Though Ozzy Osbourne may be gone, his movements were captured for a videogame some years ago. So, Ozzy lives? CC-licensed photo by Kevin Burkett on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Not paranoid. 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 considers backing down on Apple encryption backdoor after pressure from US • FT via Ars Technica
Anna Gross, Tim Bradshaw and Laren Fedor:
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Sir Keir Starmer’s government is seeking a way out of a clash with the Trump administration over the UK’s demand that Apple provide it with access to secure customer data, two senior British officials have told the Financial Times.
The officials both said the Home Office, which ordered the tech giant in January to grant access to its most secure cloud storage system, would probably have to retreat in the face of pressure from senior leaders in Washington, including Vice President JD Vance.
“This is something that the vice president is very annoyed about and which needs to be resolved,” said an official in the UK’s technology department. “The Home Office is basically going to have to back down.”
Both officials said the UK decision to force Apple to break its end-to-end encryption—which has been raised multiple times by top officials in Donald Trump’s administration—could impede technology agreements with the US.
“One of the challenges for the tech partnerships we’re working on is the encryption issue,” the first official said. “It’s a big red line in the US—they don’t want us messing with their tech companies.”
Starmer’s government has set out a trade strategy that focuses on digital goals such as AI and data partnerships.
The other senior government official added that the Home Office had handled the issue of Apple encryption very badly and now had “its back against the wall,” adding: “It’s a problem of the Home Office’s own making, and they’re working on a way around it now.”
…In the meantime, the Home Office continues to pursue its case with Apple at the tribunal.
Its lawyers discussed the next legal steps this month, reflecting the divisions within government over how best to proceed. “At this point, the government has not backed down,” said one person familiar with the legal process.
A third senior British official added that the UK government was reluctant to push “anything that looks to the US vice-president like a free-speech issue.”
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We don’t know where the legal process actually is (as far as I can tell?). WhatsApp has joined with Apple; if WhatsApp removes itself from the UK, there would be hell to pay: entire companies, not to mention political parties, would collapse. (WhatsApp should do it abruptly to maximise the effect.) I’ve seen governments since Labour in 2000 try to push this wrongheaded idea, and they never listen to the people telling them quite how bad it is.
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Ozzy Osbourne’s short, sweet stint in music videogames • Kotaku
Kenneth Shepard:
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Ozzy Osbourne, the lead singer of the foundational metal band Black Sabbath and, later in life, a reality TV star, has died at the age of 76. His passing comes just two-and-a-half weeks after Black Sabbath’s final show on July 5 in Birmingham. Osbourne performed from a throne, as he was unable to walk the stage due to advanced Parkinson’s disease. His impact on music spanned decades and ultimately, briefly, saw him enjoy a stint as a star of video games as well, garnering him roles tied to his musical legacy in both Guitar Hero: World Tour and the musical RTS Brütal Legend.
Guitar Hero: World Tour carried on the rhythm series’ tradition of putting rock legends into the game as playable guest characters. Osbourne was one of the playable characters featured in the game alongside his bandmate, guitarist Zakk Wylde. Some of the real-world figures added to the series over the years felt ghoulish and kinda gross, such as Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain, both of whom were dead by the time they were included. Osbourne, however, was more hands-on with the process and even did motion capture to get scanned into the game. In interviews about his time working on World Tour, Osbourne admitted he wasn’t a technologically advanced person, so the idea of being in a video game was pretty foreign to him, but he came away impressed with the final product.
“I had to put on this black suit with all these little ping-pong ball-like things all over me, motion capture,” he said to ABC News. “I had to dance around like I’m on stage when one of my songs are on. I don’t really know how it works, but I have seen a run of it. It is really interesting. The image of me, I wish I had the energy it has. The graphics are really, really good.”
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So I guess he will live forever, motion-captured and retained in an earlier age. Wonder if the estate will try to make use of this.
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“How many tennis balls fit in a bus?” — why weird interview questions sometimes make sense • Medium
Jarek Orzel:
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I have just seen someone on LinkedIn astonished about being asked: “How many tennis balls can fit in a bus?” during a job interview. Many people think these questions don’t make sense, but here’s why they’re actually valuable.
The goal isn’t to get the exact right answer — it’s to show your thinking process.
For the bus example, you might approach it like this:
• Assume a bus is 6m long, 2.5m high, and 2m wide = 30m³ of volume
• A tennis ball has roughly 4cm in diameter
• For a quick approximation, treat it as a cube: 0.04m × 0.04m × 0.04m = 0.000064m³
• Divide: 30 ÷ 0.000064 ≈ 500,000 ballsThis method is known as a Fermi problem — named after physicist Enrico Fermi, who was renowned for making remarkably accurate estimates with minimal data. The key is breaking complex questions into smaller, manageable parts and making reasonable estimates.
Fermi problems teach you to:
• Work with incomplete information
• Make logical assumptions
• Think systematically under pressure
• Accept that “roughly right” is often better than “precisely wrong”.If your initial assumptions are close (bus volume, ball size), your final answer can be surprisingly accurate — often within an order of magnitude of the real answer.
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Orzel then offers a trio of Fermi problems. Good luck with them because I wouldn’t have done well on the size of the bus, personally.
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Amazon buys Bee AI wearable that listens to everything you say • The Verge
Emma Roth:
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Amazon is acquiring Bee, a startup that puts AI on your wrist. Bee CEO Maria de Lourdes Zollo says on LinkedIn that the company is joining Amazon to help “bring truly personal, agentic AI to even more customers.”
Bee makes a $49.99 Fitbit-like device that listens in on your conversations while using AI to transcribe everything that you and the people around you say, allowing it to generate personalized summaries of your days, reminders, and suggestions from within the Bee app. You can also give the device permission to access your emails, contacts, location, reminders, photos, and calendar events to help inform its AI-generated insights, as well as create a searchable history of your activities.
My colleague Victoria Song got to try out the device for herself and found that it didn’t always get things quite right. It tended to confuse real-life conversations with the TV shows, TikTok videos, music, and movies that it heard. When asked about Amazon’s plans to apply the same privacy measures offered by Bee, such as its policy against storing audio, Amazon spokesperson Alexandra Miller says the company “cares deeply” about customer privacy and security, adding that the company will work with Bee to give users “even greater control over” their devices when the deal closes.
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An unreliable AI wearable, constantly listening, from Amazon? It’s what the world has been waiting for. In dread.
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Climate emergency hypocrisy • The Value of Nothing
Martin Robbins on Durham council, which in 2019 declared a “climate emergency”:
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One of the [newly] Reform-led council’s first actions has been to block a proposed solar farm at Haswell Plough. You might expect Labour to object to this, but it turns out that Grahame Morris, a local MP and former shadow minister under Corbyn, was already campaigning against the farm and spoke of how distressed he was by the “thought of residents being surrounded by solar panels”, as if they were going to march out of the fields and start haranguing residents at bus stops or something.
In fact Reform are simply continuing Labour’s own record in charge. Earlier this year, with the council firmly under Labour control, another solar development at Burnhope was blocked by the planning committee. This was nominally on farmland, but landowners “explained that the soil structure across the site is poor, making it difficult to grow arable crops and that it is too wet for winter livestock.”
That didn’t stop the Council for the Protection of Rural England from wading in to object to, “the amount of agricultural land, whatever its agricultural grade, being lost to purposes such as this.” So the net result is a bunch of derelict fields and a farmer struggling with uneconomical land they can’t do anything else with. All to placate a small minority of about a hundred or so angry villagers who would barely have been able to notice it once built.
…Where councils can really make a difference, dwarfing those three percentage points, is on planning and support for greener infrastructure. Council planning committees are well-placed to ensure that proposals for railways, renewables and other green infrastructure get through with minimal fuss. Which makes Durham County Council’s outright hostility to renewable energy projects over the years bewildering.
A wind farm at Sheraton Farm was blocked by councillors who insisted that “there was currently an over-supply of wind farms in County Durham” and that they shouldn’t build any more since the county had “already exceeded its 2020 targets.” This was despite the fact that even Natural England and the RSPB were happy to wave it through.
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Another excellent post from Robbins. I feel that the completely sclerotic nature of modern Britain is typified by the desire of the All-England Lawn Tennis Club (Wimbledon, to most people) to build a new complex across the road from its current base, to make it even better and allow more spectators. The project is bitterly opposed by local residents who are suing everyone they can and seeking judicial review on every decision they lose, delaying the start date again and again.
And yet somehow our GDP growth is barely above zero? Such a puzzle.
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What went wrong inside these recalled power banks? • Lumafield
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Recently, Anker recalled over one million PowerCore 10000 power banks, model A1263, produced between 2016 and 2019 and sold through 2022. Anker has provided a general warning that the lithium-ion battery can overheat, but they have yet to share the exact reason for the recall. Armed with our Neptune Industrial CT Scanner and five A1263 power banks from Lumafield team members, we set out to see if we could identify the source of this recall. Could we identify the defects with CT [computerised tomography, ie multiple X-ray] scanning? And could CT inspection during development or manufacturing have prevented the faulty power banks from shipping in the first place?
…There are a few common defects in the battery manufacturing process that can be easily spotted in a CT scan. For example, in lithium-ion batteries, it’s important to ensure that the anode has a sufficient overhang above the cathode, preventing the lithium plating that can lead to dendrite formation. Dendrites can subsequently result in degraded performance and short circuits, which can cause the worst-case scenarios of thermal runaway. CT scanning can also be used for Foreign Object Detection (FOD) within batteries, as particle contamination can lead to reduced performance and potentially short circuits.
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There’s no simple answer, but the CT scans do reveal how incredibly complex modern manufacturing is for things that we take completely for granted.
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US Supreme Court urged to block Mississippi law restricting children’s social media use • Reuters
Mike Scarcella:
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An internet trade association whose members include Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday to block a Mississippi law that imposes age-verification and parental-consent requirements on social media sites.
Washington, D.C.-based NetChoice said in its filing that a 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel improperly allowed the Mississippi law to take effect even though a judge had found the regulations likely violate, opens new tab constitutional free speech protections.
The law requires minors to obtain parental consent to open accounts at certain kinds of digital service providers, and says regulated platforms must make “commercially reasonable” efforts to verify users’ ages. The state can pursue civil penalties of up to $10,000 per violation as well as criminal penalties under Mississippi’s deceptive trade practices law.
NetChoice’s emergency filing, opens new tab provides the first opportunity for the Supreme Court to consider a social media age-verification law.“Just as the government can’t force you to provide identification to read a newspaper, the same holds true when that news is available online,” Paul Taske, co-director of the NetChoice Litigation Center, said in a statement.
The Mississippi attorney general’s office in a statement welcomed the 5th Circuit’s order permitting the law to take effect and said it looked forward to the appellate court’s full consideration of the case.
Courts in Florida, Texas and five other states have preliminarily or permanently blocked similar measures, NetChoice said in its filing. Only Mississippi has been allowed to implement its rules.
NetChoice, which sued to block the Mississippi law in 2024, said in Monday’s Supreme Court filing that its members’ social media platforms have already adopted extensive policies to moderate content for minors and provide parental controls.
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UK public service TV endangered in YouTube era, says Ofcom • The Guardian
Mark Sweney:
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Public service television such as the news, ITV’s Mr Bates vs the Post Office and the BBC nature series Wild Isles is becoming an “endangered species” in the streaming era and ministers should pass laws to make it easier to discover on websites such as YouTube, the media regulator has said.
A report by Ofcom warns that UK-focused programming made by the British public service broadcasters (PSBs) – the BBC, ITV and Channels 4 and 5 – is under threat and there is a “strong case” for legislation to make sure it is easy to find on third-party platforms, most notably the Alphabet-owned video-sharing site.
Ofcom said the need for effective prominence extends to public service media content such as news, children’s shows and some original programmes “which reflect British culture and bring the country together”, made by the PSBs and Sky.
The regulator said the British public service model was “now under serious threat” amid a viewer exodus from traditional TV viewing to global streaming platforms.
Ofcom highlights as a “priority” that PSBs should “work urgently” with YouTube, which dominates streaming on devices and is also rapidly becoming more popular for viewing through smart TVs, to ensure their content gains prominence for viewers.
“This is particularly important for news and children’s content, and we believe there is a strong case for government to legislate to enable the change,” Ofcom said.
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That would be an interesting move. Quite what form the legislation would take isn’t obvious, but it sure would be good to see drafted. Whether the Culture, Media and Sport secretary Lisa Nandy will actually have the guts and/or brains to take it up is a totally different question. (Quiz question: what, if anything, has Nandy accomplished in her first year? The Football Governance Act was in train under the Conservatives.)
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Spud-tacular: how India became a chip superpower • BBC News
Priti Gupta:
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French fries [we call them “chips”, but of course the BBC is writing for an international audience corrupted by Americanisms – Overspill Ed] turned around the fortunes of Jitesh Patel. He comes from a family of farmers in Gujarat in the northwest of India. Traditionally they grew cotton, but the returns were poor.
Droughts in 2001 and 2002 made the situation worse and the Patels knew things had to change. “We realised that we had to start growing something that does not require lot of water,” Mr Patel says.
So, they experimented with potatoes. Initially they tried table potatoes; the kind available in local markets and cooked at home, but the returns weren’t much better than cotton.
Spurred by the arrival of
french frychip makers in their state, in 2007 they started growing the varieties of potato used by the food industry. It turned out to be a winning strategy. “Since then, no looking back,” says Mr Patel.Mr Patel is part of India’s rise to potato superpower status. It is already the world’s second biggest spud producer.
But it’s the export market, particularly of french fries [sigh], that’s really flying.Gujarat has become India’s capital of french fry production, home to huge factories churning out chips, including facilities belonging to Canadian giant McCain Foods and India’s biggest maker of French Fries, HyFun Foods.
From Gujarat, fries are sent all over over the world. But the most important markets at the moment are in Asia, including the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia, according to Devendra K, who has been studying the potato market for many years.
In February of this year, monthly exports of Indian frozen fries broke the 20,000 tonnes barrier for the first time. In the year to February, India’s fry exports totalled 181,773 tonnes, a 45% increase compared with the previous year.
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Still, odd little story. (Via John Naughton.)
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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 