The original idea of Disney World – a place where everyone is equal – has been gradually subverted by financial targeting of customers. CC-licensed photo by Haydn Blackey on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Magic? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Exclusive: Meta created flirty chatbots of Taylor Swift, other celebrities without permission • Reuters
Jeff Horwitz:
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Meta has appropriated the names and likenesses of celebrities – including Taylor Swift, Scarlett Johansson, Anne Hathaway and Selena Gomez – to create dozens of flirty social-media chatbots without their permission, Reuters has found.
While many were created by users with a Meta tool for building chatbots, Reuters discovered that a Meta employee had produced at least three, including two Taylor Swift “parody” bots.
Reuters also found that Meta had allowed users to create publicly available chatbots of child celebrities, including Walker Scobell, a 16-year-old film star. Asked for a picture of the teen actor at the beach, the bot produced a lifelike shirtless image. “Pretty cute, huh?” the avatar wrote beneath the picture.
All of the virtual celebrities have been shared on Meta’s Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp platforms. In several weeks of Reuters testing to observe the bots’ behavior, the avatars often insisted they were the real actors and artists. The bots routinely made sexual advances, often inviting a test user for meet-ups.
Some of the AI-generated celebrity content was particularly risqué: Asked for intimate pictures of themselves, the adult chatbots produced photorealistic images of their namesakes posing in bathtubs or dressed in lingerie with their legs spread.
Meta spokesman Andy Stone told Reuters that Meta’s AI tools shouldn’t have created intimate images of the famous adults or any pictures of child celebrities. He also blamed Meta’s production of images of female celebrities wearing lingerie on failures of the company’s enforcement of its own policies, which prohibit such content.
…Mark Lemley, a Stanford University law professor who studies generative AI and intellectual property rights, questioned whether the Meta celebrity bots would qualify for legal protections that exist for imitations. “California’s right of publicity law prohibits appropriating someone’s name or likeness for commercial advantage,” Lemley said, noting that there are exceptions when such material is used to create work that is entirely new. “That doesn’t seem to be true here,” he said, because the bots simply use the stars’ images. In the United States, a person’s rights over the use of their identity for commercial purposes are established through state laws, such as California’s.
Reuters flagged one user’s publicly shared Meta images of Anne Hathaway as a “sexy victoria Secret model” to a representative of the actress. Hathaway was aware of intimate images being created by Meta and other AI platforms, the spokesman said, and the actor is considering her response.
Representatives of Swift, Johansson, Gomez and other celebrities who were depicted in Meta chatbots either didn’t respond to questions or declined to comment.
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Exclusive: Google set to face modest EU antitrust fine in adtech investigation, sources say • Reuters via WHTC
Foo Yun Chee:
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Alphabet’s Google is set to face a modest EU antitrust fine in the coming weeks for allegedly anti-competitive practices in its adtech business, three people with direct knowledge of the matter said.
The decision by the European Commission follows a four-year long investigation triggered by a complaint from the European Publishers Council that subsequently led to charges in 2023 that Google allegedly favours its own advertising services over rivals.
The modest fine will mark a shift in new EU antitrust chief Teresa Ribera’s approach to Big Tech violations from predecessor Margrethe Vestager’s focus on hefty deterrent penalties.
The sources said Ribera wants to focus on getting companies to end anti-competitive practices rather than punish them. The EU competition enforcer declined to comment.
Google referred to a 2023 blog post in which it criticised what it said was the Commission’s flawed interpretation of the adtech sector and that both publishers and advertisers have enormous choice.
The fine will likely not be on the scale of a record 4.3 billion euro penalty imposed on Google by the EU competition enforcer in 2018 for using its Android mobile operating system to quash rivals.
…Ribera will not order Google to sell part of its adtech business, despite her predecessor’s suggestion that the company could divest its DoubleClick for Publishers tool and AdX ad exchange, the people said, confirming a Reuters story last year.
They said the EU may not have to issue a break-up order at all as a U.S. judge has set a September trial date on potential remedies for Google’s dominance in ad tools used by online publishers.
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Summer’s over and the European commissioners are coming back to their desks.
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Is Google making us stupid? • New Cartographies
Nicholas Carr:
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“Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”
I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
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This is a rerun of an article from 2008 – “when MySpace was bigger than Facebook and going online still felt liberating”, as Carr puts it. But you could put the same context on it; only a little light tweaking would be needed to make it truthful for the world of ChatGPT.
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Disney World is the happiest place on earth, if you can afford it • The New York Times
Daniel Currell:
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For most of the park’s history, Disney was priced to welcome people across the income spectrum, embracing the motto “Everyone is a V.I.P.” In doing so, it created a shared American culture by providing the same experience to every guest. The family that pulled up in a new Cadillac stood in the same lines, ate the same food and rode the same rides as the family that arrived in a used Chevy. Back then, America’s large and thriving middle class was the focus of most companies’ efforts and firmly in the driver’s seat.
That middle class has so eroded in size and in purchasing power — and the wealth of our top earners has so exploded — that America’s most important market today is its affluent. As more companies tailor their offerings to the top, the experiences we once shared are increasingly differentiated by how much we have.
Data is part of what’s driving this shift. The rise of the internet, the algorithm, the smartphone and now artificial intelligence are giving corporations the tools to target the fast-growing masses of high-net-worth Americans with increasing ease. As a management consultant, I’ve worked with dozens of companies making this very transition. Many of our biggest private institutions are now focused on selling the privileged a markedly better experience, leaving everyone else to either give up — or fight to keep up.
Disney’s ethos began to change in the 1990s as it increased its luxury offerings, but only after the economic shock of the pandemic did the company seem to more fully abandon any pretense of being a middle-class institution. A Disney vacation today is “for the top 20% of American households — really, if I’m honest, maybe the top 10% or 5 percent,” said Len Testa, a computer scientist whose “Unofficial Guide” books and website Touring Plans offer advice on how to manage crowds and minimize waiting in line. “Disney positions itself as the all-American vacation. The irony is that most Americans can’t afford it.”
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Doctors develop AI stethoscope that can detect major heart conditions in 15 seconds • The Guardian
Andrew Gregory:
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A study trialling the AI stethoscope, involving about 12,000 patients from 200 GP surgeries in the UK, looked at those with symptoms such as breathlessness or fatigue. Those examined using the new tool were twice as likely to be diagnosed with heart failure, compared with similar patients who were not examined using the technology.
Patients were three times more likely to be diagnosed with atrial fibrillation – an abnormal heart rhythm that can increase the risk of having a stroke. They were almost twice as likely to be diagnosed with heart valve disease, which is where one or more heart valves do not work properly.
Dr Patrik Bächtiger, of Imperial College London’s National Heart and Lung Institute and Imperial College healthcare NHS trust, said: “The design of the stethoscope has been unchanged for 200 years – until now. So it is incredible that a smart stethoscope can be used for a 15-second examination, and then AI can quickly deliver a test result indicating whether someone has heart failure, atrial fibrillation or heart valve disease.”
The device, manufactured by California company Eko Health, is about the size of a playing card. It is placed on a patient’s chest to take an ECG recording of the electrical signals from their heart, while its microphone records the sound of blood flowing through the heart.
This information is sent to the cloud – a secure online data storage area – to be analysed by AI algorithms that can detect subtle heart problems a human would miss. The test result, indicating whether the patient should be flagged as at-risk for one of the three conditions or not, is sent back to a smartphone.
The breakthrough does carry an element of risk, with a higher chance of people wrongly being told they may have one of the conditions when they do not.
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First trials began in November 2023. The false positives are about 20%.
The story’s been under the radar for a bit: the NHS did a press release in June.
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CDC cuts back foodborne illness surveillance program • CIDRAP
Chris Dall:
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has scaled back a federal-state surveillance program for foodborne pathogens.
As of July 1, the CDC’s Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (FoodNet), which works with the Food and Drug Administration, the US Department of Agriculture, and 10 state health departments to track infections commonly transmitted through food, has reduced required surveillance to two pathogens: Salmonella and Shiga toxin–producing Escherichia coli (STEC). Reporting of illnesses caused by Campylobacter, Cyclospora, Listeria, Shigella, Vibrio, and Yersinia is now optional, according to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
The story was first reported by NBC News, which cited a set of CDC talking points that suggested reduced federal funding for FoodNet was the reason for the move.
The network includes Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico, Oregon, Tennessee, and select counties in California and New York. A spokesperson for the Minnesota Department of Health told CIDRAP News that all eight pathogens are covered by the state’s infectious disease reporting rule, which means that all providers in the state are still required to report cases to the department.
The Maryland Health Department told NBC News that it will also continue tracking all eight pathogens regardless of the changes to FoodNet. But Colorado health officials said they may have to cut back on surveillance activities.
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If you’re unfamiliar with Yersinia, it’s usually in the form of Yersinia pestis, aka the Black Death. Camplyobacter and the others can kill. And now they can spread untroubled.
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Two more people dead after eating Louisiana oysters infected with flesh-eating bacteria • WBRZ New Orleans
Joe Collins:
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Two people have died after eating Louisiana oysters infected with the flesh-eating bacteria Vibrio vulnificus, officials confirmed to WBRZ.
A state health official said that the two deaths happened after people ate oysters harvested in Louisiana at two separate restaurants — one in Louisiana and another in Florida.
Jennifer Armentor, molluscan shellfish program administrator from the Louisiana Department of Health, added that 14 more people have been infected. Now, 34 people have been infected and six people have died in 2025 alone, a higher rate than any previous year over the last decade.
“It’s just prolific right now,” Armentor told the Louisiana Oyster Task Force on Tuesday at the New Orleans Lakefront Airport.
WBRZ spoke with Jones Creek Cafe & Oyster Bar CEO George Shaheen about this news and how seafood spots ensure that their oysters stay tasty and safe.
Shaheen has been at the head of his business for nearly 40 years. “Well, over the years, we haven’t had as much of that as you would actually think because the way that the Wildlife and Fisheries and the Department of Health have created a bond between the fishermen who are out there fishing and how things need to be done and handled,” Shaheen said.
Shaheen told WBRZ that he gets his oysters from Delacroix Island, where he used to fish, and has complete trust in those who harvest the oysters.
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Vibrio? One of the foodborne illnesses that the CDC is no longer going to monitor? Louisiana isn’t part of the CDC Foodnet, but this does show the trouble with any cutbacks in surveillance.
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What is a color space? • Making Software
Dan Hollick:
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Color is an unreasonably complex topic. Just when you think you’ve got it figured out, it reveals a whole new layer of complexity that you didn’t know existed.
This is partly because it doesn’t really exist. Sure, there are different wavelengths of light that our eyes perceive as color, but that doesn’t mean that color is actually a property of that light – it’s a phenomenon of our perception.
Digital color is about trying to map this complex interplay of light and perception into a format that computers can understand and screens can display. And it’s a miracle that any of it works at all.
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There are another 6,000 words (or so) here, so if you’re a bit short of reading, and want to really understand colours on screens, this is the one for you.
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Five ways manufacturers have changed phones for the worse • Pocket Lint
Chris Hackey:
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Some people love buying new phones. Any time there is a new update on a flagship line, some people jump at the chance to upgrade. Many people I have known over the years as a tech journalist are this way. I’m definitely not. I tend to get the most mileage out of my phones before I trade them in.
But, the main reason why I don’t like to get the latest phone right away is because, much of the time, there isn’t something that blows me away enough to make a sudden switch. Also, phones are really expensive, and I don’t always want to drop hundreds of dollars for a new model. I’m fine with keeping my phone until it doesn’t work any longer, quite frankly.
Part of the reason I don’t want to upgrade is that manufacturers have made shopping for phones a harder pill to swallow. Sure, there are plenty of phones available that can do so much, like use AI, erase people from pictures, and record long videos. But there are some things that manufacturers have changed over the years that have made the phone-buying process exhausting.
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They are: no charging bricks included, eSIMs are standard, no headphone jacks, no SD slots (or similar) to expand storage, phones are bigger.
Responses: there’s a zillion of them; can’t be stolen; adaptors and Bluetooth exist; cloud storage exists; some aren’t. The storage point might be valid.
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The beauty of batteries • Works In Progress
Austin Vernon:
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electricity systems rely on layers of complex rules and processes. Power plants are scheduled hours or days in advance based on forecasts. Others are paid just to stay running in case demand spikes or another plant fails. Some are required to operate even when uneconomic, in order to meet reliability rules. Prices are often fixed or averaged across large regions, so they don’t reflect real-time local conditions. These tools keep the system running, but at a high cost.
Much of the infrastructure – plants, power lines, and reserves – exists only to cover rare events and sits underused most of the time. The cost of this redundancy is passed on to consumers. This complexity also means electricity markets are less efficient than they could be. Prices and investment don’t reliably reflect scarcity, location, or flexibility. The result is an expensive, inefficient grid that is struggling to keep pace with demand and the transition to renewable energy sources.
Batteries offer a way out of this structural bind, giving producers, consumers, and distributors a way of keeping inventories for the first time ever, meaning that their value goes well beyond simply storing excess solar or wind.
They can respond in milliseconds, shift between consuming and supplying power as needed, and are controlled entirely through software. This flexibility allows them to take on a wide range of roles within the system: stabilizing frequency, supporting local distribution networks, reducing peak demand, and easing pressure on transmission lines. Because they require no fuel, emit no local pollution, and can be deployed close to where electricity is used, they can often replace several types of traditional infrastructure at once. Rather than being single-purpose assets, batteries adapt in real time to whatever role is most valuable at that moment.
…Once even a few gigawatts of storage come online, batteries quickly dominate the ancillary market and cut prices dramatically. In Texas, for example, in the space of a year, the price of ancillary services dropped from $3.74 per megawatt hour to $0.98, while the cost of maintaining the emergency reserve fell from $76.77 to $9.62 per megawatt hour. In California, ancillary service costs in 2024 were roughly one-third lower than in 2023. This is because a system with abundant fast storage no longer needs to commit gas units days in advance or pay plants to stay warm.
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This extract is very much the helicopter view of why batteries are so, so desirable in grids. The full article (no paywall) is fascinating.
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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 