Ransomware attacks that disabled airport check-in systems are just the most visible effect of a growing problem. CC-licensed photo by Mark Hodson Photos on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Checked in. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Huntington’s disease treated successfully for first time in UK gene therapy trial • The Guardian
Hannah Devlin:
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Huntington’s disease, a devastating degenerative illness that runs in families, has been treated successfully for the first time in a breakthrough gene therapy trial.
The disease, caused by a single gene defect, steadily kills brain cells leading to dementia, paralysis and ultimately death. Those who have a parent with Huntington’s have a 50% chance of developing the disease, which until now has been incurable.
The gene therapy slowed the progress of the disease by 75% in patients after three years.
Prof Sarah Tabrizi, the director of University College London’s Huntington’s disease centre, who led the trial, said: “We now have a treatment for one of the world’s more terrible diseases. This is absolutely huge. I’m really overjoyed.”
The drug, which inactivates the mutant protein that causes Huntington’s, is delivered to the brain in a single shot during a 12- to 20-hour surgical procedure, meaning that it will be expensive. The breakthrough is sending ripples of hope through the Huntington’s community, many of whom have witnessed the brutal impact of the disease on family members.
The first symptoms, which typically appear when the affected person is in their 30s or 40s, include mood swings, anger and depression. Later patients develop uncontrolled jerky movements, dementia and ultimately paralysis, with some people dying within a decade of diagnosis.
…The mutant Huntington’s gene contains instructions for cells to make a toxic version of a brain protein, called huntingtin. The therapy is delivered via a harmless virus that has been modified to deliver a specifically designed strand of DNA into neurons.
To avoid adverse reactions, the virus is infused very slowly through a micro-catheter into two separate brain regions, a complex procedure that takes 12 to 20 hours. Once the DNA is delivered into the neurons, it instructs the cells to block the production of the toxic version of huntingtin.
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Very, very expensive. But also enormously hopeful. Though it has to be observed that gene therapy for cystic fibrosis, which seemed like a slam-dunk, has eluded researchers for decades.
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What I learned in the first five years of Platformer • Platformer
Casey Newton:
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In many ways, the crisis in journalism is more serious than ever. Tech platforms take a larger share of advertising revenue than they ever have, and the rise of artificial intelligence is crowding journalism out of search results and social feeds. Platformer has outlasted a depressing number of tech-focused publications whose links once filled these pages, including BuzzFeed News, Vice and Motherboard, Protocol, and OneZero. We are all worse off for their absence.
At the same time, my media diet feels as rich and varied as it ever has, thanks to the rise of the newsletter economy and the resurgence in amateur blogging that it has inspired. Core members of the Motherboard team launched the incredible 404 Media, and now deliver scoops at a forbidding pace. Oliver Darcy left CNN barely a year ago, started with nothing, and now his media newsletter Status is a four-person operation and similarly dominant in its field. Publishers have never known how to make profitable journalism about video games, despite their cultural dominance; longtime gaming reporter Stephen Totilo left Axios and now has a stable, profitable, scoopy publication called Game File that he can do for as long as he wants, and on his own terms.
This is the world I was dreaming of five years ago when Platformer began. And no, the success of these publications does not begin to make up for the loss of tens of thousands of journalism jobs over the past two decades. But the newsletter economy has managed to do what nothing else has over the same time period — create a popular, lucrative, replicable, stable format for journalism.
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The newsletter business is booming, relatively. But of course the revenues are unevenly distributed (at a guess, on a power law distribution) and there’s far more competition from “free” than there ever used to be. Newton is one of the few who is thriving, but his thinking about what else is needed (pivot to audio? Pivot to video?) is insightful.
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When “no” means “yes”: why AI chatbots can’t process Persian social etiquette • Ars Technica
Benj Edwards:
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If an Iranian taxi driver waves away your payment, saying, “Be my guest this time,” accepting their offer would be a cultural disaster. They expect you to insist on paying—probably three times—before they’ll take your money. This dance of refusal and counter-refusal, called taarof, governs countless daily interactions in Persian culture. And AI models are terrible at it.
New research released earlier this month titled “We Politely Insist: Your LLM Must Learn the Persian Art of Taarof” shows that mainstream AI language models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta fail to absorb these Persian social rituals, correctly navigating taarof situations only 34 to 42% of the time. Native Persian speakers, by contrast, get it right 82% of the time. This performance gap persists across large language models such as GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Haiku, Llama 3, DeepSeek V3, and Dorna, a Persian-tuned variant of Llama 3.
A study led by Nikta Gohari Sadr of Brock University, along with researchers from Emory University and other institutions, introduces “TAAROFBENCH,” the first benchmark for measuring how well AI systems reproduce this intricate cultural practice. The researchers’ findings show how recent AI models default to Western-style directness, completely missing the cultural cues that govern everyday interactions for millions of Persian speakers worldwide.
“Cultural missteps in high-consequence settings can derail negotiations, damage relationships, and reinforce stereotypes,” the researchers write. For AI systems increasingly used in global contexts, that cultural blindness could represent a limitation that few in the West realize exists.
“Taarof, a core element of Persian etiquette, is a system of ritual politeness where what is said often differs from what is meant,” the researchers write. “It takes the form of ritualized exchanges: offering repeatedly despite initial refusals, declining gifts while the giver insists, and deflecting compliments while the other party reaffirms them. This ‘polite verbal wrestling’ (Rafiee, 1991) involves a delicate dance of offer and refusal, insistence and resistance, which shapes everyday interactions in Iranian culture, creating implicit rules for how generosity, gratitude, and requests are expressed.”
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Seems like America and its tipping culture, which puzzles (and slightly annoys) Britons and Scandinavians alike.
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AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity • Harvard Business Review
Kate Niederhoffer, Gabriella Rosen Kellerman, Angela Lee, Alex Liebscher, Kristina Rapuano and Jeffrey T. Hancock:
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a recent report from the MIT Media Lab found that 95% of organizations see no measurable return on their investment in these technologies. So much activity, so much enthusiasm, so little return. Why?
In collaboration with Stanford Social Media Lab, our research team at BetterUp Labs has identified one possible reason: Employees are using AI tools to create low-effort, passable looking work that ends up creating more work for their coworkers. On social media, which is increasingly clogged with low-quality AI-generated posts, this content is often referred to as “AI slop.” In the context of work, we refer to this phenomenon as “workslop.” We define workslop as AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.
Here’s how this happens. As AI tools become more accessible, workers are increasingly able to quickly produce polished output: well-formatted slides, long, structured reports, seemingly articulate summaries of academic papers by non-experts, and usable code. But while some employees are using this ability to polish good work, others use it to create content that is actually unhelpful, incomplete, or missing crucial context about the project at hand. The insidious effect of workslop is that it shifts the burden of the work downstream, requiring the receiver to interpret, correct, or redo the work. In other words, it transfers the effort from creator to receiver.
If you have ever experienced this, you might recall the feeling of confusion after opening such a document, followed by frustration—Wait, what is this exactly?—before you begin to wonder if the sender simply used AI to generate large blocks of text instead of thinking it through. If this sounds familiar, you have been workslopped.
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Sure to be a new word in the dictionary in a year or two, and in widespread use well before that.
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That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus • Cybersect
Rob Graham:
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On Tuesday, the Secret Service announced they foiled some big national security threat. Major news organizations (e.g. NYTimes) have repeated their claims without questioning them.
The story is bogus. What they discovered was just normal criminal enterprise, banks of thousands of cell “phones” (sic) used to send spam or forward international calls using local phone numbers. Technically, it may even be legitimate enterprise, being simply a gateway between a legitimate VoIP provider and the mobile phone network.
The backstory is a Secret Service investigation into threats sent to politicians via SMS messages. The miscreant used one of this spam farms to mask their origin. When the Secret Service traced back the messages, using radio “triangulation” (sic) to find the mobile phones, they found these SIM farms instead.
One of the reasons we know this story is bogus is because of the New York Times story which cites anonymous officials, “speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation”. That’s not a thing. That’s not a valid reason to grant anonymity under normal journalistic principles. It’s the “Washington Game” of “official leaks”, disseminating propaganda without being held accountable.
The Secret Service is lying to the press. They know it’s just a normal criminal SIM farm and are hyping it into some sort of national security or espionage threat. We know this because they are using the correct technical terms that demonstrate their understanding of typical SIM farm crimes. The claim that they will likely find other such SIM farms in other cities likewise shows they understand this is a normal criminal activity and not any special national security threat.
Their official statements are obvious distortions, like being within 35 miles of the UN building. Their unofficial statements are designed to exaggerate even more, like “never before seen such an extensive operation”. The Secret Service doesn’t normally investigate such crime, so of course they are unlikely to have seen such an extensive operation.
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Rob goes into some detail about how these systems work, why you shouldn’t trust the people quoted in the press, and how much it would really cost to set this up. Long story short, there’s zero national security threat.
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Revealed: the huge growth of Myanmar scam centres that may hold 100,000 trafficked people • The Guardian
Rebecca Ratcliffe:
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Five years ago, the land now home to KK Park – a vast, heavily guarded complex stretching for 210 hectares (520 acres) along the churning Moei River that forms Myanmar’s border with Thailand – was little more than empty fields.
Set against rugged mountains south of the town of Myawaddy, KK Park, with its on-site hospital, restaurants, bank and neat lines of villas with manicured lawns, looks more like the campus of a Silicon Valley tech company than what it really is: the frontline of a multibillion-dollar criminal fraud industry fuelled by human trafficking and brutal violence.
Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos have in recent years become havens for transnational crime syndicates running scam centres such as KK Park, which use enslaved workers to run complex online fraud and scamming schemes that generate huge profits.
There have been some attempts to crack down on the centres and rescue the workers, who can be subjected to torture and trapped inside. But drone images and new research shared exclusively with the Guardian reveal that the number of such centres operating along the Thai-Myanmar border has more than doubled since Myanmar’s military seized power in 2021, with construction continuing to this day.
Data from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (Aspi), a defence thinktank in Canberra, shows that the number of Myanmar scam centres on the Thai border has increased from 11 to 27, and they have expanded in size by an average of 5.5 hectares a month.
Drone images and photographs of KK Park and other Myanmar scam centres, Tai Chang and Shwe Kokko, taken by the Guardian in August show new features and active building work.
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The numbers are absolutely bonkers. A hundred thousand people working in slave conditions in complexes that are clearly visible in drone pictures? But the organised crime behind it pays tithes to Myanmar’s military coup leaders. It’s become an essential part of its economy.
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The enshittification of solar (and how to stop it) • Pluralistic 23 Sep 2025
Cory Doctorow:
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solar is cheap – over the past year, we’ve crossed a threshold, and solar is now substantially cheaper than coal, natural gas or oil. It’s getting cheaper still, with no bottom in sight. No wonder solar deployment is growing exponentially. Exponential growth is notoriously difficult to really get your head around, hence the ancient parable of the chessboard and the grains of rice.
…But the fossil fuel industry understands exponentials, and they’re freaking the fsck out.
…The fossil fuel industry is many things – ardent génocidaires bent on the extinction of the human race for profit – but what they are above everything else is rent-seekers.
The whole point of an extraction economy is to control a key factor of production so that other people need to come to you in order to do everything else. The ideal oil economy consists of a series of holes in the ground surrounded by people with guns, owned by a cartel that chokes off supply to maximize profits while leaving a highly visible share of the world’s population shivering in the dark as a warning to anyone complaining about their prices.
Fossil fuels are valuable because they are a chokepoint on the entire productive economy.
…I think there’s a collision looming between these rent-seeking missiles and the ever-cheaper, ever-better solar world. Eventually, these garbage people will stop trying to halt renewables, and they’ll start looking to own them.
…If I was a Big Oil company, I’d be investing heavily in the control systems for EVs, solar inverters, induction tops, heat pumps, smart thermostats, and anything else that depends on an internet-connected computer to operate. I’d flood every sales channel, offering zero-money-down installations with teaser zero rate loans and I’d do exclusivity deals with landlords and property developers. I’d get states and city councils to pass “safety” laws requiring grid coordination using a proprietary protocol and/or authentication token. I’d ship products that were compatible with open protocols, and later push mandatory updates to them that flip them to using proprietary controllers, like Chamberlain did with virtually every garage door opener in America.
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Doctorow’s writings always have an inevitability about them: oh, you think, that’s how it’s going to work out, isn’t it. I think it’s hard to point to him being dramatically wrong about anything: when DRM on music was all the rage, he predicted it would have to be abandoned. A couple of years later, lo and behold.. (Thanks wendyg for the link.)
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‘Existential crisis’: how Google’s shift to AI has upended the online news model • The Guardian
Mark Sweney:
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Google’s AI Overviews, which sit at the top of the results page and summarise responses and often negate the need to follow links to content, as well as its recently launched AI Mode tab that answers queries in a chatbot format, have prompted fears of a “Google zero” future where traffic referrals dry up.
“This is the single biggest change to search I have seen in decades,” says one senior editorial tech executive. “Google has always felt like it would always be there for publishers. Now the one constant in digital publishing is undergoing a transformation that may completely change the landscape.”
Last week, the owner of the Daily Mail revealed in its submission to the Competition and Markets Authority’s consultation on Google’s search services that AI Overviews have fuelled a drop in click-through traffic to its sites by as much as 89%.
DMG Media and other leading news organisations, including Guardian Media Group and the magazine trade body the Professional Publishers Association (PPA), have urged the competition watchdog to make Google more transparent and provide traffic statistics from AI Overview and AI Mode to publishers as part of its investigation into the tech firm’s search dominance.
Publishers – already under financial pressure from soaring costs, falling advertising revenues, the decline of print and the wider trend of readers turning away from news – argue that they are effectively being forced by Google to either accept deals, including on how content is used in AI Overview and AI Mode, or “drop out of all search results”, according to several sources.
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EU agency confirms ransomware attack behind airport disruptions • Reuters
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Airport disruptions that affected automated check-in systems in recent days were caused by a ransomware attack, the EU’s cybersecurity agency said on Monday, highlighting the growing risks of such attacks to critical infrastructure and industries.
Several of Europe’s biggest airports still faced disruptions on Monday after hackers knocked out automated check-in systems provided by Collins Aerospace, owned by RTX, affecting dozens of flights and thousands of passengers since Friday.
“Law enforcement is involved to investigate” malicious software that locks up data until the victim pays to have access restored, the ENISA agency said in a statement, without saying where the ransomware attack originated from.
Governments and companies have been the targets of cyberattacks in recent months, including luxury carmaker Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), which had to pause production as a result.
Rafe Pilling, director of threat intelligence at British cybersecurity firm Sophos, said there have been more ransomware attempts targeting higher-profile victims because of the attention they bring, but such attacks weren’t becoming more frequent.
“Disruptive attacks are becoming more visible in Europe, but visibility doesn’t necessarily equal frequency,” he told Reuters.
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Sure, but visible does mean, you know, visible. The JLR attack is potentially going to need some sort of bailout for supply chain companies (perhaps JLR could pay); the airport attack has inconvenienced people across the continent. The hackers may be commercial, but the effect is equivalent to terrorism.
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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 