A determined husband and wife team uncovered a team of hackers stealing garages’ customer data – and got them convicted. CC-licensed photo by Ivan Radic on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Inflated. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
‘We got upset, then we got angry’: the couple who took on one of the UK’s biggest cold-call scams • The Guardian
Alexandra Topping:
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Michael and Jan Reed can remember the moment their family business received its first indelible blow. It was 2015 and three of their regular customers were standing in the reception of their accident repair centre in County Durham. It had been a busy period and, unusually, all three had come to collect their cars at the same time.
One had got a call from an accident management company trying to persuade him to make a personal injury claim. Unusually, the caller knew the make and model of the car and the date of the accident. The second man said the same had happened to him. By the time the third customer confirmed he had also got the cold call, the three of them were pulling out their phones.
“One of the guys said: ‘Well, what number was it?’”, says Jan, brow furrowed at the memory. “They were just getting the mobiles out and saying this number, and then asking me if I knew it. I said: ‘No, I don’t know that number at all’. And they asked: ‘Well, where did they get it from?’”
The men did not have insurance with the same company, had used different brokers and their accidents were unconnected. “And then all three of them turned around,” says Michael. “They went: ‘Well, it must be you guys.’”
…The names, numbers and details of people involved in accidents may seem like rows on a spreadsheet, but they provide lucrative spoils. That information is sold to claims management firms hoping to generate leads for personal injury cases.
The cold-calling gang targeted a million people and hundreds of accident repair garages between 2014 and 2017, according to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).
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The ICO reckons the criminals took about £3m from obtaining and selling the details. Pause and consider how much the cold-calling companies that bought the data must have made. Though – American readers have permission to weep – “UK residents received an average of three spam calls a month between January and June last year”. I think in the US it’s more like three per hour, isn’t it?
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MAGA AI bot network divided on Trump-Epstein backlash • NBC News
Kevin Collier:
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A previously unreported network of hundreds of accounts on X is using artificial intelligence to automatically reply to conservatives with positive messages about people in the Trump administration, researchers say.
But with the MAGA movement split over the administration’s handling of files involving deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, the accounts’ messaging has broken, offering contradictory statements on the issue and revealing the AI-fueled nature of the accounts.
The network, tracked for NBC News by both the social media analytics company Alethea and researchers at Clemson University, consists of more than 400 identified bot accounts, though the number could be far larger, the researchers say. Its accounts offer consistent praise for key Trump figures, particularly support for Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
As often is the case with bot accounts, those viewed by NBC News tended to have only a few dozen followers, and their posts rarely get many views. But a large audience does not appear to be the point. Their effectiveness, if they have any, is in the hope that they contribute to a partisan echo chamber, and that en masse they can “massage perceptions,” said Darren Linvill, the director of Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, which studies online disinformation campaigns.
“They’re not really there to get engagement. They’re there to just be occasionally seen in those replies,” Linvill told NBC News.
The researchers declined to share specifics on how they identified the accounts, but noted they shared a number of distinct trends. All were created, seemingly in batches, around three specific days last year. They frequently punctuate their posts with hashtags, often ones that are irrelevant to the conversation. They post almost exclusively by replying to other users, often to people who pay X for verification and by repeating similarly worded sentiments over and over in short succession. At times, they will respond to someone’s post by repeating it back to them verbatim.
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Hilarious that the bots, or their owners, are getting confused about what their position should be. Once these get unleashed to run on their own, they’re going to go off the rails in no time at all.
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Exhausted man defeats AI model in world coding championship • Ars Technica
Benj Edwards:
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A Polish programmer running on fumes recently accomplished what may soon become impossible: beating an advanced AI model from OpenAI in a head-to-head coding competition. The 10-hour marathon left him “completely exhausted.”
On Wednesday, programmer Przemysław Dębiak (known as “Psyho”), a former OpenAI employee, narrowly defeated the custom AI model in the AtCoder World Tour Finals 2025 Heuristic contest in Tokyo. AtCoder, a Japanese platform that hosts competitive programming contests and maintains global rankings, held what may be the first contest where an AI model competed directly against top human programmers in a major onsite world championship. During the event, the maker of ChatGPT participated as a sponsor and entered an AI model in a special exhibition match titled “Humans vs AI.” Despite the tireless nature of silicon, the company walked away with second place.
“Humanity has prevailed (for now!),” wrote Dębiak on X, noting he had little sleep while competing in several competitions across three days. “I’m completely exhausted. … I’m barely alive.”
The competition required contestants to solve a single complex optimization problem over 600 minutes. The contest echoes the American folk tale of John Henry, the steel-driving man who raced against a steam-powered drilling machine in the 1870s. Like Henry’s legendary battle against industrial automation, Dębiak’s victory represents a human expert pushing themselves to their physical limits to prove that human skill still matters in an age of advancing AI.
Both stories feature exhausting endurance contests—Henry drove steel spikes for hours until his heart gave out, while Dębiak coded for 10 hours on minimal sleep. The parallel extends to the bittersweet nature of both victories: Henry won his race but died from the effort, symbolizing the inevitable march of automation, while Dębiak’s acknowledgment that humanity prevailed “for now” suggests he recognizes this may be a temporary triumph against increasingly capable machines.
While Dębiak won ¥500,000 (£2,500) and survived his ordeal better than the legendary steel driver, the AtCoder World Tour Finals pushes humans and AI models to their limits through complex optimization challenges that have no perfect solution—only incrementally better ones.
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Echoes of Kasparov v Deep Blue and Lee Sedol v AlphaGo. They’re coming for us all.
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Dole Kemp ’96
»
To our many thousands of new subscribers, welcome!
Whether you are a first time visitor or a frequent guest who
hasn’t had a chance to look around recently, we want to let
you know what you can find at the Dole/Kemp web site:Customization – https://www.dolekemp96.org/
If you are using a Netscape 2.0 compatible browser, you can
customize our site to your interests. Tell us what issues are
important to you, what state you are from, and we’ll make a
web site just for you. You’ll get your own personal tool bar
and in box. Each time you visit back, the site checks when
you last visited and puts everything added since then into
your personal in box.About The Team – https://www.dolekemp96.org/about/
Here you can learn more about Bob Dole and Jack Kemp
and their families. Read the very personal story of Bob
Dole’s life – from childhood in Russell, Kansas to World
War II, his injury and recovery, to his service for America in
Congress.Dole Interactive – https://www.dolekemp96.org/interactive/
A place for some fun. Take a trivia quiz, fill out a crossword
puzzle, send a postcard to your friends, or make your own
button or poster. Download wallpaper for your computer
and show your support for Dole/Kemp.«
Yes indeedy – the first online US Presidential campaign website is still alive and kicking (with the weird formatting of the newsletter, from which an extract is taken). Nearly 30 years on, it’s a glimpse of such an innocent time. They lost to Bill Clinton, but at least they had animated GIFs.
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Satellites are fueling a space-based internet gold rush • Rest of World
Khadija Alam:
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Internet satellites orbit Earth at a relatively low elevation — galactically speaking. They live in low Earth orbit, an area of space with an altitude of up to 2,000 kilometers (1,243 miles). In theory, LEO is a vast three-dimensional territory that could contain many millions of satellites — more than we would ever need.
Some researchers have created a model for how many satellites could fit in LEO, taking into account how far apart they should be spaced to reduce the risk of collisions. They estimate that LEO could theoretically hold up to 12.6 million satellites.
But others have warned that even 1 million satellites in LEO — the number of satellites that were filed for approval with the International Telecommunication Union, a U.N. agency, between 2017 and 2022 — pose a risk because of a greater chance for collisions and debris surviving reentry and falling out of the sky.
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This is one of those scrollfests that the NYT made popular a few years back, and whose usefulness I’m always dubious about, because it’s so hard to remember where you are in the article.
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Nurseries in England bring in Covid-style protocols as measles cases rise • The Guardian
Jessica Murray:
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Parents and experts have voiced alarm over rising measles cases, with nurseries bringing in Covid-style isolation protocols to clamp down on outbreaks.
There have been more than 500 confirmed cases in England in 2025, the majority in young children. A child died at Alder Hey hospital in Liverpool on Sunday after contracting the infectious disease.
With cases increasing and vaccine uptake in some parts of the country worryingly low, nurseries are bringing back infection control measures last used during the pandemic to keep children safe and ease parents’ fears.
Adam Rowles’ two-year-old daughter attends a nursery in south-east London that recently had four cases of measles. Although his daughter is fully vaccinated, his six-month-old son is due to start attending the nursery before his first birthday, when he would be eligible for his first measles jab.
Rowles said: “It’s alarming, isn’t it? Because it’s something that you think has been eradicated, and we don’t have to worry about any more, but then all of a sudden here we are. It’s just baffling.”
He has asked about postponing his son’s nursery place until he is vaccinated but was told that would cost him his place. The nursery said it had implemented strict protocols, such as dividing up walking and nonwalking babies to reduce the spread of infection and had brought back “Covid levels of cleaning”.
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And what difference will “Covid levels of cleaning” make to a virus that is airborne and highly infectious (ten times more than Covid)? None at all. It’s exactly the same performative nonsense that made no difference then. Perhaps one could argue that it’s so long since measles was pervasive that people have forgotten. But I’d hope the father in this story could find a way to postpone, because his child isn’t going to be made safe by people washing their hands. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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Astronomer CEO Andy Byron resigns following Coldplay concert scandal • Axios
Eleanor Hawkins:
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Astronomer CEO Andy Byron has resigned from the company after a video of him canoodling with chief people officer Kristin Cabot at a Coldplay concert went viral.
Astronomer co-founder and chief product officer Pete DeJoy is currently serving as interim CEO, the company announced late Friday.
“As stated previously, Astronomer is committed to the values and culture that have guided us since our founding. Our leaders are expected to set the standard in both conduct and accountability, and recently, that standard was not met,” the company said in a statement Saturday. “Andy Byron has tendered his resignation, and the Board of Directors has accepted.”
Astronomer put out an initial statement on Friday, more than 24 hours after the video went viral, saying that its board had initiated a formal investigation into the matter.
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Byron and Cabot truly are the conscious uncoupling that launched a million memes. The pressure on them is going to be enormous, of course, and wherever they next surface (together? Separately?) they’ll draw huge attention. Is the attention unfair? It’s unavoidable in this age, so the question of “unfair” doesn’t really arise, I feel: it’s like complaining about the weather.
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I know genomes. Don’t delete your DNA • Science and skepticism
Steven Salzberg:
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what exactly does 23andMe collect from its customers? Despite the near-hysterical warnings from the Washington Post and other sources, 23andMe doesn’t have “your DNA.” Your genome (which contains all your DNA) has 23 pairs of chromosomes (that’s where the name 23andMe comes from), and all together they add up to about 3.1 billion letters (nucleotides) of DNA. It might be cool if 23andMe had all that, but they don’t!
Instead, when you spit into a tube and send it to 23andMe, they run what’s called a DNA “chip” on your sample. This chip identifies less than a million individual nucleotides scattered around the genome (about 640,000, actually). But for the sake of argument, let’s say they have 1 million letters of your DNA. That’s a tiny percentage: about 0.02% of your genome. So no, they don’t have your genome, but they do have a small sample of it.
What’s fascinating–and a lot of fun, for some–is that by comparing these scattered landmarks, called SNPs or “snips,” you can get a very accurate picture of how closely related two people are. For example, you share half your DNA with your parents, siblings, and children, so you should share approximately half of these SNPs. For a niece or nephew, you share about 1/4 of your SNPs, and for a first cousin, 1/8. I have multiple relatives on 23andMe, and I can see them all in the DNA Relatives section. (I have fewer there now, because several of them deleted their data.)
23andMe also tells you your genetic “risk” for dozen of traits and a few genetic diseases. However–and here’s the rub–some 25 years after the human genome was sequenced, and despite huge efforts to link genes and disease, there are almost no SNPs that tell you anything consequential about your health. If you have a genetic disease, you almost certainly already know about it, and if you don’t know, then the 23andMe data just isn’t going to reveal anything.
Okay, so now that we’ve covered that, let’s go back to this privacy claim. The WashPost says you should worry because 23andMe might not protect your data, and might even sell it to a third party without your consent. My response is: so what?
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Salzberg’s point is that any “privacy” and “immutability” about your DNA has already been breached for other aspects of far more important data about you. Faintly depressing, but nonetheless true.
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Unapologetic brands lean into the vibe shift • Financial Times
Jemima Kelly:
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Jaguar’s — sorry, jaGuar’s — rebrand came at a time when other, better advised companies had been going in the other direction. Over the last couple of years, a number of them have eschewed the bland, blend-in-with-everyone-else branding that has dominated for the past 15 years or so and started to return to a design that harks back to their heritage and tradition.
For instance, Saint Laurent — which in 2012 had switched to a sans-serif, Helvetica-adjacent typeface — has quietly returned to a more distinctive serif font that looks awfully similar to its previous one, albeit without the “Yves” at the start. Burberry has also dropped the very similar and characterless font it had rebranded to in 2018 and gone for a more traditional serif typeface, along with a new “archive-inspired” version of its Equestrian Knight logo.
Meanwhile the kind of humble, we-don’t-want-your-money, all-lower-case, primary-colour logos made popular by Silicon Valley start-ups like ebay and airbnb are being phased out, to be replaced by title case or even all-upper-case logos. The latter taps into a new more macho cultural energy: several studies have shown that brands that use all lower-case logos are associated with feminine characteristics, and vice versa for the all-upper-case ones.
After 14 years of drinking “pepsi”, with a globe logo that warped the traditional red-white-and-blue horizontal colours, we are now drinking PEPSI again, with a return to the symmetrically colour-distributed globe and brand name in the middle as it was in the 1990s.
“We designed the new visual identity to connect future generations with our brand’s heritage,” said PepsiCo chief design officer Mauro Porcini. “We want to instigate moments of unapologetic enjoyment”.
“Unapologetic” captures the new cultural moment nicely. Pepsi launched its lower-case-logo during the financial crisis in 2008, at a time when greedy banks made Silicon Valley’s start-ups look soft and cuddly in comparison. As a deep global recession set in, fashion runways were taken over by minimalism, practicality and discretion. The era of “quiet luxury” had begun.
No longer.
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The fonts, they are a-changin’.
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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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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 