: he had heard about a novel way of altering the acclimatization process that could allow them to summit the 8,849-meter (29,032 feet) peak in under a week — by inhaling a noble gas called xenon ahead of the expedition.
This month, the men — a pilot, a politician, a businessman and an entrepreneur — will attempt to summit Everest in seven days: they will fly from the UK to Kathmandu, where they will take a helicopter to base camp, and attempt to summit the mountain in a few days, before returning home in what would be a historic first.
This, they hope, will be made possible by inhaling the noble gas xenon ten days prior, as part of a tour with Furtenbach Adventures.
…Furtenbach was convinced of [xenon’s] ability to increase the body’s production of erythropoietin, also known as EPO, a hormone naturally produced by human kidneys to stimulate red blood cell production.
“One side effect of using Xenon is that it triggers the body’s EPO production, and that results in an increase of red blood cells in the blood — and that’s the same effect that you have when you are acclimatizing at real altitude,” he added.
Furtenbach told CNN he first tested the effects of gas on himself while summiting Argentina’s 6,961-meter Aconcagua, and one year later took it to Everest to trial with a larger team. At the time of speaking with CNN, he had used xenon five times.
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I guess we’ll find out whether this works in a week or two. Let’s hope it does.
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Cryptocurrency boss’ daughter escapes kidnapping attempt in Paris • Euronews
Estelle Nilsson-Julien:
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A woman said to be the daughter of a French cryptocurrency boss narrowly avoided being kidnapped in Paris on Tuesday morning.
According to Le Parisien newspaper, the woman, who was out walking with her partner and their young child, was attacked at just after 8am on a street in Paris’ 11th arrondissement.
The French media said her partner managed to fend off the masked assailants who were trying to force the woman into a white van.
A video of the attack, which was shared online, also showed passers-by helping the couple. One of them picked up a gun belonging to an assailant — which had fallen to the ground — and pointed it back at them, while another threw a red fire extinguisher in the direction of the masked men. After failing in their kidnapping attempt, the attackers then drove away.
In recent months, across France and Europe a growing number cryptocurrency bosses and their families have been kidnapped or have escaped kidnapping attempts.
In early May, the father of a cryptocurrency boss spent three days in captivity, after he was kidnapped while walking his dog in Paris’ 14th arrondissement. His kidnappers demanded a multi-million euro ransom in exchange for his release, sending a video of his mutilated finger to his son, according to French broadcaster Franceinfo.
Meanwhile, in January, David Balland, the 36-year-old co-founder of French crypto company Ledger, and his partner were kidnapped from their home in the small commune of Méreau, which is located in central-northern France. Ledger co-founder Eric Larchevêque sounded the alarm after he received a video of Balland’s severed finger, accompanied by a cryptocurrency ransom demand.
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Of course it’s not just cryptocurrency riches – Kim Kardashian is about to testify in the trial of men accused of an armed robbery targeting her in 2016.
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This year there have been zero public deadly mass shootings in the US • The Washington Post
James Fox is a professor of criminology:
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When it comes to crime statistics, bad news is big news. But to make sound policy, we need to hear good news, too, like the recent decline in mass shootings.
As of May 10, there have been four shootings in the United States in which four or more victims died this year, compared with 11 at the same juncture last year. It’s the lowest incident count over the first four months of a year since at least 2006, when researchers started the Mass Killing Database, which is maintained by the Associated Press, USA Today and Northeastern University.
The drop builds on year over year data, which shows that mass shootings declined from 39 in 2023 to 30 in 2024.
A similar pattern has emerged for mass shootings with fewer or no fatalities. According to the Gun Violence Archive, shootings with at least four victims killed or wounded declined from 659 in 2023 to 503 last year, a 24% drop. By May 10, the numbers plunged further, from 152 last year to 106 this year.
Of course, the heartening although short-term trend over the last 16 months does not guarantee safer days ahead. In 2023, America experienced the highest number of deadly mass shootings on record. It may just be a case of criminological gravity — what goes up eventually comes down.
Even so, the drop underscores an often-misunderstood fact about deadly mass shootings: They have not skyrocketed over the past couple of decades, especially considering the growth in population.
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Certainly – fingers crossed – haven’t heard anyone making big of this small figure. But it is remarkable.
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Amazon hopes AI gives streaming ‘pause ads’ new momentum • Variety
Brian Steinberg:
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Amazon hopes to get more marketers stuck on one of the most popular commercial formats in streaming: pause ads.
The company said Monday it would introduce artificial intelligence to help generate “pause ads” that can play off whatever program the viewer is watching. Imagine, for example, if someone watching a sad moment during a romantic comedy stopped the action and encountered an on-screen message for eye drops or tissues, or if a viewer in the middle of watching a high-speed car chase halted the stream and encountered a promotion from the manufacturer behind one of the vehicles.
Amazon intends to build the new commercials using A.I. that can understand immediately what kind of show or movie is being watched and what attributes pertain to any scene on screen. The technology creates a “contextual advertising experience that dynamically aligns the ad message with the content viewers are watching – creating a natural and relevant connection,” says Alan Moss, Amazon’s vice president of global ad sales, in a statement. The hope is that subscribers will see the new pause-screen pitches as “extensions of the entertainment experience, not interruptions.”
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Yeah that’ll definitely work because when you watch a car chase you think about buying the car. For sure. The belief that we’re just lab rats chasing cheese is so embedded in this thinking.
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Klarna hiring back human help after going all-in on AI • Gizmodo
AJ Dellinger:
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As soon as AI-powered chatbots seemed functional enough, buy now, pay later service Klarna went all in on them, promising to swap much of its human workforce with robotic replacements. Now it’s on a human hiring spree after running into the limitations of AI, according to Bloomberg.
Company CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski recently announced that the company intends to make sure that customers will always have the option to speak to a human when they need service. It is, of course, doing that in a way that presents its own concerns—claiming that it will structure its new human-powered customer service cohort will be fully remote and with a “Uber type of setup” that seems like it will rely on contract work and will reportedly tap into an employee pool of students and people in rural populations. But if the best we can do is exploitative work or out of work entirely, I guess the former at least represents the slightest of improvements.
“From a brand perspective, a company perspective…I just think it’s so critical that you are clear to your customer that there will be always a human if you want,” Siemiatkowski said, per Bloomberg.
It is a starkly different position than the company took just two years ago. Back in 2023, Siemiatkowski basically threw himself at AI, saying that he wanted his company to be OpenAI’s “favourite guinea pig.” The company instituted a hiring freeze and set out to replace as many humans on its payroll as possible with AI.
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Headcount was cut from 3,800 to 2,000. But:
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Klarna claimed that AI chatbots were handling two-thirds of customer service conversations within their first month of deployment and went on to claim that AI was doing the work of 700 customer service agents. The problem is that it’s really doing the work of 700 really bad agents, and that quality took a toll.
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‘Tone deaf’: US tech company responsible for global IT outage to cut jobs and use AI • The Guardian
Josh Taylor:
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The cybersecurity company that became a household name after causing a massive global IT outage last year has announced it will cut 5% of its workforce in part due to “AI efficiency”.
In a note to staff earlier this week, released in stock market filings in the US, CrowdStrike’s chief executive, George Kurtz, announced that 500 positions, or 5% of its workforce, would be cut globally, citing AI efficiencies created in the business.
“We’re operating in a market and technology inflection point, with AI reshaping every industry, accelerating threats, and evolving customer needs,” he said.
Kurtz said AI “flattens our hiring curve, and helps us innovate from idea to product faster”, adding it “drives efficiencies across both the front and back office”.
“AI is a force multiplier throughout the business,” he said.
Other reasons for the cuts included market demand for sustained growth and expanding the product offering. The company expects to incur up to US$53m in costs as a result of the job cuts.
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That last bit, about needing to cut because of market demand, seems contradictory. But of course AI is going to magically sort it out! Perhaps it can do the customer service next time there’s a calamity.
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Microsoft laying off about 6,000 people, or 3% of its workforce
Jordan Novet:
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Microsoft on Tuesday said that it’s laying off 3% of employees across all levels, teams and geographies, affecting about 6,000 people.
“We continue to implement organizational changes necessary to best position the company for success in a dynamic marketplace,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement to CNBC.
The company reported better-than-expected results, with $25.8bn in quarterly net income, and an upbeat forecast in late April.
Microsoft had 228,000 employees worldwide at the end of June. On Tuesday Microsoft’s home state of Washington said the company was reducing headcount in the state by 1,985 people, including 1,510 in office.
In total, it’s likely Microsoft’s largest round of layoffs since the elimination of 10,000 roles in 2023. In January the company announced a small round of layoffs that were performance-based. These new job cuts are not related to performance, the spokesperson said.
One objective is to reduce layers of management, the spokesperson said. In January Amazon announced that it was getting rid of some employees after noticing “unnecessary layers” in its organization.
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Amazon “noticed” unnecessary layers? Anyway, it’s very much the accordion theory of employment: firms reach a certain size, get bigger, then they get smaller, then bigger, then..
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Using AI to stop tech support scams in Chrome • Google Online Security Blog
Jasika Bawa, Andy Lim, and Xinghui Lu:
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Chrome has always worked with Google Safe Browsing to help keep you safe online. Now, with this week’s launch of Chrome 137, Chrome will offer an additional layer of protection using the on-device Gemini Nano large language model (LLM). This new feature will leverage the LLM to generate signals that will be used by Safe Browsing in order to deliver higher confidence verdicts about potentially dangerous sites like tech support scams.
Initial research using LLMs has shown that they are relatively effective at understanding and classifying the varied, complex nature of websites. As such, we believe we can leverage LLMs to help detect scams at scale and adapt to new tactics more quickly. But why on-device? Leveraging LLMs on-device allows us to see threats when users see them. We’ve found that the average malicious site exists for less than 10 minutes, so on-device protection allows us to detect and block attacks that haven’t been crawled before.
The on-device approach also empowers us to see threats the way users see them. Sites can render themselves differently for different users, often for legitimate purposes (e.g. to account for device differences, offer personalization, provide time-sensitive content), but sometimes for illegitimate purposes (e.g. to evade security crawlers) – as such, having visibility into how sites are presenting themselves to real users enhances our ability to assess the web.
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There’s a lot more “how it works”, but the idea that a mini LLM can be running locally on your machine and spot scams is quite remarkable from the perspective of even a couple of years ago.
Helps Google explain why Chrome is munching through your RAM too.
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How Xi sparked China’s electricity revolution
Nassos Stylianou, Jana Tauschinski and Edward White:
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When Xi Jinping took over the leadership of the Chinese Communist party in late 2012 he quickly identified a national security vulnerability.
China had just leapfrogged Japan to become the world’s second-biggest economy and was fast becoming America’s chief rival nuclear-armed superpower. But the country of 1.4bn people was highly dependent on foreign nations for energy.
Reliance on oil and coal imports had surged to record highs, exposing China to potential supply disruptions via chokepoints in trade channels from the disputed waters of the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea to the Strait of Malacca and the Indian Ocean.
Today, as the world is rocked by Donald Trump’s trade war, the view from the CCP’s leadership compound in Beijing’s Zhongnanhai is starkly different.
China is on its way to becoming the world’s first “electrostate”, with a growing share of its energy coming from electricity and an economy increasingly driven by clean technologies. It offers China a strategic buffer from trade decoupling and rising geopolitical tensions with the US.
The country is not only rapidly advancing towards self-sufficiency in energy from secure domestic sources, but also wields vast power over the markets for the resources and materials that underpin technologies of the future.
“Nobody had been seriously worrying about energy security or supply chains for armaments and critical industries and food because everyone thought that went with the cold war,” says Andrew Gilholm, head of China analysis at consultancy Control Risks. “Meanwhile, China has been working on that for years.”
…Clean energy sectors accounted for a record 10% of the country’s GDP and drove a quarter of its growth last year, according to analysis of official government statistics by the Helsinki-based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.
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And yet electricity is only about 30% of total energy consumption; other countries are at about 20%. See what happens, though, when a country really focuses on energy security.
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Google teases Glasses announcement for I/O next week • UploadVR
David Heaney:
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Google just teased a smart glasses announcement, or at least demo, for its I/O conference, which will take place next Tuesday.
Today Google streamed “The Android Show: I/O Edition”, wherein it detailed a design overhaul for Android and Wear OS, upcoming improvements to Gemini on Android platforms, and UWB support for its Find My Device network, which the company now calls Find Hub.
Near the end of the stream, Google’s President of Android Ecosystem Sameer Samat teased that Google I/O 2025, which takes place next Tuesday, will have “deep dives from developers, the latest on Google Gemini”, and, after putting on a pair of ostensibly smart glasses, “maybe even a few more really cool Android demos”.
“See you on May 20th”, he says as he walks off.
The tease comes one month after Google’s Android XR lead Shahram Izadi demonstrated sleek smart glasses with a small monocular HUD, which the company described as “ conceptual hardware”, on-stage at TED2025.
Google may be hoping to preempt Meta’s launch of its own smart glasses with a monocular HUD, reportedly set for October, though there’s no indication that Google will have an actual product ready before Meta.
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Remarkable that Google is ready to jump back in the smart glasses water again, but maybe everyone has forgotten Google Glass now. Trying to get ahead of Meta, though, seems like a foolish errand. But there’s always a desire in Google to show off rather than lock down products.
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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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