Summer 1976 is no longer one of the UK’s top five hottest on record, after 2025 set new records. CC-licensed photo by Ross Beresford 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.
A selection of 9 links for you. Baked. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
How OnlyFans piracy is ruining the internet for everyone • 404 Media
Emanuel Maiberg:
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The internet is becoming harder to use because of unintended consequences in the battle between adult content creators who are trying to protect their livelihoods and the people who pirate their content.
Porn piracy, like all forms of content piracy, has existed for as long as the internet. But as more individual creators who make their living on services like OnlyFans, many of them have hired companies to send Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notices against companies that steal their content. As some of those services turn to automation in order to handle the workload, completely unrelated content is getting flagged as violating their copyrights and is being deindexed from Google search. The process exposes bigger problems with how copyright violations are handled on the internet, with automated systems filing takedown requests that are reviewed by other automated systems, leading to unintended consequences.
These errors show another way in which automation without human review is making the internet as we know it increasingly unusable. They also highlight the untenable piracy problem for adult content creators, who have little recourse to stop their paid content from being redistributed all over the internet.
I first noticed how bad some of these DMCA takedown requests are because one of them targeted 404 Media. I was searching Google for an article Sam wrote about Instagram’s AI therapists. I Googled “AI therapists 404 Media,” and was surprised it didn’t pop up because I knew we had covered the subject. Then I saw a note from Google at the bottom of the page noting Google had removed some search results “In response to multiple complaints we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act.”
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Turns out there are some, well, lax companies doing takedown demands. But, but, but I’m sure we were always told that piracy was good and meant people would spend more money on whatever the product is that’s being pirated! Or does that only work for Hollywood and commercial music?
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What every argument about sideloading gets wrong • Hugotunius
Hugo Tunius:
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Sideloading has been a hot topic for the last decade. Most recently, Google has announced further restrictions on the practice in Android. Many hundreds of comment threads have discussed these changes over the years. One point in particular is always made: “I should be able to run whatever code I want on hardware I own”. I agree entirely with this point, but within the context of this discussion it’s moot.
When Google restricts your ability to install certain applications they aren’t constraining what you can do with the hardware you own, they are constraining what you can do using the software they provide with said hardware. It’s through this control of the operating system that Google is exerting control, not at the hardware layer.
You often don’t have full access to the hardware either, and building new operating systems to run on mobile hardware is impossible, or at least much harder than it should be. This is a separate, and I think more fruitful, point to make. Apple is a better case study than Google here. Apple’s success with iOS partially derives from the tight integration of hardware and software. An iPhone without iOS is a very different product to what we understand an iPhone to be. Forcing Apple to change core tenets of iOS by legislative means would undermine what made the iPhone successful.
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The “any code I want” argument does tend to slide past the pyramid of software layers that produce the screen you see (whether phone or PC). The processor has microcode, and then firmware above that, and the operating system (there’s also a parallel operating system for the cellular modem), and the application software. And the makers get to say what you do with their code. If you want to write all the code from the ground up, go ahead.
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Tesla said it didn’t have critical data in a fatal crash. Then a hacker found it • The Washington Post
Trisha Thadani and Faiz Siddiqui:
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Years after a Tesla driver using Autopilot plowed into a young Florida couple in 2019, crucial electronic data detailing how the fatal wreck unfolded was missing. The information was key for a wrongful death case the survivor and the victim’s family were building against Tesla, but the company said it didn’t have the data.
Then a self-described hacker, enlisted by the plaintiffs to decode the contents of a chip they recovered from the vehicle, found it while sipping a Venti-size hot chocolate at a South Florida Starbucks. Tesla later said in court that it had the data on its own servers all along.
The hacker’s discovery would become a key piece of evidence presented during a trial that began last month in Miami federal court, which dissected the final moments before the collision and ended in a historic $243m verdict against the company.
The pivotal and previously unreported role of a hacker in accessing that information points to how valuable Tesla’s data is when its futuristic technology is involved in a crash. While Tesla said it has produced similar data in other litigation, the Florida lawsuit reflects how a jury’s perception of Tesla’s cooperation in recovering such data can play into a judgment in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
…The batch of data the plaintiffs were after, internally referred to as a collision snapshot, showed exactly what the vehicle’s cameras detected before the crash, including the young woman who was killed. The plaintiffs’ attorneys said they believed the data would present a damning picture of the system’s shortcomings, and the hacker — who for years had been taking Autopilot computers apart and cloning their data — was confident he could find it.
“For any reasonable person, it was obvious the data was there,” the hacker told The Washington Post, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
…It took the jury less than a day of deliberation to find Tesla 33% liable for the crash and responsible for $243m in punitive and compensatory damages.
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Reports of Gmail security issue are inaccurate • Google blog
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Gmail’s protections are strong and effective, and claims of a major Gmail security warning are false.
We want to reassure our users that Gmail’s protections are strong and effective. Several inaccurate claims surfaced recently that incorrectly stated that we issued a broad warning to all Gmail users about a major Gmail security issue. This is entirely false.
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No author name provided. Clearly a response to the many clickbait stories about a “big security breach” of Gmail, which honestly never sounded realistic.
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Summer 2025 is the warmest on record for the UK • Met Office
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Provisional Met Office statistics confirm that summer 2025 is officially the warmest summer on record for the UK.
Analysis by Met Office climate scientists has also shown that a summer as hot or hotter than 2025 is now 70 times more likely than it would be in a ‘natural’ climate with no human caused greenhouse gas emissions.
The UK’s mean temperature from 1 June to 31 August stands at 16.10°C, which is 1.51°C above the long-term meteorological average. This surpasses the previous record of 15.76°C, set in 2018, and pushes the summer of 1976 out of the top five warmest summers in a series dating back to 1884.
Met Office scientist Dr Emily Carlisle said: “Provisional Met Office statistics show that summer 2025 is officially the warmest on record with a mean temperature of 16.10°C, surpassing the previous record of 15.76°C set in 2018.
…1976, which had a mean temperature of 15.70°C, has now dropped out of the top five warmest summers since records began in 1884, leaving all five warmest summers having occurred since 2000.
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Expunging 1976 from the top five will hurt all those who continually shrug and say “well, it was hotter in my day”. Perhaps now they’ll start to listen to the message about climate change?
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“Sliding into an abyss”: experts warn over rising use of AI for mental health support • The Guardian
Rachel Hall:
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Vulnerable people turning to AI chatbots instead of professional therapists for mental health support could be “sliding into a dangerous abyss”, psychotherapists have warned.
Psychotherapists and psychiatristssaid they were increasingly seeing negative impacts of AI chatbots being used for mental health, such as fostering emotional dependence, exacerbating anxiety symptoms, self-diagnosis, or amplifying delusional thought patterns, dark thoughts and suicide ideation.
Dr Lisa Morrison Coulthard, the director of professional standards, policy and research at the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, said two-thirds of its members expressed concerns about AI therapy in a recent survey.
Coulthard said: “Without proper understanding and oversight of AI therapy, we could be sliding into a dangerous abyss in which some of the most important elements of therapy are lost and vulnerable people are in the dark over safety.
“We’re worried that although some receive helpful advice, other people may receive misleading or incorrect information about their mental health with potentially dangerous consequences. It’s important to understand that therapy isn’t about giving advice, it’s about offering a safe space where you feel listened to.”
Dr Paul Bradley, a specialist adviser on informatics for the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said AI chatbots were “not a substitute for professional mental healthcare nor the vital relationship that doctors build with patients to support their recovery”.
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The very first chatbot – Eliza – was modelled on the patterns of speech used by a nondirectional therapist, and that fooled people pretty well. We just have chattier ones which are more directional now.
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Mastodon says it doesn’t ‘have the means’ to comply with age verification laws • TechCrunch
Sarah Perez:
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Decentralized social network Mastodon says it can’t comply with Mississippi’s age verification law — the same law that saw rival Bluesky pull out of the state — because it doesn’t have the means to do so.
The social nonprofit explains that Mastodon doesn’t track its users, which makes it difficult to enforce such legislation. Nor does it want to use IP address-based blocks, as those would unfairly impact people who were traveling, it says.
The statement follows a lively back-and-forth conversation earlier this week between Mastodon founder and CEO Eugen Rochko and Bluesky board member and journalist Mike Masnick. In the conversation, published on their respective social networks, Rochko claimed, “there is nobody that can decide for the fediverse to block Mississippi.” (The Fediverse is the decentralized social network that includes Mastodon and other services, and is powered by the ActivityPub protocol.)
“And this is why real decentralization matters,” said Rochko.
Masnick pushed back, questioning why Mastodon’s individual servers, like the one Rochko runs at mastodon.social, would not also be subject to the same $10,000 per user fines for noncompliance with the law.
At the time of our reporting on this exchange, Mastodon gGmbH, the community-funded nonprofit organization, didn’t respond to a request for comment.
On Friday, however, the nonprofit shared a statement with TechCrunch to clarify its position, saying that while Mastodon’s own servers specify a minimum age of 16 to sign up for its services, it does not “have the means to apply age verification” to its services.
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The balkanisation of the internet goes on. Do people in Mississippi use Starlink? Would it be banned too?
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Nitrous oxide drivers are causing chaos on London’s roads • London Centric
Jim Waterson:
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Earlier this year, in the middle of the night, a black Mercedes mounted the central kerb of a busy road near the Blackwall Tunnel, turned ninety degrees, smashed down railings designed to protect pedestrians and blocked the street. The driver fled, abandoning his car on the streets of London. But before he sprinted away, he paused to throw an item he was holding back into the vehicle: an inflated black balloon, suggesting he was potentially inhaling nitrous oxide at the wheel moments before the collision.
The Tower Hamlets incident would fit with a wider trend of drivers using the banned drug in the borough, where one local Bengali social media influencer warned that the “gas and car scene” is out of control. A medical expert described broader use of the drug in the borough as an “epidemic” and said it disproportionately affected the area’s south Asian population.
Nitrous oxide – also known as laughing gas or balloons, due to how users inhale it – has traditionally been associated with music festivals and street corners for its quick, odourless high. Its discarded metal canisters, which can be sold legally on the pretence they are being used to make whipped cream, have been commonplace in the capital for decades, even following its reclassification as a prohibited drug in 2023.
Big Fish, a Bengali TikToker based in Tower Hamlets, told London Centric that use of laughing gas by drivers had “blown up” in the area in the past six months. Nationwide use of the drug by young people had combined with the local “big hire car scene”, he explained – referring to the trend of hiring luxury cars for celebratory events such as prom, Eid, or the ongoing wedding season, particularly among the borough’s South Asian population.
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Waterson’s Substack-based London “paper” keeps going from strength to strength. This story caught my eye just for the way that people will mispurpose pretty much anything drug-related. The hiring of big cars is just the icing on the, er, cake. Can it be long, though, before nitrous oxide sales are banned and replaced with carbon dioxide (which wouldn’t be nearly as much fun to inhale).
This edition also has a fun story about a Reform candidate who is well-suited in every department apart from not being, well, alive.
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After Paris curbed cars, air pollution maps showed a dramatic change • The Washington Post
Naema Ahmed and Chico Harlan:
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Over the past 20 years, Paris has undergone a major physical transformation, trading automotive arteries for bike lanes, adding green spaces and eliminating 50,000 parking spaces.
Part of the payoff has been invisible — in the air itself.
Airparif, an independent group that tracks air quality for France’s capital region, said in April that levels of fine particulate matter (PM 2.5) have decreased 55% since 2005, while nitrogen dioxide levels have fallen 50%. It attributed this to “regulations and public policies”, including steps to limit traffic and ban the most polluting vehicles.
Air pollution heat maps show the levels of 20 years ago as a pulsing red — almost every neighborhood above the European Union’s limit for nitrogen dioxide, which results from the combustion of fossil fuels. By 2023, the red zone had shrunk to only a web of fine lines across and around the city, representing the busiest roads and highways.
The change shows how ambitious policymaking can directly improve health in large cities. Air pollution is often described by health experts as a silent killer. Both PM 2.5 and nitrogen dioxide have been linked to major health problems, including heart attacks, lung cancer, bronchitis and asthma.
Paris has been led since 2014 by Mayor Anne Hidalgo, a Socialist who has pushed for many of the green policies and has described her wish for a “Paris that breathes, a Paris that is more agreeable to live in.”
Her proposals have faced pushback — from right-leaning politicians, a car owners’ association and suburban commuters, who say that targeting cars makes their lives more difficult.
But last month, Parisians voted in a referendum to turn an additional 500 streets over to pedestrians. A year earlier, Paris had moved to sharply increase parking fees for SUVs, forcing drivers to pay three times more than they would for smaller cars. The city has also turned a bank of the Seine from a busy artery into a pedestrian zone and banned most car traffic from the shopping boulevard of Rue de Rivoli.
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The graphic, from Airparif, is amazing. I do wonder how all the trucks and delivery vehicles operate: are they limited in when they can go in, or obliged to have lower emissions/be electric?
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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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