Two British teenagers have been charged with an August 2024 cyber attack on Transport for London that disrupted services for three months. CC-licensed photo by Photo Monkey on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Going underground. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Nvidia and Intel’s $5bn deal is apparently about eating AMD’s lunch • The Verge
Sean Hollister:
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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan held a joint webcast to explain just why the world’s most valuable company (Nvidia, at $4.28 trillion) is throwing a $5bn lifeline to a struggling competitor.
Nvidia quickly shut down several possible explanations. Huang claimed it had nothing to do with Trump, who famously shook down Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan for the United States’ own 10% stake of Intel, shortly after shaking down Nvidia for 15% of its revenue selling chips to China. (China may have just ended that.)
And, Huang insisted, it’s not a strategic shift away from the newer Arm architecture towards the venerable x86, which has driven PCs and servers for decades. “We’re fully committed to the Arm roadmap, we have lots and lots of customers for Arm,” he said, adding later that “this doesn’t affect any of that.” Nor is it a shift from TSMC to Intel as manufacturing partner for Nvidia’s chips — Huang quickly turned to effuse praise for TSMC as soon as a reporter asked — or about manufacturing in the US.
Instead, over the course of the 40-minute call, Nvidia and Intel basically said they were going to eat AMD’s lunch.
AMD is the one chipmaker that competes with both Intel and Nvidia, and it’s long been competitive in one hugely important way: while Intel has always specialized in CPUs, and Nvidia has always specialized in GPUs, AMD does both, and it’s become very good at putting both into the same chip.
…Of course, competition would be better if it were among three companies rather than two — like how Intel, Nvidia, and AMD were all competing in graphics (at least they were until this deal happened, and until the exec who insisted Intel would stay in graphics abruptly left the company).
Nvidia says the other reason to tie up with Intel is server CPUs, targeting another segment where AMD has been racking up wins: AMD was reportedly approaching 40% server processor market share this summer. (Its desktop CPU market share also hit a historic high in August, particularly among gamers.)
Huang said twice that Nvidia will become a “major customer” of Intel CPUs, buying them to put into its rackscale servers.
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Feels like Nvidia will just quietly absorb Intel at some point when it’s convenient, and Intel shareholders, and directors, will be made to feel happy about it.
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U.S. spending bill to grant $40 billion in fossil fuel subsidies • Wired via Yale E360
Molly Taft:
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The Trump administration has already added nearly $40bn in new federal subsidies for oil, gas, and coal in 2025, a report released Tuesday finds, sending an additional $4bn out the door each year for fossil fuels over the next decade. That new amount, created with the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act this summer, adds to $30.8bn a year in preexisting subsidies for the fossil fuel industry. The report finds that the amount of public money the U.S. will now spend on domestic fossil fuels stands at least $34.8bn a year.
The increase amounts to “the largest single-year increase in subsidies we’ve seen in many years — at least since 2017,” says Collin Rees, the U.S. program manager for Oil Change International, an anti-fossil fuels advocacy organization and author of the report.
The U.S. has been subsidizing fossil fuel production for more than a century. Many of the tax subsidies logged in the report — including a tax break passed in 1913 that allows companies to write off large amounts of expenses related to drilling new oil wells — have been on the books for decades.
Fossil fuel subsidies have proven notoriously difficult to undo, even with a determined administration. After campaigning on ending tax breaks for oil companies, President Joe Biden’s 2021 budget pledged to raise $35bn over 19 years by eliminating certain fossil fuel subsidies; one of his first executive orders tasked agencies with getting rid of those subsidies. (“I don’t think the federal government should give handouts to Big Oil,” he said at a press conference announcing the order.)
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They just can’t give it up. Endless complaints about subsidies for renewables, yet unable to see the huge amounts of money they put in to the worst of the status quo.
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Teenagers charged over Transport for London cyber attack • BBC News
Joe Tidy and Graham Fraser:
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Two teenagers have been charged in connection with a massive cyber attack which caused Transport for London (TfL) months of disruption.
The National Crime Agency (NCA) says it believes the hack – which began on 31 August last year – was carried out by members of the cyber-criminal group, Scattered Spider.
Thalha Jubair, 19, from east London, and Owen Flowers, 18, from Walsall in the West Midlands, were arrested at their home addresses on Tuesday by the NCA and City of London Police.
Both appeared at Westminster Magistrates Court on Thursday afternoon charged with conspiring together to commit unauthorised acts against TfL, under the Computer Misuse Act. They have been remanded in custody to appear at Southwark Crown Court at a later date.
TfL says the hack caused it £39m of damage and disruption. The hack disrupted TfL services for three months. Whilst trains, buses and other transport was unaffected, many TfL online services and connected information boards went offline as part of the attack.
TfL wrote to around 5,000 customers to say there may have been unauthorised access to their personal information such as bank account numbers and sort codes. Data including names, emails and home addresses were accessed.
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It’s always summer, and it’s always school-age (or just beyond) teenagers. The trial probably won’t happen until some time well into 2026, but no doubt the bail conditions will be no use of the internet.
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Satya Nadella is haunted at the prospect of Microsoft not surviving the AI era • The Verge
Tom Warren:
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“Some of the biggest businesses we’ve built might not be as relevant going forward,” admitted Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella during an employee-only town hall last week. Nadella was responding to a question about the perceived change in culture inside Microsoft, but his answer revealed a lot more about his own fears over Microsoft’s future in this AI era.
“Our industry is full of case studies of companies that were great once, that just disappeared. I’m haunted by one particular one called DEC,” said Nadella. Digital Equipment Corporation once ruled the world of minicomputers with its PDP series in the early 1970s, but it quickly faced competition from IBM and others that made it irrelevant. It also made some strategic errors by betting on its own Virtual Address eXtension (VAX) architecture instead of the emerging Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) architecture.
…Nadella’s cautionary tale came in response to a UK employee who said the company had recently “felt markedly different, colder, more rigid, and lacking in the empathy we have come to value.”
I’ve spoken to dozens of employees over the past few months, and they all told me that morale inside Microsoft is at an all-time low. If there’s fear at the top of Microsoft, then employees will undoubtedly feel that through the constant rounds of layoffs and change. It’s why I said in July that Microsoft risks creating a culture of fear.
While Nadella didn’t fully address the perceived cultural shift inside Microsoft, he did say the company’s leadership team “can do better and we will do better.” He didn’t explain how Microsoft would actually do better, though.
“Here we are in our 51st year as a company, and if you look at a set of metrics we are thriving. But at the same time, when I think about the degree of difficulty that is ahead, for us to navigate what is a changing industry, a changing tech sector, and changing economics, we have some very hard work ahead of us,” Nadella said.
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Nadella is absolutely right to be paranoid about this: 20-odd years ago Microsoft didn’t catch the mobile wave – it had the wrong business structure of charging for mobile phone licences – and thought that Windows would save it. Intel also thought that being big in the PC age would save it. Not so.
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Software update shoves ads onto Samsung’s pricey fridges • Ars Technica
Scharon Harding:
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Days after someone revealed the news on social media, Samsung confirmed today that it is showing advertisements on some US customers’ smart fridges. Samsung said the ads showing on some Family Hub-series fridges are part of a pilot program, but we suspect that they may become more permanent additions to Samsung fridges and/or other types of screen-equipped smart home appliances.
In a statement sent to Ars Technica, Samsung confirmed that it is “conducting a pilot program to offer promotions and curated advertisements on certain Samsung Family Hub refrigerator models in the US market.”
Samsung currently lists nine Family Hub refrigerators in the US, which have MSRPs ranging from $1,800 to $3,500. Family Hub fridges have 21.5- or 32-inch screens, which, until now, users have had autonomy over for displaying helpful or fun things, like photos and videos, memos, weather, timers, and a web browser. Some of those abilities require a Wi-Fi connection or a Samsung account.
Now, Samsung is commandeering some of the screens already set up in homes to display ads. As Samsung’s rep explained:
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As a part of this pilot program, Family Hub refrigerators in the US will receive an over-the-network (OTN) software update with Terms of Service (T&C) and Privacy Notice (PN). Advertising will appear on certain Family Hub refrigerator Cover Screens. The Cover Screen appears when a Family Hub screen is idle. Ad design format may change depending on Family Hub personalization options for the Cover Screen, and advertising will not appear when Cover Screen displays Art Mode or picture albums.
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If a user doesn’t like a particular ad, they can remove it so that they won’t see the ad “again during the campaign period,” Samsung’s rep noted.
…Based on Samsung’s statement, users can prevent ads from showing on their smart fridges by having the screen show photos or art. However, that limits the ways people can use their expensive fridge.
Another option is to disconnect the fridge from the Internet. Again, though, this would eliminate some core capabilities, like its meal planner, recipes, and shopping list features.
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Another option being to just sell the fridge and get a boring one that just keeps food cold.
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Johnson: China is straining U.S. relations with Nvidia chip ban • CNBC
Samantha Subin and Chris Eudaily:
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Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson called China an “adversary” of the U.S. on Wednesday after a report that the country has told tech companies to stop buying Nvidia
’s artificial intelligence chips.The Cyberspace Administration of China ordered companies to halt purchases of Nvidia’s RTX Pro 6000D, a chip that was made for the country, the Financial Times reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
“They steal our intellectual property,” Johnson told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Wednesday. “They have no regard whatsoever for U.S. trademark law or any of the other provisions that make for fair trade agreements. It is not the fault of the United States that there are these strained relations.”
Johnson’s comments coincided with remarks from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at a news conference Wednesday in London.
“We can only be in service of a market if a country wants us to be,” he said in response to the ban on the company’s chips. “I’m disappointed with what I see, but they have larger agendas to work out between China and the United States.”
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The US clearly feels it’s unfair for China to not want its products, because that prevents it denying their sale to China. Or, in the Trump administration’s case, from shaking Nvidia down for cash on sales it makes to China.
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The UK’s £31bn tech deal with the US might sound great – but the government has to answer these questions • The Guardian
Matt Davies:
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In the US itself, datacentre developments have led to rising energy bills and disrupted water supplies while supporting remarkably few jobs. It is unsurprising, then, that existing plans for a new “hyperscale” datacentre in Buckinghamshire have encountered local opposition and legal pushback. To ensure its new “AI growth zones” are not beset by similar controversy, government will need to provide assurances that energy resources and other assets staked for private investment will produce returns for local economies – and to the public purse – rather than just powering profits abroad.
Then there is the opportunity cost associated with prioritising US tech over domestic alternatives. Liz Kendall, Kyle’s successor as technology secretary, has described the new partnership as a “vote of confidence in Britain’s booming AI sector”, although few of the companies involved are based – let alone owned – in Britain. Investment from US companies does not need to be zero-sum, but without deft management it risks crowding out any green shoots of growth in the UK’s own tech sector. Entrenching reliance on US technologies at the most lucrative parts of the AI value chain would leave UK firms to fight over the leftovers.
It’s true that the UK lacks the scale and resource advantages of the US, and therefore the ability to participate in cutting-edge AI development on its own: from this perspective, US investment is essential. Yet our international peers – from the EU’s “EuroStack” movement to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s Brazil – have charted alternative paths to bolster sovereign capabilities and create the conditions for domestic tech firms, small and medium-sized enterprises and truly public alternatives to flourish.
All of this is downstream of the most important issue: what is the government’s vision for AI beyond doing it bigger and faster?
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(Davies is economic and social policy lead at the Ada Lovelace Institute.) The question of quite who benefits, and where all these promised high-tech jobs will really be, still remains unanswered.
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ChatGPT mostly used for help with writing, research • The Register
Simon Sharwood:
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Users of individual accounts for OpenAI’s ChatGPT mostly use it for research and to help with writing, according to a new study into the kind of queries fed into the service.
The study, penned by researchers from OpenAI and the USA’s National Bureau of Labor Research, used a random selection of messages sent to ChatGPT by users signed up for Free, Plus, and Pro plans between May 2024 and June 2025. Those are plans OpenAI aims at individuals, not businesses. That may help to explain why the study found steady growth in work-related messages but even faster growth in messages of a personal nature, which have grown from 53% to more than 70% of all usage.
If you’ve used ChatGPT during the study period and fear the authors read your input, the paper explains that the researchers devised a method that meant no human read your work. They also excluded material from users who opted out or deleted their accounts, or were under 18 at the time they used the bot.
The study found most queries to ChatGPT concern either “Practical Guidance”, “Seeking Information”, or “Writing”.
An example the paper offers for “Seeking Information” is asking ChatGPT to find the qualifying times by age and gender for the Boston Marathon, while “Practical Guidance” involves asking ChatGPT to devise a fitness program that will help a user prepare to run in the event.
“Writing” covers requests for “automated production of emails, documents and other communications, but also editing, critiquing, summarizing, and translating text provided by the user.” The study finds writing accounts for 40% of ChatGPT usage at work, and that almost two thirds of such requests ask ChatGPT to edit, critique, or translate text rather than create it from scratch.
Most of you still appear to write your own material. As we always do here at The Register.
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Huawei pushes AI and cloud into emerging markets after US ban • Rest of World
Viola Zhou:
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Huawei’s low pricing and wide product offerings make it an attractive partner for smaller countries as they start to build their AI infrastructure, experts say. But by choosing Huawei, the nations risk political pressure from the U.S. government, which is increasingly wary of China’s ambition in the global AI race.
“We are seeing a bifurcation of the global AI stack,” Rebecca Arcesati, who researches Chinese technology at the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Germany, told Rest of World. “The U.S. government is saying: Let’s lock in market dominance for U.S. companies, including chip designers and hyperscalers, so that those markets are not won by Chinese companies.”
Up for grabs is a global AI infrastructure market that is estimated to reach $200bn in annual spending in 2028. Chip manufacturers including Nvidia and AMD, as well as cloud providers such as Google, Amazon, and Chinese tech giants, are competing for a larger share of the market, which is growing quickly as countries race to harness AI for socioeconomic benefits.
The Biden administration’s efforts to block China’s access to American AI chips has only encouraged China to nurture its own chip industry. Now, the Trump administration is trying to prevent Chinese companies from gaining share in the global AI market. In July, the U.S. allowed Nvidia to resume selling its H20 chips in China, a move seen as reinforcing Nvidia’s dominance. Trump also unveiled an AI Action Plan, pledging to export America’s “full AI technology stack” — including software, hardware, models and applications — to keep countries from turning to Chinese alternatives.
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Huawei was forestalled from selling its phones – and to some extent networking equipment – around the world by US sanctions, but it’s really starting to rebuild its strength. What doesn’t kill it makes it stronger.
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‘I have to do it’: why one of the world’s most brilliant AI scientists left the US for China • The Guardian
Chang Che:
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Today, at 56, Song-Chun Zhu is one of the world’s leading authorities in artificial intelligence. In 1992, he left China for the US to pursue a PhD in computer science at Harvard. Later, at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), he led one of the most prolific AI research centres in the world, won numerous major awards, and attracted prestigious research grants from the Pentagon and the National Science Foundation. He was celebrated for his pioneering research into how machines can spot patterns in data, which helped lay the groundwork for modern AI systems such as ChatGPT and DeepSeek. He and his wife, and their two US-born daughters, lived in a hilltop home on Los Angeles’s Mulholland Drive. He thought he would never leave.
But in August 2020, after 28 years in the US, Zhu astonished his colleagues and friends by suddenly moving back to China, where he took up professorships at two top Beijing universities and a directorship in a state-sponsored AI institute. The Chinese media feted him as a patriot assisting the motherland in its race toward artificial intelligence. US lawmakers would later demand to know how funders such as UCLA and the Pentagon had ignored “concerning signs” of Zhu’s ties to a geopolitical rival. In 2023, Zhu became a member of China’s top political advisory body, where he proposed that China should treat AI with the same strategic urgency as a nuclear weapons programme.
Zhu’s journey from rural China to the helm of one of the US’s leading AI labs was both improbable and part of a much bigger story. For almost a century, the world’s brightest scientific minds were drawn to the US as the place where they could best advance their research. The work of these new arrivals had helped secure US dominance in technologies such as nuclear weapons, semiconductors and AI. Today, that era seems to be coming to a close.
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(Thanks Gregory 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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