Residents of San Francisco can now find out where parking tickets are being issued from a constantly updated map. CC-licensed photo by davitydave on Flickr.

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There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

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A selection of 10 links for you. Yellow lines? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

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Europe’s cookie law messed up the internet. Brussels wants to fix it • POLITICO

Ellen O’Regan:

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In a bid to slash red tape, the European Commission wants to eliminate one of its peskiest laws: a 2009 tech rule that plastered the online world with pop-ups requesting consent to cookies.

It’s the kind of simplification ordinary Europeans can get behind.

Cookies are a foundation of the internet that allow website holders to collect information about visitors — everything from whether they’ve logged in with a password to what items they’re looking to buy and therefore, might want to see advertising about.

European rulemakers in 2009 revised a law called the e-Privacy Directive to require websites to get consent from users before loading cookies on their devices, unless the cookies are “strictly necessary” to provide a service. Fast forward to 2025 and the internet is full of consent banners that users have long learned to click away without thinking twice.

“Too much consent basically kills consent. People are used to giving consent for everything, so they might stop reading things in as much detail, and if consent is the default for everything, it’s no longer perceived in the same way by users,” said Peter Craddock, data lawyer with Keller and Heckman.

Cookie technology is now a focal point of the EU executive’s plans to simplify technology regulation. Officials want to present an “omnibus” text in December, scrapping burdensome requirements on digital companies. On Monday, it held a meeting with the tech industry to discuss the handling of cookies and consent banners.

A note sent to industry and civil society attending a focus group on Sept. 15, seen by POLITICO, showed the Commission is pondering how to tweak the rules to include more exceptions or make sure users can set their preferences on cookies once (for example, in their browser settings) instead of every time they visit a website. 

EU countries have floated similar ideas. Denmark (currently presiding over meetings in the Council of the European Union) suggested in May to drop consent banners for cookies collecting data “for technically necessary functions” or “simple statistics.”

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The real problem is it just accustoms people to clicking “OK” all the time – making them vulnerable to phishing – or annoys them because they have to hunt around for the button to get rid of the dialog. I think we’d all celebrate the end of cookie banners.
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‘SIM farms’ are a spam plague. A giant one in New York threatened US infrastructure, Feds say • WIRED

Andy Greenberg:

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The recent discovery of a sprawling SIM farm operation in the New York City area has revealed how these facilities, typically used by cybercriminals to flood phones with spam calls and texts, have grown large enough that the US government is warning it could have been used not just for crime, but large-scale disruption of critical infrastructure.

On Tuesday morning, the US Secret Service revealed that it had found a collection of facilities across the “New York tristate area” holding more than 100,000 SIM cards housed in “SIM servers,” devices that allow them to be managed and operated simultaneously. Due to the sheer scale of the infrastructure of this single SIM farm—and the fact that it reportedly came onto the Secret Service’s radar after it was exploited in “swatting” attacks that targeted US members of Congress around Christmas of 2023—the agency has warned that the operation, which has been at least partially dismantled, posed a serious threat of a disruptive attack on cellular service.

…Despite speculation in some reporting about SIM farm operation that suggests it was created by a foreign state such as Russia or China and used for espionage, it’s far more likely that the operation’s central focus was scams and other profit-motivated forms of cybercrime, says Ben Coon, who leads intelligence at the cybersecurity firm Unit 221b and has carried out multiple investigations into SIM farms. “The disruption of cell services is possible, flooding the network to the degree that it couldn’t take any more traffic,” Coon says. “My gut is telling me there was some type of fraud involved here.”

In this case, according to a CNN report on the Secret Service’s investigation, the agency got onto the trail of the New York area SIM farm after it was used in a pair of swatting incidents around Christmas Day in 2023 that targeted congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and US senator Rick Scott. Those incidents appear to have been tied to a pair of Romanian men, Thomasz Szabo and Nemanja Radovanovic, who were working with the American serial swatter Alan Filion, also known as Torswats.

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The idea this could have “disrupted” the whole infrastructure is ridiculous: there are millions of phones in the are around New York. This was indeed a spam farm.
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Find My Parking Cops

Riley Walz:

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Where does this site get data from? In San Francisco, the SFMTA is the government authority tasked with giving out parking tickets. On average, they issue 1 parking ticket every 24 seconds. They employ about 300 officers who drive these tiny single-seat vehicles around, looking for violations:

I thought it would be interesting to visualize parking ticket data. I discovered that the city website people use to pay their tickets also includes a full copy of the citation. But you need to know the citation ID number, which presumably you only know if you have the ticket in your hand. I don’t have a car, but my roommate does and he got a ticket recently.

This is gold! I can see everything: the make, color, location, the reason for the ticket, license plate, and even the initials of the officer who wrote the ticket. I would really love to be able to see EVERY ticket. But I don’t know the IDs of every ticket. BUT WAIT. These numbers look like they go sort of in order. Current IDs are somewhere around 992,000,000. And tickets issued a couple months ago were around 988,000,000.

I was looking at ticket 984,946,605. When I type in 1 higher, 984,946,606, no ticket is found. That makes sense, there definitely aren’t close to a billion tickets issued. Well, how are these IDs generated? There must be some logic to it.

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He was able to figure out who, where and when new tickets are issued, and then put them all on a map. It’s like 2005 all over again.
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Ukraine is using AI-powered drone swarms against Russia • WSJ

Alistair MacDonald (Photographs by Justyna Mielnikiewicz):

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On a recent evening, a trio of Ukrainian drones flew under the cover of darkness to a Russian position and decided among themselves exactly when to strike.

The assault was an example of how Ukraine is using artificial intelligence to allow groups of drones to coordinate with each other to attack Russian positions, an innovative technology that heralds the future of battle. 

Military experts say the so-called swarm technology represents the next frontier for drone warfare because of its potential to allow tens or even thousands of drones—or swarms—to be deployed at once to overwhelm the defenses of a target, be that a city or an individual military asset.

Ukraine has conducted swarm attacks on the battlefield for much of the past year, according to a senior Ukrainian officer and the company that makes the software. The previously unreported attacks are the first known routine use of swarm technology in combat, analysts say, underscoring Ukraine’s position at the vanguard of drone warfare.

Swarming marries two rising forces in modern warfare: AI and drones. Companies and militaries around the world are racing to develop software that uses AI to link and manage groups of unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, leaving them to communicate and coordinate with each other after launch.

But the use of AI on the battlefield is also raising ethical concerns that machines could be left to decide the fate of combatants and civilians.

The drones deployed in the recent Ukrainian attack used technology developed by local company Swarmer. Its software allows groups of drones to decide which one strikes first and adapt if, for instance, one runs out of battery, said Chief Executive Serhii Kupriienko.

“You set the target and the drones do the rest,” Kupriienko said. “They work together, they adapt.”

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Scary. And makes the storyline in the third (new) Star Trek film look very prescient, though we didn’t need multiple centuries to achieve it.
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Apple announces project to protect California redwood forest • MacRumors

Hartley Charlton:

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Apple on Tuesday announced a new investment in the restoration and sustainable management of California’s Gualala River Forest, expanding its global Restore Fund initiative.

The project is conducted in partnership with The Conservation Fund and seeks to protect and manage coastal redwoods in Mendocino County while generating carbon credits that contribute to Apple’s climate goals.

The Restore Fund launched in 2021 with Goldman Sachs and Conservation International. It has since grown to include Climate Asset Management and direct investments from Apple in projects across the U.S. and Latin America. Apple suppliers TSMC and Murata also back the fund, which now supports two dozen conservation and regenerative agriculture initiatives spanning six continents.

The Gualala River Forest project is part of Apple’s push to reach carbon neutrality across its entire footprint by 2030.

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It’s not entirely altruistic: Apple gets carbon credits from the forest. There’s no mention of how much money Apple is putting into the project.
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In-depth Q&A: the IPCC’s sixth assessment report on climate science • Carbon Brief

Carbon Brief Staff:

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The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has published the first part of its sixth assessment report (AR6), which will form the cornerstone of climate science for the years ahead.

Summarising the “physical science basis” for climate change, the report pulls together the findings from more than 14,000 peer-reviewed studies. 

The authors conclude that it is “unequivocal” that humans have warmed the planet, causing “widespread and rapid” changes to Earth’s oceans, ice and land surface. They warn that the present state of many parts of the climate system is “unprecedented over many centuries to many thousands of years”.

Many of these changes – particularly to the oceans, ice sheets and global sea levels – are “irreversible”, the authors say. Abrupt changes and “tipping points” – such as rapid Antarctic ice sheet melt and forest dieback – “cannot be ruled out”.

One of the key developments since the IPCC’s last assessment report in 2013-14 is the strengthening of the links between human-caused warming and increasingly severe extreme weather, the authors say. This is now “an established fact”, they write.

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Not in doubt for decades. Increasingly obvious with every passing day.
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‘Tentacles squelching wetly’: the human subtitle writers under threat from AI • The Guardian

Lucy Carter:

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Teri Devine, associate director of inclusion at the Royal National Institute for Deaf People, says: “For people who are deaf or have hearing loss, subtitles are an essential service – allowing them to enjoy film and TV with loved ones and stay connected to popular culture.”

The deaf and hard-of-hearing community is not monolithic, which means subtitlers are juggling a variety of needs in SDH creation. Jones says: “Some people might say that having the name of a song subtitled is completely useless, because it tells them nothing. But others might have a memory of how the song went, and they’ll be able to connect to it through the song’s title. Some people think that emotional cues get in the way and tell them how to feel rather than being objective. Others want them.”

Subtitling involves much creative and emotionally driven decision-making, two things that AI does not currently have the capacity for. When Jones first watches a show, she writes down how the sounds make her feel, then works out how to transfer her reactions into words. Next, she determines which sounds need to be subtitled and which are excessive. “You can’t overwhelm the viewer,” she says. It is a delicate balance. “You don’t want to describe something that would be clear to the audience,” Cannella says, “and sometimes, what’s going on on the screen is much more important than the audio. The gentle music might not matter!”

AI is unable to decide which sounds are important. “Right now, it’s not even close,” Deryagin says. He also stresses the importance of the broader context of a film, rather than looking at isolated images or scenes. In Blow Out (1981), for example, a mysterious sound is heard. Later, that sound is heard again – and, for hearing viewers, reveals a major plot point. “SDH must instantly connect those two things, but also not say too much in the first instance, because viewers have to wonder what’s going on,” he says. “The same sound can mean a million different things. As humans, we interpret what it means and how it’s supposed to feel.”

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AI’s um, tentacles are reaching into so many places, and their effects so ambiguous: is this good or bad?
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Why science needs outsiders • Works in Progress Magazine

Alvin Djajadikerta and Laura Lungu:

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Many of the most important scientific advances came from unexpected people. A draper was the first to observe bacteria, a clockmaker solved the problem of longitude, a musician discovered Uranus, and a Hollywood actress helped invent secure wireless communication. Let’s call these people outsiders. [Let’s add Einstein, who was not at all known in the world of physics when he published his first major paper. – Overspill Ed.]

Most scientists are ‘insiders’ – experts and specialists who spend their careers inside one academic discipline, mastering its ideas and methods over time. Outsiders, on the other hand, may come from another discipline, work outside established institutions, or be early enough in their careers that they are not yet part of the senior establishment of a discipline.

Outsiders often succeed because scientific progress is in part about generating models about how the world works, and in part about testing, applying and refining these models. The former is how we got quantum theory and the latter is how we got lasers and the MRI machine.

Insiders are often better at fleshing out theories in detail. But they get attached to their theories and can be bad at seeing when those theories need to change. Outsiders have accumulated less expertise, but being less attached to specific theories, they are more willing to update them through ‘paradigm shifts’: creating new theories to predict facts and define research questions. A productive system needs both kinds of work.

Academia has a comparative advantage in ‘outsider’ work – unlike industry research, which has a tendency to be applied, narrow, and focused towards a practical goal, academics naturally have the freedom and job security to take the outside view. But academia can be hostile to outsiders and is becoming more hostile as it comes to represent a larger and larger fraction of science.

This narrowing of opportunities for outsiders has weakened science’s ability to generate paradigm shifts. Many of the biggest scientific leaps began when an outsider spotted a puzzle, imported a method, or sketched a new theory. To encourage more of these leaps today, we need to create space for outsiders by giving people more freedom to switch fields, work independently earlier in their careers, and explore unusual ideas.

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There’s a neat graph which shows that after a “superstar” scientist’s death, their collaborators publish less, while non-collaborators publish more. It’s a version of the old adage that science progresses one funeral at a time. The article also points to the replication crisis – which is a big, big problem for multiple branches of science.
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GuitarPie: guitar fretboard as audio/playback controller • Andreas Fender

Andreas Fender, Frank Heyen, Marius Labudda and Michael Sedlmair:

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Nowadays, electric guitars are often used together with digital interfaces. For instance, tablature applications can support guitar practice by rendering and playing back the tabs of individual instrument tracks of a song (guitar, drums, etc.). However, those interfaces are typically controlled via mouse and keyboard or via touch input. This means that controlling and configuring playback during practice can lead to high switching costs, as learners often need to switch between playing and interface control. In this paper, we explore the use of audio input from an unmodified electric guitar to enable interface control without letting go of the guitar.

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This is the overview of a paper for the ACM 2025; the video showing how it works is fun.

I get the impression this was a labour of love for the lead author, who has a wonderfully appropriate name. Though there’s no indication of where or when the software might be released. (It seems to be a web interface.)
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Are smartphones eroding the experience of watching football? • The Guardian

Kenny Pieper:

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In her recent book The Extinction of Experience, Christine Rosen argues that emerging technologies have personalised our life experiences to such an extent that we no longer need to wait, no longer need to experience anything we don’t like, no longer need to put up with anything which might not fit with our realities.

As football fans, we expect news immediately. We expect access to games without complication, with tickets on our phones. But Rosen argues that these modern conveniences carry a hidden cost: as we grow less used to waiting, our brains stop recognising why patience matters. And that makes us angry and impatient.

Like every new technology that has sped up our daily life – transport, telephones, domestic appliances – the internet, and especially the smartphone, have changed our expectation of time and the value we have placed on it. Not too far back in history, travelling to away games was a challenge, with patience required for the long cross-country journeys. But better roads, trains and buses now mean that legions of fans can travel from all over the country to Ibrox or Parkhead rather than watch their local teams. It’s so much easier and quicker now. And better.

Before this, when travel was a rarity and a chore, teams like East Fife and Cowdenbeath, Queen of the South and others had attendances of over 20,000. Travelling to other grounds was hard. So, you stayed and watched your local team. It wasn’t that you required patience. There was no alternative.

…We might see the questioning of a manager’s future on social media following a loss, sometimes even mid-game. “How can he survive this?” Our Tourette’s-like pronouncements neither reflect well on us or add much to the situation. That we call for anyone to lose their job is an anomaly for a sport proclaiming to be the working-class game.

Like most areas of our lives, we don’t like to wait to get what we want. Today, if you have the money, you can buy your way out of waiting in a queue. Why would football be any different? We have been conditioned to get what we want and get it now.

What troubles me about the changes in our experience of football is not the things that no longer exist. That would be a tedious and fruitless exercise. More importantly it’s about what we’ve lost in ourselves.

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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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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified