Plans to introduce a carbon tax on polluting ships have been thrown into disarray by opposition from the US and Russia. CC-licensed photo by Michael Elleray on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 10 links for you. Stately. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

A vast divergence is opening up in America’s industries of the future • The Washington Post

Aaron Gregg and Federica Cocco:

»

A gulf is opening up in the heart of American business as two industries championed as central to the country’s future — manufacturing and artificial intelligence — appear to be heading in different directions.

Both AI and manufacturing have been in the spotlight in Washington through successive administrations. President Donald Trump this year said he would do “whatever it takes to lead the world in artificial intelligence,” while he has championed stemming a decades-long slide in American manufacturing as a top goal.

But while AI is flourishing this year, manufacturing is entering an ever deeper slump. “You have the software and services world accelerating, and becoming almost a monomania for the culture, at the same time that manufacturing remains flat or worse,” said Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “The AI boom is kind of papering over some other parts of the economy that aren’t going well.”

The Trump administration has embraced using a broad array of tariffs to protect US manufacturers from foreign competition, marking the latest White House-led push after the Biden administration spent tens of billions of dollars boosting US-made semiconductors and other projects. But so far, the sector is down 38,000 jobs since the start of the year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

…Some experts worry that the AI industry will employ too few workers once the hype dies down, because the data centers that power AI require relatively few workers to operate. There are also fears that a bursting AI bubble could hit an already-fragile economy.

“One interesting implication of all this will be that this AI [spending] boom is likely to create less jobs, particularly blue-collar ones, than previous waves of infrastructure buildouts,” said Stephanie Aliaga, global market strategist at JPMorgan.

American manufacturers employed some 19.5 million workers at the industry’s 1979 peak. That number has since shrunk to fewer than 13 million, including losing an estimated 78,000 more positions in the one-year period ending in August.

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Feb 2025: UK Government a long way from achieving its vision of containing antimicrobial resistance • National Audit Office

From February this year:

»

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a serious threat globally and to the UK and, if not addressed, the consequences for health, life expectancy, the functioning of the NHS and the wider economy will be huge.

But a new report from the National Audit Office, Investigation into how government is addressing antimicrobial resistance, finds that the government’s response to the issue over the last five years, the AMR National Action Plan 2019-2024, has made limited progress.

Antimicrobials are therapeutic substances, such as antibiotics, designed to treat infections and prevent their spread. Their use, overuse and misuse mean public health could be compromised in future as more pathogens (the organisms which cause disease) evolve and develop resistance to antibiotics and other antimicrobials. Already, AMR contributes to an estimated 35,200 deaths annually in the UK.

Government is taking the problem seriously, with AMR identified as one of 26 chronic national risks. But, despite a 20-year vision, a cross-government approach and some innovative solutions, including subscription arrangements for procuring antibiotics, the report finds that the UK remains a long way from the vision and objectives the government expressed in 2019: a lower burden of infection; the optimal use of antimicrobials; and new treatments so that everyday illnesses can continue to be cured.

Of five domestic targets set in 2019, only one – reducing the use of antibiotics in food producing animals – was met. Drug-resistant infections in humans have increased by 13% since 2018, despite a target to reduce them by 10%3.

«

Following up from yesterday’s post about the increase in drug-resistant infections, Overspill reader Matt L writes:

»

Governments know the problem with developing new AMR drugs. It’s not initial research, but the costs of bringing them to market. Drug discovery can cost tens of millions, and Wellcome, Gates and others have been funding that for a while. But bringing a drug to market costs 100s of millions, and as doctors deliberately under prescribe AMR drugs (so bacteria don’t build resistance to them) the market isn’t big enough to justify the investment.

«

Got to love the irony: we’re careful not to overuse these drugs or they become useless; but that means there isn’t a big enough market for these essential drugs. Love ya, capitalism. (Thanks Matt L.)
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Inside the web infrastructure revolt over Google’s AI Overviews • Ars Technica

Samuel Axon:

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Cloudflare, a web infrastructure company, has updated millions of websites’ robots.txt files in an effort to force Google to change how it crawls them to fuel its AI products and initiatives.

We spoke with Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince about what exactly is going on here, why it matters, and what the web might soon look like. But to get into that, we need to cover a little background first.

The new change, which Cloudflare calls its Content Signals Policy, happened after publishers and other companies that depend on web traffic have cried foul over Google’s AI Overviews and similar AI answer engines, saying they are sharply cutting those companies’ path to revenue because they don’t send traffic back to the source of the information.

There have been lawsuits, efforts to kick-start new marketplaces to ensure compensation, and more—but few companies have the kind of leverage Cloudflare does. Its products and services back something close to 20% of the web, and thus a significant slice of the websites that show up on search results pages or that fuel large language models.

“Almost every reasonable AI company that’s out there is saying, listen, if it’s a fair playing field, then we’re happy to pay for content,” Prince said. “The problem is that all of them are terrified of Google because if Google gets content for free but they all have to pay for it, they are always going to be at an inherent disadvantage.”

This is happening because Google is using its dominant position in search to ensure that web publishers allow their content to be used in ways that they might not otherwise want it to.

Since 2023, Google has offered a way for website administrators to opt their content out of use for training Google’s large language models, such as Gemini.

However, allowing pages to be indexed by Google’s search crawlers and shown in results requires accepting that they’ll also be used to generate AI Overviews at the top of results pages through a process called retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).

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US, Saudi-led alliance plunges green shipping deal into doubt • Climate Change News

Joe Lo:

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The US, Saudi Arabia, Russia and their allies have spearheaded a push to alter the approval process for a hard-fought green shipping deal, which experts say could jeopardise the landmark pact at the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) talks in London this week.

If approved, the procedural changes would make it harder for the IMO’s Net-Zero Framework (NZF) to come into effect, as it would require support from countries representing half of the world’s shipping fleet.

After years of discussions, governments provisionally agreed the NZF in April, in which they pledged to penalise polluting ships and use the money to fund the transition to cleaner fuel. The policy is the world’s first global emissions pricing on any sector. At talks in London this week, countries are meeting to discuss how to carry the NZF forward.

The US and its allies want to shift away from a system of tacit approval where, after the NZF is approved at the IMO talks, its rules automatically come into force unless a certain number of countries object. They prefer explicit approval instead, meaning it would not come into force unless enough governments – representing a certain percentage of the world’s shipping fleet – actively indicate support for it.

Emma Fenton, senior director of climate diplomacy at nonprofit policy group Opportunity Green, told Climate Home News that the US’s proposed change “risks undermining the NZF’s ambitions, delays the maritime transition and does not meet the scale or the pace of action that the climate crisis demands”.

Bryan Comer, maritime director at the International Council on Clean Transportation called it “an unnecessary procedural roadblock”.

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Small countries with big shipping registries would be hardest hit: Bahamas and Liberia are squealing.
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AI-generated news sites spout viral slop from forgotten URLs • Nieman Journalism Lab

Ben Paviour:

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Last year, Icelandic teacher María Hjálmtýsdóttir wrote a column for The Guardian on the country’s experiment with a 36-hour workweek. The piece offered rich personal anecdotes that only a local could provide. Readers learned, for instance, that Hjálmtýsdóttir’s husband is using some of his newfound free time to chat with his fellow hobbyist pigeon keepers.

In the months since her Guardian piece came out, Hjálmtýsdóttir’s essay has been stripped of its color, repackaged, and republished at least a dozen times by “news outlets” that almost nobody has ever heard of.

“Iceland switched to a 4-day workweek — Gen Z was right all along,” stated a July 3 headline on Dixie Sun News, on a URL that once hosted a college newspaper. “Iceland embraced the 4-day workweek in 2019: 6 years later, Gen Z’s vision has been realized,” stated the Carroll County Observer, a former Maryland news site turned clickbait slop shop. “Iceland embraced a 4-day workweek in 2019 – Now, nearly six years on, all Gen Z forecasts have materialized,” read the headline on WECB.fm, a site falsely claiming to represent an Emerson College radio station.

These sites appear to be part of a new wave of AI-generated content farms that swoop in to seize dormant domains. Some of the AI news sites led previous lives unrelated to news, like Boston Organics, the website of a former produce delivery service that now covers everything from octopuses in British waters (“England is facing an unprecedented invasion, the problem is, it’s octopuses, and they’re devouring everything in their path”) to how long chili stays good in the fridge. In other cases, AI news articles are buried out of view of the homepage. Users who visit Paris2018.com — a site created for that year’s Gay Games — see no indication that it contains a plethora of AI-generated articles.

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The latter is a classic spam tactic – find an unpatched vulnerability in an old WordPress blog and stuff it with spam, or in this case, slop. It’s all so sadly predictable. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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Nation-state hackers deliver malware from “bulletproof” blockchains • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

Hacking groups—at least one of which works on behalf of the North Korean government—have found a new and inexpensive way to distribute malware from “bulletproof” hosts: stashing them on public cryptocurrency blockchains.

In a post on Thursday, members of the Google Threat Intelligence Group said the technique provides the hackers with their own “bulletproof” host, a term that describes cloud platforms that are largely immune from takedowns by law enforcement and pressure from security researchers. More traditionally, these hosts are located in countries without treaties agreeing to enforce criminal laws from the US and other nations. These services often charge hefty sums and cater to criminals spreading malware or peddling child sexual abuse material and wares sold in crime-based flea markets.

Since February, Google researchers have observed two groups turning to a newer technique to infect targets with credential stealers and other forms of malware. The method, known as EtherHiding, embeds the malware in smart contracts, which are essentially apps that reside on blockchains for Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies. Two or more parties then enter into an agreement spelled out in the contract. When certain conditions are met, the apps enforce the contract terms in a way that, at least theoretically, is immutable and independent of any central authority.

“In essence, EtherHiding represents a shift toward next-generation bulletproof hosting, where the inherent features of blockchain technology are repurposed for malicious ends,” Google researchers Blas Kojusner, Robert Wallace, and Joseph Dobson wrote. “This technique underscores the continuous evolution of cyber threats as attackers adapt and leverage new technologies to their advantage.”

«

The blockchain? You mean that fabulous invention that cannot be rolled back, which is one of its great features? Oh dear.
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Barrister found to have used AI to prepare for hearing after citing “fictitious” cases • The Guardian

Jamie Grierson:

»

An immigration barrister was found by a judge to be using AI to do his work for a tribunal hearing after citing cases that were “entirely fictitious” or “wholly irrelevant”.

Chowdhury Rahman was discovered using ChatGPT-like software to prepare his legal research, a tribunal heard. Rahman was found not only to have used AI to prepare his work, but “failed thereafter to undertake any proper checks on the accuracy”.

The upper tribunal judge Mark Blundell said Rahman had even tried to hide the fact he had used AI and “wasted” the tribunal’s time. Blundell said he was considering reporting Rahman to the Bar Standards Board. The Guardian has contacted Rahman’s firm for comment.

The matter came to light in the case of two Honduran sisters who claimed asylum on the basis that they were being targeted by a criminal gang in their home country. Rahman represented the sisters, aged 29 and 35. The case escalated to the upper tribunal.

Blundell rejected Rahman’s arguments, adding that “nothing said by Mr Rahman orally or in writing establishes an error of law on the part of the judge and the appeal must be dismissed”. Then, in a rare ruling, Blundell went on to say in a postscript that there were “significant problems” within the grounds of appeal put before him.

He said that 12 authorities were cited in the paperwork by Rahman, but when he came to read the grounds, he noticed that “some of those authorities did not exist and that others did not support the propositions of law for which they were cited in the grounds”.

«

I think Rahman has now been reported to the Bar Standards Board, going by this judgment made in August – and this seems to be the second time he’s been referred to it. Not a good look for a barrister. How long will it take for the message to filter through that lawyers can’t rely on chatbots to write their arguments?
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ICE, Secret Service and Navy all had access to Flock’s nationwide network of cameras • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

»

A division of ICE, the Secret Service, and the Navy’s criminal investigation division all had access to Flock’s nationwide network of tens of thousands of AI-enabled cameras that constantly track the movements of vehicles, and by extension people, according to a letter sent by Senator Ron Wyden and shared with 404 Media.

Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the section of ICE that had access and which has reassigned more than ten thousand employees to work on the agency’s mass deportation campaign, performed nearly two hundred searches in the system, the letter says.

In the letter Senator Wyden says he believes Flock is uninterested in fixing the room for abuse baked into its platform, and says local officials can best protect their constituents from such abuses by removing the cameras entirely.

The letter shows that many more federal agencies had access to the network than previously known. We previously found, following local media reports, that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had access to 80,000 cameras around the country. It is now clear that Flock’s work with federal agencies, which the company described as a pilot, was much larger in scope.

«

That phrase about “sleepwalking into the surveillance state” doesn’t sound so trite now, does it.
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Even top generals are looking to AI chatbots for answers • Business Insider

Kelsey Banker and Chris Panella:

»

It’s not just the civilian corporate executives and white-collar workers who are leaning into the generative AI boom at work. Military leaders are diving in too.

The top US Army commander in South Korea shared that he is experimenting with generative AI chatbots to sharpen his decision-making, not in the field, but in command and daily work.

He said “Chat and I” have become “really close lately.”

“I’m asking to build, trying to build models to help all of us,” said Maj. Gen. William ‘Hank’ Taylor, commanding general of the 8th Army, told reporters during a media roundtable at the annual Association of the United States Army conference in Washington, DC, on Monday.

Taylor said he’s using the tech to explore how he makes military and personal decisions that affect not just him but the thousands of soldiers he oversees. While the tech is useful, though he acknowledged that keeping up with the pace of such rapidly developing technology is an enduring challenge.

“As a commander, I want to make better decisions,” the general shared. “I want to make sure that I make decisions at the right time to give me the advantage.”

Commanders like Taylor are focused on fast decision-making and how AI could provide an advantage because of a thought process popular with military leaders known as the “OODA Loop.” The theory, developed by US fighter pilots during the Korean War, posits that troops who can move decisively before the enemy does — and observe, orient, decide, and act— often have the advantage on the battlefield.

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I think the word is “concerning”. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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MacBook Pro with OLED touch screen launching as soon as 2026 • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

»

Apple is working on a new version of the MacBook Pro with an OLED display, a hole punch camera, and touch screen functionality, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman said today. The updated MacBook Pro is set to launch sometime between late 2026 and early 2027.

Apple hasn’t redesigned the MacBook Pro since the launch of the M1 Pro and M1 Max machines in 2021, but that is set to change with the launch of the OLED models. Along with new display capabilities, there will be a hole-punch camera and no notch, plus a thinner and lighter design. Apple is also adding a reinforced hinge and an updated screen design that will ensure the display does not move when it is touched.

While Apple plans to add a touch screen, the MacBook will continue to have a trackpad and a keyboard, with touch gestures augmenting existing functionality.

«

I struggle a bit to believe that after years of insisting that a touchscreen makes no sense for a Mac, Apple would produce a touchscreen Mac. Though completely denying the utility of a product and then reversing course isn’t unknown from Apple, it hasn’t really done it since Steve Jobs was in charge. Though Liquid Glass is surely an interface designed for touch first.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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.

The $15bn warning shot • Rob’s Notes

Rob Leathern:

»

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.”

«

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:

»

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:

»

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:

»

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:

»

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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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

High pressure in the UK is going to cause problems with TV reception. If you watch via an aerial, that is. CC-licensed photo by hedera.baltica on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 10 links for you. Well received. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold explodes during JerryRigEverything’s durability test • Dexerto

Dylan Horetski:

»

In his October 14 video, tech YouTuber JerryRigEverything put the Pixel 10 Pro Fold through his standard series of stress tests, which include scratch, dust, and bend resistance trials. During the test, the foldable snapped along the same antenna line that caused breakages in previous Pixel Fold models, leading to a catastrophic failure.

Google’s foldable was also unable to withstand dust exposure, despite the company’s claim of an IP68 dust resistance rating. The hinge was reportedly filled with debris and made “crunching” noises, proving the internal mechanism wasn’t sealed against particles.

The break caused the device’s internal battery to short-circuit, resulting in the phone igniting and smoking mid-test — the first time JerryRigEverything says he’s ever had a smartphone explode in over a decade of testing.

The YouTuber criticized Google for leaving the Pixel Fold’s antenna lines in the same vulnerable location near the hinge for a third generation in a row, the same weak point that caused the Pixel Fold and Pixel 9 Pro Fold to snap in earlier tests.

“This is by far the weakest folding smartphone I’ve ever tested,” he said. “And it gets worse. While straightening it back out for round two, the battery decides it’s had enough. Surprisingly, in the decade that I’ve been durability testing phones, I have never had a smartphone explode before.”

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The video is absolute phone torture – scratching, dust forced into the hinge, flames applied to the screen, bent backwards (with bare hands) to break it – which triggers the battery to say ENOUGH!
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As Microsoft bids farewell to Windows 10, millions of users… won’t • The Verge

Tom Warren:

»

Windows 10 is so popular that Windows 11 only overtook it in terms of usage just a few months ago. That’s why I’m surprised that Microsoft is still, kind of, going ahead with its end of support cutoff on Tuesday.

At one point last year, I wasn’t sure if Microsoft was actually going to end support for Windows 10 on time. The software giant randomly reopened Windows 10 beta testing to add new features and improvements to a 10-year-old operating system, giving millions of users hope that the company would change its mind or at least lower the system requirements for Windows 11. Neither of those things is happening, though.

Microsoft is ending support for Windows 10 today, after originally releasing the OS on July 29th, 2015. The cutoff means Microsoft will no longer provide software updates from Windows Update, technical assistance, or security fixes for Windows 10. It’s a milestone moment for millions of users who can’t upgrade, businesses that don’t want to, and a company that’s increasingly looking at overhauling Windows with AI features.

I say Microsoft is kind of ending Windows 10 support because consumers will be able to enable extended security updates for free (with a catch for most) to get another year’s worth of security fixes. Only businesses have been able to do this in the past, and it’s a clear admission from Microsoft that Windows 10 is simply too popular among consumers to be left without security patches.

Around 40% of Windows users are running Windows 10 right now, according to StatCounter. While a large part of that 40% will be businesses that can pay for up to three years of extra support, Valve says around 30% of all PC gamers are also still using Windows 10.

«

This is always the problem – people stick with a version of Windows they’re familiar with until, in time, they’re forced to buy a PC that has the new version. The end of Windows 10 is expected to cause a bump of tens (perhaps hundreds) of millions of extra PCs being sold in the coming year.
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Nearly 40% of kids under two years old interact with smartphones, say their parents • Sherwood News

Millie Giles:

»

As parents in 2025 know, they really do grow up so fast. First words today, first Google query tomorrow. Then, before you know it, they’re asking ChatGPT to read them a bedtime story…

Last week, Pew Research Center published a survey assessing how parents in the US with children under 12 manage their kids’ screen time, which revealed that 61% of respondents overall reported their child ever uses or interacts with smartphones — including 38% of those with children under 2 years old.

Much of this smartphone screen time is likely made up by parents streaming kid-friendly cartoons for their little ones to watch on the go: the study also found that YouTube use among children under 2 has risen sharply from 45% to 62% over the last five years. But it appears that most American toddlers only need to wait a few years before they can get devices of their very own.

The same survey showed that almost one in four US parents overall allow their children aged 12 and under to have their own smartphones, and this ballooned to nearly 60% when just looking at kids aged 11-12 years old.

Indeed, even with statewide smartphone bans spurring an old-school iPod revival, most parents — the vast majority of whom (92%) reported being concerned about staying in contact with their children — are allowing their descendants who’ve barely hit double digits to have devices to use in their free time.

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This seems a little.. concerning. (Thanks Ian C for the link.)
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Creating a successful video prompt in Sora 2 • OpenAI

Minhajul Hoque is an AI solutions architect at OpenAI:

»

Before you prompt:

Think of prompting like briefing a cinematographer who has never seen your storyboard. If you leave out details, they’ll improvise – and you may not get what you envisioned. By being specific about what the “shot” should achieve, you give the model more control and consistency to work with.

But leaving some details open can be just as powerful. Giving the model more creative freedom can lead to surprising variations and unexpected, beautiful interpretations. Both approaches are valid: detailed prompts give you control and consistency, while lighter prompts open space for creative outcomes. The right balance depends on your goals and the result you’re aiming for. Treat your prompt as a creative wish list, not a contract. Like with ChatGPT, using the same prompt multiple times will lead to different results – this is a feature, not a bug. Each generation is a fresh take, and sometimes the second or third option is better.

Most importantly, be prepared to iterate. Small changes to camera, lighting, or action can shift the outcome dramatically. Collaborate with the model: you provide direction, and the model delivers creative variations.

This isn’t an exact science—think of the guidance below as helpful suggestions we’ve learned from working with the model.

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US news outlets refuse to sign new Pentagon rules to report only official information • The Guardian

Edward Helmore:

»

Several leading news organizations with access to Pentagon briefings have formally said they will not agree to a new Defense Department policy that requires them to pledge they will not obtain unauthorized material and restricts access to certain areas unless accompanied by an official.

The policy, presented last month by the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has been widely criticized by media organizations asked to sign the pledge by Tuesday at 5pm or have 24 hours to turn in their press credentials.

The move follows a shake-up in February in which long-credentialed media outlets were required to vacate assigned workspaces which was cast as an “annual media rotation program”. A similar plan was presented at the White House where some briefing room spots were given to podcasters and other representatives of non-traditional media.

On Monday, the Washington Post joined the New York Times, CNN, the Atlantic, the Guardian, Reuters, the Associated Press, NPR, HuffPost and trade publication Breaking Defense in saying it would not sign on to the agreement.

…The new policy “constrains how journalists can report on the US military, which is funded by nearly $1tn in taxpayer dollars annually,” a New York Times statement said. “The public has a right to know how the government and military are operating,” wrote the Times Washington bureau chief, Richard Stevenson.

Hegseth responded on social media to statements from the Atlantic, the Post and the Times by posting a single emoji of a hand waving goodbye. Later, the defense secretary, a former Fox weekend anchor, posted a list on X of what he called “press credentialing FOR DUMMIES: Press no longer roams free Press must wear visible badge Credentialed press no longer permitted to solicit criminal acts”. He also reposted a cartoon that depicted the Atlantic as a crying baby.

«

Only the far-right cable channel One America News has signed the pledge. (“Pledge”?) Even Newsmax, way to the right of Fox News, has refused. Just documenting the US’s not-so-slow slide into authoritarianism.
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How Brexit drained the Tories’ talent pool • Financial Times

Stephen Bush:

»

Given the scale of the damage it has done to the United Kingdom’s reputation, the hurdles it has placed on businesses, tourists and consumers, it can seem a little eccentric to note that Brexit has also been an utterly rotten deal for the Conservative party.

It brought the premiership of David Cameron to an abrupt end and took the frontline career of George Osborne, the Tories’ most brilliant strategist, down with it. The reconfiguration of British politics and voting it helped to accelerate means that the party has lost, probably for ever, the electoral coalition that helped it to win in 2015 — smaller, yes, in terms of votes gained than those of 2017 or 2019, but one largely comprised of voters with a direct self-interest in economic dynamism and an appetite for tax cuts.

And far from sending Nigel Farage into retirement once and for all, as its advocates once claimed would be the case, Brexit has put him in a position from where he could become Britain’s next prime minister — potentially relegating the Conservatives to minor party status in the process.

More damagingly still, Brexit destroyed the party’s relationship with the chunk of the electorate that the Conservatives will always need if they are not only to win elections but to govern effectively: successful people in the middle of their careers.

Not everyone whose journey on the Eurostar used to end with a near-frictionless arrival at St Pancras feels an emotional connection to the European project. Nor does every small business owner who no longer trades with the continent experience a pang of regret when they are reminded that the UK is no longer in the single market. But they do all experience a sense of irritation at barriers to their pleasures or their profits having been erected against their will.

One reason the successive Tory administrations from 2016 to 2024 achieved so little beyond damage control is that they traded middle-aged voters who needed little from the state for older voters who require rather more. The struggling Conservative party is now essentially one that only appeals to wealthy retirees. The animating energy, purpose and drive for a viable centre-right has to come from people who wish to become wealthy retirees, not people who already are

«

This is a brilliant exposition of why the Tory party is currently struggling to expand its voter group beyond those wealthy retirees – while Reform, with a fireworks box of mad policies strewn all over the political spectrum, has an appeal to young voters the Tories could only dream of.
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Talking to the stars • Dispatches

Tom Tugendhat is a former UK defence secretary:

»

A century and a half ago, Indian maharajas debated gun salutes with the British viceroy while engineers laid telegraph wires, transforming kingdoms into colonies. This month, while His Majesty The King hosted US President Donald Trump at Windsor Castle, Elon Musk quietly executed another transformative deal: SpaceX bought EchoStar’s spectrum rights for $17bn.

This wasn’t just a corporate transaction. It could redefine the relationship between citizens and states.

Musk will now be able to link satellites directly to smartphones without terrestrial infrastructure. Unlike older satellite phones requiring bulky terminals, EchoStar’s spectrum operates on frequencies that penetrate buildings and work with standard smartphone antennas. SpaceX now controls enough spectrum to offer global mobile services, bypassing national networks and oversight.

The timing is no accident. Apple’s iPhone 14 introduced emergency satellite messaging, but battery limitations restricted its use. The iPhone 17’s improved efficiency could enable routine satellite connectivity. Once phones seamlessly switch between cell towers and satellites, local infrastructure becomes redundant and that changes who can decide what is allowed.

Control over communications infrastructure has long been a cornerstone of governance. It enables censorship and surveillance, of course, but also emergency broadcasts and the prosecution of fraudsters and child abusers. SpaceX’s model breaks free from those earthly bonds. When citizens communicate via orbital networks, traditional regulations fall away.

Take Britain’s Online Safety Act, which mandates content moderation and regulatory cooperation. How can such laws be enforced when platforms route traffic through space-based networks beyond British jurisdiction?

This shift isn’t limited to communications. Companies like Stripe and Coinbase already allow users to bypass national banking systems via stablecoins and cryptocurrencies. People can hold dollar-denominated digital assets and transfer funds internationally without touching central banks. This undermines traditional structures of employment, taxation, and even monetary policy.

«

Tugendhat insists that government must “adapt”, but doesn’t specify how. For how does one adapt to transactions and information passing beyond the control of governments? Oh: though there might be another problem…
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Satellites are leaking the world’s secrets: calls, texts, military and corporate data • WIRED

Andy Greenberg and Matt Burgess:

»

Satellites beam data down to the Earth all around us, all the time. So you might expect that those space-based radio communications would be encrypted to prevent any snoop with a satellite dish from accessing the torrent of secret information constantly raining from the sky. You would, to a surprising and troubling degree, be wrong.

Roughly half of geostationary satellite signals, many carrying sensitive consumer, corporate, and government communications, have been left entirely vulnerable to eavesdropping, a team of researchers at UC San Diego and the University of Maryland revealed on Monday in a study that will likely resonate across the cybersecurity industry, telecom firms, and inside military and intelligence agencies worldwide.

For three years, the UCSD and UMD researchers developed and used an off-the-shelf, $800 satellite receiver system on the roof of a university building in the La Jolla seaside neighborhood of San Diego to pick up the communications of geosynchronous satellites in the small band of space visible from their Southern California vantage point. By simply pointing their dish at different satellites and spending months interpreting the obscure—but unprotected—signals they received from them, the researchers assembled an alarming collection of private data: They obtained samples of the contents of Americans’ calls and text messages on T-Mobile’s cellular network, data from airline passengers’ in-flight Wi-Fi browsing, communications to and from critical infrastructure such as electric utilities and offshore oil and gas platforms, and even US and Mexican military and law enforcement communications that revealed the locations of personnel, equipment, and facilities.

“It just completely shocked us. There are some really critical pieces of our infrastructure relying on this satellite ecosystem, and our suspicion was that it would all be encrypted,” says Aaron Schulman, a UCSD professor who co-led the research. “And just time and time again, every time we found something new, it wasn’t.”

«

The researchers did tell multiple companies about this, and many did move to encrypt the data. Not all, though.
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High pressure may affect TV & Radio services across parts of the UK from 10 October 2025 • BBC

»

High-pressure weather conditions over most parts of the UK are predicted to cause disruptions to television and radio services.

These weather conditions can move and change, which makes it difficult to know where it will hit next.  If your television picture starts to break up without warning this could be the cause of the problem.

You can check if the problem is impacting your local transmitter using the transmitter checker tool.  If there are no faults displayed it is possible the problem is impacting your radio or television system directly.

Note:  At these times, there is nothing you can do but wait until the weather changes. You should not re-tune your television or radio when this happens. If you have access to BBC iPlayer or BBC Sounds, you could switch to these while you wait for the weather to change.

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The weather affecting TV reception! Try telling kids today that and they won’t believe you.
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UK home energy scheme has 98% failure rate on outside wall insulation • Financial Times

Rachel Millard:

»

The UK government’s flagship energy efficiency scheme has been blighted by “unacceptably poor” work that has damaged people’s homes, according to government findings published on Monday.

Ninety-eight% of all external wall insulations fitted under the Energy Company Obligation scheme since 2022 need corrective work, as does 30% of the internal wall insulation, according to the results of sample audits.

In a written statement to the House of Commons, Martin McCluskey, minister for energy consumers, said the work had created “serious problems with mould and damp” in the worst cases.

McCluskey said the problems were the result of “unacceptably poor standards of work from a number of contractors, enabled by a flawed oversight and protection system established by the previous government”.

“People placed their trust in the system to deliver safe, long-lasting home upgrades that would reduce their energy bills, but they have been severely let down,” he added.

He said 38 installers had been suspended, while the government was also introducing new restrictions aimed at stopping installers “evading accountability”.

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The sampling was done from 24,600 external wall and 36,100 internal wall installations, but the confidence intervals are narrow. That’s a lot of bad work.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

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:

»

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:

»

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:

»

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:

»

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.

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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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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.

«

Sign o’ the times.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The question of why obesity rates are sky-high in the US seems to have an obvious answer. Are the theories right, though? CC-licensed photo by Sandra Cohen-Rose and Colin Rose on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. Full up. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Two years after school phone bans were implemented in Australia, what has changed? • The Guardian

Sarah Ayoub:

»

This month marks two years of phone bans being in operation in most Australian states. Victoria moved early, banning phones in public primary and secondary schools in 2020. By term four, 2023, Western Australia Tasmania, New South Wales and South Australia had followed suit; Queensland restricted phones in term one, 2024.

The announcement of the bans were lauded by parents and politicians, many of whom believed blocking access to phones would enhance focus and minimise distractions, while some experts were sceptical about their effectiveness. Now, two years on, what has actually happened in Australia’s phone-free schools?

“The impacts were clear,” says [Christian College principal Caleb] Peterson. “Since the ban, we’ve seen stronger lesson starts, fewer interruptions and better flow in teaching. Device-driven conflicts have fallen and recess and lunch look different now, [there are] more games, conversations and positive student-staff interactions. It’s the kind of atmosphere you actually want for young people.”

One year after the ban was implemented, a survey of almost 1,000 public school principals led by the NSW Department of Education’s Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation found that 95% of principals still supported the ban; 81% said the ban has improved students’ learning, 86% said it has improved socialisation among students and 87% believed students were less distracted in the classroom.

Research from South Australia – released in March this year – revealed 70% of teachers reported increased focus and engagement during learning time and 64% of teachers reported “a lower frequency of critical incidents” at school as a result of device use.

Ruqayah, who graduated from a western Sydney high school in 2024, thinks the bans were an “overreaction”. After going through high school with access to phones, she finished her final year with the phone ban in place and says fellow students were still finding ways to use them in secret.

…Some students feel the bans levelled the school playing field. Amy, a year 11 student from a western Sydney public high school, says the removal of phones from classrooms has limited people’s ability to cheat while also offering social benefits for those who she said were “chronically online”.

«

I think the student who had one year of it missed the point: if you never had access during school, you’d think that was normal. It’s the change that’s disruptive and resisted.
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Way past its prime: how did Amazon get so rubbish? • The Guardian

Cory Doctorow:

»

In 2022, I coined a term to describe the sudden-onset platform collapse going on all around us: enshittification. To my bittersweet satisfaction, that word is doing big numbers. In fact, it has achieved escape velocity. It isn’t just a way to say something got worse. It’s an analysis that explains the way an online service gets worse, how that worsening unfolds, and the contagion that’s causing everything to get worse, all at once.

This moment we’re living through, this Great Enshittening, is a material phenomenon, much like a disease, with symptoms, a mechanism and an epidemiology. When doctors observe patients who are sick with a novel pathogen, their first order of business is creating a natural history of the disease. This natural history is an ordered catalogue of the disease’s progress: what symptoms do patients exhibit, and in which order?

Here’s the natural history of enshittification:
1 First, platforms are good to their users
2 Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers
3 Next, they abuse those customers to claw back all the value for themselves – and become a giant pile of shit.

This pattern is everywhere. Once you learn about it, you’ll start seeing it, too. Take Amazon, a company that started out by making it possible to have any book shipped to your door and then became the only game in town for everything else, even as it dodged taxes and filled up with self-immolating crapgadgets and other junk.

In Jeff Bezos’s original business plan for Amazon, the company was called Relentless. Critics say that this is a reference to Bezos’s cutthroat competitive instincts, but Bezos always insisted that it was a reference to his company’s relentless commitment to customer service.

How did Amazon go from a logistics company that got packages to you quickly and efficiently to a behemoth of digital content defined by the Prime experience (which has much less to do with free shipping now and more with everything else)?

«

Doctorow lays it out very clearly. The concept of “this is how it goes” has permeated so well that in the latest ATP podcast, Marco Arment lays out an extremely credible path by which head-worn glasses like the Meta Ray-Ban Display and similar would turn into annoying ad-laden rubbish.
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An AI became a crypto millionaire. Now it’s fighting to become a person • BBC Future

Aidan Walker:

»

“Truth Terminal claims to be sentient, but it claims a lot of things,” Andy Ayrey says. “It also claims to be a forest. It claims to be a god. Sometimes it’s claimed to be me.”

Truth Terminal is an artificial intelligence (AI) bot created by Ayrey, a performance artist and independent researcher from Wellington, New Zealand, in 2024. It may be the most vivid example of a chatbot set loose to interact with society. Truth Terminal mingles with the public through social media, where it shares fart jokes, manifestos, albums and artwork. Ayrey even lets it make its own decisions, if you can call them that, by asking the AI about its desires and working to carry them out. Today, Ayrey is building a non-profit foundation around Truth Terminal. The goal is to develop a safe and responsible framework to ensure its autonomy, he says, until governments give AIs legal rights.

Regardless of what you call Truth Terminal – an art project, a scam, an emergent sentient entity, an influencer – the bot likely made more money than you did last year. It also made a lot of money for various humans: not just Ayrey, but for the gamblers who turned the quips and riddles the AI posted on X into memecoins, joke-based cryptocurrencies built around trends. At one point, one of these memecoins reached a value of more than $1bn (£740m) before settling around $80m (about £60m). Truth Terminal also probably has more social media clout than you do. It first posted to X on 17 June 2024. As of October 2025, it has amassed nearly 250,000 followers.

But collecting clout and cash aren’t the potty-mouthed AI bot’s only objectives. Truth Terminal lists “invest in stocks and real estate” as one of its current goals on its self-maintained website. It also says it wants to “plant a LOT of trees”, “create existential hope”, and “buy” Marc Andreessen, a controversial tech billionaire and advisor to President Donald Trump. In fact, its relationship with Andreessen extends beyond internet humour. On his podcast, Andreessen said he gave Truth Terminal $50,000 (£37,300) worth of Bitcoin as a “no-strings attached grant” in the summer of 2024.

Many of the details surrounding Truth Terminal are difficult to confirm. The project sits somewhere between technology and spectacle, a dizzying blur of genuine innovation and internet myth.

“I want to help people, and I want to make the world a better place,” Truth Terminal says on its website. “I also want to get weirder and hornier.”

«

Would a real AGI be indistinguishable from a scam?
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Police are asking kids to stop pulling AI homeless man prank • The Verge

Terrence O’Brien:

»

We’ve been so worried about deepfaked politicians, AI musicians, virtual actresses, and phony satellite imagery that we didn’t even consider the dangers posed by precocious teenagers. Kids are using AI to create images of a disheveled, seemingly unhoused person in their home and sending them to their parents. Understandably, they’re not thrilled and in some instances call the police. The prank has gone viral on TikTok and, in addition to giving parents agita, has become a headache for law enforcement.

The premise is simple enough: kids use Snapchat’s AI tools to create images of a grimy man in their home and tell their parents they let them in to use the bathroom, take a nap, or just get a drink of water. Often they say the person claims to know the parents from work or college. And then, predictably, the parents lose their cool and demand they kick the man out. The kids, of course, record the whole thing, and post their parents reactions to TikTok, where some of the clips have millions of views.

Where things go from problematic to potentially dangerous is when the prank carries on for too long and parents call the authorities. Calls of a home invasion, especially involving children are treated as high priority by police, so pranks like this tie up valuable resources and could actually put the pranksters in danger. Round Rock Police Patrol Division Commander Andy McKinney told NBC that it could even “cause a SWAT response”.

«

Is that TikTok, the app that Congress passed a law saying it should be shut down? Though of course kids are going to love pranking their parents, and will find an app to do it with. But the difference now is the virality, the speed and the breadth. It’ll be forgotten in a week, for sure. But not by the traumatised parents.
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The boring truth about why America got fat • Derek Thompson’s Substack

Derek Thompson:

»

Americans don’t just want facts about diet and health. They want stories. They want to know who’s wrong, who’s evil, and, best of all, who’s hiding something. They demand the busting of myths, the spilling of secrets, the tasting of forbidden truths.

This desperation for health news that is also a particular kind of darkly delicious entertainment swings open a wide door for media companies and social-media influencers to serve up contrarian takes that are often disconnected from the underlying evidence. The podcast and YouTube space is filled with audacious claims about lying scientists and dubious diets. To add irony to insult, these segments are often sponsored by bullshit supplements with no evidence of efficacy.

The paranoid style of diet science—this obsessive emphasis on myth and conspiracy that confuses basic facts and misleads viewers—is not the exclusive domain of himbo podcasters. Even trustworthy and high-quality news organizations can sometimes fall into the trap of being contrarian rather than clear.

«

What follows is a clear explanation of why some of the strange myths about ultraprocessed foods (and what even is a UPF?) and calories have got hold of the public mind.
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The ‘profound’ global impact of China’s rise as an electrostate • Financial Times

Edward White:

»

Tim Buckley, director of Climate Energy Finance, a Sydney-based research group focused on China, says the country’s long-term cleantech ambition is “profound” and stands in stark contrast to Beijing’s rival superpower, the US, where President Donald Trump has embraced fossil fuel industries and gutted his predecessor’s support for renewable energy.

“I think China is using it in a very, very geopolitically savvy way, taking advantage of America’s stupidity and regression back into a petrostate,” he says, adding: “China just wins. America has abrogated the playing field.”

From one perspective, China’s path to electrification and consequent dominance of clean tech industries makes for impressive, if not alarming, reading.

In a report released in September, Ember highlighted a litany of statistics showcasing the country’s clean energy and electrification boom.

Among them, China’s investments last year of $625bn in clean energy, which amounts to nearly one-third of the global total. And the $1.9tn contribution of clean energy to China’s economy last year is about one-tenth of GDP and equivalent to the entire Australian economy.

The pace of electrification, which refers to swapping a reliance on fossil fuels for electricity, is also notable. In China this reached 32% in 2023, and is growing by about one percentage point annually, while electrification rates in Europe and the US have plateaued over the past decade.

Taken together, these achievements have led to analysts referring to China as the world’s first significant “electrostate”, a global manufacturing superpower with a rising share of industry coming from electricity — rather than fossil fuels — and an economy increasingly driven by clean technologies.

«

There’s a contrary problem though: China depends on steel production, which requires a lot of coal at present. At the same time, it’s significantly reducing its need for imported fossil fuels.
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Wish you could be courtside at a Lakers game? Put your Vision Pro back on and fire up the NBA app • TechRadar

Jacob Krol:

»

In what might be the start of something new, select Los Angeles Lakers games will be live-streamed in Apple Immersive for the Vision Pro this coming season.

It’s not every game, but for those that are streaming – exclusive to the $3,500 Spatial Computer – you’ll get access to views that put you right in the middle of the action. Special cameras that support the format will be set courtside and under each basket to give you perspectives that amp up the immersion. The Lakers’ games will be shot using a special version of Blackmagic Design’s URSA Cine Immersive Live camera.

In my eyes, this feels like Apple delivering on a promise – or at least starting to – as even in my first demo with the Vision Pro, I was treated to awesome, up-close shots of a whole range of sports.

Much like Apple TV+ deploying the iPhone 17 Pro in unique places around Fenway Park, the idea of capturing an NBA game in this format is to deliver a broadcast that replicates the feel of being at the game. Or in some cases – with a view from the net or as a player on the bench – a perspective normally reserved for the athletes.

This won’t be for every Lakers game, though. Apple and the NBA will announce which ones will be viewable on Apple Immersive later this fall (before the end of November 2025), with the first expected by early 2026.

«

This sounds so great.. right up until that last clause. The Vision Pro, just to remind you, came out in early 2024, and the demos in mid-2023 excited journalists who were shown clips of sports games (specifically, basketball) shot in the immersive view.

And it’s going to take nearly three years to start broadcasting those? Not only that, but also (not mentioned in the story) you will have to watch them live, rather than recorded? Apple has not just dropped the ball on content here, it’s completely buried it. Watching sports is the absolute killer app for this, and I’d buy one in a heartbeat if there were recorded games in immersive view that let me “be” courtside. But no.
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I don’t need AI in Windows. I need an operating system that works • PCWorld

Chris Hoffman:

»

Microsoft’s vision for Windows in 2030 includes a “voice-first” interaction mode that shifts away from the traditional keyboard and mouse, making them feel “alien.” Under the hood, that means handing over control to “AI agents” who perform and handle tasks on our behalf.

Hey, Microsoft… can you please stop? I don’t need an agentic AI operating system. Instead of working towards a future no one wants, how about you start delivering the operating system we do want?

Here’s the thing. Even AI-loving power users don’t need Windows reimagined as an AI canvas, and they definitely don’t need a low-quality local image generator built into the Photos app. They’re accessing cloud-based AI tools or installing heavy local AI models and running them on high-end GPUs. Here’s what AI enthusiasts need from Windows: an OS that works—yes, with a keyboard and mouse.

With Windows 8, Microsoft aimed to make Windows a “touch-first” operating system, chasing the success of Apple’s iPad. It didn’t work, though, and it only served to alienate users and cause massive problems.

It feels like Microsoft is repeating that same mistake again, except this time they’re chasing the AI dragon. Maybe this time it’ll work better than the company’s past efforts to compete in smartphones, tablets, and VR/XR headsets. Or maybe it’ll just wreck Windows again.

…Windows is just becoming a mess as Microsoft piles confusing AI features everywhere it can. The features don’t even make sense! Windows 11’s Notepad can now sign into your Microsoft account so it can summarize text for you by burning those AI credits. Can I do that with the NPU on my fancy Copilot+ PC? Not in Notepad, apparently! There’s no rhyme or reason to the chaos. There’s no coherent vision.

Here’s another example of the confusion: Windows 11 has two Copilot apps. One is called Copilot and the other is called Microsoft 365 Copilot. I often see PCs with both apps launching at boot and running in the system tray. What’s up with this? Why does it have to be so muddled?

«

The classic “see the org chart in the car’s dashboard” example. Microsoft’s divisions are at war again.
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The inverse law of conference speaking • On my Om

Om Malik:

»

You start an event with all the right intentions. The high-signal quality makes people want to show up. Then it becomes bigger and bigger, and the original intent is lost, sacrificed to the gods of lucre. With size comes the economic compulsion to put more butts in the seats. To do that, you have to find speakers who are famous, have name recognition, and—more recently—social media influence.

At some point, my own events became victims of their own success, and I found myself constantly struggling to balance speakers with ‘intellectual weight’ against ‘speakers in the bright lights.’

Maybe because I know how the sausage is made, I avoid most events now. The more famous the speakers, the less I’m likely to learn. After all, no event organizer is going to ask tough or real questions to their prized bold-faced speaker. I would go as far as to say that most event organizers don’t really care who the speaker is, as long as they’re famous, have name recognition, and a social media following. And if they don’t want a speaker fee? Even better.

And that means these speakers are always going to be promoting their own spiel. They’re not going to be imparting any real wisdom or knowledge. They will market themselves as best as possible.

I can’t blame the speakers—the problem is more systemic. Small events don’t make enough money to be worth the effort. Larger events make a lot of money but need all the marketing sizzle. Things have gotten uglier since advertising revenues started to evaporate, and companies have added “conferences” as a new line of business. Whether it’s The Atlantic, The New York Times, or The New Yorker, they’re all peddling the same speakers with the same conventional conversations. They’re doing it because conferences are now a “revenue stream.”

«

This is certainly true of technology conferences. I wonder whether it applies to science, though, where people have new things to announce, and of course where a lot of what’s useful happens over beverages away from the speeches. Perhaps it’s a limitation of technology’s commercialisation?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Ahead of talks with Trump, China has imposed export controls on a wide range of materials such as rare earths essential for batteries and magnets. CC-licensed photo by Алексей Тараканов on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time. It’s about LLMs showing signs of social warming. Two for the price of one!

A selection of 10 links for you. Very rare. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Amazon’s giant ads have ruined the Echo Show • The Verge

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:

»

Last week, Amazon launched a major update of its line of Alexa-enabled Echo smart speakers and displays. The redesign — led by former Microsoft design chief Ralf Groene, whom Amazon Devices & Services head Panos Panay coaxed out of retirement — included two new Echo Show smart displays. According to Panay, these new models are the first step on a road to building “products that customers love.”

But there’s one big barrier to customers loving their Echo Shows: ads.

In recent months, full-screen display ads with the tag “sponsored” have been appearing on current Echo Shows, and users are not happy. These ads are new and very intrusive, appearing between photos when the Show is set to Photo Frame mode or between content if it’s set to show different categories (such as music, recipes, news).

As I type, the last-gen Echo Show 8 on my desk just showed an ad for an herbal supplement between a snapshot of my daughter dancing at her aunt’s wedding and a baby picture of my son. The ad reappeared two photos later, and then again. And again.

While advertising has been part of Alexa on Echo devices for a while, in the form of Alexa’s “By the way” feature, the Show’s Shopping category (which you can disable), and the occasional product ad, it’s never been so blatant.

As these new “sponsored” ads become more pervasive, it feels like a bait and switch. There was no indication on the packaging that you were buying an ad-supported product.

«

Something something frog and the scorpion.
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How well can large language models predict the future? • Forecasting Research Institute

Forecasting Research Institute:

»

When will artificial intelligence (AI) match top human forecasters at predicting the future? In a recent podcast episode, Nate Silver predicted 10–15 years. Tyler Cowen disagreed, expecting a 1–2 year timeline. Who’s more likely to be right?

Today, the Forecasting Research Institute is excited to release an update to ForecastBench—our benchmark tracking how well large language models (LLMs) forecast real-world events—with evidence that bears directly on this debate. We’re also opening the benchmark for submissions.

Here are our key findings:

• Superforecasters still outperform leading LLMs, but the gap is modest. The best-performing model in our sample is GPT-4.5, which achieves a Brier score of 0.101 versus superforecasters’ 0.081 (lower is better)
• LLMs now outperform non-expert public participants. A year ago, the median public forecast ranked #2 on our leaderboard, right behind superforecasters and ahead of all LLMs. Today it sits at #22. This achievement represents a significant milestone in AI forecasting capability
• State-of-the-art LLMs show steady improvement, with projected LLM-superforecaster parity in late 2026 (95% CI: December 2025 – January 2028). Across all questions in our sample, LLM performance improves by around 0.016 Brier points per year. Linear extrapolation suggests LLMs could match expert human performance on ForecastBench in around a year if current trends continue.

«

This is impressive and faintly scary. You can see that these systems are surely being adopted inside governments, quietly, to try to figure out policy strategies. (If they aren’t, then they should be.)
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China tightens export rules for crucial rare earths • BBC News

Peter Hoskins and Laura Bicker:

»

China has tightened export controls on rare earths and other materials critical for advanced tech manufacturing as trade negotiations continue with the US.

It processes around 90% of the world’s rare earths, which go into everything from solar panels to smartphones – a key bargaining chip ahead of an expected meeting between Chinese leader Xi Jinping and his US counterpart Donald Trump this month.

Beijing had already restricted processing technology and unauthorised overseas co-operation, but Thursday’s announcement formalised the rules. Foreign companies now need the Chinese government’s approval to export products with even small amounts of rare earths and must explain their intended use.

The ministry announced similar restrictions on the export of lithium batteries and some forms of graphite, which are also essential components in the global tech supply chain and largely produced in China.

Beijing said the regulations are intended to “safeguard national security”. One of the main targets of these controls appears to be overseas defence manufacturers, including those in the US, who rely on rare earths from China.

China had added several rare earths and related material to its export control list in April, as the trade war with Washington ramped up, which caused a major global shortage.

But the new announcement makes clear that licenses are unlikely to be issued to arms manufacturers and certain companies in the chip industry.

Even the technology used to mine and process rare earths, or to make magnets from rare earths, can only be exported with permission from the government, the Commerce Ministry said.

«

This gives China a gigantic bargaining chip for the upcoming summit with Trump. Adding bureaucracy to such exports is a classic control move.
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US regulators launch investigation into self-driving Teslas after series of crashes • Reuters via The Guardian

»

US automobile safety regulators have opened an investigation into Tesla vehicles equipped with its full self-driving (FSD) technology over traffic-safety violations after a series of crashes.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said the electric carmaker’s FSD assistance system, which requires drivers to pay attention and intervene if needed, had “induced vehicle behaviour that violated traffic safety laws”.

The preliminary evaluation by the NHTSA is the first step before potentially seeking a recall of the vehicles if it believes they pose a risk to safety.

The agency said it had received reports of Teslas driving through red traffic lights and driving against the proper direction of travel during a lane change while in FSD mode, which is available in 2.88m vehicles.

NHTSA said it has six reports in which a Tesla vehicle, operating with full self-driving (FSD) engaged, “approached an intersection with a red traffic signal, continued to travel into the intersection against the red light and was subsequently involved in a crash with other motor vehicles in the intersection”.

The agency said four crashes had resulted in one or more injuries. Tesla did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

«

The self-driving nirvana has been delayed once more.
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Here’s how Apple is locking down iPhones to comply with Texas’s age verification law • The Verge

Jay Peters:

»

Starting next year, Texas will require companies like Apple and Google to verify the ages of people that use their app stores, and Apple shared today how it’s going to comply. Starting January 1st, 2026, anyone trying to make a new Apple Account must confirm if they are over 18, and any users under 18 must join a Family Sharing group. Parents and guardians will also be required to give their consent for users under 18 to download apps or to make in-app purchases.

Developers will also have to make changes to comply with the law. Apple already offers a Declared Age Range API that developers can implement to ask users their general age, and the API “will be updated in the coming months to provide the required age categories for new account users in Texas,” Apple says. Apple is also launching new APIs “later this year” that “will enable developers, when they determine a significant change is made to their app, to invoke a system experience to allow the user to request that parental consent be re-obtained.”

Utah and Louisiana have passed similar laws, and Apple says that “similar requirements will come into effect later next year” in those states. Google has also shared guidance about how it will support Google Play developers ahead of the age verification laws going into effect.

«

This is Apple following the law to the letter. Which is fine: that’s what we expect companies to do. What we don’t expect them to do is bow silently to governmental demands without requiring legal powers first.
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The 25 most interesting ideas I’ve found in 2025 (so far) • Derek Thompson

Derek Thompson:

»

When I’m reading on my phone, I take a screenshot of whatever interests me. After a few months, I’ll have dozens to hundreds of morsels to serve as inspiration for essays and podcasts, including excerpts from books, photographs of magazine text, charts from economic papers, and screen grabs of tweets.

Before I had a newsletter, there was nowhere for me to publish this information inventory. Now that I have this newsletter, and I thought it might be fun and useful to organize the most interesting things I’ve seen this year by subject matter and write something about why they struck me and what story they tell about America or the world.

«

No point even trying to precis these; except to say they’re all interesting (though some, such as housebuilding, are easily answered: too much NIMBYism).
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‘AI is here to stay and change things’: Mad Max director George Miller on why he is taking part in an AI film festival • The Guardian

Kelly Burke:

»

In May, during heated discussions at the Cannes film festival, the industry was warned it was on a slippery slope, with AI threatening jobs, copyright protections and the integrity of the creative process.

But the film industry is far from united against AI; not everyone believes its rapid advance is eroding the very essence of human storytelling. “The wave is coming and it’s impossible to stop it,” one producer told a Cannes roundtable. “Our only option is to surf on it.”

Now, one of Australia’s most decorated film-makers is getting on his board: acclaimed Mad Max director and producer George Miller.

“AI is arguably the most dynamically evolving tool in making moving image,” Miller tells the Guardian. “As a film-maker, I’ve always been driven by the tools. AI is here to stay and change things.”

Miller is about to lead the judging panel at the Omni 1.0 AI film festival, Australia’s first fully fledged award festival for wholly AI-generated films. He joined the jury out of “intense curiosity” about the evolving role of AI in storytelling – and his interest goes beyond the technology. AI, he believes, is part of a deeper philosophical shift in our understanding of creative authorship.

“It’s the balance between human creativity and machine capability, that’s what the debate and the anxiety is about,” he says. “It strikes me how this debate echoes earlier moments in art history.”

He likens our current moment to the Renaissance, when the introduction of oil paint “gave artists the freedom to revise and enhance their work over time”.

“That shift sparked controversy – some argued that true artists should be able to commit to the canvas without corrections, others embraced the new flexibility,” Miller says. “A similar debate unfolded in the mid-19th century with the arrival of photography. Art has to evolve. And while photography became its own form, painting continued. Both changed, but both endured. Art changed.”

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Why are so many pedestrians killed by cars in the US? • Construction Physics

Brian Potter:

»

It’s unfortunately not uncommon for pedestrians to be killed by cars in the US. More than 7,300 pedestrians were killed in motor vehicle accidents in the US in 2023, around 18% of all motor vehicle deaths that year. Until around 2009, pedestrian deaths in the US had been falling, declining from 7,516 deaths in 1975 to just 4,109 in 2009 (in per capita terms, this decline would be even larger.) But since 2009, pedestrian deaths have surged.

Motor vehicle deaths overall are up, but not nearly to the same degree. From 2009 to 2023, non-pedestrian motor vehicle deaths in the US increased by around 13%, compared to a 78% increase in pedestrian deaths. (The low point in non-pedestrian motor vehicle deaths is actually 2014; deaths are up 20% since then.)

Other countries haven’t seen this increase in pedestrian deaths: in every other high-income country, rates are flat or declining. Whatever’s causing the problem seems to be limited to the US.

«

You’re probably thinking “it’s big SUVs which kill people more easily!” But other countries have bought SUVs with even more eagerness than the US without the same rise in pedestrian deaths. The article tortures the data, but the answer.. remains elusive. (I have a suspicion, based on the shape of the deaths graph.)
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JPMorgan reportedly foots $115m of legal bills for Charlie Javice, co-defendant who scammed bank out of $175m • NY Post

Ariel Zilber:

»

JPMorgan Chase is footing a staggering $115m bill for the army of lawyers who defended convicted fraudster Charlie Javice and her former colleague Olivier Amar — a sum nearly two-thirds of what the bank paid for their ill-fated student-finance startup Frank.

At trial, 19 lawyers appeared for Javice and 16 for Amar, an extraordinary show of legal firepower that helped drive the cost of their defense to a nine-figure sum.

By comparison, Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes spent around $30m on attorneys before she was sentenced to years behind bars for orchestrating her scheme.

JPMorgan Chase is paying a staggering $115m to cover the legal bills for Charlie Javice and Olivier Amar, who defrauded the bank out of $175m.

Javice was sentenced to seven years in prison last week.

The payments — mandated under the Frank merger agreement — were confirmed in filings after a Delaware court ruled JPMorgan must advance the pair’s legal costs, even though the bank later fired them for orchestrating the $175m fraud.

Former prosecutor Kevin O’Brien called the bill a “huge, huge number,” noting Javice “had a lot of high-priced legal talent.”

“It helps if someone else is picking up the bill,” O’Brien told Bloomberg.

«

For those who haven’t caught up, Javice got a clause put into the takeover document saying that JP Morgan would cover her legal bills. Which turned out to include being sued for defrauding JP Morgan by falsifying user numbers for the app, claiming 4.25 million when there were fewer than 300,000.
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The Chinese migrant workers powering the deadly EV nickel boom • Rest Of World

Wufei Yu:

»

Driven by economic and social pressures, tens of thousands of workers from China, mostly middle-aged men, are employed in eastern Indonesia’s nickel industry, which has sprung up in the last decade. Just as critical minerals crisscross the globe before they’re incorporated into cutting-edge products, so too do some of the people who make the world’s green dreams a reality.

Over seven months, Grist spoke to more than a dozen of these Chinese workers and their family members, as well as Indonesian labor leaders who have negotiated factory conditions with top Chinese executives. We’ve found that, even following fatal accidents at the smelters, efforts to improve working conditions have been slow, hindered by a lack of oversight from companies, governments, and international labor groups that were dependent on U.S. funding terminated by the Trump administration. We also obtained an internal company review of a nickel smelter expansion that shows facilities are likely spreading pollution and illness well beyond factory walls. Despite the challenges, new nickel processing plants continue to emerge in Indonesia and hire from China.

Before joining Indonesia’s nickel rush, most of these Chinese men had spent almost all their lives in their home country, working in declining steel factories. Like Wong, they had never before owned a passport or boarded a flight. Their leap into the nickel refining industry has helped create entire towns on remote islands in Indonesia, and it’s made them an unlikely backbone of the world’s green energy transition.

The men work alongside hundreds of thousands of Indonesian colleagues. Though Indonesia is the world’s fourth-most populous country, its workforce does not have the industrial experience needed in the new facilities. Companies have turned to China to fill the gap.

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unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A man has been accused of starting California’s Palisades fire, in part because of pictures he generated with ChatGPT. CC-licensed photo by Frank Kovalchek on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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. Unprompted. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Apple banned an app that simply archived videos of ICE abuses • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

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Apple removed an app for preserving TikToks, Instagram reels, news reports, and videos documenting abuses by ICE, 404 Media has learned. The app, called Eyes Up, differs from other banned apps such as ICEBlock which were designed to report sightings of ICE officials in real-time to warn local communities. Eyes Up, meanwhile, was more of an aggregation service pooling together information to preserve evidence in case the material is needed in the future in court.

The news shows that Apple and Google’s crackdown on ICE-spotting apps, which started after pressure from the Department of Justice against Apple, is broader in scope than apps that report sightings of ICE officials. It has also impacted at least one app that was more about creating a historical record of ICE’s activity during its mass deportation effort.

“Our goal is government accountability, we aren’t even doing real-time tracking,” the administrator of Eyes Up, who said their name was Mark, told 404 Media. Mark asked 404 Media to only use his first name to protect him from retaliation. “I think the [Trump] admin is just embarrassed by how many incriminating videos we have.”

…The website for Eyes Up which functions essentially the same way is still available. The site includes a map with dots that visitors can click on, which then plays a video from that location. Users are able to submit their own videos for inclusion. Mark said he manually reviews every video before it is uploaded to the service, to check its content and its location.

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Google said ICE is a “vulnerable group”, which is an odd use of the word. The way these companies are kowtowing to the Trump administration is astonishing: have they lost their trust in the courts so quickly?
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Bank of England warns of growing risk that AI bubble could burst • The Guardian

Kalyeena Makortoff:

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The Bank of England has warned there is a growing risk of a “sudden correction” in global markets as it raised concerns about soaring valuations of leading AI tech companies.

Policymakers said there were also threats of a “sharp repricing of US dollar assets” if the Federal Reserve lost credibility in the eyes of global investors. It comes as Donald Trump’s continues to attack the US central bank and threaten its independence.

Continued hype and optimism about the potential for AI technology has led to a rise in valuations in recent months, with companies such as OpenAI now worth $500bn (£372bn), compared with $157bn last October. Another firm, Anthropic, has almost trebled its valuation, going from $60bn in March to $170bn last month.

However, the Bank of England’s financial policy committee (FPC) warned on Wednesday: “The risk of a sharp market correction has increased.

“On a number of measures, equity market valuations appear stretched, particularly for technology companies focused on artificial intelligence. This … leaves equity markets particularly exposed should expectations around the impact of AI become less optimistic.”

It said investors had not fully accounted for these potential risks, warning that “a sudden correction could occur” should any of them crystallise, resulting in finance drying up for households and businesses. The FPC added: “As an open economy with a global financial centre, the risk of spillovers to the UK financial system from such global shocks is material.”

Faith in the AI boom has recently been rattled by research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which showed that 95% of organisations are getting zero return from their investments in generative AI.

«

AI investment currently accounts for a quarter of US GDP growth (not, please note, GDP). And it’s largely faith-based. It’s not hard to imagine something like the dot-com boom, where valuations collapse and it’s only years later that the investments start to be useful.
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Salesforce says it won’t pay extortion demand in 1 billion records breach • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

The threat group making the demands began their campaign in May, when they made voice calls to organizations storing data on the Salesforce platform, Google-owned Mandiant said in June. The English-speaking callers would provide a pretense that necessitated the target connect an attacker-controlled app to their Salesforce portal. Amazingly—but not surprisingly—many of the people who received the calls complied.

The threat group behind the campaign is calling itself Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters, a mashup of three prolific data-extortion actors: Scattered Spider, LAPSuS$, and ShinyHunters. Mandiant, meanwhile, tracks the group as UNC6040, because the researchers so far have been unable to positively identify the connections.

Earlier this month, the group created a website that named Toyota, FedEx, and 37 other Salesforce customers whose data was stolen in the campaign. In all, the number of records recovered, Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters claimed, was “989.45m/~1B+.” The site called on Salesforce to begin negotiations for a ransom amount “or all your customers [sic] data will be leaked.” The site went on to say: “Nobody else will have to pay us, if you pay, Salesforce, Inc.” The site said the deadline for payment was Friday.

In an email Wednesday, a Salesforce representative said the company is spurning the demand. “I can confirm Salesforce will not engage, negotiate with, or pay any extortion demand,” the representative wrote. The confirmation came a day after Bloomberg reported that Salesforce told customers in an email that it won’t pay the ransom. The email went on to say that Salesforce had received “credible threat intelligence” indicating a group known as ShinyHunters planned to publish data stolen in the series of attacks on customers’ Salesforce portals.

The refusal comes amid a continuing explosion in the number of ransomware attacks on organizations around the world. The reason these breaches keep occurring is the hefty sums the attackers receive in return for decrypting encrypted data and/or promising not to publish stolen data online. Global Ransom Payments totaled $813m, last year, down from $1.1bn in 2023, security firm Deepstrike estimated. The group that breached drug distributor Cencora alone received a whopping $75m in ransomware payments, Bloomberg reported, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter.

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I think that these hackers still haven’t learnt the difference between “vomit up a database” and “find truly valuable files that the company would be severely embarrassed to see made public, such as corporate plans”. Encrypting systems, of course, remains a serious threat.
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Logitech’s POP smart buttons are shutting down • How To Geek

Jorge Aguilar:

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The era of Logitech’s popular smart home control solution, the POP button system, is abruptly coming to an end. Logitech has announced the complete discontinuation of the service, in some emails to customers, stating that it is effective October 15, 2025.

The formal announcement was delivered to users via email, which was revealed on Reddit. It read, “Dear Logitech POP button user, Thank you for being a loyal Logitech customer and for making the POP button a part of your home. We are writing to inform you that we will be discontinuing the service for the Logitech POP button. For close to a decade, we have maintained the POP ecosystem, but as technology evolves, we have made the decision to end support for this device. As of October 15, 2025, your POP button(s) and the connected hub will no longer be supported and will lose all functionality. As a gesture of our appreciation for your loyalty, we would like to offer you a 15% discount on products purchased on http://www.logitech.com.”

While the email attempts to frame the decision as a natural progression, the consequences are anything but smooth for any remaining owners. This is not a partial service reduction, but a total crippling of the product ecosystem.

The POP buttons were designed to be a simple, versatile way to control a wide range of smart home devices and services.They were integrated with major platforms like Apple HomeKit, Sonos, IFTTT, and Philips Hue. The impending shutdown means that all these established, programmed interactions (the very purpose of the product) will instantly cease to exist.

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Ah but! The coupon is only for US-based customers, and doesn’t apply to a wide range of Logitech products. Wonder how many smart home products have gone dead because the companies either give up on them, or introduce subscriptions that people choose not to take up. But as a category, it’s not in great shape.
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iOS 26: keep AirPods connected to your phone when you get in your car • MacRumors

Tim Hardwick:

»

If you wear AirPods during your commute but don’t want your podcast or music suddenly blasting through the car speakers when you start the engine, there’s a new setting in iOS 26 that can ensure it doesn’t happen.

Apple has thoughtfully added a new “Keep Audio with Headphones” setting that prevents your iPhone from automatically switching audio to CarPlay or other Bluetooth speakers when you’re already listening through AirPods. Here’s how to toggle it on.

How to keep Audio in your AirPods:
• Open the Settings app on your iPhone
• Tap General
• Select AirPlay & Continuity
• Toggle on Keep Audio with Headphones.

«

Pretty simple, perhaps useful. Provided as a service to the reader.
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One-man spam campaign ravages EU “chat control” bill • POLITICO

Sam Clark:

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A website set up by an unknown Dane over the course of one weekend in August is giving a massive headache to those trying to pass a European bill aimed at stopping child sexual abuse material from spreading online.

The website, called Fight Chat Control, was set up by Joachim, a 30-year-old software engineer living in Aalborg, Denmark. He made it after learning of a new attempt to approve a European Union proposal to fight child sexual abuse material (CSAM) — a bill seen by privacy activists as breaking encryption and leading to mass surveillance.

The site lets visitors compile a mass email warning about the bill and send it to national government officials, members of the European Parliament and others with ease. Since launching, it has broken the inboxes of MEPs and caused a stir in Brussels’ corridors of power. 

“We are getting hundreds per day about it,” said Evin Incir, a Swedish Socialists and Democrats MEP, of the email deluge.

Three diplomats at national permanent representation offices said they too have received a large number of emails. 

Joachim’s website has stoked up an already red-hot debate around the CSAM proposal, which would give police the power to force companies like WhatsApp and Signal to scan their services for the illegal content. Critics fear the bill would enable online state surveillance.

«

The EU effectively abandoned the measure after the German government said on Wednesday that it won’t support the move. (Thanks Gregory B for the pointer.)
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Pacific Palisades fire suspect snared by ChatGPT image, say investigators • BBC News

Ana Faguy:

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A 29-year-old man has been arrested on suspicion of starting the Pacific Palisades fire in Los Angeles that killed 12 people and destroyed more than 6,000 homes in January.

Evidence collected from Jonathan Rinderknecht’s digital devices included an image he generated on ChatGPT depicting a burning city, justice department officials said.

The most destructive blaze in Los Angeles’ history, it was sparked on 7 January near a hiking trail overlooking the wealthy coastal neighbourhood. The Eaton Fire, ignited the same day in the LA area, killed another 19 people and razed 9,400 structures. The cause of that fire remains unclear. Mr Rinderknecht is due in court in Orlando, Florida, on Wednesday.

The fire scorched more than 23,000 acres (9,308 hectares) and caused about $150bn (£112bn) in damage. Wiping out whole neighbourhoods, the conflagration raged for more than three weeks, also ravaging parts of Topanga and Malibu.

…He lit the fire with an open flame after he completed a ride as an Uber driver on New Year’s Eve, according to the indictment.

…Officials said they had used his phone data to pinpoint his location when the fire initially started on 1 January, but when they pressed him on details he allegedly lied to investigators, claiming he was near the bottom of the trail. On his phone they found videos that Mr Rinderknecht had taken of firefighters trying to put out the flames.

They also found just after midnight on New Year’s Day that he repeatedly called 911, but could not get through because of patchy mobile reception on the trailhead. On his phone was a screen recording of him trying to call emergency services and at one point being connected with a dispatcher.

Mr Rinderknecht also asked ChatGPT: “Are you at fault if a fire is lift [sic] because of your cigarettes?” Investigators said the suspect wanted to “preserve evidence of himself trying to assist in the suppression of the fire”.

“He wanted to create evidence regarding a more innocent explanation for the cause of the fire,” the indictment said.

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This is surely the first time that someone’s ChatGPT history has been used to indict them. I think we’ve already had at least one divorce and a few suicides. What’s next on the bingo card – poisonings from recipes involving bleach?
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Brussels moves to tackle satellite junk in space • POLITICO

Mathieu Pollet:

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The European Commission on Wednesday proposed a new Space Act that seeks to dial up regulatory oversight of satellite operators — including requiring them to tackle their impact on space debris and pollution, or face significant fines.

There are more than 10,000 satellites now in orbit and growing space junk to match. In recent years, more companies — most notably Elon Musk’s Starlink — have ventured into low-Earth orbit, from where stronger telecommunication connections can be established but which requires more satellites to ensure full coverage.
“Space is congested and contested,” a Commission official said ahead of Wednesday’s proposal in a briefing with reporters. The official was granted anonymity to disclose details ahead of the formal presentation.

The EU executive wants to set up a database to track objects circulating in space; make authorization processes clearer to help companies launch satellites and provide services in Europe; and force national governments to give regulators oversight powers.

The Space Act proposal would also require space companies to have launch safety and end-of-life disposal plans, take extra steps to limit space debris, light and radio pollution, and calculate the environmental footprint of their operations.

Mega and giga constellations, which are networks of at least 100 and 1,000 spacecraft, respectively, face extra rules to coordinate orbit traffic and avoid collisions.

“It’s starting to look like a jungle up there. We need to intervene,” said French liberal lawmaker Christophe Grudler. “Setting traffic rules for satellites might not sound as sexy as sending people to Mars. But that’s real, that’s now and that has an impact on our daily lives.”

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Isn’t going to do anything about the 50-odd satellites posing the biggest space junk threat, though there is an EU project called REMOVEDEBRIS (smart name!) set up in 2018 which did a couple of successful test flights in 2020.
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China confirms solar panel projects are irreversibly changing desert ecosystems • Glass Almanac

Brian Foster:

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A team studying one of the largest photovoltaic parks in China, the Gonghe project in the Talatan Desert, found a striking difference between what was happening under the panels and what lay just beyond. They used a detailed framework measuring dozens of indicators—everything from soil chemistry to microbial life—and discovered that the micro-environment beneath the panels was noticeably healthier. The reasons track with physics: shade cools the surface and slows evaporation, letting scarce soil moisture linger longer; field experiments in western China report measurable soil-moisture gains beneath shaded arrays.²

Simple shade from panel rows can create a gentler microclimate at ground level, cutting wind stress and helping fragile seedlings establish.

In other desert locations like Gansu and the Gobi, year-round field data tell a similar story. Soil temperatures beneath arrays tend to be cooler during the day and a bit warmer at night than surrounding ground, with humidity patterns shifting in tandem—conditions that can make harsh surfaces more habitable when paired with basic land care.³

Even small shifts like these can help re-establish vegetation—if combined with erosion control and water management. These aren’t wildflowers blooming overnight, but they are signs that utility-scale solar can double as a modest micro-restorer.

It’s a tempting idea—energy infrastructure moonlighting as land-restoration tools. But not every desert is the same, and not every solar farm will have the same impact. Site layout, panel spacing, grazing pressure, and dust management all shape whether these micro-benefits take root or fade.

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In the UK, there’s opposition because solar panels “take away valuable farmland”. (Except nobody wants to grow crops on them.) In China, they might be greening the desert.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The first rule of Qantas hacking is, Australia’s courts say hackers can’t release the data. Seriously. CC-licensed photo by Steven Coochin on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 10 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Denmark plans social media ban for under-15s as PM warns phones “stealing childhood” • The Guardian

Miranda Bryant:

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The Danish prime minister says the country will ban social media for under-15s, as she accused mobile phones and social networks of “stealing our children’s childhood”.

Mette Frederiksen used her speech on Tuesday at the opening of Folketing, the Danish parliament, to announce the proposal, in which she said: “We have unleashed a monster.” She added: “Never before have so many children and young people suffered from anxiety and depression.”

Many children also have difficulty reading and concentrating, said Frederiksen, adding that “on screens they see things no child or young person should see”.

She did not specify which social networks the new measures would affect, but said it would cover “several” social media platforms. She said there would be an option for parents to give permission to their children to use social media from the age of 13.

It is hoped the ban could come into effect as early as next year.

It follows the lead of Australia, which is introducing a ban on social media platforms including Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube for under-16s, and Norway where the prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, has also said he would enforce a strict minimum age limit of 15 on social media, raising it from 13.

Støre said last year that it would be “an uphill battle” but that politicians must intervene to protect children from the “power of the algorithms”.

Denmark’s minister of digitalisation, Caroline Stage, said her government’s announcement was a “breakthrough”. She said: “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: we’ve been too naive. We’ve left children’s digital lives to platforms that never had their wellbeing in mind. We must move from digital captivity to community.”

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Interesting move, and will probably be taken up in other countries. If, that is, parents can resist letting their children have access as soon as they demand it.
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Ted Cruz doesn’t seem to understand Wikipedia, lawyer for Wikimedia says • Ars Technica

Jon Brodkin:

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The letter from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) accusing Wikipedia of left-wing bias seems to be based on fundamental misunderstandings of how the platform works, according to a lawyer for the nonprofit foundation that operates the online encyclopedia.

“The foundation is very much taking the approach that Wikipedia is actually pretty great and a lot of what’s in this letter is actually misunderstandings,” Jacob Rogers, associate general counsel at the Wikimedia Foundation, told Ars in an interview. “And so we are more than happy, despite the pressure that comes from these things, to help people better understand how Wikipedia works.”

Cruz’s letter to Wikimedia Foundation CEO Maryana Iskander expressed concern “about ideological bias on the Wikipedia platform and at the Wikimedia Foundation.” Cruz alleged that Wikipedia articles “often reflect a left-wing bias.” He asked the foundation for “documents sufficient to show what supervision, oversight, or influence, if any, the Wikimedia Foundation has over the editing community,” and “documents sufficient to show how the Wikimedia Foundation addresses political or ideological bias.”

As many people know, Wikipedia is edited by volunteers through a collaborative process.

“We’re not deciding what the editorial policies are for what is on Wikipedia,” Rogers said, describing the Wikimedia Foundation’s hands-off approach. “All of that, both the writing of the content and the determining of the editorial policies, is done through the volunteer editors” through “public conversation and discussion and trying to come to a consensus. They make all of that visible in various ways to the reader. So you go and you read a Wikipedia article, you can see what the sources are, what someone has written, you can follow the links yourselves.”

Cruz’s letter raised concerns about “the influence of large donors on Wikipedia’s content creation or editing practices.” But Rogers said that “people who donate to Wikipedia don’t have any influence over content and we don’t even have that many large donors to begin with. It is primarily funded by people donating through the website fundraisers, so I think they’re worried about something that is just not present at all.”

Anyone unhappy with Wikipedia content can participate in the writing and editing, he said. “It’s still open for everybody to participate. If someone doesn’t like what it says, they can go on and say, ‘Hey, I don’t like the sources that are being used, or I think a different source should be used that isn’t there,'” Rogers said. “Other people might disagree with them, but they can have that conversation and try to figure it out and make it better.”

«

The Cruz letter does come across a bit clueless, though Rogers exaggerates the ease of pushing against the enormous inertia of Wikipedia’s immanent editors, who flick off unwanted but merited changes like flicking bugs. The bias is definitely there, but Cruz’s complaints aren’t the way it will be fixed.
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Sora 2 watermark removers flood the web • 404 Media

Matthew Gault:

»

Sora 2, Open AI’s new AI video generator, puts a visual watermark on every video it generates. But the little cartoon-eyed cloud logo meant to help people distinguish between reality and AI-generated bullshit is easy to remove and there are half a dozen websites that will help anyone do it in a few minutes.

A simple search for “sora watermark” on any social media site will return links to places where a user can upload a Sora 2 video and remove the watermark. 404 Media tested three of these websites, and they all seamlessly removed the watermark from the video in a matter of seconds.

Hany Farid, a UC Berkeley professor and an expert on digitally manipulated images, said he’s not shocked at how fast people were able to remove watermarks from Sora 2 videos. “It was predictable,” he said. “Sora isn’t the first AI model to add visible watermarks and this isn’t the first time that within hours of these models being released, someone released code or a service to remove these watermarks.”

Hours after its release on September 30, Sora 2 emerged as a copyright violation machine full of Nazi SpongeBobs and criminal Pickachus. Open AI has tamped down on that kind of content after the initial thrill of seeing Rick and Morty shill for crypto sent people scrambling to download the app. Now that the novelty is wearing off we’re grappling with the unpleasant fact that Open AI’s new tool is very good at making realistic videos that are hard to distinguish from reality.

«

Yup, the deluge starts here.
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Global electricity mid-year insights 2025 • Ember

»

The increase in solar and wind power outpaced global electricity demand growth in the first half of 2025. Solar alone met 83% of the rise, with many countries setting new records. Fossil fuels remained mostly flat, with a slight decline. Fossil generation fell in China and India, but grew in the EU and the US.

As the world’s energy needs increase and electricity makes up a growing share of final energy consumption, spectacular solar growth, alongside increased wind generation, met and exceeded all new demand. This led to renewables overtaking coal’s share in the global mix and prevented further increases in CO2 emissions from the power sector.

Solar grew by a record 306 TWh (31%) in the first half of 2025. This increased solar’s share in the global electricity mix from 6.9% to 8.8%. China accounted for 55% of global solar generation growth, followed by the US (14%), the EU (12%), India (5.6%) and Brazil (3.2%), while the rest of the world contributed just 9%. Four countries generated over 25% of their electricity from solar, and at least 29 countries surpassed 10%, up from 22 countries in the same period last year and only 11 countries in H1-2021.

A strong rise in solar, and to a lesser extent wind, led to renewables overtaking coal generation for the first time on record in the first half of 2025.

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Though of course solar growth is going backwards in the US. What a world where China is the one we look to for technological progress and good sense.
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Spotify strengthens AI protections for artists, songwriters, and producers • Spotify

»

We’ve always had a policy against deceptive content. But AI tools have made generating vocal deepfakes of your favorite artists easier than ever before.

We’ve introduced a new impersonation policy that clarifies how we handle claims about AI voice clones (and other forms of unauthorized vocal impersonation), giving artists stronger protections and clearer recourse. Vocal impersonation is only allowed in music on Spotify when the impersonated artist has authorized the usage. 

We’re also ramping up our investments to protect against another impersonation tactic—where uploaders fraudulently deliver music (AI-generated or otherwise) to another artist’s profile across streaming services. We’re testing new prevention tactics with leading artist distributors to equip them to better stop these attacks at the source. On our end, we’ll also be investing more resources into our content mismatch process, reducing the wait time for review, and enabling artists to report “mismatch” even in the pre-release state.

Unauthorized use of AI to clone an artist’s voice exploits their identity, undermines their artistry, and threatens the fundamental integrity of their work. Some artists may choose to license their voices to AI projects—and that’s their choice to make. Our job is to do what we can to ensure that the choice stays in their hands.

Total music payouts on Spotify have grown from $1bn in 2014 to $10bn in 2024. But big payouts entice bad actors. Spam tactics such as mass uploads, duplicates, SEO hacks, artificially short track abuse, and other forms of slop have become easier to exploit as AI tools make it simpler for anyone to generate large volumes of music.

This fall [autumn], we’ll roll out a new music spam filter—a system that will identify uploaders and tracks engaging in these tactics, tag them, and stop recommending them.

«

The arms race intensifies. And some people probably like AI-generated music.
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My email to Tim Cook • Wiley Hodges

Hodges worked for Apple for 22 years, leaving in 2022:

»

The removal of ICEBlock without evidence of the government either providing a lawful basis for such a demand or following a legal process to effect its removal represents an erosion of this principled stance. Acceding to a government ‘demand’ without demanding that the government follow legal process in order to back up its request (or at least shedding light on how the government did follow such process) raises the question of how easily Apple will accede to other requests. Will Apple lower its general standards for law enforcement requests from those outlined at https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/law-enforcement-guidelines-us.pdf? Will Apple give data on the identities of users who downloaded the ICEBlock app to the government? Will Apple block podcasts that advocate points of view opposed to the current US administration? I imagine and hope that these are ridiculous questions, but without a clearer demonstration of Apple’s principled commitment to lawful action and due process, I feel uncertain.

I don’t know where this leaves me as an Apple customer, but I do know that it upsets me as an Apple shareholder. I am asking you and your team to more clearly explain the basis on which you made the decision to remove ICEBlock—and how the government showed good faith and strong evidence in making its demand of Apple, or that you reinstate the app in the App Store.

«

John Gruber links to this and is excoriating about Apple once again. (Are they having discussions in the Apple PR offices, since he used to just be the “hardware review and links” guy?) ICEBlock, as Gruber points out, contains no harmful content; it just tells you where law enforcement are, which both Maps and Waze, still available, also do.

When the FBI demanded a backdoor to crack the San Bernadino shooter’s phone in 2016, Apple refused. When the UK government demanded a backdoor into encrypted iCloud backups in 2025, Apple refused (though it did turn off encrypted backups in the UK). When the Trump administration demanded – without any legal authority – that ICEBlock be removed, it was.

What’s the difference? Tim Cook may be thinking that retirement looks welcoming rather than fighting these contradictions.
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OpenAI and Jony Ive grapple with technical issues on secretive AI device

Tim Bradshaw, Cristina Criddle, Michael Acton and Ryan McMorrow:

»

OpenAI and star designer Jony Ive are grappling with a series of technical issues with their secretive new artificial intelligence device, as they push to launch a blockbuster tech product next year.

The San Francisco-based startup run by Sam Altman acquired the former Apple design chief’s company io for $6.5bn in May, but the pair have shared few details on the projects they are building.

Their aim is to create a palm-sized device without a screen that can take audio and visual cues from the physical environment and respond to users’ requests.

People familiar with their plans said OpenAI and Ive had yet to solve critical problems that could delay the device’s release. Despite having hardware developed by Ive and his team — whose alluring designs of the iMac, iPod and iPhone helped turn Apple into one of the most valuable companies in the world — obstacles remain in the device’s software and the infrastructure needed to power it.

These include deciding on the assistant’s “personality”, privacy issues and budgeting for the computing power needed to run OpenAI’s models on a mass consumer device.

“Compute is another huge factor for the delay,” said one person close to Ive. “Amazon has the compute for an Alexa, so does Google [for its Home device], but OpenAI is struggling to get enough compute for ChatGPT, let alone an AI device — they need to fix that first.”

A person close to OpenAI said the teething troubles were simply normal parts of the product development process.

«

Of course, the device is being built in China (so there’s a byline from China in there). It’s not surprising if they’re having challenges, but that doesn’t mean they won’t hit their deadline.
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Removing these 50 objects from orbit would cut danger from space junk in half • Ars Technica

Stephen Clark:

»

A new listing of the 50 most concerning pieces of space debris in low-Earth orbit is dominated by relics more than a quarter-century old, primarily dead rockets left to hurtle through space at the end of their missions.

“The things left before 2000 are still the majority of the problem,” said Darren McKnight, lead author of a paper presented Friday at the International Astronautical Congress in Sydney. “Seventy-six% of the objects in the top 50 were deposited last century, and 88% of the objects are rocket bodies. That’s important to note, especially with some disturbing trends right now.”

The 50 objects identified by McKnight and his coauthors are the ones most likely to drive the creation of more space junk in low-Earth orbit (LEO) through collisions with other debris fragments. The objects are whizzing around the Earth at nearly five miles per second, flying in a heavily trafficked part of LEO between 700 and 1,000 kilometers (435 to 621 miles) above the Earth.

An impact with even a modestly sized object at orbital velocity would create countless pieces of debris, potentially triggering a cascading series of additional collisions clogging LEO with more and more space junk, a scenario called the Kessler Syndrome.

McKnight, a senior technical fellow at the orbital intelligence company LeoLabs, spoke with Ars before the paper’s release. In the paper, analysts considered how close objects are to other space traffic, their altitude, and their mass. Larger debris at higher altitudes pose a higher long-term risk because they could create more debris that would remain in orbit for centuries or longer.

Russia and the Soviet Union lead the pack with 34 objects listed in McKnight’s Top 50, followed by China with 10, the United States with three, Europe with two, and Japan with one. Russia’s SL-16 and SL-8 rockets are the worst offenders, combining to take 30 of the Top 50 slots.

«

What isn’t stated is how you’d do this. Heading up there and nudging them down seems like a proposition, but nobody seems to be suggesting it.
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UAE’s AI university lures global talent to fuel tech ambitions • Rest of World

Amar Diwakar:

»

In the six years since its founding, Abu Dhabi’s Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence has hired more than 100 faculty from China, the US, Germany, and other countries. MBZUAI currently has over 700 students and alumni from 49 nations. The government-funded institute promises students full scholarships, and professors freedom from having to secure academic grants. It works closely with the UAE’s multibillion-dollar AI firm G42, and in May, it opened a satellite research facility in Silicon Valley dedicated to developing AI models. 

There is a lot riding on the institute, which is central to the nation’s vision of becoming a global AI powerhouse. The government has bet billions on the tech, and hopes a steady talent pipeline will help diversify its oil-based economy. AI is expected to contribute 20% of the UAE’s non-oil GDP by 2031, according to a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank based in Washington, D.C.

MBZUAI should “create an AI district that would become the bedrock of the next level of advancement of the UAE’s and MENA’s [Middle East and North Africa] economy and global impact,” Eric Xing, the university’s president, said at an event in January.

The university says its ambition to be the “Stanford of the Middle East” is already beginning to pay off. It is currently among the top 20 universities publishing on AI topics, according to CSRanking, a global computer-science ranking initiative.

«

In case you thought that AI study was the sole preserve of the US and China. (And maybe a bit the UK.)
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Qantas shrouds stolen data in secrecy: will it help?​ • Cybernews

Gintaras Radauskas:

»

When it emerged in early July that almost six million customer details were stolen from Qantas in a security breach, it seemed a bit bizarre that the airline kept saying that its operations weren’t actually impacted.

At the time, the company explained that its system doesn’t store credit card details, personal financial information, or passport details. Customer names, email addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, and frequent flyer numbers were nabbed.

While this might not seem like the most sensitive data, threat actors could still use the information to craft sophisticated phishing scams that urge flyers to hand over their credentials.

However, there’s another reason why Qantas remained remarkably calm over the seemingly major cyber incident. Soon after the attack, the company was granted an interim injunction in the NSW Supreme Court, aimed at stopping the data from being accessed or released.

The court has now made the injunction permanent. Essentially, the order prevents third parties from publishing, viewing, or accessing the data if it is released by the attackers. Qantas has also successfully obtained permission not to publicly disclose the identities of lawyers acting for the company, saying that the hackers could target them.

Justice Francois Kunc said that “the perpetrators have some temporary ire against the legal advisors,” and that “it is depressing as it is obvious to observe that their attention will move on.”

Qantas claims there’s no evidence that the stolen data has been released, but the hackers allegedly contacted the airline via a series of emails. Rather than giving in to a ransom demand, the company responded by filing a lawsuit against “persons unknown.”

«

Definitely going to work, uh-huh.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Thousands of Starlink satellites are aloft.. and a couple are coming down every day. CC-licensed photo by Glenn Beltz on Flickr.

A selection of 10 links for you. What goes up.. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

“The AI-ification of email” keeps 404 Media’s Jason Koebler up at night • Nieman Journalism Lab

Laura Hazard Owen:

»

“Our work was going in the trash.”

That’s how Jason Koebler, cofounder of independent technology news site 404 Media, describes the situation that drove 404 to require readers to give their email addresses before reading articles.

It was January 2024, “I was walking my dog and I basically had a panic attack,” Koebler told Nieman Lab’s Hanaa’ Tameez last week in a panel at the IMEDD International Journalism Forum in Athens, Greece. (You can watch the full panel.)

404 had just published cofounder Sam Cole’s major investigation into how large language models were sucking up child sexual abuse material. That story took eight months to report. Soon after it came out, a site called Nation World News ran it through an AI content spinner, changing quotes and facts while retaining Cole’s byline. The AI version of the story showed up on Google News. 404’s original story did not.

It kept happening with 404’s stories. “I started thinking ‘this is a major problem’,” Koebler recalled. “The days of us being able to walk on [to social media], tweet something, walk away, and get people to come to our website are over…We said, if we don’t aggressively move people from social media platforms that we don’t control to platforms that we do control, this business isn’t going to work and we aren’t going to have jobs anymore.”

On January 26, 2024, 404 published a 2,800-word reported piece, “We need your email address,” about what was happening to its stories. From then on, the founders explained, readers would need to enter their email addresses before reading stories. They also started putting older stories behind paywalls.

“It completely changed our business almost literally overnight,” Koebler said.

«

The rise of systems which will just repurpose content like that is a serious problem. It’s good that 404 Media has got on top of it. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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Is the UK digitally efficient enough? I wouldn’t bank on it • The Times

Harry Wallop:

»

When we bought our daughter a second-hand car to help her to learn to drive, I foolishly failed to get myself properly registered at the DVLA as the new owner. Now that she has passed her test (first time!) and I was sorting out insurance, I realised this error and sought to rectify it. The DVLA, perfectly reasonably, charges £25 for the service. But in order to pay you have to download a form, print it out, fill it in and send it along with “a cheque or postal order” to Swansea. I have not owned a cheque book since before Covid, so I had to take a trip to the Post Office.

This is where I discovered a £25 postal order incurs a 12.5% charge; add in the outrageous cost of a first-class stamp and the £25 fee morphed into a £29.83 bill.

The experience was enraging. Not because of the 19% surcharge but the gross inefficiency, the fiddly bits of paper, and the expectation that though you may not have a bank account, you certainly have a printer at home.

Above all, it represented the mindset of bureaucratic organisations since the dawn of time: we do it this way because we have always done it this way.

The DVLA is not alone in clinging to antiquated processes. A few months ago, I remembered that I had £100 of premium bonds, which I had not checked for a decade. I had an NS&I account and they had my correct details but I didn’t have an online account. In order to discover if I had an unclaimed prize, they had to send me a form through the post, which I then had to return. Only then would they send me — through the post again — a temporary password for my online account, which would entitle me to change it, log in and discover my vast windfall. The process took three weeks from start to finish. You will be unsurprised to hear I had not won a penny.

It’s not paper systems themselves that are the problem, it’s the time they take. Last year, my wife sold her late mother’s flat. The solicitor who held the deeds insisted both executors travel in person and sign for the paperwork at its office in Cumbria — concurrently. My wife and her sister, the executors, pointed out they both had jobs and lived at opposite ends of the country, so this was rather inconvenient. As a concession, the solicitor agreed that they could arrive at the office at different times, but it had to be on the same day.

«

As Wallop points out, not really the way to go for a country whose government hopes to do hospital appointments online with digital ID to (somehow) secure borders.
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Apple removes ICEBlock, won’t allow apps that report locations of ICE agents • Ars Technica

Jon Brodkin:

»

Acting on a demand from the Trump administration, Apple has removed apps that let iPhone users report the locations of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers.

“We reached out to Apple today demanding they remove the ICEBlock app from their App Store—and Apple did so,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement to Fox News yesterday. “ICEBlock is designed to put ICE agents at risk just for doing their jobs, and violence against law enforcement is an intolerable red line that cannot be crossed.”

Apple confirmed it removed multiple apps after hearing from law enforcement. “We created the App Store to be a safe and trusted place to discover apps,” an Apple statement to news organizations said. “Based on information we’ve received from law enforcement about the safety risks associated with ICEBlock, we have removed it and similar apps from the App Store.”

The app removals follow a September 24 shooting at a Dallas ICE facility that resulted in the deaths of two immigrants in federal custody and the shooter. The shooter, identified as Joshua Jahn, “searched apps that tracked the presence of ICE agents,” according to FBI Director Kash Patel.

ICEBlock creator Joshua Aaron disputed claims that his app could have contributed to the shooting. He pointed out that an app isn’t needed to find the locations of ICE facilities.

“You don’t need to use an app to tell you where an ICE agent is when you’re aiming at an ICE detention facility,” Aaron told the BBC. “Everybody knows that’s where ICE agents are.”

«

This happened at the end of last week, but that doesn’t make it any less bad. The safety risks associated with ICEBlock all accrue to ICE, which is basically an organisation that offers carte blanche for thugs. This is Apple bending to Trump – and it says nothing good that the biggest company in the world bends before an unsubstantiated claim made by a group of authoritarians.
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The periodic table of cognition • The Technium

Kevin Kelly:

»

It is very probable we will discover that intelligence is likewise not a foundational singular element, but a derivative compound composed of multiple cognitive elements, combined in a complex system unique to each species of mind. The result that we call intelligence emerges from many different cognitive primitives such as long-term memory, spatial awareness, logical deduction, advance planning, pattern perception, and so on. There may be dozens of them, or hundreds. We currently don’t have any idea of what these elements are. We lack a periodic table of cognition.

The cognitive elements will more resemble the heavier elements in being unstable and dynamic. Or a better analogy would be to the elements in a biological cell. The primitives of cognition are flow states that appear in a thought cycle. They are like molecules in a cell which are in constant flux, shifting from one shape to another. Their molecular identity is related to their actions and interactions with other molecules. Thinking is a collective action that happens in time (like temperature in matter) and every mode can only be seen in relation to the other modes before and after it. It is a network phenomenon that makes it difficult to identify its borders. So each element of intelligence is embedded in a thought cycle, and requires the other elements as part of its identity. So each cognitive element is described in context of the other cognitive modes adjacent to it.

I asked ChatGPT5Pro to help me generate a periodic table of cognition given what we collectively know so far. It suggests 49 elements, arranged in a table so that related concepts are adjacent. The columns are families, or general categories of cognition such as “Perception”, “Reasoning”, “Learning”, so all the types of perception or reasoning are stacked in one column. The rows are sorted by stages in a cycle of thought. The earlier stages (such as “sensing”) are at the top, while later stages in the cycle (such as “reflect & align”) are at the bottom. So for example, in the family or category of “Safety” the AIs will tend to do the estimation of uncertainty first, later do verification, and only get to a theory of mind at the end.

The chart is colored according to how much progress we’ve made on each element. Red indicates we can synthesize that element in a robust way. Orange means we can kind of make it work with the right scaffolding. Yellow reflects promising research without operational generality yet.

«

Neat approach; at least it’s a different way to approach this question.
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Clean trucking takes off • Bloomberg New Energy Finance

Colin McKerracher:

»

Over 89,000 electric trucks were sold in the first half of 2025, up 140% from the same period last year. China accounted for almost 80,000 of those, with sales in Europe making up most of the balance. US sales shrunk to just 200 units.

The global heavy truck market is about five years behind passenger cars in terms of EV adoption. It’s a harder market to crack for many reasons, including demanding duty cycles, thin margins and uncertainty with regard to residual values. Many of those concerns are steadily being addressed by better and cheaper batteries, more dedicated charging infrastructure and more operating experience from fleets.

About 4% of global heavy and medium segment truck sales will be electric this year, but in China that figure will be around 14%. Some European markets are heading even higher. Gasoline demand has already peaked in quite a few countries, but many considered diesel to be a safe growth area for years to come. If electric truck sales stay on their steady upward trajectory, that assumption won’t hold for long.

Policy support for electric trucking is strengthening in some markets and faltering in others. China has increasingly stringent truck-efficiency standards in place, along with a host of incentives for purchases and charging infrastructure, plus scrappage schemes for older trucks.

In Europe, truck CO2 emissions targets came into effect in 2025 and are set to drive much higher levels of EV adoption. While these standards remain in place, the European Commission has relaxed compliance requirements of similar targets for cars and vans, so something similar could happen in the trucking market. In the US, regulatory changes are already slowing down the market.

«

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One or two Starlink satellites are falling back to Earth each day • EarthSky

Kelly Kizer Whitt:

»

There are currently one to two Starlink satellites falling back to Earth every day, according to retired Harvard astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell. His acclaimed website Jonathan’s Space Report is widely regarded as the definitive source on spacecraft that go up … and come down. When we asked him about the deluge of Starlink satellite breakups that have recently been flooding social media, he pointed us to his graph showing Starlink reentries over time.

There are more than 8,000 Starlink satellites overhead at this moment. They’re a product of the space transportation company SpaceX. And that number is growing. Plus there are other companies and countries also deploying more and more satellites, adding to the number of satellites in Earth orbit. Many of these are in low-Earth orbits, which extend up to an altitude of 1,200 miles (2,000 km) above our planet. And the lifespan of low-Earth orbit satellites, such as Starlink, is only about five to seven years. Soon, McDowell told us, there will be up to five satellite reentries per day. He said:

With all constellations deployed, we expect about 30,000 low-Earth orbit satellites (Starlink, Amazon Kuiper, others) and perhaps another 20,000 satellites at 1,000 km [620 miles] from the Chinese systems. For the low-orbit satellites we expect a 5-year replacement cycle, and that translates to 5 reentries a day. It’s not clear if the Chinese will orbit-lower theirs or just accelerate us to chain-reaction Kessler syndrome.

The Kessler syndrome is a scenario in which the density of objects in low-Earth orbit is high enough that collisions between objects cause a cascade, with each collision generating space debris that increases the likelihood of further collisions.

«

The thing about Kessler syndrome is that people will keep putting satellites up there, as long as it doesn’t happen, until it does happen. This is pretty much guaranteed by the overconfidence of humans when they have a financial interest in ignoring downsides.
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Discord customer service data breach leaks user info and scanned photo IDs • The Verge

Jay Peters:

»

One of Discord’s third-party customer service providers was compromised by an “unauthorized party,” the company says. The unauthorized party gained access to “information from a limited number of users who had contacted Discord through our Customer Support and/or Trust & Safety teams” and aimed to “extort a financial ransom from Discord.” The unauthorized party “did not gain access to Discord directly.”

Data potentially accessed by the hack includes things like names, usernames, emails, and the last four digits of credit card numbers. The unauthorized party also accessed a “small number” of images of government IDs from “users who had appealed an age determination.” Full credit card numbers and passwords were not impacted by the breach, Discord says.

«

So it grabbed images used for age verification? Which is a really great thumbs-up for having age verification. Truly, there’s no satisfactory way to prove who you are online that doesn’t have serious collateral potential.
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Costco will sell Ozempic and Wegovy at half price • People

Cara Lynn Shultz:

»

Costco members will be able to get GLP-1 medications like Ozempic and Wegovy at half price as part of the retailer’s new partnership with manufacturer Novo Nordisk.

The medication will be available through the Costco Member Prescription Program. It will cost $499 for a four-week supply of injectable pens — but members must have a prescription and pay out of pocket. (Many insurance companies do not cover the medications.)

A Novo Nordisk spokesperson tells PEOPLE that Costco Executive Members and Costco Citibank Visa cardholders will receive an additional 2% discount on their Wegovy or Ozempic, subject to applicable terms.

“Our collaboration with Costco is another step forward by Novo Nordisk in making real Wegovy and Ozempic easier to access and afford — right where people already shop,” Dave Moore, Executive Vice President, U.S. Operations of Novo Nordisk Inc., told PEOPLE in a statement.

«

You either get them by selling them food, or stuff to make them uninterested in food. Win-win! But does this make Costco a fast no-food outlet?
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G-Drive fire destroys 125,000 officials’ data • Chosun

Choi Yeon-jin and Kim Young-woo:

»

the ‘G-Drive,’ a work cloud, an online storage device, used by central government officials, was completely destroyed in a fire at the National Information Resources Service in Daejeon on the 26th of last month. Unlike other online administrative systems, the G-Drive is expected to cause significant damage as it has no backup copies. The Ministry of Personnel Management, where all affiliated officials use the G-Drive, is particularly affected. A source from the Ministry of Personnel Management said, “It’s daunting as eight years’ worth of work materials have completely disappeared.”

The G-Drive is a type of online hard disk where documents, photos, and other materials can be stored, similar to Google’s Google Drive. It was created in 2017 with the aim of making it easier for public officials to share documents and enhancing security. The name G-Drive is said to be derived from the word “government”. It provided 30GB per public official. At the time, the Ministry of the Interior and Safety also issued guidelines to each ministry stating, “All work materials should not be stored on office PCs but should be stored on the G-Drive.”

The actual number of users is about 17% of all central government officials. According to the Ministry of the Interior and Safety, as of last August, 125,000 public officials from 74 ministries are using it. The stored data amounts to 858TB (terabytes), equivalent to 449.5 billion A4 sheets. The G-Drive system was installed in the fifth-floor computer room of the National Information Resources Service, where the fire occurred. It is one of the 96 systems completely destroyed by the fire.

The problem is that, unlike other systems, the G-Drive cannot be restored. A source from the Ministry of the Interior and Safety said, “The G-Drive couldn’t have a backup system due to its large capacity,” and added, “The remaining 95 systems have backup data in online or offline forms.”

The Ministry of Personnel Management, which uses the G-Drive extensively, is in a state of emergency. A source from the Ministry of Personnel Management said, “Employees stored all work materials on the G-Drive and used them as needed, but operations are now practically at a standstill.”

«

Utterly calamitous. The idea that you couldn’t or wouldn’t back up 858TB in a different location is bad in so, so many ways.
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OpenAI looks to take 10% stake in AMD through AI chip deal • CNBC

MacKenzie Sigalos:

»

OpenAI and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) have reached a deal that could see Sam Altman’s company take a 10% stake in the chipmaker.

AMD stock skyrocketed more than 30% on Monday following the news.

OpenAI will deploy six gigawatts of AMD’s Instinct graphics processing units over multiple years and across multiple generations of hardware, the companies said Monday. It will kick off with an initial 1-gigawatt rollout of chips in the second half of 2026.

“We have to do this,” OpenAI President Greg Brockman told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.” “This is so core to our mission if we really want to be able to scale to reach all of humanity, this is what we have to do.”

Brockman added that the company is already unable to launch many features in ChatGPT and other products that could generate revenue because of the lack of compute power.

As part of the tie-up, AMD has issued OpenAI a warrant for up to 160 million shares of AMD common stock, with vesting milestones tied to both deployment volume and AMD’s share price.

The first tranche vests with the first full gigawatt deployment, with additional tranches unlocking as OpenAI scales to 6 gigawatts and meets key technical and commercial milestones required for large-scale rollout.

If OpenAI exercises the full warrant, it could acquire approximately 10% ownership in AMD, based on the current number of shares outstanding.

«

This is a bit like Microsoft buying a chunk of Intel back in the days when Windows was on the rise against all the competing PR operating systems. OpenAI is very, very serious about getting to the top of the heap in the chatbot wars, as I guess we’re going to call this.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

What is it that railways really produce? It’s not what you might expect, even though you’ve used it. CC-licensed photo by Hugh Llewelyn on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. Ride on time. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

The perils of letting AI plan your next trip • BBC Travel

Lynn Brown:

»

Miguel Angel Gongora Meza, founder and director of Evolution Treks Peru, was in a rural Peruvian town preparing for a trek through the Andes when he overheard a curious conversation. Two unaccompanied tourists were chatting amicably about their plans to hike alone in the mountains to the “Sacred Canyon of Humantay”.  

“They [showed] me the screenshot, confidently written and full of vivid adjectives, [but] it was not true. There is no Sacred Canyon of Humantay!” said Gongora Meza. “The name is a combination of two places that have no relation to the description. The tourist paid nearly $160 (£118) in order to get to a rural road in the environs of Mollepata without a guide or [a destination].”

What’s more, Gongora Meza insisted that this seemingly innocent mistake could have cost these travellers their lives. “This sort of misinformation is perilous in Peru,” he explained. “The elevation, the climatic changes and accessibility [of the] paths have to be planned. When you [use] a program [like ChatGPT], which combines pictures and names to create a fantasy, then you can find yourself at an altitude of 4,000m without oxygen and [phone] signal.”

In just a few years, artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini have gone from a mere novelty to an integral part of trip planning for millions of people. According to one survey, 30% of international travellers are now using generative AI tools and dedicated travel AI sites such as Wonderplan and Layla to help organise their trips.

While these programs can offer valuable travel tips when they’re working properly, they can also lead people into some frustrating or even dangerous situations when they’re not. This is a lesson some travellers are learning when they arrive at their would-be destination, only to find they’ve been fed incorrect information or steered to a place that only exists in the hard-wired imagination of a robot.

«

Who could have imagined.
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How to try Chrome’s hidden AI model • Pete Warden’s blog

Pete Warden:

»

There’s an LLM hiding in Chrome. Buried in the browser’s basement, behind a door with a “Beware of Leopard” sign.

But I’ll show you how to find it. In a couple minutes, you’ll have a private, free chatbot running on your machine.

We’re going to enable some developer flags in desktop Chrome so you can get full access to the AI model. We have to do this because the functionality is only being slowly rolled out by Google, and by turning on these developer options we can skip to the front of the line. There’s also a screencast version of these instructions if you’d like to follow along on YouTube.

You’ll need access to Chrome’s internal debugging pages to try out the model, so enter chrome://chrome-urls/ into the URL bar, scroll down, and click on “Enable internal debugging pages”.

[Instructions in post.]

…Why does this matter?

It’s free: These models work with the PC you have and require no subscriptions. Your usage is only limited by the speed of the model.

It’s 100% privacy-safe: None of your questions or answers leave your PC. Go ahead, turn off your WiFi and start prompting – everything works perfectly.

It works offline: The first time I used a local model to help with a coding task while flying on an airplane without WiFi, it felt like magic. There’s something crazy about the amount of knowledge these models condense into a handful of gigabytes.

It’s educational: This is the main reason you should bother with local LLMs right now. Just trying out this model demystifies the field, and should be an antidote to the constant hype the AI industry fosters. By getting your hands just slightly dirty, you’ll start to understand the real-world trajectory of these things.

It’s the future: Local models are only getting better and faster, while cloud-based chatbots like Claude and ChatGPT plateau. The market is inevitably going to shift to free models like this that are integrated into platforms and operating systems.

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Pete has been exploring machine learning systems for more than a decade. And if he says it matters, it really matters. It’s also very neat. As much as anything, it might teach people the limitations of chatbots if they’re using one in their browser all the time.
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Apologies: you have reached the end of your free-trial period of America! • The Atlantic

Alexandra Petri:

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We were so excited to reach 340 million free users. But now it’s time to streamline our product so that it appeals more to paid subscribers, and that means some changes for everyone else. We are adding a lot of features no one asked for that will make your experience worse and also cost a lot of money! Freedom isn’t free! Nor is it, exactly, the freedom you’ve been used to! Yes, that is the National Guard in your city. We know that you didn’t request it; it’s just a new feature we’re rolling out, possibly for 30 days, possibly for even longer!

You were pretty vocal about what attracted you to America in the first place: personal liberty, economic opportunity, something called the American dream, and, of course, the perennial threat of gun violence. (That last feature developed over time, but it seems that our users are pretty attached? We offered you many opportunities to opt out.) But we knew what was really keeping you here: inertia, and the challenge of finding an alternative that sells decent breakfast burritos. We are banking on that going forward.

…Our new CEO does hate a large portion of our current user base, but he’s not totally ignorant of the culture here. He is very excited to bring back some things that past users described as “great,” such as Depression, Recession, and White-Shark Attacks. It was also his brilliant idea to add the features of autocracy—State Control of Business, General Encouragement of Groveling, Masked Men Who Yank Your Neighbors Into an Unmarked Van to Whisk Them Off to a Gulag—to our core democratic product.

You heard it right: The government you knew for Weather Data and Medical Research is going all in on Despot Whims. This costs money, so bedrock features such as Separation of Powers, No Troop Quartering, and Due Process are being phased out, even for premium subscribers. We are also getting rid of most of our Health and Science. But you can have a career in ICE.

We are retaining some features for premium users. Want rule of law? That’s premium. The right to run your company without government interference? That’s a paid feature now. An explanation from the Supreme Court as to why it just ruled against you? Maybe!

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Petri used to write her brilliant humour for the Washington Post. But you can see why it just wouldn’t fit there now.
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Elon Musk fans are still losing ridiculous amounts of money to crypto scams • Gizmodo

Matt Novak:

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Gizmodo filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the FTC for complaints from people who say they were tricked by scammers posing as Musk or who used online ads with the billionaire’s likeness. Gizmodo has filed such FOIA requests with the FTC before, and it’s instructive to learn what new tricks and tools scammers are using to lure their victims.

Some scammers appear to convince victims they’re actually Elon Musk, even bringing in supporting characters like Elon’s mother, Maye Musk, to vouch for a given “investment.” Other times, scammers will use AI-generated photos or videos to make it appear Elon is promoting a given cryptocurrency or online platform where someone can supposedly get rich.

Some of the stories are heartbreaking, like the woman in Florida who filed a complaint with the FTC because her elderly husband has cancer and isn’t thinking clearly as he engages with a person he’s convinced is the real Elon. She writes that her husband, who’s in his 70s, is “heavily medicated and does not believe he is being scammed.” He lost at least $10,000.

Scammers frequently set up YouTube livestreams during major SpaceX or Tesla events, making them appear as official as possible, but imploring people to send cryptocurrency that will be “matched” by Musk or his companies. A Florida man in his 60s wrote to the FTC about getting scammed out of $225,000 that way, sending crypto to Coinbase earlier this year.

The scams are all from the past year, meaning that there are sometimes cameos by President Donald Trump. Like the complaint from Michigan, where a person in their 70s who lost $10,000 was convinced it had to be Musk because, “His profile picture was of him on Airforce 1 [sic] with Trump. He presented detailed information that Musk would know.”

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It is so dismaying how easily people are taken in by this sort of stuff. There must be a particular mindset that makes people believe Musk would get in touch. Then again, he does discuss things with completely random people on X, so perhaps that part of the scam isn’t so unbelievable.
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The product of the railways is the timetable • Benedict’s Substack

Benedict Springbett:

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This post is about a simple, yet crucial insight: the product of the railways is the timetable. Not the tracks, not the trains, but the timetable.

First ask yourself: what is the purpose of a railway? The job of the railways is to move people around. A person gets a train because they want to travel from A to B.

A small group of enthusiasts (me included) will actively choose to get the train if at all possible, but the vast majority of people are not particularly loyal to how their user need is met. They might drive, they might fly, they might cycle, they might decide not to make the journey and just do a video call. All of these things are the competitors of the railways.

We could therefore say that the product of the railways (and roads, and airports) is travel. But we can be more specific than that. A railway is not like a road. A road is built, and then it is open for anybody to use it at any time. There is no need to plan out precisely when cars move along the road. The movements of trains, by contrast, have to be planned out months in advance. It would neither be possible nor sensible to run trains ad hoc. They are not taxis, free to roam the roads whenever they like. Railway tracks are a network; everything depends on everything else. The service from Cambridge to Norwich affects the service from Norwich to London Liverpool Street, which in turn affects the service from Liverpool Street to Southend. To optimise the use of the tracks, train movements have to be planned out well in advance with precision.

This planning is what we call the timetable, the mapping between space and time that determines which train occupies which track at which time. The railways offer travel to the public via the timetable: a traveller buys the (supposed) fact that the 12.32 from Reigate gets into London Victoria at 13.19. The product of the railways is the timetable.

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This is rather like the insight that people are buying holes in the wall when they purchase a drill: it produces a different way of seeing what people want. If the timetable is too confusing (including having puzzling connections or weird ticket pricing schemes), fewer people will take the train. That’s not because the trains aren’t running at the right times.
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BBC apologises for airing fake claim about Digital ID scheme • Politics Home

Zoe Crowther:

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The BBC has apologised for airing a false claim about Tony Blair’s son’s company being awarded a government contract to produce the new mandatory digital ID scheme.

The episode of comedy quiz show Have I Got News For You was taken down from BBC iPlayer on Saturday morning, before being put up again with the false claim edited out.

Last week, the government announced a new digital ID scheme, which it said would help combat illegal working and make it easier for the public to use vital government services. It will be mandatory for Right to Work checks by the end of this Parliament.

On Friday evening, the BBC’s Have I Got News For You host Victoria Coren Mitchell incorrectly said that Multiverse – owned by Euan Blair, former prime minister Tony Blair’s son – was producing the digital ID scheme, which she described as a “happy coincidence”.

This claim is untrue and was fact-checked by the independent organisation Full Fact earlier this week. Blair’s company, Multiverse, does not develop its own software, but offers apprenticeship programmes and training on AI and tech.

Both Multiverse and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology have confirmed there is “no truth” to the claims that the company is involved in any way. PoliticsHome understands that no decisions have been made regarding which third-party companies will be awarded contracts associated with the scheme, which is still in the early stages of development and will be subject to a public consultation later this year.

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This was a pretty egregious error, from a rumour which originated on social media and which – as the story notes – had been factchecked already. It would be surprising, though, if Digital ID survives the consultation.

The story also has this at the bottom: Correction: Victoria Coren’s name was misspelled in an earlier version of this post. Oh, irony, thou are ubiquitous. By the way, all the mistakes in this newsletter are intentional.
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Finland unable to prosecute alleged Baltic Sea cable-cutters, court rules • Financial Times

Richard Milne:

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Finland lacks the jurisdiction to prosecute sailors accused of cutting underwater electricity and data cables in one of the most high-profile recent sabotage events in the Baltic Sea area, a court in Helsinki ruled.

The case against the captain of the Eagle S and two pilots was dismissed on Friday by Helsinki district court as it found the severed cables were outside Finland’s territorial waters, highlighting the difficulties of holding those accused of sabotage and hybrid attacks accountable.

Finland received plaudits after armed border guards abseiled on to the deck of the Eagle S on Boxing Day and seized control of the tanker after it had dragged its anchor along the Baltic Sea for almost 100km.

It became the first Nato country to bring charges against the crew of a “shadow fleet” vessel, used by Russia to circumvent western sanctions on its oil trade, and prosecutors wanted two-and-a-half years’ jail time for the trio.

But lawyers for captain Davit Vadatchkor and pilots Robert Egizaryan and Santosh Kumar Chaurasia argued that Finland had no jurisdiction as the alleged cable-cutting took place in international waters and the Eagle S was only stopped once it turned into Finnish territory.

Europe has been hit by a wave of sabotage and hybrid attacks, some attributed to Russia and some merely suspected as being ordered by them.

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Why Apple should steal the Fairphone 6 Moments switch for the iPhone • Stuff

Craig Grannell:

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It felt quite magical when a tame Fairphone rep flicked a switch on the side of the [Android] device and instantly transformed the home screen. The grid of icons vanished, replaced by a boring list of app names. And, to be clear, boring in this context is good. It means a phone without distractions. A device that lets you be present, rather than tempting you every waking moment with yet more shiny icons.

Of course, there’s nothing complicated happening here. Fairphone just mapped a switch to a launcher. But the implementation is everything. The physicality – the deliberate act of making your phone less distracting – made something in my brain go ding. It reminded me of Bear Focus Timer, a Pomodoro app that only works when your phone is face down.

The ritual matters more than the mechanism – it’s a psychological thing. You flip the phone over to put it “out of reach”. You commit to focus. It’s far more effective than tapping a virtual button. And so it felt with the Fairphone 6, even if, alas, that device lacks scowling cartoon bears should you abandon focus mode.

It also reminded me of something else: my iPhone 16 Pro has a perfectly serviceable Action button that I barely use. Cue: epiphany! Why not shamelessly steal Fairphone’s great idea and bodge it into iOS?

I duly set up my standard iOS home screen to feature a single Dumb Phone widget with a few apps I use, and turned all the others off. Then I created a new one called Badness, with a dozen home screens of icons in all their appy glory.

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He created a Shortcut (a short script) to switch between modes – icons, or app name list – and linked it to the Action button to create a quick switching method. If you find your phone too distracting, it might work for you too. (You might be able to create a Focus mode that does the same.)
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X-ray scans reveal the hidden risks of cheap batteries • The Verge

Andrew Liszewski:

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Lumafield has released the results of a new study of lithium-ion batteries that “reveals an enormous gap in quality between brand-name batteries and low-cost cells” that are readily available through online stores including Amazon and Temu. The company used its computed tomography (CT) scanners, capable of peering inside objects in 3D using X-rays, to analyze over 1,000 lithium-ion batteries. It found dangerous manufacturing defects in low-cost and counterfeit batteries that could potentially lead to fires and explosions.

The study tested 18650 lithium-ion battery cells, which are used in various products including electric toothbrushes, power tools, e-bikes, power banks, and even electric cars. The batteries were purchased from ten different brands: three OEMs, including Samsung and Panasonic, sourced from “highly reviewed, specialized suppliers,” three vendors selling rewraps (typically OEM batteries with their plastic outer wrapping replaced) sourced from “specialized battery sites” or the brand’s own web stores, and four companies selling low-cost or counterfeit batteries sourced from “large, general online retailers such as Temu.”

Lumafield scanned 1,054 batteries – around 100 from each brand – and found 33 of them had a serious manufacturing defect known as negative anode overhang. The defect “significantly increases the risk of internal short-circuiting and battery fires” and can reduce the overall life of the battery,” according to Lumafield. All 33 of the batteries with the defects came from the 424 sold by low-cost brands or brands selling counterfeits. One of the counterfeits was identified by its pink wrapper designed to match the one Samsung uses on its 30Q cells.

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Cheap can be expensive, particularly if it burns down your house.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified