Future recruits for MI6 are being sought on the dark web rather than through newspaper crosswords. CC-licensed photo by Mike Mozart on Flickr.
A selection of 9 links for you. Undercover. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Here’s what it’s like to use Meta’s new Ray-Ban Display glasses • CNN Business
Clare Duffy:
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Have you ever wished you could quickly and quietly respond to a text while in a movie theatre without pulling out your phone. Or that you could see directions to the closest coffee shop without having to look down at your maps app? A new pair of Meta smart glasses with a tiny display inside the lens makes those things possible.
Meta unveiled the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses Wednesday at its annual Connect event at its headquarters in Menlo Park, California, along with several updated versions of its more basic, audio-only Ray-Ban and Oakley smart frames.
It’s all part of Meta’s push to develop devices for the artificial intelligence era. In demos of the new glasses at the event, I saw firsthand how they could make it possible to spend less time looking down at your phone — thanks to a tiny screen an inch from my eyeball.
“Glasses are the only form factor where you can let AI see what you see, hear what you hear, talk to you throughout the day… so it is no surprise that AI glasses are taking off,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the Connect event. He added that the company is seeing consumers adopt smart glasses at a rate similar to that of “some of the most popular consumer electronics of all time.”
But are consumers ready to shell out $799 for Meta’s smart glasses that represent an early step toward augmented reality? Here are my takeaways after trying them out.
…When you’re wearing the frames, the display looks like it’s projected several feet in front of you. You have to focus on it to really see what’s there — otherwise, it kind of floats in your peripheral vision when you’re looking at things in the real world. (You can also turn the display off, if you want to do focused work or have a conversation without the distraction of the screen.)
Only the wearer can see the display. Talking to someone who is wearing the Ray-Ban Displays you’d have no indication if they had messages popping up or Instagram Reels scrolling on the side, except that they might break direct eye contact with you to look at the display.
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I don’t know how I missed the fact that they were shown off on Wednesday, but anyway: here they are. The maps are only for walking. I think this is showing Apple where it should be heading; the question is whether it can jump in, as it did with the iPod against music players; or will miss the boat, as with search and LLMs.
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Oklahoma’s big “TV nudes” scandal was… a Jackie Chan movie on a Samsung streaming service • Ars Technica
Nate Anderson:
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Since July, the state of Oklahoma has been consumed by important investigative questions, including:
• Why did naked women appear on a state-owned TV set during an official Board of Education meeting? Was someone in the room inadvertently streaming pornography from a personal device to the TV? Will anyone be prosecuted for what happened?
• Were the board members who complained about the video directed by the governor to “lie about me,” as the state’s pugnacious, hard-right Superintendent of Education asked?
• Why was a “chiropractic table” involved in the scene? And why did the video feature, as one board member noted, a retro vibe and “a guy with a white hat, kind of a Gilligan-type hat”?We now have answers to all of those questions.
After a lengthy investigation by the Oklahoma County Sheriff’s Office and the State Bureau of Investigation, and then a lengthy consideration of their reports, the Oklahoma County District Attorney this week announced that “there is insufficient evidence to file criminal charges.”
But the investigators confirmed that the complaint was true; a TV in the office did in fact show the images in question, including the “chiropractic table.” The naked women did not come from anyone’s secret stash of pornography, however; they came from Jackie Chan’s 1985 film The Protector.
After this was announced, a local Oklahoma news channel confirmed it by… sitting down and watching the movie.
…But why was The Protector showing on a TV in a state office building at all? Investigators came to find out that the Samsung smart TV in question—recently installed in the office—had been set up in such a way that it defaulted to showing Samsung TV Plus Channel 1204, the “Movie Hub Action.”
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Smart TVs considered harmful (to political careers). Didn’t know Jackie Chan films got that steamy-adjacent, though.
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British spies turn to dark web to recruit Russian agents, access secrets • Reuters
Michael Holden:
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British spies are to use the digital shadows of the dark web to recruit informants and allow them to receive secret information from agents in Russia and worldwide, Britain’s foreign ministry said on Thursday.
The Secret Intelligence Service, Britain’s foreign spy agency known as MI6, is to use a dark web portal called Silent Courier, which will allow people to securely pass on details about illicit activities anywhere in the world, or offer their own services.
“Today we’re asking those with sensitive information on global instability, international terrorism or hostile state intelligence activity to contact MI6 securely online,” MI6 chief Richard Moore will say when he formally announces the plans in a speech in Istanbul on Friday.
“Our virtual door is open to you,” Moore, who has previously called on Russians to spy, opens new tab for Britain, will say.
MI6, which was established in 1909 but not officially acknowledged until the 1990s, usually operates in the shadows, and only its head – known as “C” – is a publicly named member of the service.
In a promotional video to accompany the announcement, it said the bedrock of its operations had been face-to-face meetings, but it was now turning to the anonymity of the dark web, the murky part of the internet with hidden sites often used by the likes of drug dealers, terrorists and child sex abusers. Instructions on how to use the portal will be put on MI6’s YouTube channel, the foreign ministry said.
“As the world changes, and the threats we’re facing multiply, we must ensure the UK is always one step ahead of our adversaries,” foreign minister Yvette Copper said.
“Now we’re bolstering their efforts with cutting-edge tech so MI6 can recruit new spies for the UK – in Russia and around the world.”
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Just don’t forget to view the MI6 YouTube channel on a private browser, would-be Russian spies! (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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Trump’s H-1B visa fee isn’t just about immigration. It’s about fealty • The Verge
Terrence O’Brien:
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In short, it seems like the Secretary of Homeland Security can exempt any person, company, or even an entire industry from the travel restrictions and the $100,000 at their (or more likely, the president’s) discretion. It’s this carveout that betrays a major purpose of the proclamation.
The tech industry and Donald Trump were long at odds with each other, even if the president has largely brought it to heel in his second term. The White House has already made a big show of making tech CEOs trip over themselves to see who can fawn the hardest over Trump or wow him with the gaudiest gift. Now, it can wring further concessions and flattery out of the likes of Satya Nadella, lest he have to choose between dropping half-a-billion dollars on visa fees or replacing over 5,000 highly-skilled employees.
Companies like Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon aren’t the only major beneficiaries of the H-1B program. The financial industry, including companies like JP Morgan Chase and Deloitte, each have over 2,000 H-1B workers on their payroll according to federal data. It wouldn’t come as a surprise if the Secretary of Homeland Security decided to grant JP Morgan a waiver after it, say, suddenly granted a loan to the Trump Organization or made a substantial donation to his MAGA super PAC. He used similar tactics to squeeze pro-bono legal work out of law firms.
Colleges and universities also make extensive use of the H-1B program to attract top talent for professorships, especially for nursing and medical programs. Harvard, which the president has tussled with quite publicly in 2025 has roughly 280 H-1B workers on its books, and Columbia University has over 200 as well. Now the White House can threaten their foreign born professors and researchers as well as their funding.
This is the tariff mess all over again.
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There’s even confusion about whether the H1B fee (used by tech companies particularly to import skilled workers) applies retrospectively, or every time the person enters the country, or only to those being issued it the first time. In reality, as O’Brien says, it’s a method of either extracting money or fealty. It feels like everyone keeps saying the US is getting worse, but the US is getting worse.
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Meta exposé author faces bankruptcy after ban on criticising company • The Guardian
Michael Savage:
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A former Meta executive who wrote an explosive exposé making allegations about the social media company’s dealings with China and its treatment of teenagers is said to be “on the verge of bankruptcy” after publishing the book.
An MP has claimed in parliament that Mark Zuckerberg’s company was trying to “silence and punish” Sarah Wynn-Williams, the former director of global public policy at Meta’s precursor, Facebook, after her decision to speak out about her time at the company.
Louise Haigh, the former Labour transport secretary, said Wynn-Williams was facing a fine of $50,000 (£37,000) every time she breached an order secured by Meta preventing her from talking disparagingly about the company.
Wynn-Williams made a series of claims about the social media company’s behaviour and culture in her book Careless People, published this year. It also contained allegations of sexual harassment denied by the company. It states she was fired for “poor performance and toxic behaviour”.
However, the former diplomat was barred from publicising the memoir after Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, secured a ruling preventing her from doing so. She subsequently appeared before a US Senate judiciary subcommittee, in which she said Meta worked “hand in glove” with Beijing over censorship tools – something the company has denied.
Pan Macmillan, which published the memoir, said it had sold more than 150,000 copies across all formats. The book was also named in The Sunday Times‘ bestselling hardbacks of 2025 so far. The paperback edition is due to be published early next year.
New York magazine has previously reported that Wynn-Williams was paid an advance for the book of more than $500,000 (£370,000).
…It is understood that the $50,000 figure represents the damages Wynn-Williams has to pay for material breaches of the separation agreement she signed when she left Meta in 2017. Meta has emphasised that Wynn-Williams entered into the non-disparagement agreement voluntarily as part of her departure.
Meta said that to date, Wynn-Williams had not been forced to make any payments under the agreement.
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“To date”.
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From London to Java: how AI helped us locate a viral video’s true origin • Full Fact
Charlotte Green:
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This week, we found a video posted on X of a crowd of women wearing niqabs (a veil worn by some Muslim women which covers their entire body and face, except their eyes) walking past a tall brick wall. The caption said this was filmed in London.
We suspected that this was not actually the case, although at first glance, there was not much in the footage to dispute the claim it was filmed in the UK.
All that could be seen in the background was the end of a wall, trees, and some blurry buildings in the distance.
Our first point of call when trying to geolocate images or footage is what we do to all visual media we fact check at Full Fact—a reverse image search using either the picture or key stills from a video. Finding the oldest result often reveals its original source and the context in which it was first shared.
But in this case, directly reverse image searching through Google took me to a TikTok video with a location marker for ‘Pondok Pesantren Al Fatah Temboro’, in Indonesia.
An internet search revealed that Al Fatah Temboro is an Islamic boarding school (such schools are known in Indonesia as a ‘pesantren’) located in Temboro on the island of Java—not London, as the posts were claiming. A crowd of this size wearing niqabs is not unusual in this context; Indonesia has a large Muslim population.
…We found a slightly different compilation of similar videos on Facebook, seemingly from the same area, also with women in Islamic dress, but with more geographical features visible, such as a sign and clearer views of buildings.
Using stills from this video as references, we asked the AI chatbot ChatGPT if it could provide coordinates to the location, using the possible location of the Al Fatah school in Indonesia.
An investigation by open source research experts at Bellingcat earlier this year found that AI tools can be a supportive tool for geolocating images, although this isn’t an open goal, as they can still hallucinate (when a model generates false or conflicting information, often presented confidently) and provide wrong answers. In this investigation, we double-checked everything it told us.
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And thus we see the positive uses of geolocation by chatbots.
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Africa’s only internet cable repair ship keeps the continent online • Rest of World
Jess Auerbach Jahajeeah and Stephanie Wangari:
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As the Léon Thévenin eased into Cape Town port last month, Shuru Arendse was ready to rush home to his family. He had a month off and a laundry list of to-do’s: fix a leaky tap, patch a hole in the roof, take his two children to the trampoline park.
But halfway through Arendse’s leave, there was a phone call: An undersea internet cable off Angola was malfunctioning. The Thévenin, the only cable repair ship permanently stationed in Africa, was heading off to fix it, and Arendse was needed. He is a cable jointer — one of a handful of people on the continent who know how to splice cables together.
His wife got angry. “Shuru, we didn’t even get a chance to do anything yet,” he recalled her saying.
The ship has taken Arendse all along the African coast and given him a sense of purpose. But it has been at the expense of his family, the 43-year-old said. Cable-ship crew like him can spend weeks to months at sea, interspersed with periods of shore leave.
“I’m an absent parent,” he told Rest of World. “Because of that guilt, I spoil my children. What I do is, I buy, buy, buy.”
Working on an internet cable repair ship is grueling but rewarding — and never more important than in today’s hyperconnected world, a handful of the Thévenin’s crew members told Rest of World. This report is based on three years of observations and two weeks onboard the ship.
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This is a lovely essay with great photos.
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United Kingdom national charged in connection with multiple cyber attacks, including on critical infrastructure • US Department of Justice
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A complaint filed in the District of New Jersey was unsealed today charging Thalha Jubair, a United Kingdom national, with conspiracies to commit computer fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering, in relation to at least 120 computer network intrusions and extortion involving 47 US entities. The complaint alleges victims paid at least $115m in ransom payments.
“Jubair is alleged to have participated in a sweeping cyber extortion scheme carried out by a group known as Scattered Spider, which committed at least 120 attacks worldwide and resulted in over $115 million in ransom payments from victims,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Matthew R. Galeotti of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division.
…Portions of the ransom payments from at least five victims were sent to wallets on a server controlled by Jubair. In July 2024, while law enforcement was seizing that server — including successfully seizing cryptocurrency worth approximately $36m at the time of the seizure — Jubair transferred a portion of cryptocurrency that originated from one of the victims, worth approximately $8.4m at the time, to another wallet.
The charges arise out of an investigation into a cyber threat group that has been referred to as “Scattered Spider,” “Octo Tempest,” “UNC3944,” and/or “0ktapus.” Scattered Spider has targeted victims throughout the United States, including in New Jersey.
Jubair is charged with computer fraud conspiracy, two counts of computer fraud, wire fraud conspiracy, two counts of wire fraud, and money laundering conspiracy. If convicted, he faces a maximum penalty of 95 years in prison.
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Jubair has already been charged in the UK over ransomware attacks on TfL.
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A government of all the podcasters • The Atlantic
Helen Lewis:
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In the past decade, American public life has undergone two major transformations: The MAGA movement has swallowed the Republican Party whole. And influencers such as Kirk have elbowed aside traditional media outlets in the quest for attention. Even more important, the boundary between the movement and the influencers is nonexistent: Kirk’s campus-outreach group, Turning Point USA, was ostensibly a grassroots operation, but it was also a mouthpiece for Trumpism.
Here’s Kirk talking about his voter-outreach operation during last year’s presidential race: “We’re working directly in harmony with the Trump campaign,” he announced in an archive clip aired at the start of Vance’s tribute show. “It’s been vetted, it’s been cleared, it’s been blessed,” he said of his event, adding, “We’re going to try to win this thing.”
Vance and Kirk were personally close, and the vice president was clearly moved by the shock and injustice of his friend’s assassination. He traveled to Utah to bring Kirk’s coffin home to Arizona on Air Force Two. But the vice president’s decision to host The Charlie Kirk Show was also a political act. As the party’s most likely nominee for 2028, Vance must hope to inherit Kirk’s organizational infrastructure—and his audience.
Just last week, Kamala Harris was confessing that she felt sidelined as vice president, confined to unpopular policy areas by a president who didn’t want to be overshadowed. Vance has realized that podcaster in chief is a more powerful position than the one he currently holds. Imagine how strange a sitting vice president’s decision to host The Charlie Kirk Show would seem to a time traveler from 20 years ago. Had Rush Limbaugh died during George W. Bush’s presidency, would Dick Cheney have hosted the radio host’s call-in show?
To those inside the MAGA movement, Kirk was not merely a friend, a young father, and a passionate advocate for conservative-Christian values—he was just like them. From the president down, this is a group of people obsessed with “owning the narrative.” The “performative utterance”—a sentence that bends reality into the speaker’s preferred form with words alone—might be a concept championed by the postmodern left, but it has been embraced by Trump and the MAGA right, who believe that saying something is 90% of doing it.
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The idea that podcasts – those funny things that were enabled by the iPod being able to play MP3s – would become a hugely influential part of modern media would be impossible to comprehend even ten years ago.
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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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