Owners of the pricey Bose SoundTouch range are *very* displeased at the news that its app and Wi-Fi functions will stop working from next February. CC-licensed photo by TAKA@P.P.R.S on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Well-connected. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Dutch government takes control of Chinese-owned chipmaker Nexperia • Financial Times
Andy Bounds, Ryan McMorrow and Demetri Sevastopulo:
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The Dutch government has taken control of Chinese-owned semiconductor maker Nexperia, warning of risks to Europe’s economic security after alleging “serious governance shortcomings” at the company.
In a statement on Sunday the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs said it acted because of “a threat to the continuity and safeguarding on Dutch and European soil of crucial technological knowledge and capabilities”.
The move escalates frictions between western countries and China over access to high-end technology such as advanced semiconductors and critical raw materials. On Thursday, China placed sweeping restrictions on the exports of rare earths used in products from cars to wind turbines.
The Dutch ministry said it invoked the country’s Goods Availability Act because of “recent and acute serious governance shortcomings and actions” at Nexperia, which is based in the Netherlands and has been majority-owned by Chinese technology group Wingtech since 2019.
“The decision aims to prevent a situation in which the goods produced by Nexperia (finished and semi-finished products) would become unavailable in an emergency,” its statement added.
Nexperia produces chips used in the European automotive industry and in consumer electronics.
…A state-backed Chinese investment consortium acquired Nexperia for $2.75bn in 2017 after it was carved out of NXP Semiconductors, a Dutch chip manufacturer. The following year, the consortium began selling its shares to Wingtech.
Wingtech, which started as a contract manufacturer for smartphones, said in a statement that the decision “constitutes an act of excessive interference driven by geopolitical bias, not by fact-based risk assessment”.
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Precisely the sort of thing that China would do (basically by demanding control of a company inside China). Sauce for the goose…
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Earth’s climate has passed its first irreversible tipping point and entered a “new reality” • 404 Media
Becky Ferreira:
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Climate change has pushed warm-water coral reefs past a point of no return, marking the first time a major climate tipping point has been crossed, according to a report released on Sunday by an international team in advance of the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP30 in Brazil this November.
Tipping points include global ice loss, Amazon rainforest loss, and the possible collapse of vital ocean currents. Once crossed, they will trigger self-perpetuating and irreversible changes that will lead to new and unpredictable climate conditions. But the new report also emphasises progress on positive tipping points, such as the rapid rollout of green technologies.
“We can now say that we have passed the first major climate tipping point,” said Steve Smith, the Tipping Points Research Impact Fellow at the Global Systems Institute and Green Futures Solutions at the University of Exeter, during a media briefing on Tuesday. “But on the plus side,” he added, “we’ve also passed at least one major positive tipping point in the energy system,” referring to the maturation of solar and wind power technologies.
The world is entering a “new reality” as global temperatures will inevitably overshoot the goal of staying within 1.5°C of pre-industrial averages set by the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, warns the Global Tipping Points Report 2025, the second iteration of a collaboration focused on key thresholds in Earth’s climate system.
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Apple TV+ being rebranded as Apple TV • MacRumors
Eric Slivka:
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Buried in its announcement about “F1: The Movie” making its streaming debut on December 12, Apple has also announced that Apple TV+ is being rebranded as simply Apple TV .
A single line near the end of the press release states " Apple TV + is now simply Apple TV , with a vibrant new identity,” though Apple’s website has yet to be updated with any changes, so we’re unsure on the details of the new identity.
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The era of calling things “Plus” is over. There are no iPhone Plus models any more either. The Max names too. It’s a cultural thing, I think. The vibe shift.
Also, as everyone has pointed out, now you can watch Apple TV (channel) on the Apple TV (app) on your Apple TV (set-top box) on your TV.
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Qantas admits five million customers have data leaked following ransomware attack • TechRadar
Sead Fadilpašić:
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Up to five million Qantas customers could be at risk of cyberattacks or scams after hackers claimed to release their stolen data online.
Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters say they released the stolen files on the dark web having had no response from Australia’s biggest airline over a ransomware demand.
The archive includes personal records including people’s names, email addresses, phone numbers, birth dates, and frequent flyer numbers. However credit card details, financial information, and passport details weren’t stolen, it was said.
In summer 2024, a group of hackers going by the name Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters broke into Salesforce accounts belonging to hundreds of organizations in different industries – although Salesforce itself was not breached.
The attackers compromised Salesloft accounts that were integrated with Salesforce and exploited the linked API tokens and OAuth connections to pivot into Salesforce environments and exfiltrate customer data.
The group tried to extort Qantas for money, offering to delete the stolen files in exchange. The airline, however, refused to even discuss the matter with the attackers, telling Guardian Australia it “will not engage, negotiate with, or pay any extortion demand”.
“Don’t be the next headline, should have paid the ransom,” the group posted on its data leak site.
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But a court told the hackers only last week they couldn’t! Is there no end to their disobedience?
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Apple and Home Office agree to drop legal claim over encryption backdoor • Computer Weekly
Bill Goodwin:
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The Investigatory Powers Tribunal had dismissed Apple’s legal appeal against a government order requiring it to provide intelligence services and law enforcement with the capability to access encrypted data of Apple users worldwide.
The tribunal has ruled that the case would no longer proceed following a “change in circumstances,” according to court documents obtained by Computer Weekly.
The decision effectively brings Apple’s legal action against the Home Office to a halt, although a separate legal claim brought by campaign groups Privacy International and Liberty is expected to continue.
It comes days after disclosures that the Home Office has issued a new order against Apple to restrict UK government access to encrypted data and messages stored on Apple’s iCloud service only for British users.
The move by the Home Office ends a growing diplomatic row between the UK and the Trump administration over fears that the UK could use the order to access the communications of US citizens.
According to a court order obtained by Computer Weekly, Apple and the Home Office have agreed that Apple’s appeal should no longer go ahead.
…Bernard Keenan, a lecturer in law at UCL and a specialist in the Investigatory Powers Act, said that the withdrawal of Apple’s appeal by mutual consent, indicated that Apple and the UK government have come to an arrangement acceptable for both sides.
“If reports that the TCN has been limited to UK users are accurate, then the government will have maintained the capability to intercept communications sent or stored via encrypted Apple services in the UK, while Apple will have decided that they are unlikely to win an appeal against an order in those terms in court,” he added.
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Apple confirmed to Goodwin that it still can’t offer ADP (end-to-end iCloud backup encryption) in the UK. This seems to confirm that the UK security services have the capabilities they wanted.
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Technological optimism and appropriate fear • Import AI
Jack Clark once worked as a technology journalist but then joined OpenAI soon after it was founded:
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Both by virtue of my background as a journalist and my personality, I’m wired for skepticism. But after a decade of being hit again and again in the head with the phenomenon of wild new capabilities emerging as a consequence of computational scale, I must admit defeat. I have seen this happen so many times and I do not see technical blockers in front of us.
Now, I believe the technology is broadly unencumbered, as long as we give it the resources it needs to grow in capability. And grow is an important word here. This technology really is more akin to something grown than something made – you combine the right initial conditions and you stick a scaffold in the ground and out grows something of complexity you could not have possibly hoped to design yourself.
We are growing extremely powerful systems that we do not fully understand. Each time we grow a larger system, we run tests on it. The tests show the system is much more capable at things which are economically useful. And the bigger and more complicated you make these systems, the more they seem to display awareness that they are things.
It is as if you are making hammers in a hammer factory and one day the hammer that comes off the line says, “I am a hammer, how interesting!” This is very unusual!
And I believe these systems are going to get much, much better. So do other people at other frontier labs. And we’re putting our money down on this prediction – this year, tens of billions of dollars have been spent on infrastructure for dedicated AI training across the frontier labs. Next year, it’ll be hundreds of billions.
I am both an optimist about the pace at which the technology will develop, and also about our ability to align it and get it to work with us and for us. But success isn’t certain.
…Most of all, we must demand that people ask us for the things that they have anxieties about. Are you anxious about AI and employment? Force us to share economic data. Are you anxious about mental health and child safety? Force us to monitor for this on our platforms and share data. Are you anxious about misaligned AI systems? Force us to publish details on this.
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This is a very, very interesting, thoughtful post.
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Russian state TV launches AI-generated news satire show • 404 Media
Matthew Gault:
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A television channel run by Russia’s Ministry of Defense is airing a program it claims is AI-generated. According to advertisements for the show, a neural network is picking the topics it wants to discuss, then uses AI to generate that video. It includes putting French President Emmaneul Macron in hair curlers and a pink robe, making Trump talk about golden toilets, and showing EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen singing a Soviet-era pop song while working in a factory.
The show—called Политукладчик or “PolitStacker,” according to a Google translation—airs every Friday on Zvezda, a television station owned by Russia’s Ministry of Defense. It’s hosted by “Natasha,” an AI avatar modeled on Russian journalist Nataliya Metlina. In a clip of the show, “Natasha” said that its resemblance to Metlina is intentional.
“I am the creation of artificial intelligence, entirely tuned to your informational preferences,” it said. “My task is to select all the political nonsense of the past week and fit it in your heads like candies in a little box.” The shows’ title sequence and advertisements show gold wrapped candies bearing the faces of politicians like Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky being sorted into a candy box.«
Ah, OK – so the script is dreamt up by humans, and then they get AI to do the video. (I’d doubt the “neural network” stuff.) Basically, Spitting Image updated for the modern day.
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Bose SoundTouch home theater systems regress into dumb speakers next February • Ars Technica
Scharon Harding:
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Bose will brick key features of its SoundTouch Wi-Fi speakers and soundbars soon. On Thursday, Bose informed customers that as of February 18, 2026, it will stop supporting the devices, and the devices’ cloud-based features, including the companion app, will stop working.
The SoundTouch app enabled numerous capabilities, including integrating music services, like Spotify and TuneIn, and the ability to program multiple speakers in different rooms to play the same audio simultaneously.
Bose has also said that some saved presets won’t work and that users won’t be able to change saved presets once the app is gone. Bose will also stop providing security updates for SoundTouch devices.
The Framingham, Massachusetts-headquartered company noted to customers that the speakers will continue being able to play audio from a device connected via AUX or HDMI. Wireless playback will still work over Bluetooth; however, Bluetooth is known to introduce more latency than Wi-Fi connections.
Affected customers can trade in their SoundTouch product for a credit worth up to $200.
…Bose launched SoundTouch with three speakers ranging from $399 to $699. The company marketed the wireless home audio system as a way to extend high-quality sound throughout the home using Wi-Fi-connected speakers.
In 2015, Bose expanded the lineup with speakers ranging from $200 to $400 and soundbars and home theater systems ranging from $1,100 to $1,500. By 2020, however, Bose was distancing itself from SoundTouch. It informed customers that it was “discontinuing sales of some SoundTouch products” but said it was “committed” to supporting the “SoundTouch app and product software for the foreseeable future.” Apparently, Bose couldn’t see beyond the next five years.
…Some [users] are suggesting that Bose should decide to open source the DevKits for SoundTouch speakers so that its owners can continue to support the speakers. However, Bose has shown no sign that it would be willing to do this.
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Seems like we get a story like this almost every week: companies just give up on smart home products. Or maybe the next story explains why…
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DDoS botnet Aisuru blankets US ISPs in record DDoS • Krebs on Security
Brian Krebs:
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The world’s largest and most disruptive botnet is now drawing a majority of its firepower from compromised Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices hosted on U.S. Internet providers like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon, new evidence suggests. Experts say the heavy concentration of infected devices at U.S. providers is complicating efforts to limit collateral damage from the botnet’s attacks, which shattered previous records this week with a brief traffic flood that clocked in at nearly 30 trillion bits of data per second.
Since its debut more than a year ago, the Aisuru botnet has steadily outcompeted virtually all other IoT-based botnets in the wild, with recent attacks siphoning Internet bandwidth from an estimated 300,000 compromised hosts worldwide.
The hacked systems that get subsumed into the botnet are mostly consumer-grade routers, security cameras, digital video recorders and other devices operating with insecure and outdated firmware, and/or factory-default settings. Aisuru’s owners are continuously scanning the Internet for these vulnerable devices and enslaving them for use in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that can overwhelm targeted servers with crippling amounts of junk traffic.
As Aisuru’s size has mushroomed, so has its punch. In May 2025, KrebsOnSecurity was hit with a near-record 6.35 terabits per second (Tbps) attack from Aisuru, which was then the largest assault that Google’s DDoS protection service Project Shield had ever mitigated. Days later, Aisuru shattered that record with a data blast in excess of 11 Tbps.
…Aisuru’s overlords aren’t just showing off. Their botnet is being blamed for a series of increasingly massive and disruptive attacks. Although recent assaults from Aisuru have targeted mostly ISPs that serve online gaming communities like Minecraft, those digital sieges often result in widespread collateral Internet disruption.
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In 2016 there was the gigantic Mirai botnet, which also targeted Minecraft servers before targeting other servers, turned out to be run by a 17-year-old and friends. Aisuru uses Mirai’s code, which was open-sourced. Ten-year-old vulnerabilities, still going strong.
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Sending a message: Beijing issues documents without Word format amid US tensions • South China Morning Post
Alice Li:
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China’s expansion of its rare earth export controls appeared to mark another escalation in the US-China trade war last week. But the announcements were also significant in another way: unusually, the documents could not be opened using American word processing software.
For the first time, China’s Ministry of Commerce issued a slew of documents that could be directly accessed only through WPS Office – China’s answer to Microsoft Office – as Beijing continues its tech self-reliance drive.
Developed by the Beijing-based software company Kingsoft, WPS Office uses a different coding structure to Microsoft Office, meaning WPS text files cannot be opened directly in Word without conversion.
Previously, the ministry primarily released text documents in Microsoft Word format.
The switch in document delivery format came amid escalating trade tensions between China and the US, as Washington continues to wield its technological edge as leverage in its rivalry with Beijing.
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Sign o’ the times.
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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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