A Chinese team has worked out why the infamous “spin serve” in badminton is so hard to return. CC-licensed photo by Tool Dude8mm on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Serve them up! 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 has ‘agreed to drop’ demand for access to Apple user data, says US • Financial Times
Anna Gross, Joe Miller, Tim Bradshaw and George Parker:
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The UK has retreated on its controversial demand for Apple to provide a “back door” to encrypted customer data after pressure from the Trump administration, according to US officials, ending a diplomatic row between London and Washington.
Tulsi Gabbard, Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence, told the Financial Times the UK had “agreed to drop” its demand that Apple enable access to “the protected encrypted data of American citizens”, a move that the US president had previously likened to Chinese surveillance.
Vice-president JD Vance, who was recently on holiday in the UK, intervened to ensure Britain agreed to withdraw an order that sought to force Apple to break open encrypted data stored in its iCloud system that even the iPhone maker itself is normally unable to access, according to a US official.
“The vice-president negotiated a mutually beneficial understanding that the UK government will withdraw the current backdoor order to Apple,” the official said.
Vance has previously accused European countries of curtailing free speech and of treating some American companies unfairly. He and Gabbard strongly objected to the UK order, which was issued in January under the UK Investigatory Powers Act and has been resisted by Apple.
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I don’t think the decryption demand was a ploy by the UK to get a bargaining chip with the US; it seriously annoyed the administration there, which meant it was just a source of pressure rather than strength. But let’s hope that once again the UK government abandons its quixotic pursuit of the unicorn of “breakable but secure encryption” which it has been chasing since the Blair government tried it in 2000.
We’ll probably find out presently whether Apple will reintroduce its Advanced Data Protection for iCloud – basically, user-encrypted backups in the cloud.
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SoftBank invests $2bn in Intel as Trump administration weighs taking 10% stake • WSJ
Robbie Whelan and Amrith Ramkumar:
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SoftBank Group has agreed to invest $2bn in Intel, a boost from the private sector that coincides with a US government rescue effort for the embattled chip maker.
Trump administration officials are discussing taking a 10% stake in Intel in a bid to revive the company’s fortunes and bolster semiconductor manufacturing in the US, according to people briefed on the talks.
On Monday, Intel announced that SoftBank would buy $2bn worth of Intel stock, roughly 87 million shares, at $23 a share, a slight discount to Monday’s closing price of $23.66. The investment would give the Japanese firm ownership of about 2% of the company, making it Intel’s sixth-largest shareholder, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.
Investors appeared to interpret SoftBank’s move as a vote of confidence: The chip maker’s shares popped in off-hours trading after closing down 3.7% for the day.
Additional investment is helpful for Intel, but the company needs customers for its chip design and fabrication businesses to get back on track, industry analysts say.
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Surprising move seen in isolation, but SoftBank is trying to play nicely in order to get favourable treatment from Trump (a triumph of hope over experience). If the US government pitches in, SoftBank might even make a profit on the shares in time. But I don’t feel that confident about Intel’s long-term future.
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The physics of badminton’s new killer spin serve • Ars Technica
Jennifer Ouellette:
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Serious badminton players are constantly exploring different techniques to give them an edge over opponents. One of the latest innovations is the spin serve, a devastatingly effective method in which a player adds a pre-spin just before the racket contacts the shuttlecock (aka the birdie). It’s so effective—some have called it “impossible to return”—that the Badminton World Federation (BWF) banned the spin serve in 2023, at least until after the 2024 Paralympic Games in Paris.
The sanction wasn’t meant to quash innovation but to address players’ concerns about the possible unfair advantages the spin serve conferred. The BWF thought that international tournaments shouldn’t become the test bed for the technique, which is markedly similar to the previously banned “Sidek serve.”
The BWF permanently banned the spin serve earlier this year. Chinese physicists have now teased out the complex fundamental physics of the spin serve, publishing their findings in the journal Physics of Fluids.
…While many studies have extensively examined the physics of the shuttlecock’s trajectory, the Chinese authors of this latest paper realized that nobody had yet investigated the effects of the spin serve on that trajectory. “We were interested in the underlying aerodynamics,” said co-author Zhicheng Zhang of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. “Moreover, revealing the effects of pre-spin on the trajectory and aerodynamics of a shuttlecock can help players learn the art of delivering a spin serve, and perhaps help players on the other side of the net to return the serve.”
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But as the story points out, though we now know why the serve is difficult to return, it doesn’t matter – it’s banned. The first ban was within six weeks of it first being used in competition, followed by the longer ban.
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Threads MAU update • Threads
Adam Mosseri (in charge of Meta’s Threads):
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As of a few weeks ago we there are more than 400 million people active on Threads every month. It’s been quite the ride over the last two years. This started as a zany idea to compete with Twitter, and has evolved into a meaningful platform that fosters the open exchange of perspectives. I’m grateful to all of you for making this place what it is today 🙏🏼. There’s so much work to do from our side, more to come.
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Fascinating that he’s admitting the idea was to compete with Twitter. Based on those numbers, it’s pretty much level. And yet the odd thing is that Threads seems to be self-contained. It doesn’t leak over into the other social networks in the way that traffic – mostly snarky, but sometimes just duplicative – flows between X and Bluesky (and vice-versa), and also pulls in from Instagram.
Is Threads actually a hotbed of important social dialogue? The replies to Mosseri’s post suggest there’s tension between people who want to monetise, and those who don’t; and those who perceive a huge bot problem, and those who don’t.
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AI x Commerce • Andreessen Horowitz
Justine Moore and Alex Rampell:
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The internet’s most profitable business model has always been simple: running search ads on monetizable queries. When you search “how many protons are in a cesium atom,” Google makes no money. When you search “best tennis racket,” it prints cash.
This asymmetry defines the entire search economy–some queries are pure curiosity, and others have direct purchase intent. It’s part of why Google (where people often search for products) is a $2T company and Wikipedia (where people search for knowledge or fun facts) is a non-profit.
Google could lose 95% of search volume and still grow revenue as long as it retains the valuable queries, which are largely commerce related. Has Google managed to keep these searches from moving to AI platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity?
Maybe. In May 2025, Apple SVP Eddy Cue testified during the DOJ’s antitrust trial that Safari search volume had declined for the first time in over two decades. The result? Alphabet’s stock dropped nearly 8% in a day, wiping out over $150bn in market cap — all from the hint that queries might be leaking to AI. But fast forward to Google’s increasing revenue (including from search!) and it’s pretty clear (squaring Eddy Cue’s comments with Google’s Q2 earnings) that Google is likely only losing low-monetizing queries, at least for now.
AI is eating the low-value (at least in “cost-per-click terms”) queries first, the ones with no commercial intent that are more informational. If language models answer your cesium question, Google loses the query but not a dime. The revenue remains until AI starts replacing things like “best X for Y” commerce journeys — the ones with actual purchase intent. There’s no question this is about to happen, but not all commerce is the same. Some commerce will be eaten by AI, some will be immune to it, and some will be up for grabs by new startups.
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As much as anything this is venture capitalists thinking out loud about what they expect, so the post goes into some detail about how they expect the future to pan out. (In effect it’s also asking companies to pitch for the businesses they think are open.)
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Exclusive: US embeds trackers in AI chip shipments to catch diversions to China, sources say • Reuters
Fanny Potkin, Jun Yuan Yong and Karen Freifeld:
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U.S. authorities have secretly placed location tracking devices in targeted shipments of advanced chips they see as being at high risk of illegal diversion to China, according to two people with direct knowledge of the previously unreported law enforcement tactic.
The measures aim to detect AI chips being diverted to destinations which are under U.S. export restrictions, and apply only to select shipments under investigation, the people said.
They show the lengths to which the U.S. has gone to enforce its chip export restrictions on China, even as the Trump administration has sought to relax some curbs on Chinese access to advanced American semiconductors.
The trackers can help build cases against people and companies who profit from violating U.S. export controls, said the people, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue.
Location trackers are a decades-old investigative tool used by U.S. law enforcement agencies to track products subject to export restrictions, such as airplane parts. They have been used to combat the illegal diversion of semiconductors in recent years, one source said.
Five other people actively involved in the AI server supply chain say they are aware of the use of the trackers in shipments of servers from manufacturers such as Dell and Super Micro, which include chips from Nvidia and AMD.
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Then there’s also the story of two Chinese nationals arrested in California, accused of illegally shipping millions of dollars worth of Nvidia AI chips to China. The fun part, though, is that this story preceded the above one – so one suspects that Reuters started asking questions about the arrests and learnt about the trackers.
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South Korea’s no-kids zones • Boom
“Boom”:
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Imagine you are a South Korean parent. You want to take your 10 year old to a new café that has opened up a few streets away and treat them to a slice of cake. What’s the first thing you do? You go online, and check to see whether the café bans children.
This map shows restaurants and cafés across South Korea that users have identified as officially designating themselves either as a ‘No-Kids Zone’ or as child-friendly in 2023. The 451 blue pins represent places where children are banned, and the 62 green pins are places where children are welcomed. Below you can see the cluster of blue pins in and around Seoul.
It’s difficult to know exactly how many South Korean establishments are child-free, but for cafés it was estimated at 5-10% in 2022, and has probably increased since then.
One area particularly dense in No-Kids Zones is Jeju Island, famed for its natural beauty, which has around 150 businesses that have banned children. A survey of Jeju’s No-Kids Zones reported that business owners had implemented the rule for reasons including a quiet atmosphere, problems with badly behaved children, and concern about legal liability in the event of a child accidentally getting hurt.
The below screenshot, from the Instagram account of a café serving what looks to be a variety of cheesecakes, is a typical example. It carefully specifies that no children below the age of 12 are allowed.
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This feels strange, but (as the blog says) cafes banning children isn’t the cause of South Korea’s low, low fertility – the lowest birth rate in the world – but it’s surely a consequence which then gets reinforced as people find children a novel irritation. (The blog’s purpose, apparently, is “We want it to be easier to choose to have children, for everyone.”)
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Lab-grown salmon gets FDA approval • The Verge
Dominic Preston:
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The FDA has issued its first ever approval on a safety consultation for lab-grown fish. That makes Wildtype only the fourth company to get approval from the regulator to sell cell-cultivated animal products, and its cultivated salmon is now available to order from one Portland restaurant.
Wildtype announced last week that the FDA had sent a letter declaring it had “no questions” about whether the cultivated salmon is “as safe as comparable foods,” the customary final step in the FDA’s approval process for lab-grown animal products. The FDA has sole responsibility for regulating most lab-grown seafood, whereas the task is shared with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) for cultivated meat.
The FDA’s pre-market safety consultation is voluntary, but is “helpful for marketability,” IP lawyer Dr. Emily Nytko-Lutz, who specializes in biotechnology patents, explained to The Verge. “There are other pathways involving self-affirmation of safety as well as a longer food additive review process, but the FDA’s authorisation with a ‘No Questions’ letter is a middle ground.”
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It’s a bit vague quite how the salmon cuts are made to look like, well, salmon cuts; there’s an FAQ of sorts on Wildtype’s site. It’s been working for years on this.
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Forget LASIK: safer, cheaper vision correction could be coming soon • ScienceDaily
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Human corneas are dome-shaped, clear structures that sit at the front of the eye, bending light from surroundings and focusing it onto the retina, where it’s sent to the brain and interpreted as an image. But if the cornea is misshapen, it doesn’t focus light properly, resulting in a blurry image. With LASIK, specialized lasers reshape the cornea by removing precise sections of the tissue. This common procedure is considered safe, but it has some limitations and risks, and cutting the cornea compromises the structural integrity of the eye. Hill explains that “LASIK is just a fancy way of doing traditional surgery. It’s still carving tissue — it’s just carving with a laser.”
But what if the cornea could be reshaped without the need for any incisions?
This is what [professor of chemistry at Occidental College, Michael] Hill and collaborator Brian Wong are exploring through a process known as electromechanical reshaping (EMR). “The whole effect was discovered by accident,” explains Wong, a professor and surgeon at the University of California, Irvine. “I was looking at living tissues as moldable materials and discovered this whole process of chemical modification.”
In the body, the shapes of many collagen-containing tissues, including corneas, are held in place by attractions of oppositely charged components. These tissues contain a lot of water, so applying an electric potential to them lowers the tissue’s pH, making it more acidic. By altering the pH, the rigid attractions within the tissue are loosened and make the shape malleable. When the original pH is restored, the tissue is locked into the new shape.
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Sounds fun – but it’s a very long way away from being available from doctors.
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Renewables do unambiguously reduce wholesale power prices • Carbon Commentary
Chris Goodall:
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We still hear assertions that adding renewables to the grid has increased the UK’s electricity costs. I looked at two sources of data and plotted one against the other to test whether there’s any truth in this.
1: The ‘next day’ electricity price for each hour in the period from 1st January 2025 to the early days of August 2025. That’s about 220 days, covering the coldest period of the year and the heat of the summer. (In the UK, electricity prices are highest in the winter and fall to lower levels in the summer because demand is much lower). The source for this data was the research group Ember.
2: The percentage share of wind and solar electricity in total generation in each of the 220 or so days. The source was the GB network operator, NESO.
The analysis seeks to show whether or not days of high electricity price are associated with large or small shares of renewables in total generation. For each day, I plotted the average hourly price of electricity against the share of solar and wind in that day’s total electricity generation. If more renewables adds to costs, the price of electricity should be higher when wind and solar are abundant.
Of course that is not the case; a day with wind or sun (or both) typically has a lower hourly average electricity price. And the differences are substantial…
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He goes into plenty of detail, though of course this will make no difference to those convinced about this. Isn’t it a pity that “understanding logical arguments” isn’t taught in schools? (Thanks Ben B for the link.)
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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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