The end of an era as TiVo announces that it is throwing in the towel after 25 years. CC-licensed photo by on Flickr.

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A selection of 10 links for you. Programmatic. 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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The $15bn warning shot • Rob’s Notes

Rob Leathern:

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On Tuesday news broke from the US DOJ about the largest forfeiture in its history: a staggering $15bn in Bitcoin from a large scam operation where “pig-butchering”, initiated on social media and messaging platforms, plays a major role.

Back in early 2024 I posted about a study by UT’s Professor John Griffin estimating that pig-butchering scams had stolen over $75bn worldwide between 2020 and 2024, significantly more than previously thought. We need to anticipate the evolution of these scams and build proactive counter-measures, including inside of encrypted environments.

…Today’s AI tools can supercharge scams. First, personalization at zero marginal cost. Fraud relies on persuasion; persuasion feeds on context. Large language models can synthesize biographies from stray data points and generate messages in the target’s idiom, salted with plausible detail and error‑free grammar. “Spearphishing” once meant labor-intensive research on a few valuable marks. With AI, every mark can be a high‑value mark.

Second, synthetic presence. Voice‑cloning apps now need mere seconds of audio; deepfake video grows more lifelike by the month. Imagine the same phone‑farms scaled to millions of high‑fidelity avatars that can hop between messaging, video calls and customer‑support lines. The romance scam becomes the video‑date; the “broker” becomes a moving face in a crisp suit; the “bank official” calling about a flagged bank wire sounds exactly like your branch manager. We are already seeing deepfakes moving from major celebrities to local doctors and finance professionals.

Third, toolchain integration. The indictment’s playbook – bulk account creation or acquisition, scripted chats, multilingual segmentation, payment orchestration – is already modular. AI can plug into each module with better scripts, smarter target selection, automated rebuttals to doubts, even real‑time generation of doctored “portfolio” screenshots. The result is not merely more spam; it is a service platform for crime, with measurable conversion funnels and A/B‑tested lies.

The implications are stark. Tech firms must treat abuse as a core product risk, not a reputation clean‑up. That means throttling mass account creation and finding new challenge-response checks that are hard for farms but light for humans.

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The whole thing is worrying about how AI is sure to be weaponised to make these scams even more effective. Troubling times.
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EU gets what it asked for: no charger in the MacBook Pro box • Apple Insider

William Gallagher:

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Don’t blame Apple, this time. If you’re in the European Union or the UK, your new M5 14-inch MacBook Pro or iPad Pro may cost you $70 (£59) extra because Apple isn’t allowed to bundle a charger.

It’s chiefly because of the European Union’s law that Apple was forced to move from Lightning to USB-C charging on the iPhone. But those laws covered more than just smartphones, and the EU has also been pressing for companies to stop bundling chargers with their devices.

The idea is that so many consumers already have chargers that bundling new ones creates unacceptable volumes of e-waste. The EU enacted a law covering this back in 2003, but its latest amendment requires its 27 member states to have implemented it by October 9, 2025. [Note: the UK left the EU in early 2020 and is not bound by subsequent amendments. – Overspill Ed]

It’s a different matter for the US and most of the world, including Brazil, which has previously fined Apple for not including chargers. For all of those countries, buyers of the new M5 14-inch MacBook Pro are offered a 70W power adaptor in the price. Alternatively, they can choose to pay $20 more and instead get a 96W charger.

In European Union territories and the UK, there is no such option at all. Curiously, these places do get a “What’s in the Box” section in the Store, while US buyers do not.

Should UK buyers want a charger, they have to pay £59 for the 70W version. The 96W model costs £79. Across the EU, the price in Euros is equivalent to $75 or $98.

For the new M5 iPad Pro, a 20W charger is included in the US and most territories. But in the UK and EU, they must buy a separate 30W charger for $50.

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Just as annoying as the charger pricing is folks writing stories where they don’t just quote the local prices, which I had to find out and substitute (but couldn’t be bothered to find the euro prices). Though as Mark Gurman points out, Apple could have offered the charger for free (either as an add-on or write-in), but chose to charge for it. Though people then point out that Apple has reduced the price of the base model computer.
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How I almost got hacked by a “job interview” • David Dodda

David Dodda:

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Last week, I got a LinkedIn message from Mykola Yanchii. Chief Blockchain Officer at Symfa. Real company. Real LinkedIn profile. 1,000+ connections. The works.

The message was smooth. Professional. “We’re developing BestCity, a platform aimed at transforming real estate workflows. Part-time roles available. Flexible structure.”

I’ve been freelancing for 8 years. Built web applications, worked on various projects, done my share of code reviews. I’m usually paranoid about security – or so I thought.

This looked legit. So I said yes to the call. Before our meeting, Mykola sent me a “test project” – standard practice for tech interviews. A React/Node codebase to evaluate my skills. 30-minute test. Simple enough.

The Bitbucket repo looked professional. Clean README. Proper documentation. Even had that corporate stock photo of a woman with a tablet standing in front of a house. You know the one.

Here’s where I almost screwed up: I was running late for our call. Had about 30 minutes to review the code. So I did what lazy developers do – I started poking around the codebase without running it first.

Usually, I sandbox everything. Docker containers. Isolated environments. But I was in a rush. I spent 30 minutes fixing obvious bugs, adding a docker-compose file, cleaning up the code. Standard stuff. Ready to run it and show my work.

Then I had one of those paranoid developer moments. Before hitting npm start, I threw this prompt at my Cursor AI agent:

“Before I run this application, can you see if there are any suspicious code in this codebase? Like reading files it shouldn’t be reading, accessing crypto wallets etc.”

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Turned out it had an obfuscated call to a site which would have downloaded and run malware that looks like it would have emptied his crypto wallet. The company looked legit; was fake. The URL disappeared 24 hours later.
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WHO warns of sharp increase in drug-resistant infections • NY Times via The Seattle Times

Andrew Jacobs:

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Around the world, the spread of dangerous infections that do not respond to antibiotics has been increasing by as much as 15% a year, affecting treatment for urinary tract infections, gonorrhea, E. coli and other pathogens that kill millions of people annually, according to a report released Monday by the World Health Organization.

The report documents how countries are grappling with the challenge of so-called antimicrobial resistance. It found that 1 in 6 infections in 2023 was resistant to the current roster of antibiotic drugs. The drug resistance involves 40% of the most common antibiotics used against these infections.

Southeast Asia and the eastern Mediterranean had the highest rates of resistance, with 1 in 3 infections resistant to antibiotics. That is roughly double the worldwide average and more three times the rates in Europe and the Western Pacific.

Overall, antimicrobial resistance was more prevalent in low- and middle-income countries, especially those with weak health care systems.

…At the same time, the pipeline for new drugs has largely dried up, the result of a broken marketplace for antimicrobials that has driven the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies from the field. Companies that have tried to make new antibiotics have been unable to make money from them.

“For many of these threats, the consequences are real — harder-to-treat infection, rising costs and lives lost,” Hutin said.

The report sounded the alarm on so-called gram-negative bacteria, which pose additional challenges because of a protective outer membrane that can be tough for antibiotics to penetrate. Gram-negative bacteria include Escherichia coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae, which are often implicated in severe infections that lead to sepsis and death. In Africa, resistance to cephalosporins, a class of antibiotics and the first choice treatment for such infections, can exceed 70%.

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This has been a known problem for around 30 years. You’d think governments might want to fund research to solve the problem of the market failure. But apparently not.
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Dutch seizure of chipmaker followed US ultimatum over Chinese chief • Financial Times

Andy Boundds, Ben Hall and Ryan McMorrow:

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The Dutch government seized control of chipmaker Nexperia after Washington warned that the company would not be removed from its export control list if its Chinese chief executive remained in charge, according to court filings.

The economy ministry this month removed the chief executive, Zhang Xuezheng — who was also the controlling shareholder of the chipmaker — in a rare move that brought the Netherlands into the escalating fight for technological dominance between Washington and Beijing.

Nexperia makes basic low-margin chips in vast quantities for consumer electronics and a broad range of industrial uses, but it is also an important supplier for Europe’s auto industry. It was sold to a Chinese consortium in 2017 before being bought by Chinese group Wingtech.

The Amsterdam court of appeal published the proceedings between the Dutch economy ministry and Wingtech on Tuesday. It revealed that US officials told the Dutch in June that a plan to ringfence its European operations from Chinese ones was moving too slowly.

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Ah, so not the Dutch having a bright idea on their own, but rather being impelled towards it.
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4chan fined $26k for refusing to assess risks under UK Online Safety Act • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

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A battle over the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act (OSA) heated up Monday as UK regulator Ofcom fined the notorious image-hosting board 4chan about $26,000 for failing to provide a risk assessment detailing the potential harms of illegal content hosted on its forum.

In a press release provided to Ars, Ofcom said 4chan refused to respond to two requests for information that the regulator considered “routine.” The first asked for the risk assessment and the second for 4chan’s “qualifying worldwide revenue.”

4chan was anticipating the Monday fine, noting in a lawsuit—which was jointly filed with the online trolling forum Kiwi Farms in August and seeks to permanently enjoin Ofcom from enforcing OSA—that Ofcom had made it clear that because 4chan ignored Ofcom’s emails, the fine was coming.

Now, 4chan has 60 days to hand over the information Ofcom requested while risking incurring about $130 in additional daily penalties.

If 4chan continues to ignore Ofcom, the forum could be blocked in the UK. And 4chan could face even bigger fines totaling about $23m or 10% of 4chan’s worldwide turnover, whichever is higher. 4chan also faces potential arrest and/or “imprisonment for a term of up to two years,” the lawsuit said.

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Does 4chan have any sources of revenue? Except it has managed to find a lawyer who is seeking to get a US court to rule that the Online Safety Act doesn’t apply to “speech and content published and distributed in the US”.
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TiVo stops selling DVRs, marking the end of an era • Cord Cutters News

Luke Bouma:

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In a seismic shift for the television industry, TiVo Corporation has quietly pulled the plug on its storied digital video recorder line, effectively ending an era that redefined how consumers interacted with broadcast content. As of early October 2025, the company’s official website has scrubbed all references to its hardware DVR products, including the once-revered TiVo Edge models designed for cable subscribers and over-the-air antenna users. Visitors searching for these devices now encounter a streamlined catalog that omits any mention of physical recording hardware, signaling a complete withdrawal from the retail DVR market.

This move culminates decades of gradual decline for TiVo’s hardware ambitions, which peaked in the early 2000s when the brand became synonymous with effortless time-shifting of television programming. Launched in 1999, TiVo’s DVRs introduced features like one-touch recording, commercial skipping, and intuitive search capabilities that made traditional TV schedules feel obsolete. At its zenith, the company boasted millions of subscribers, forcing cable providers and networks to adapt to empowered viewers who could pause live broadcasts or binge-watch at will.

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The very first time I saw a TiVo demonstrated – in September 2000 – I could see it was absolutely the future. I then tried it out and became even more convinced. And wrote about how it came to be, from an era when building hardware seemed to be a matter of finding a use and exploiting it.
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The AI water issue is fake • The Weird Turn Pro

Andy Masley:

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AI data centres use water. Like any other industry that uses water, they require careful planning. If an electric car factory opens near you, that factory may use just as much water as a data centre. The factory also requires careful planning. But the idea that either the factory or AI is using an inordinate amount of water that merits any kind of boycott or national attention as a unique serious environmental issue is innumerate. On the national, local, and personal level, AI is barely using any water, and unless it grows 50 times faster than forecasts predict, this won’t change. I’m writing from an American context and don’t know as much about other countries. But at least in America, the numbers are clear and decisive.

The idea that AI’s water usage is a serious national emergency caught on for three reasons:

• People get upset at the idea of a physical resource like water being spent on a digital product, especially one they don’t see value in, and don’t factor in just how often this happens everywhere
• People haven’t internalized how many other people are using AI. AI’s water use looks ridiculous if you think of it as a small marginal new thing. It looks tiny when you divide it by the hundreds of millions of people using AI every day
• People are easily alarmed by contextless large numbers, like the number of gallons of water a data centre is using. They compare these large numbers to other regular things they do, not to other normal industries and processes in society.

Together, these create the impression that AI water use is a problem. It is not. Regardless of whether you love or hate AI, it is not possible to actually look at the numbers involved without coming to the conclusion that this is a fake problem.

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There follow a lot of numbers which will inform you that it’s honestly not a problem. Happily there are graphs to help if the words become overwhelming.
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Nvidia sells tiny new computer that puts big AI on your desktop • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

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On Tuesday, Nvidia announced it would begin taking orders for the DGX Spark, a $4,000 desktop AI computer that wraps one petaflop of computing performance and 128GB of unified memory into a form factor small enough to sit on a desk. Its biggest selling point is likely its large integrated memory that can run larger AI models than consumer GPUs.

Nvidia began taking orders for the DGX Spark on Wednesday, October 15, through its website, with systems also available from manufacturing partners and select US retail stores.

The DGX Spark, which Nvidia previewed as “Project DIGITS” in January and formally named in May, represents Nvidia’s attempt to create a new category of desktop computer workstation specifically for AI development.

With the Spark, Nvidia seeks to address a problem facing some AI developers: Many AI tasks exceed the memory and software capabilities of standard PCs and workstations (more on that below), forcing them to shift their work to cloud services or data centers. However, the actual market for a desktop AI workstation remains uncertain, particularly given the upfront cost versus cloud alternatives, which allow developers to pay as they go.

Nvidia’s Spark reportedly includes enough memory to run larger-than-typical AI models for local tasks, with up to 200 billion parameters and fine-tune models containing up to 70 billion parameters without requiring remote infrastructure. Potential uses include running larger open-weights language models and media synthesis models such as AI image generators.

According to Nvidia, users can customize Black Forest Labs’ Flux.1 models for image generation, build vision search and summarization agents using Nvidia’s Cosmos Reason vision language model, or create chatbots using the Qwen3 model optimized for the DGX Spark platform.

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Power requirement: 240W. The upfront cost is only the beginning – watch your electricity bill rocket too. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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Meet the AI chatbots replacing India’s call-center workers • Reuters

Munsif Vengattil and Aditya Kalra:

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At a startup office in Bengaluru, India, developers are fine-tuning artificial-intelligence chatbots that talk and message like humans.

The company, LimeChat, has an audacious goal: to make customer-service jobs almost obsolete. It says its generative AI agents enable clients to slash by 80% the number of workers needed to handle 10,000 monthly queries. “Once you hire a LimeChat agent, you never have to hire again,” Nikhil Gupta, its 28-year-old co-founder, told Reuters.

Cheap labor and English proficiency helped make India the world’s back office — sometimes at the expense of workers elsewhere. Now, AI-powered systems are subsuming jobs done by headset-wearing graduates in technical support, customer care and data management, sparking a scramble to adapt, a Reuters examination found.

That’s driving business for AI startups that help companies slash staffing costs and scale operations — even though many consumers still prefer to deal with a person.

…Rather than pump the brakes as the technology threatens jobs built on routine tasks, the country is accelerating, wagering that a let-it-rip approach will create enough new opportunities to absorb those displaced, Reuters found. The outcome of India’s gamble carries weight far beyond its borders — a test case for whether embracing AI-driven disruption can elevate a developing economy or render it a cautionary tale.
The global conversational AI market is growing 24% a year and should reach $41 billion by 2030, consultancy Grand View Research estimates.

India — which relies on IT for 7.5% of its GDP — is leaning in. In a February speech, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said “work does not disappear due to technology. Its nature changes and new types of jobs are created.”

Not everyone shares Modi’s confidence in India’s preparedness. Santosh Mehrotra, a former Indian official and visiting professor at the University of Bath’s Centre for Development Studies, criticized the government for a lack of urgency in assessing AI’s effects on India’s young workforce. “There’s no gameplan,” he said.

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Of course the difference about the chatbots is that they will have an accent matching the country they’re meant to be dealing with (the opposite still irks some people) and they will be endlessly, exhaustingly patient.
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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