A YouTube documentary about birdwatching gives an insight into how app gamify, then corrupt, hobbies. CC-licensed photo by JuliaC2006 on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Over there! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
AWS outage exposes Achilles heel: central control plane • The Register
Dan Robinson:
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The problems began just after midnight US Pacific Time today when Amazon Web Services (AWS) noticed increased error rates and latencies for multiple services running within its home US-EAST-1 region.
Within a couple of hours, Amazon’s techies had identified DNS as a potential root cause of the issue – specifically the resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1 – and were working on a fix.
However, it was affecting other AWS services, including global services and or features that rely on endpoints operating from AWS’ original region, such as IAM (Identity and Access Management) updates and DynamoDB global tables.
While Amazon worked to fully resolve the problem, the issue was already causing widespread chaos to websites and online services beyond the Northern Virginia locale of US-EAST-1, and even outside of America’s borders.
As The Register reported earlier, Amazon.com itself was down for a time, while the company’s Alexa smart speakers and Ring doorbells stopped working. But the effects were also felt by messaging apps such as Signal and WhatsApp, while in the UK, Lloyds Bank and even government services such as tax agency HMRC were impacted.
According to a BBC report, outage monitor Downdetector indicated there had been more than 6.5 million reports globally, with upwards of 1,000 companies affected.
How could this happen? Amazon has a global footprint, and its infrastructure is split into regions, physical locations with a cluster of datacenters. Each region consists of a minimum of three isolated and physically separate availability zones (AZ), each with independent power and connected via redundant, ultra-low-latency networks.
Customers are encouraged to design their applications and services to run in multiple AZs to avoid being taken down by a failure in one of them.
Sadly, it seems that the entire edifice has an Achilles heel that can cause problems regardless of how much redundancy you design into your cloud-based operations, at least according to the experts we asked.
“The issue with AWS is that US East is the home of the common control plane for all of AWS locations except the federal government and European Sovereign Cloud. There was an issue some years ago when the problem was related to management of S3 policies that was felt globally,” Omdia Chief Analyst Roy Illsley told us.
He explained that US-EAST-1 can cause global issues because many users and services default to using it since it was the first AWS region, even if they are in a different part of the world.
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Grateful to Microsoft Security’s Matt Zorich, who published his handy guide: Something is down » Is it a telco? Yes » It’s BGP [Border Gateway Protocol]. No? » It’s DNS.
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Life-changing eye implant helps blind patients read again • BBC News
Fergus Walsh:
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A group of blind patients can now read again after being fitted with a life-changing implant at the back of the eye.
A surgeon who inserted the microchips in five patients at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London says the results of the international trial are “astounding”.
Sheila Irvine, 70, who is registered blind, told the BBC it was “out of this world” to be able to read and do crosswords again. “It’s beautiful, wonderful. It gives me such pleasure.”
The technology offers hope to people with an advanced form of dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD), called geographic atrophy (GA), which affects more than 250,000 people in the UK and five million worldwide. In those with the condition – which is more common in older people – cells in a tiny area of the retina at the back of the eye gradually become damaged and die, resulting in blurred or distorted central vision. Colour and fine detail are often lost.
The new procedure involves inserting a tiny 2mm-square photovoltaic microchip, with the thickness of a human hair, under the retina. Patients then put on glasses with a built-in video camera. The camera sends an infrared beam of video images to the implant at the back of the eye, which sends them on to a small pocket processor to be enhanced and made clearer.
The images are then sent back to the patient’s brain, via the implant and optic nerve, giving them some vision again. The patients spent months learning how to interpret the images.
Mahi Muqit, consultant ophthalmic surgeon at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, who led the UK arm of the trial, told the BBC it was “pioneering and life-changing technology”.
…Of 32 patients given the implant, 27 were able to read again using their central vision. After a year, this equated to an improvement of 25 letters, or five lines, on an eye chart.
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The unexpected profundity of a movie about birdwatching • The Atlantic
Tyler Austin Harper:
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The new YouTube documentary Listers is a down-the-rabbit-hole glimpse at the norms and neuroses of the “extreme bird-watching” community. If that sounds painfully boring, it’s not—this is one of the funniest documentaries I’ve seen in some time. In it, the brothers Quentin and Owen Reiser chronicle their try at a “big year,” a bird-nerd term for attempting to identify as many different species as possible in a single calendar year.
They start out knowing next to nothing about birds—an app designer and a cinematographer from Collinsville, Illinois, the Reisers get into birding after one of them stumbles across an ornithological guidebook during a bleary-eyed smoke session. Then they buy a $4,500 Kia Sedona and traverse the country with the goal of finding more than 700 unique specimens.
Although both brothers are the subjects of the film, Quentin spends most of the time on camera while Owen remains behind the lens. He alternates between a low-tech camcorder and a high-resolution camera, the former to capture the mundane and often gritty work of tracking down birds, and the latter to reveal their quarry in all its splendor.
…But underneath the stoner hijinks (and legitimately stunning wildlife videography), Listers is a serious film about the meaning that hobbies can provide to our lives, and the corrupting influence of smartphone apps on our leisure activities.
As the documentary progresses, it gradually begins to examine how eBird, a social app that is popular in the bird-watching community, has overtaken the pastime. The brothers start without complaints about eBird, which connects them with other hobbyists, helps them track their progress when they “list” birds, and provides a ranking system so they can see how they’re stacking up against other birders.
But by the end of the year, they become disillusioned by eBird and interview other hobbyists who are as well. “This country is so big, and you have to go everywhere in the country to see enough birds to be in the power rankings or whatever the fuck it is,” Quentin grouses. “I like bird-watching, but I don’t like it in the competitive sense.”
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The future I saw through the Meta Ray-Ban Display amazes and terrifies me • The Verge
Victoria Song:
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These glasses do everything that the audio-only Ray-Ban Meta glasses do, but the display lets them introduce a variety of new features that you’d previously need to pull out your phone for. You can reply to texts, view Instagram Reels, frame photos and videos, caption or translate the conversations happening around you, and get walking directions while viewing a map of your surroundings. When you interact with Meta AI, you can now see informational cards.
It took a while to figure out where the display fits into my life. With the original audio-only Ray-Bans, the use case was clear-cut. I pop them on when I go for walks or attend events like a concert, where I might want footage. But as an able-bodied, sighted person, I’ve never found the Meta AI features that useful in my day-to-day life. I might use the glasses to identify a flower or tree I see on a walk, but that’s as far as it went.
A display opens more doors. One of the big features is live captions, which adds real-time subtitles to your conversations. It was helpful to turn on live captions during a podcast taping. They’re not always perfect — AI transcriptions universally struggle with slang or uncommon names — but they’re nice in one-on-one conversations in a noisy restaurant. The transcriptions are less useful when you’re walking and talking with a friend, though. For it to work well, you have to be looking directly at your conversation partner. That makes it awkward if you’re walking side by side, as you physically have to turn your head to face each speaker. The AI also had a hard time captioning my mumbly spouse. No amount of yelling in a loud bar can help the AI, either.
…Texting on the glasses ties all of this together — and also starts to get at where using them becomes uncomfortable. It feels magical when, at dinner, I can hide my hand under the table, read a text, swipe my fingers, and reply to a message without anyone knowing. But the problem is that much of what makes texting (and photos, and videos, and so many other features enabled by the display) so impressive is that no one else can tell what you’re doing.
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Heavy, two different chargers for the neural band and the glasses (which have short battery lives). But: definitely a glimpse of the future.
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Wikipedia says AI is causing a dangerous decline in human visitors • 404 Media
Emanuel Maiberg:
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Ironically, while generative AI and search engines are causing a decline in direct traffic to Wikipedia, its data is more valuable to them than ever. Wikipedia articles are some of the most common training data for AI models, and Google and other platforms have for years mined Wikipedia articles to power its Snippets and Knowledge Panels, which siphon traffic away from Wikipedia itself.
“Almost all large language models train on Wikipedia datasets, and search engines and social media platforms prioritize its information to respond to questions from their users,” Miller said. That means that people are reading the knowledge created by Wikimedia volunteers all over the internet, even if they don’t visit wikipedia.org— this human-created knowledge has become even more important to the spread of reliable information online.”
Miller said that in May 2025 Wikipedia noticed unusually high amounts of apparently human traffic originating mostly from Brazil. He didn’t go into details, but explained this caused the Foundation to update its bot detections systems.
“After making this revision, we are seeing declines in human pageviews on Wikipedia over the past few months, amounting to a decrease of roughly 8% as compared to the same months in 2024,” he said. “We believe that these declines reflect the impact of generative AI and social media on how people seek information, especially with search engines providing answers directly to searchers, often based on Wikipedia content.”«
Probably the most telling stat is “Edited pages” for Wikipedia, which (in English) is down 20% year-on-year. There’s also “Edits” which, for all Wikipedias (in multiple languages) is down 4% in the same period.
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ESMO 2025: mRNA-based COVID vaccines generate improved responses to immunotherapy • MD Anderson Cancer Center
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Patients with cancer who received mRNA-based COVID vaccines within 100 days of starting immune checkpoint therapy were twice as likely to be alive three years after beginning treatment, according to a new study led by researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.
These findings, which include more than 1,000 patients treated between Aug. 2019 and Aug. 2023, were presented today at the 2025 European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress (Abstract LBA54). The study was led by Steven Lin, M.D., Ph.D. professor of Radiation Oncology, and Adam Grippin, M.D., Ph.D.,senior resident in Radiation Oncology.
“This study demonstrates that commercially available mRNA COVID vaccines can train patients’ immune systems to eliminate cancer,” Grippin said. “When combined with immune checkpoint inhibitors, these vaccines produce powerful antitumor immune responses that are associated with massive improvements in survival for patients with cancer.”
The discovery that mRNA vaccines were powerful immune activators came from research conducted by Grippin during his graduate work at the University of Florida in the lab of Elias Sayour, M.D., Ph.D. While developing personalized mRNA-based cancer vaccines for brain tumors, Grippin and Sayour found that mRNA vaccines trained immune systems to eliminate cancer cells, even when the mRNA didn’t target tumors directly.
This finding led to the hypothesis that other types of mRNA vaccines might have the same effect, and the approval and use of mRNA-based COVID vaccines created an opportunity to test this hypothesis. Lin and Grippin initiated a major effort to retrospectively study if MD Anderson patients who received mRNA COVID vaccines lived longer than those who did not receive these vaccines.
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In short, the mRNA vaccine – and it has to be mRNA; others don’t have the same effect – seems to wake up the immune system and gets it to “notice” tumours and act on them. Work in healthy people too: immune systems are stronger following Covid vaccination.
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Ibuprofen: how an everyday drug might offer protection against cancer • The Conversation
Dipa Kamdar, Ahmed Elbediwy and Nadine Wehida:
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A 2025 study found that ibuprofen may lower the risk of endometrial cancer, the most common type of womb cancer, which starts in the lining of the uterus (the endometrium) and mainly affects women after menopause.
One of the biggest preventable risk factors for endometrial cancer is being overweight or obese, since excess body fat increases levels of oestrogen – a hormone that can stimulate cancer cell growth.
Other risk factors include older age, hormone replacement therapy (particularly oestrogen-only HRT), diabetes, and polycystic ovary syndrome. Early onset of menstruation, late menopause, or not having children also increase risk. Symptoms can include abnormal vaginal bleeding, pelvic pain, and discomfort during sex.
In the Prostate, Lung, Colorectal, and Ovarian (PLCO) study, data from more than 42,000 women aged 55–74 was analysed over 12 years. Those who reported taking at least 30 ibuprofen tablets per month had a 25% lower risk of developing endometrial cancer than those taking fewer than four tablets monthly. The protective effect appeared strongest among women with heart disease.
Interestingly, aspirin – another common NSAID – did not show the same association with reduced risk in this or other studies. That said, aspirin may help prevent bowel cancer returning.
Other NSAIDs, such as naproxen, have been studied for preventing colon, bladder, and breast cancers. The effectiveness of these drugs seems to depend on cancer type, genetics, and underlying health conditions.
Ibuprofen’s possible cancer-protective effects extend beyond endometrial cancer. Studies suggest it may also reduce risk of bowel, breast, lung, and prostate cancers.
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My only quibble with this is that “30 ibuprofen tablets” could be anything from 1,500mg to 12,000mg. Not all tablets are the same. Anyway, two cancer cures in one day! It’s like the Daily Mail in here.
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Apple sued over use of copyrighted books to train Apple Intelligence • Reuters
Blake Brittain:
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Apple was hit with a lawsuit in California federal court by a pair of neuroscientists who say that the tech company misused thousands of copyrighted books to train its Apple Intelligence artificial intelligence model.
Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik, professors at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University in Brooklyn, New York, told the court in a proposed class action last Thursday that Apple used illegal “shadow libraries” of pirated books to train Apple Intelligence.
A separate group of authors sued Apple last month for allegedly misusing their work in AI training.
The lawsuit is one of many high-stakes cases brought by copyright owners such as authors, news outlets, and music labels against tech companies, including OpenAI, Microsoft, and Meta Platforms over the unauthorized use of their work in AI training. Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5bn to settle a lawsuit from another group of authors over the training of its AI-powered chatbot Claude in August.
Spokespeople for Apple and Martinez-Conde, Macknik, and their attorney did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the new complaint on Friday.
Apple Intelligence is a suite of AI-powered features integrated into iOS devices, including the iPhone and iPad.
“The day after Apple officially introduced Apple Intelligence, the company gained more than $200 billion in value: ‘the single most lucrative day in the history of the company,'” the lawsuit said.According to the complaint, Apple utilized datasets comprising thousands of pirated books as well as other copyright-infringing materials scraped from the internet to train its AI system.
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Can’t make an LLM – even a little one, an LLM-ette – without breaking regs, it seems.
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London became a global hub for phone theft. Now we know why • The New York Times
Lizzie Dearden and Amelia Nierenberg:
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For years, London’s police assumed most of the phone thefts were the work of small-time thieves looking to make some quick cash. But last December, they got an intriguing lead from a woman who had used “Find My iPhone” to track her device to a warehouse near Heathrow Airport. Arriving there on Christmas Eve, officers found boxes bound for Hong Kong. They were labeled as batteries but contained almost 1,000 stolen iPhones.
“It quickly became apparent this wasn’t just normal low-level street crime,” said Mark Gavin, a senior detective leading the investigation for the Metropolitan Police. “This was on an industrial scale.”
The breakthrough coincided with a broader push by the police to increase public confidence by tackling the city’s most common crimes. Phone theft has been the subject of particular anger among victims, who for years reported their cellphones stolen and handed the police the locations being transmitted, only to be given a crime reference number and hear nothing more.
The police are now using that information to map where stolen phones are transported by street thieves. After the Heathrow seizure, a team of specialist investigators who normally deal with firearms and drug smuggling was assigned to the case. They identified further shipments and used forensics to identify two men in their 30s who are suspected of being ringleaders of a group that sent up to 40,000 stolen phones to China.
When the men were arrested on Sept. 23, the car they were traveling in contained several phones, some wrapped in aluminum foil in an attempt to prevent them from transmitting tracking signals. At one point, the police said at a news conference, they observed the men buying almost 1.5 miles’ worth of foil in Costco.
Some phones are reset and sold to new users in Britain. But many are shipped to China and Algeria as part of a “local-to-global criminal business model,” the police said, adding that in China, the newest phones could be sold for up to $5,000, generating huge profits for the criminals involved.
Joss Wright, an associate professor at the University of Oxford who specializes in cybersecurity, said that it is easier to use stolen British phones in China than elsewhere because many of the country’s network providers do not subscribe to an international blacklist that bars devices that have been reported stolen.
“That means that a stolen iPhone that has been blocked in the U.K. can be used without any problems in China,” Mr. Wright said.
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I hope this is a gift link. It’s a fascinating article, and that last point – about China not subscribing to the IMEI blocking – is crucial. And with the thieves getting around £300 per device, that’s tasty money for them.
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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. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 