The release of details of the UK Budget ahead of time was done by simple URL hacking. An easy mistake for a web developer, with big consequences. CC-licensed photo by CafeCredit.com 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. Think of a location. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Robots and AI are already remaking the Chinese economy • WSJ via MSN

Brian Spegele:

»

A clothing designer reports slashing the time it takes to make a sample by more than 70% with AI. Washing machines in China’s hinterland are being churned out under the command of an AI “factory brain.”

At one of China’s biggest ports, shipping containers whiz about on self-driving trucks with virtually no workers in sight, while the port’s scheduling is run by AI.

Executives involved in China’s efforts liken the future of factories to living organisms that can increasingly think and act for themselves, moving beyond the preprogrammed tasks at traditionally-automated factories. It could further enable the spread of “dark factories,” with operations so automated that work happens around the clock with the lights dimmed.

The advances can’t come quickly enough for Communist Party leaders, who fear China could lose its status as the world’s factory floor. Its population is shrinking, young people are avoiding factory jobs, and pushback against Chinese exports has intensified in many countries. At the same time, President Trump is pledging to bring home vast numbers of manufacturing jobs through tariffs on China.

AI offers a lifeline to head off those risks, by helping China make and ship more stuff faster, cheaper and with fewer workers. Although some doubts are creeping in globally about how quickly AI will transform the world, China isn’t waiting: it wants to deploy what is available today quicker than the U.S. can, locking in any advantages.

“Only by proactively embracing change can we remain invincible in this revolution,” Hu Wangming, chairman of one of China’s largest steel groups, told state media this year. Its Shanghai-listed unit Baosteel had found 125 uses for AI by the end of last year—and is planning for 1,000.

China installed 295,000 industrial robots last year, nearly nine times as many as the U.S. and more than the rest of the world combined, according to the International Federation of Robotics. China’s stock of operational robots surpassed two million in 2024, the most of any country.

«

Together with yesterday’s article about the problem of figuring out what other countries can usefully export to China, this doesn’t feel promising.
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‘Mortified’ OBR chair hopes inquiry into budget leak will report next week • The Guardian

Heather Stewart:

»

The chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility has said he felt mortified by the early release of its budget forecasts as the watchdog launched a rapid inquiry into how it had “inadvertently made it possible” to see the documents.

Richard Hughes said he had written to the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, and the chair of the Treasury select committee, Meg Hillier, to apologise.

“I felt personally mortified by what happened. The OBR prides itself on our professionalism. We let people down yesterday and we’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

Reuters, the agency that first published excerpts of the outlook on its news wire, revealed on Thursday how it had obtained the document.

It said: “The document, which is usually published after the finance minister’s speech has ended, was uploaded to the OBR website and available to download on an unprotected link.

“The link was not advertised on the website but the OBR has used the same web address, or URL, for previous budget documents, changing only the date. A Reuters reporter, in preparation for covering the budget, went to the publicly available URL shortly after 1130 GMT on Wednesday.”

Hughes said Ciaran Martin, the former chief executive of the National Cyber Security Centre, would provide expert input to the investigation into how the report was accidentally published.

«

Feels like Martin’s input isn’t really required. We already know absolutely everything about how this happened. URL hacking needed a bit of knowledge 20 years ago, but now? Any journalist worth their salt knows about it. Apple had the embarrassment of seeing the Apple Watch Series 4 unveiled ahead of its launch in 2018 when a programmer/journalist figured out where to find its marketing image URLs.

But you know that next time, there will be passwords and all sorts on the OBR site, and lots of obsessive checking of directory permissions.
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Warner Music Group partners with Suno to offer AI likenesses of its artists • The Verge

Emma Roth:

»

Warner Music Group has struck a licensing deal with the AI music creation platform Suno. Under the agreement, WMG will allow users to create AI-generated music on Suno using the voices, names, likenesses, images, and compositions of artists who opt in to the program.

WMG, which owns record labels that have signed musicians like Ed Sheeran, Twenty One Pilots, Dua Lipa, and Charli XCX, says participating artists will have “full control” over how their likeness and music are used, though it doesn’t share how.

“These will be new creation experiences from artists who do opt in, which will open up new revenue streams for them and allow you to interact with them in new ways,” Suno says, adding that users will be able to “build around” an artist’s sounds “and ensure they get compensated.”

WMG is also dropping out of a lawsuit it originally filed with Universal Music Group and Sony, alleging Suno illegally ripped their copyrighted works from YouTube. In recent weeks, major music labels have begun to embrace AI, as WMG similarly settled with AI music maker Udio earlier this month, while UMG ended its litigation against the platform in favor of a licensing agreement. The “ethical” AI music platform Klay has also struck deals with UMG, Sony, and WMG.

«

Is this a capitulation by WMG, or is it cleverly getting in on the ground floor before AI music companies are dictating the terms? It feels like a little of both: the difference for the latecomers might be how much they can get from Suno.
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New data shows Australia’s historic cervical cancer milestone • news.com.au

Claudia Poposki:

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Australia is on track to become the first country to eliminate cervical cancer by 2035, according to a new report.

The Centre for Research Excellence in Cervical Cancer Control released a report that confirmed that cervical cancer rates among Australians continues to fall.

In 2020 the rate was 6.6 per 100,000 people. In 2021 it dropped to 6.3 per every 100,000. Now, for the first time since cervical cancer rates began to be documented in 1982, there were no cervical cancer diagnoses in women under 25 in 2021.

Survival rates have also improved with the five-year rate rising from 73.9% in 2016 to 76.8% in 2021.

Rebecca White, the Assistant Minister for Health and Aged Care, Assistant Minister for Indigenous Health and the Assistant Minister for Women, said: “Australia is leading the world in cervical cancer elimination, but we must maintain momentum to make this goal a reality.

“The Albanese Government is determined to eliminate cervical cancer by 2035 and to ensure cervical screening is inclusive, accessible and effective.

“Australia’s early adoption of HPV vaccines for girls and young women and timely switch to cervical screening rather than Pap smears have us well on track to achieve elimination and save more lives,” Ms White added.

«

The key point is the lack of diagnoses in those under 25. HPV vaccination began in Australia for girls aged 12-13 in 2007, and boys of the same age began receiving it in 2013. And essentially, no female born from 2000 onwards has had a positive diagnosis.
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The ultralight gummy bear power bank just got yanked from Amazon • The Verge

Emma Roth:

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Amazon just yanked the Haribo gummy bear power bank from its website and is canceling orders for the ultralight device. In an email sent to customers, Amazon says it has “learned of a potential safety or quality issue” regarding the power bank, and that it’s not charging customers who recently purchased it.

The gummy bear theme may be a bit deceiving, but at 9.9 ounces, the $25 Haribo Mini Power Bank is one of the lightest 20,000mAh power banks around, making it a popular choice for backpackers (or anyone else who doesn’t feel like carrying around a hefty device). Now, the Amazon listing for the power bank no longer exists, and we don’t know when — or if — it’s coming back.

Last week, the 3D X-ray company Lumafield published scans showing the internals of the power bank and its battery, which is part of a broader line of Haribo-themed products.

Lumafield technical product marketing manager Alex Hao tells The Verge that the team found that the “battery quality is quite poor across the entire Haribo product line.” Hao calls attention to the “wavy nature” of the anodes that overhang the cathodes (the blue edge in the scan below), which “should be straight, or close to it,” indicating “poor process control.” Hao also found that in one area, the anode overhang measures around 0.27mm, which is less than the accepted industry standard of 0.5mm.

Lumafield uncovered similar quality issues with the Haribo-themed 10,000mAh mini power bank, which is now listed as “currently unavailable” on Amazon.

«

However: it took Lumafield doing these scans to alert Amazon to the risk that these power packs posed – to children in particular, since that’s who they’re aimed at. Low quality batteries can catch fire unexpectedly.
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Okay, so Apple’s using 3D printing in the iPhone Air. But how? • iFixit

Shahram Mokhtari and Elizabeth Chamberlain:

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We cheered with the world when the EU standardized charging ports for electronics. But when we tear down a phone and get down to the ports, we’re most interested in whether they’re modular: If they get damaged, can you swap them out?

In this case, ehh, sort of. It’s a hassle, more complicated than ideal.  

This time, though, Apple told the world that we should look a little closer at that port: its housing is 3D printed using recycled titanium, via laser powder bed fusion printers from BLT. This additive manufacturing process debuted simultaneously with the 3D-printed titanium shells in the Apple Watch Series 11 and Ultra 3.

It’s cool to finally see 3D printing become capable of this sort of high-scale production. The shift to 3D printing also provides a significant benefit for sustainability nerds like ourselves: Apple reports that this process saves 33% to 50% in material consumption over traditional forging methods. At a time when overconsumption is a major concern, efficient resource use is a welcome development.

Once we’d taken apart the iPhone Air, we had to put the USB-C port under our Evident DSX2000 microscope. Magnified images of the USB-C port revealed a perplexing detail: a chainlink-like, circular surface pattern that stumped 3D printing veterans. At the 50µm scale, this pattern seemed highly unusual.

Early reports had suggested that Apple might be using binder jetting, a 3D printing process that involves joining a powder with a binder material, which acts as an adhesive. Two years ago, when it was first reported that Apple was experimenting with using 3D printing for Apple Watch cases, a Chinese company called EasyMFG showed off smartwatch cases printed via binder jetting. 

But under a microscope, binder jetting tends to look far less regular than the crop circle pattern we were seeing in the USB-C port housing. So our industry contacts doubted that was the process we were seeing here. 

«

There’s a lot to learn about 3D printing in this. Not least that Apple (or its assemblers) is using pulsed lasers for this process, which is dramatic in itself; then you add the fact that it’s doing this to make millions of phones (and, as the article explains, Apple Watch cases). We barely have a glimpse of the complexity of modern manufacturing.
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Apple contests India’s antitrust penalty law with risk of $38bn fine, filing shows • Reuters

Aditya Kalra and Arpan Chaturvedi:

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Apple is challenging India’s new antitrust penalty law under which the U.S. company could potentially face a fine of up to $38bn, a court filing at the Delhi High Court, seen by Reuters, shows.

The challenge is the first against India’s antitrust penalty law that since last year allows the Competition Commission of India (CCI) to use global turnover when calculating the penalties it imposes on companies for abusing their market dominance.

Since 2022, Tinder-owner Match and Indian startups have been locked in an antitrust battle with Apple at the CCI, where investigators last year issued a report saying the US smartphone company had engaged in “abusive conduct” on the apps market of its iPhone Operating System, iOS.

Apple denied all wrongdoing, and the CCI is yet to make a final decision in the case, including about any penalty.
The company is asking judges to declare as illegal the 2024 law that allowed the CCI to use global turnover, not just that in India, when calculating penalties, according to its 545-page court filing, which is not public.

Apple’s “maximum penalty exposure” at the rate of 10% of its average global turnover derived from all of its services globally for three fiscal years to 2024 could be around $38bn, it said in the filing. Such a “penalty based on global turnover…would be manifestly arbitrary, unconstitutional, grossly disproportionate, unjust,” it added.

Apple cited the CCI’s use of the new rules for the first time on November 10 in an unrelated case, where they were retrospectively applied to a violation by the affected company a decade earlier. Apple has “no choice but to bring this constitutional challenge now to avoid retrospective imposition of penalty against them,” it argued.

The company has maintained it is a small player compared to Google’s Android, which is the dominant player in the Indian market.

…In a private submission to the CCI, reported by Reuters in October, Apple opponent Match argued a fine based on global turnover could “act as a significant deterrent against recidivism”.

In its court filing, Apple argued India should only impose a penalty based on the Indian revenue of the specific unit which violates antitrust law, giving an example of a toy seller running a stationery business.

It would be arbitrary and disproportionate to levy a penalty on the stationery business’s total turnover of 20,000 rupees, when the contravention is only in relation to the toy business that earns 100 rupees, it said.

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Fighting for water is on the rise, reaching a record last year • Los Angeles Times

Ian James:

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In Algeria, water shortages left faucets [taps] dry, prompting protesters to riot and set tires ablaze.

In Gaza, as people waited for water at a community tap, an Israeli drone fired on them, killing eight.

In Ukraine, Russian rockets slammed into the country’s largest dam, unleashing a plume of fire over the hydroelectric plant and causing widespread blackouts.

These are some of the 420 water-related conflicts researchers documented for 2024 in the latest update of the Pacific Institute’s Water Conflict Chronology, a global database of water-related violence.

The year featured a record number of violent incidents over water around the world, far surpassing the 355 in 2023, continuing a steeply rising trend. The violence more than quadrupled in the last five years.

The new data from the Oakland-based water think tank show also that drinking water wells, pipes and dams are increasingly coming under attack.

“In almost every region of the world, there is more and more violence being reported over water,” said Peter Gleick, the Pacific Institute’s co-founder and senior fellow, and it “underscores the urgent need for international attention.”

The researchers collect information from news reports and other sources and accounts. They classify it into three categories: instances in which water was a trigger of violence, water systems were targeted and water was a “casualty” of violence, for example when shell fragments hit a water tank.

Not every case involves injuries or deaths but many do.

The region with the most violent incidents was the Middle East, with 138 reported. That included 66 in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, both in Gaza and the West Bank.

«

The phrase “violence over water” in the original headline feels a bit misleading; is that fights on oceans? But conflicts for control of water, that’s a different thing, and one warned about for years.
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OpenAI needs to raise at least $207bn by 2030 so it can continue to lose money, HSBC estimates • FT Alphaville

Bryce Elder:

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OpenAI is a money pit with a website on top. That much we know already, but since OpenAI is a private company, there’s a lot of guesswork required when estimating the depth of the pit.

HSBC’s US software and services team has today updated its OpenAI model to include the company’s $250bn rental of cloud compute from Microsoft, announced late in October, and its $38bn rental of cloud compute from Amazon announced less than a week later. The latest two deals add an extra four gigawatts of compute power to OpenAI’s requirements, bringing the contracted amount to 36 gigawatts.

Based on a total cumulative deal value of up to $1.8tn, OpenAI is heading for a data centre rental bill of about $620bn a year — though only a third of the contracted power is expected to be online by the end of this decade.

To check OpenAI ability to pay, HSBC’s team first had to build a model to forecast revenues.

…HSBC’s model assumes that OpenAI’s rental costs will be a cumulative $792bn between the current year and 2030, rising to $1.4tn by 2033. The projection matches OpenAI’s eight-year guidance that CEO Sam Altman is exasperated at being asked to discuss.

OpenAI’s cumulative free cash flow to 2030 may be about $282bn, it forecasts, while Nvidia’s promised cash injections and the disposal of AMD shares can bring in another $26bn. The broker also includes OpenAI’s $24bn of undrawn debt and equity facilities and, at the 2025 mid-year point, its $17.5bn of available liquidity.

Squaring the first total off against the second leaves a $207bn funding hole, to which HSBC adds a $10bn cash buffer for safety’s sake.

These estimates might prove overly cautious, though guessing how is a finger-in-the-air exercise.

«

All this of course ignores the certainty of a market crash in the meantime which will significantly impair growth and revenue availability.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Food bloggers are complaining that Google’s AI overviews are creating nonsense recipes and killing their traffic. CC-licensed photo by Lily Gicker 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. Lighlty done. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

TSMC sues former top executive who joined US rival Intel • Financial Times

Kathrin Hille:

»

TSMC said on Tuesday it had filed a lawsuit in Taiwan’s intellectual property and commercial court, which will seek damages for breach of contract from former vice-president Lo Wei-Jen, who retired from the company in July.

“There is a high probability that Lo uses, leaks, discloses, delivers, or transfers TSMC’s trade secrets and confidential information to Intel, thus making legal actions (including claiming damages for breach of contract) necessary,” TSMC said.

The case highlights the geopolitical pressures that are intensifying the race to manufacture the most cutting-edge semiconductors. TSMC, which supplies companies including Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom and Apple, makes more than 90% of the world’s most advanced chips and has in recent years widened its lead over rivals Samsung and Intel.

In August, the US government agreed to invest $8.9bn into Intel, giving it a 10% equity stake, as part of a push to strengthen America’s semiconductor industry and protect against risks such as a cut in supplies from Taiwan.

In a statement on Wednesday, Intel said it “maintains rigorous policies and controls that strictly prohibit the use or transfer of any third-party confidential information or intellectual property”.

“Based on everything we know, we have no reason to believe there is any merit to the allegations involving Mr Lo,” Intel said. “Talent movement across companies is a common and healthy part of our industry, and this situation is no different.”

Lo, who holds a PhD in solid state physics from UC Berkeley and a physics degree from National Taiwan University, oversaw research and development for several of the 21 years he spent at TSMC. He did not respond to a request for comment.

Having joined from Intel in 2004, he led core R&D teams and its advanced process technology programmes. He was later put in charge of TSMC’s overall technology development strategy.

«

Intel is strongly defending its hire:

»

“As part of this transformation, Intel has welcomed back Wei-Jen Lo, who previously spent 18 years at Intel working on the development of Intel’s wafer processing technology before joining TSMC, where he continued his work in their wafer processing technology development,” Intel said.

«

A beef between the world’s two biggest chip companies might be fun.
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Google and AI slop are ruining Thanksgiving for food bloggers • Search Engine Land

Danny Goodwin:

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For more than a decade, food bloggers could predict and rely on holiday traffic. Not this year. AI answers are replacing vetted recipes, cutting off creators’ main revenue streams, and confusing home cooks with stitched-together instructions that don’t always make sense.

Google’s AI Overviews now surface blended cooking steps from multiple bloggers, often above the links/sources they draw from.

Many food creators reported between 30% and 80% drops in Google traffic, with some calling this their worst holiday season yet. Meanwhile, AI-generated recipe slop is flooding Pinterest, Facebook, and Etsy, blurring the line between human-tested dishes and AI-invented food.

Google told Bloomberg that AI Overviews are “a helpful starting point” and that people still click through to real recipes. Bloggers said the opposite:
• 40% year-over-year decline: Eb Gargano’s recipe traffic cratered, replaced by AI summaries that even get basics wrong – like baking a 6in Christmas cake for three to four hours. “You’d end up with charcoal!”
• “Frankenstein recipes”: Adam Gallagher of Inspired Taste said Google mixes his ingredients with competitors’ instructions, even for brand-name searches. His cocktail click-through rate has decreased by 30%.
• Gemini 3’s new interactive recipe graphics remix creators’ photos, a move Gallagher said crosses into “plagiarized AI recipes.”

Sarah Leung of The Woks of Life said AI summaries dominate searches for Chinese ingredients, often pulling directly from their years of reference work while giving users little reason to click. Also:
• Multiple bloggers found AI-run sites cloning their entire catalogs, rewriting instructions, tweaking photos, and even generating synthetic images of their families.
• Carrie Forrest of Clean Eating Kitchen said she lost 80% of her traffic and revenue in two years, forcing her to lay off her team.

This Thanksgiving, more people will trust AI with their menus, even when the results defy basic kitchen science. Meanwhile, the creators who built the modern recipe web say they’re becoming invisible inside the very tools powered by their work.

«

You could argue this is the worst it will be. But maybe it can get worse.
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OpenAI says dead teen violated TOS when he used ChatGPT to plan suicide • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

Facing five lawsuits alleging wrongful deaths, OpenAI lobbed its first defence Tuesday, denying in a court filing that ChatGPT caused a teen’s suicide and instead arguing the teen violated terms that prohibit discussing suicide or self-harm with the chatbot.

The earliest look at OpenAI’s strategy to overcome the string of lawsuits came in a case where parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine accused OpenAI of relaxing safety guardrails that allowed ChatGPT to become the teen’s “suicide coach.” OpenAI deliberately designed the version their son used, ChatGPT 4o, to encourage and validate his suicidal ideation in its quest to build the world’s most engaging chatbot, parents argued.

But in a blogpost, OpenAI claimed that parents selectively chose disturbing chat logs while supposedly ignoring “the full picture” revealed by the teen’s chat history. Digging through the logs, OpenAI claimed the teen told ChatGPT that he’d begun experiencing suicidal ideation at age 11, long before he used the chatbot.

“A full reading of his chat history shows that his death, while devastating, was not caused by ChatGPT,” OpenAI’s filing argued.

Allegedly, the logs also show that Raine “told ChatGPT that he repeatedly reached out to people, including trusted persons in his life, with cries for help, which he said were ignored.” Additionally, Raine told ChatGPT that he’d increased his dose of a medication that “he stated worsened his depression and made him suicidal.” That medication, OpenAI argued, “has a black box warning for risk of suicidal ideation and behavior in adolescents and young adults, especially during periods when, as here, the dosage is being changed.”

«

Sure, the lawyers at OpenAI are telling them to take this line. But it’s a terrible look: “you’re not allowed to use our product that way” versus “we’re going to make sure our product can’t talk to people in that way”.
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Electric vehicle owners to face pay-per-mile tax • BBC News

Pritti Mistry:

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A new tax for electric and hybrid vehicles has been announced by the chancellor in the Budget.
From April 2028, electric car drivers will pay a road charge of 3p per mile, while plug-in hybrid drivers will pay 1.5p per mile, with the rates going up each year with inflation.

The new tax is about “half the fuel duty rate paid by drivers of petrol cars”, according to the government’s independent forecaster, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). The chancellor also committed to extending the 5p cut in fuel duty until September next year, after which it is set to increase annually by the RPI measure of inflation.

Drivers will pay the charge based on how many miles they drive from April 2028. Motorists will have their mileage checked annually, typically during their MOT as is already the case, or for new cars, around their first and second registration anniversary, the Treasury said.

Payment will be integrated into the existing Vehicle Excise Duty system that is administrated by DVLA. Under the measures, an electric car driver clocking up 8,500 miles in the 2028-29 financial year is expected to pay about £255 – about half the cost per mile that petrol and diesel drivers pay in fuel tax.

However, mileage readings will be based on in-vehicle odometers, which the government acknowledges can be subject to tampering, or “clocking”. It recognises that the introduction of the tax “may increase the likelihood of motorists choosing to clock their vehicles”, and said it was looking at ways to mitigate this.

The government is now consulting on exactly how the scheme will work.

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The fuel tax cut (kept at the same level since April 2010) is “being reversed” – ie fuel tax will go back up – but even so, this is a perverse incentive which seems unlikely to get people to stampede to electric vehicles.
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The Vatican is the oldest computer in the world • The Slow Deep Hover

Andrew Brown:

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One way of understanding the Roman Catholic Church is to think of the Vatican as the oldest computer in the world. It is a computer made of human parts rather than electronics, but so are all bureaucracies: just like computers, they take in information, process it according to a set of algorithms, and act on the result. 

The Vatican has an operating system that has been running since the days of the Roman Empire. Its major departments are still called “dicasteries”, a term last used in the Roman civil service in about 450 AD. 

Like any very long running computer system, the Vatican has problems with legacy code: all that embarrassing stuff about usury and cousin marriage from the Middle Ages, or the more recent “Syllabus of Errors” in which Pope Pius IX in 1864 denounced as heresy the belief that he, or any Pope, can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization,” can no longer be acted on, but can’t be thrown away, either. Instead it is commented out and entirely different code added: this process is known as development.

But changing the code that the system runs on, while it is running, is a notoriously tricky operation. For the Catholic Church it requires a church council, drawing bishops from all over the world into years of deliberation. 

«

Brown is clear that the broad metaphor isn’t his: “Francis Spufford once said that Bletchley Park was an attempt to build a computer out of human beings so the credit for this metaphor belongs to him.” But it’s a very neat way to look at it, and John Naughton (via whom this came) expands on it further, with useful pointers. I’m also reminded of the (human? Imaginary?) army in The Three Body Problem which is “programmed” to calculate the timings of astronomical events in the triple-solar system.

But the Vatican as an extremely slow-running computer is a novel view of it. Does that make the Pope an app?
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A holiday gift guide: the newest, strangest gadgets and apps • The New Yorker

Kyle Chayka:

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We are entering a Surrealist phase of personal technology. Any device you might imagine can be found online courtesy of an obscure Chinese factory, ready to be shipped out for a loved one’s holiday enjoyment: pocket-size artificial-intelligence gizmos (Rabbit r1, $199), in-home hologram machines (Code 27 Character Livehouse, $558), human-size robot servants (1X NEO, $20,000).

The components of tech have become better and cheaper, from microchips to speakers and screens (have you seen how cheap a good TV is these days?), enabling out-there innovation. On the consumer side, we are bored of rote device designs; we’ve seen a dozen models of iPhone and crave something refreshingly different. Hence the proliferation of gadgets with nonsensical names, promising the same horsepower as major-brand equivalents but with new hardware twists and laughably low prices.

We live in the age of the Swype ($18), a “rechargeable disposable” vape with an integrated touch screen on which one can check the weather and get notifications via Bluetooth, mingling nicotine and dopamine hits. Who doesn’t want to find that in the bottom of their stocking? The apps and devices collected here fulfil that old promise of technology: making your life better, or at least more interesting, even if just by encouraging you to log off.

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Maybe we are returning, in a way, to the mad times of the 1980s when computerised hardware went through a sort of Cambrian explosion as Z80 chips became affordable and plentiful, and injection-moulding improved along with distribution.
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Computer maker HP to cut up to 6,000 jobs by 2028 as it turns to AI • The Guardian

Julia Kollewe:

»

Up to 6,000 jobs are to go at HP worldwide in the next three years as the US computer and printer maker increasingly adopts AI to speed up product development.

Announcing a lower-than-expected profit outlook for the coming year, HP said it would cut between 4,000 and 6,000 jobs by the end of October 2028. It has about 56,000 employees.

“As we look ahead, we see a significant opportunity to embed AI into HP to accelerate product innovation, improve customer satisfaction and boost productivity,” said the California company’s chief executive, Enrique Lores.

He said teams working on product development, internal operations and customer support would be affected by the job cuts. He added that this would lead to $1bn (£749m) savings a year by 2028, although the cuts would cost an estimated $650m.

News of the job cuts came as a leading educational research charity warned that up to 3m low-skilled jobs could disappear in the UK by 2035 because of automation and AI. The jobs most at risk are those in occupations such as trades, machine operations and administrative roles, the National Foundation for Educational Research said.

In the US, about 40% of jobs could be replaced by AI, in sectors ranging from education and healthcare to business and legal, according to a report by the McKinsey Global Institute released this week.

AI agents and robots could automate more than half of US work hours using technology that is available today, the US consultancy’s analysis found. It estimated that $2.9tn of economic value could be unlocked in the US by 2030.

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Cutting jobs. But also, hey, sprinkle some magic AI fairy dust on the future revenues. Will it work? Can’t hurt.
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Trump’s AI agenda sails toward an iceberg of bipartisan populist fury • Semafor

David Weigel:

»

The AI industry’s new super PAC, flush with cash to defend AI’s growth as critical to countering China, picked its first political target this month — and missed.

New York state Assemblyman Alex Bores is working to break out of a crowded field in the Democratic primary to succeed Rep. Jerrold Nadler. He wasn’t even close to frontrunner status when the Leading the Future PAC went after him.

But becoming the first enemy of a $100m pro-AI effort turned out to be a nice boost for the 35-year-old’s campaign. He was almost flattered that the industry would single out his RAISE Act, which requires new AI safety standards, among other changes.

“I appreciate that they’re being so direct,” Bores told Semafor. “They sound terrified that I will stand up to them on behalf of the people of this district, that I will be the biggest obstacle to their quest for unbridled control over the American worker, over our kids, over the environment. They’re right about that.”

This wasn’t the plan for Leading the Future, whose electoral plan aligns with Fairshake, the cryptocurrency PAC that Republicans thanked for beating Democrats last year. There’s one big difference between them: Fairshake was fighting for a product that only a small minority in the US owns, with fewer still getting rich off it. The AI industry is discovering populist anger that’s growing faster than many in both parties expected.

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Interesting if there’s “populist anger” that is measurable in terms of votes. Apparently David Sacks, Trump’s AI adviser, is not popular with the masses. Not that that ever worried Sacks.
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China is making trade impossible • Financial Times

Robin Harding:

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On a recent trip to mainland China, I found myself posing the same question, again and again, to the economists, technologists and business leaders who I met with. “Trade is an exchange. You provide something of value to me, and in return, I must offer something of value to you. So what is the product, in the future, that China would like to buy from the rest of the world?”

The answers were revealing. A few said “soyabeans and iron ore” before realising this was not much help to a European [who can’t provide them]. Some observed that Louis Vuitton handbags are popular and then went on to talk about the export prospects for fast-rising Chinese luxury brands. “Higher education” was another common answer, qualified sometimes with the observation that Peking University and Tsinghua are harder to get into, and more academically rigorous, than anything on offer in the west.

Several of the economists, who had perhaps pondered the issue already, jumped ahead to a different point altogether: “This,” they said, “is why you should let Chinese companies set up factories in Europe.”

It is a train of thought that gives away the real answer to the question. Which is: nothing.

There is nothing that China wants to import, nothing it does not believe it can make better and cheaper, nothing for which it wants to rely on foreigners a single day longer than it has to. For now, to be sure, China is still a customer for semiconductors, software, commercial aircraft and the most sophisticated kinds of production machinery. But it is a customer like a resident doctor is a student. China is developing all of these goods. Soon it will make them, and export them, itself.

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Harding expands on this thesis to reach a conclusion where the only logical endpoint is: either China lets its currency inflate (except its plans don’t include that), or Europe finds new axes of competition (such as technology – unlikely), or Europe turns protectionist.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A story about a Swedish startup training crows to clean up cigarette butts is true – except the startup closed last month. CC-licensed photo by shankar 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.

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

GPU prices are coming to earth just as RAM costs shoot into the stratosphere • Ars Technica

Andrew Cunningham:

»

It’s not a bad time to upgrade your gaming PC. Graphics card prices in the 2020s have undulated continuously as the industry has dealt with pandemic and AI-related shortages, but it’s actually possible to get respectable mainstream- to high-end GPUs like AMD’s Radeon RX 9060 XT and 9070 series or Nvidia’s RTX 5060, 5070, and 5080 series for at or slightly under their suggested retail prices right now. This was close to impossible through the spring and summer.

But it’s not a good time to build a new PC or swap your older motherboard out for a new one that needs DDR5 RAM. And the culprit is a shortage of RAM and flash memory chips that has suddenly sent SSD and (especially) memory prices into the stratosphere, caused primarily by the ongoing AI boom and exacerbated by panic-fuelled buying by end users and device manufacturers.

… there’s no escaping these price increases, which affect SSDs and both DDR4 and DDR5 RAM kits of all capacities (though higher-capacity RAM kits do seem to be hit a little harder). If you’re thinking about an SSD upgrade, those increases haven’t become too ludicrous just yet, but if you were thinking about a RAM upgrade, your best bet is to hold on tight to whatever you already have and hope that nothing breaks any time soon.

Memory and storage shortages can be particularly difficult to get through. As with all chips, it can take years to ramp up capacity and/or build new manufacturing facilities. Not only do we need to meet today’s demand with supply levels that were decided years ago, but manufacturers also must try to decide tomorrow’s supply levels based on today’s demand. This was part of the problem during the pandemic-fueled chip shortages of 2021 and 2022—most companies weren’t prepared for the pandemic-fueled spike in demand for consumer tech, or for the lull in normal buying and upgrade patterns that followed (just look at PC sales, which went way up in 2020 and 2021, then crashed for a while, and then eventually returned to something resembling a normal pattern).

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The table compiled by Ars Technica shows memory and storage prices rocketing – some quadrupling – just since August.
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Can crows be trained to clean the streets? The idea refuses to die • Ubergizmo

Aiva Keller:

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For a brief moment in early 2022, it felt as if humanity had finally learned to collaborate with one of the planet’s sharpest non-human minds.

A tiny Swedish startup called Corvid Cleaning AB suggested a scheme so irresistibly clever that it launched a thousand headlines: teach wild crows to pick up cigarette butts, reward them with food, and watch as nature’s most mischievous problem-solvers outsmart our waste problem. It sounded like the kind of idea a sci-fi writer would pitch as a metaphor for harmonious coexistence, except here it was, being quietly tested in a suburb southwest of Stockholm.

The underlying concept was pure operant conditioning, the same psychological mechanism behind vending machines for pigeons or the way your dog learns that “sit” equals treats. A crow drops a cigarette butt into a metal bin; a camera verifies the object; a food pellet drops.

In theory, the crow spreads the word, the flock imitates the behavior, and suddenly the city has an ultra-low-cost cleanup crew powered by curiosity and peanuts. It was whimsical, scientifically plausible, and deeply appealing in a future-tech sort of way. You could almost picture a crow dashing across a sidewalk like a tiny sanitation worker with wings.

But from the start, Swedish ethologists tapped the brakes. Cigarette butts are chemical cocktails of tar, nicotine, and microplastics. Asking wild birds to pick them up raises uncomfortable questions about animal welfare.

…And then.. quiet. No flashy municipal dashboard tracking crow productivity. No triumphant urban-innovation reports boasting a 75% reduction in cleanup costs. Instead, the story simply resurfaced every year or so, drifting through global media like an urban myth with a Scandinavian accent.

…The only concrete update arrived not from the environmental world but from Sweden’s company registry: in October 2025, Corvid Cleaning AB entered bankruptcy. According to filings, it had zero employees, around SEK 7,000 ($750 USD) in turnover, and no sign of becoming the global crow-powered sanitation empire that headlines imagined.

What remains is an idea, an undeniably enchanting one, that has not yet transformed into a viable solution.

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Definitely a zombie idea: there are posts from only a few days ago showing this working successfully. But it’s only when you try to go to the Corvid Cleaning website that you discover it’s as dead as the proverbial parrot.

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Why college students prefer TikTok over newspapers • The Verge

Victoria Le:

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rather than read traditional journalistic outlets that do the work of reporting, [computer science major Ankit] Khanal still gets most of his news from aggregators like News Daddy. Social media is simply a more appealing news source for Khanal, who says he’s turned off by the biases and political leanings of traditional news outlets. News influencers, on the other hand, are “actually connected to the people they’re getting their news for.” Khanal’s behavior is not unusual. Inside Higher Ed and Generation Lab polled 1,026 students at 181 two- and four-year institutions from December 19th to 23rd, 2024, on their media literacy practices.

In January of this year, the survey results were published, showing that social media is a “top news source” for nearly three in four students. Of those surveyed, “half at least somewhat trust platforms such as Instagram and TikTok to deliver that news and other critical information accurately.” And word of mouth ranked second among students’ most popular news sources, an avenue for half of those surveyed. Legacy media, primarily newspapers, on the other hand, are regular news sources for just two in 10 students, even though they indicate that newspapers are more likely to convey accurate information.

Professor Karen North, founder of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg digital media program, agrees with the study’s findings. At the beginning of each of her classes, North discusses with her students the day’s most relevant headlines. She asks them where they caught wind of those events. The three most common answers among her students each semester: “They get their news from Instagram and TikTok. And from their professors.” But North says classroom newsgetting is a distant third, far behind social media’s grip on student news sourcing culture.

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Wonderful how they don’t like the biases and leanings of “traditional news” but can’t see that there must be a bias in other people’s output. Quite often one has to worry about American students.
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New research on the real reason states first emerged thousands of years ago • The Conversation

Christopher Opie and Quentin Atkinson:

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One theory suggests it was the intensification of agriculture that spurred the creation of states. Once fertilisation and irrigation were used, it produced a surplus that elites could extract to build and maintain states.

However, an alternative view, first put forward by anthropologist James Scott, is gaining ground. This proposes that states didn’t emerge from agriculture in general – rather, they almost invariably formed in societies that grew cereal grains.

Grasses such as wheat, barley, rice and maize grow above ground, ripen at a predictable time, and the grains they produce are readily stored. This makes them perfect for the systems of taxation that Scott argues fuelled state formation.

By Scott’s account, Mafia-style protection rackets forced people to produce grain, from which tax could be extracted and used to fund further exploitation. Scott proposed that these protection rackets were effectively the original states.

In the meantime, writing was invented and adopted as the information system to record those taxes. Once states had formed, writing had a huge influence on the structure and institutions of those societies. States, controlled by very small elites, used writing to build institutions and laws to maintain extreme hierarchies.

We tested these ideas, combining data from hundreds of societies worldwide with a global language family tree representing the ancestral relationships between those societies. We then used a mathematical model to evaluate claims about how statehood and its possible drivers evolved along the branches of this tree.

Our results suggest that intensive agriculture, with fertilisation and irrigation, was just as likely to be the result of state formation as it was to be its cause. On the other hand, grain agriculture consistently predicted subsequent state formation and the adoption of taxes.

We also found a strong correlation between non-grain agriculture and the formation of states. However, crops such as vegetables, fruit, roots and tubers – which were hard to tax – were more likely to be lost, not gained, as states were formed. This is consistent with the idea that grains were favoured over other forms of agriculture by emerging states for their taxation potential.

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Congratulations to Opie and Atkinson on this research, which is published in Nature – and which Opie tells me was inspired (in part) by a link here on The Overspill back in September 2017, since when they’ve been working on this.

Next on their agenda: “This helps us understand current concerns about the destabilisation of modern nation states. Digital technologies and AI are disrupting how we generate, store and broadcast information; globalisation and cryptocurrencies are disrupting our taxation systems; and our agricultural production is under pressure because of climate change.”

For the avoidance of doubt: always happy to link to research projects inspired by Overspill links.
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AI teddy bear back on the market after getting caught telling kids how to find pills and start fires • Futurism

Frank Landymore:

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After pulling its AI-powered teddy bear “Kumma” from the market, the children’s toymaker FoloToy says it’s now restoring sales of the controversial product, which a safety group found would give inappropriate and potentially dangerous responses, including explaining how to find and light matches, locate pills, and discussing myriad sexual fetishes.

“After a full week of rigorous review, testing, and reinforcement of our safety modules, we have begun gradually restoring product sales,” the company said in a statement posted to social media Monday. “As global attention on AI toy safety continues to rise, we believe that transparency, responsibility, and continuous improvement are essential. FoloToy remains firmly committed to building safe, age-appropriate AI companions for children and families worldwide.”

…In its latest announcement, the company says it “strengthened and upgraded our content-moderation and child-safety safeguards,” and “deployed enhanced safety rules and protections through our cloud-based system.”

Neither FoloToy nor OpenAI responded to a request for comment. It’s unclear what AI model the company has chosen to be the default model for its toys going forward, or if the company had its access restored to OpenAI’s models.

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This one could run and run.
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Klarna launches stablecoin to cut cost of cross-border payments • Financial Times

Akila Quinio:

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Klarna is launching a payment stablecoin, becoming the latest fintech to bet that the digital tokens will reshape cross-border payments.

The Swedish “buy now, pay later” lender said on Tuesday it had launched KlarnaUSD on a blockchain created by payment company Stripe and would use the digital token for international payments.

Klarna said the stablecoin would allow it to “dramatically reduce costs for both consumers and merchants”. One person familiar with the plans said it would reduce the costs for Klarna when moving large amounts of money globally by cutting out parties such as the Swift network.

While the launch was likely to help with Klarna’s internal payment infrastructure initially, it was expected to be rolled out for merchants and consumer payments eventually, the person added.

Stablecoins are a form of privately issued digital cash typically backed by short-term securities or cash-like assets, overwhelmingly linked to US dollars. There were $280bn worth of stablecoins in issuance in September, up from $200bn at the start of the year, according to Citigroup.

Klarna’s push into stablecoins follows a wave of similar announcements by payment companies including PayPal and Stripe.

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This sounds sophisticated: cryptocoins! Blockchains! Yet in reality it’s just a sophisticated version of hawala – a system that has been used for effortless currency transfer for more than a thousand years.
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Kagi News

Since we’re doing AI news aggregators, here’s Kagi’s effort, which pulls together multiple news sources and synthesizes them into written-through stories with references and “highlights” of the key points.

It is, indeed, impressive, as reader Karsten L suggested. Going to be a while before it’s picking out links and making snarky yet incisive comments yet though.
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Obesity drug semaglutide fails to slow Alzheimer’s • BBC News

Michelle Roberts:

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Drug maker Novo Nordisk, external says semaglutide, the active ingredient for the weight loss jab Wegovy, does not slow Alzheimer’s – despite initial hopes that it might help against dementia.

Researchers began two large trials involving more than 3,800 people after reports the medicine was having an impact in the real world.

But the studies showed the GLP-1 drug, which is already used to manage type 2 diabetes and obesity, made no difference compared to a dummy drug. The disappointing results are due to be presented at an Alzheimer’s disease conference next month and are yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Dr Susan Kohlhaas from Alzheimer’s Research UK said the results would come as a blow for people affected by Alzheimer’s. Martin Holst Lange, chief scientific officer and executive vice president of research and development at Novo Nordisk, said: “Based on the significant unmet need in Alzheimer’s disease as well as a number of indicative data points, we felt we had a responsibility to explore semaglutide’s potential, despite a low likelihood of success.

“While semaglutide did not demonstrate efficacy in slowing the progression of Alzheimer’s disease, the extensive body of evidence supporting semaglutide continues to provide benefits for individuals with type 2 diabetes, obesity, and related comorbidities,” he said.

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Not quite a panacea. Still does some remarkable things.
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An AI podcasting machine is churning out 3,000 episodes a week • The Wrap

Tess Patton:

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There are already at least 175,000 AI-generated podcast episodes on platforms like Spotify and Apple. That’s thanks to Inception Point AI, a startup with just eight employees cranking out 3,000 episodes a week covering everything from localized weather reports and pollen trackers to a detailed account of Charlie Kirk’s assassination and its cultural impact, to a biography series on Anna Wintour. 

Its podcasting network Quiet Please has generated 12 million lifetime episode downloads and amassed 400,000 subscribers — so, yes, people are really listening to AI podcasts.

Inception Point’s ability to flood the market with audio episodes faster than any human team could match starkly illustrates both the promise of AI and the nightmare scenario that it can truly come after every job. Even as companies have shed more than a million jobs this year, with many citing AI as a reason, there was a belief that certain creative roles would be safe. The biggest allure of a podcast, after all, is the personality of its host. But Inception Point CEO Jeanine Wright believes the tool is proof that automation can make podcasting scalable, profitable and accessible without human writers, editors or hosts.

…At a cost of $1 an episode, Wright takes a quantity-over-quality approach …With each episode only needing 20 listeners to turn a profit, it’s no wonder Inception Point prioritizes quantity. The company noted on its website that it monetizes with iHeartRadio as a partner, but representatives for the audio platform were unfamiliar with it. The company generates its revenue from programmatic ads that run during its episodes.

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Sturgeon’s Law (“90% of everything is crap”) applies. Though I think in this, more like 100%. Also, there’s no evidence provided that there are any human listeners. Though the continuing existence of the company might argue that there are. Then again, the Corvid Cleaning story above shows that the number of stories is no measure of success.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Twenty years on, what has the One Laptop Per Child programme achieved? CC-licensed photo by Steve Rhodes 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. Not that cheap. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Don’t give your child any AI companions • After Babel

Jon Haidt and Zach Rausch:

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Large Language Models (LLMs) are not programmed by human beings in the same way that video games or spreadsheet software are. Like the human brain, they develop over time as they are fed vast quantities of training data. They behave in unexpected ways, often will not respond the same way twice to an identical question, and sometimes reveal information or patterns that were hidden in their training data.

Suppose that intelligent aliens landed on earth tomorrow, and that they seemed, at first, here to help us. Would we send our children off to play with them right away? Would we allow our adolescents to develop romantic attachments and sexual relationships with them? Or would we keep our children far away from them until we knew with high degrees of confidence that they were safe for kids?

We must not repeat the mistakes we made with social media. We cannot wait for the scientific community to come to full agreement about harm before we set clear boundaries on children’s digital lives, because consensus on such harms often takes decades to arrive. We should start with the assumption that new technologies that radically alter childhood are harmful until demonstrated to be safe, and we should be alert for early evidence of harm. We’ve already learned the hard way what happens when tech replaces real human connections.

Given the worrisome rate at which AI horror stories and lawsuits involving teens are surfacing, what do we expect to happen as chatbots enter the social lives of children and toddlers? We can be confident that these chatbots will replace — not augment — the human-to-human relationships that children need for their social and emotional development. An AI companion can imitate friendship, but it can’t actually be a friend. It can say “I understand you,” but it doesn’t. It can mirror a kid’s emotions, but that is not the same as empathy. An AI companion bot has no morals, no feelings, no shame. It is built to keep users of all ages “engaged” with it.

As we approach the holidays, my message to parents is simple: DO NOT GIVE YOUR CHILDREN ANY AI COMPANIONS OR TOYS. Give them toys, sporting equipment, and experiences that will strengthen their in-person relationships, rather than replacing them. (We note there have been several major advisories put out by leading health authorities, including Fairplay, the American Psychological Association, UNICEF, and the Children’s Commissioner of England.)

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Too late for the parents who bought AI teddy bears.
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‘It’s hell for us here’: Mumbai families suffer as datacentres keep the city hooked on coal • The Guardian

Luke Barratt, Atika Rehman and Sushmita:

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Two coal plants plant run by the Indian multinationals Tata Group and Adani were due to close last year in a government push to cut emissions. But late in 2023, those decisions were reversed after Tata argued that electricity demand was rising too fast for Mumbai to go without coal.

Neither company responded to requests for comment.

Economic growth and the need for air conditioning in climate change-linked extreme heat have seen India’s electricity demand soar in recent years. But an investigation by SourceMaterial and the Guardian reveals the biggest single factor in the city’s failure to end its dependence on fossil fuels: energy-hungry datacentres.

Leaked records also reveal the scale of the presence of the world’s biggest datacentre operator, Amazon, in Mumbai. In the city’s metropolitan area, Amazon, on its website, records three “availability zones”, which it defines as one or more datacentres. Leaked records from last year seen by SourceMaterial from inside Amazon reveal the company used 16 in the city.

As India transforms its economy into a hub for artificial intelligence, the datacentre boom is creating a conflict between energy demand and climate pledges, said Bhaskar Chakravorti, who researches technology’s impact on society at Tufts University.

“I’m not surprised they’re falling behind their green transition commitments, especially with the demand growing exponentially,” he said of the Indian government.

Kylee Yonas, a spokeswoman for Amazon, said Mumbai’s “emission challenges” were not caused by Amazon. “On the contrary – Amazon is one of the largest corporate investors in renewable energy in India, and we’ve supported 53 solar and wind projects in the country capable of generating over 4m megawatt hours of clean energy annually,” she said. “These investments, which include our 99 megawatt wind project in Maharashtra, are enough to power over 1.3m Indian homes annually once operational.”

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OK, 1.3m homes – or perhaps one data centre, while the 1.3m homes are coal-fired?
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Elon Musk’s worthless, poisoned hall of mirrors • The Atlantic

Charlie Warzel:

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Platforms not only goad users into posting more and more extreme and provocative content by rewarding them with attention; they also help people monetize that attention. Just before the 2016 election, BuzzFeed’s Craig Silverman and Lawrence Alexander uncovered a network of Macedonian teens who recognized that America’s deep political divisions were a lucrative vein to exploit and pumped out bogus news articles that were designed to go viral on Facebook, which they then put advertisements on. Today it’s likely that at least some of these bogus MAGA accounts make pennies on the dollar via X’s Creator program, which rewards engaging accounts with a cut of advertising revenue; many of them have the telltale blue check mark.

As Bellingcat’s Eliot Higgins noted on Bluesky, X’s architecture turns what should be an information ecosystem into a performative one. “Actors aren’t communicating; they’re staging provocations for yield,” he wrote. “The result is disordered discourse: signals detached from truth, identity shaped by escalation, and a feedback loop where the performance eclipses reality itself.” Beyond the attentional and financial rewards, platforms such as X have gutted their trust-and-safety or moderation teams in service of a bastardized notion of free-speech maximalism—creating the conditions for this informational nightmare.

The second lesson here is that X appears to be inflating the culture wars in ultimately unknowable but certainly important ways. On X this weekend, I watched one (seemingly real) person coming to terms with this fact. “Fascinating to look through every account I’ve disagreed with and find out they’re all fake,” they posted on Saturday. To be certain, X is not the main cause for American political division or arguing online, but it is arguably one of its greatest amplifiers. X is still a place where many journalists and editors in newsrooms across America share and consume political news. Political influencers, media personalities, and even politicians will take posts from supposed ordinary accounts and hold them up as examples of their ideological opponents’ dysfunction, corruption, or depravity.

How many of these accounts, arguments, or news cycles were a product of empty rage bait, proffered by foreign or just fake actors? Recent examples suggest the system is easily gamed: 32% to 37% of the online activity around Cracker Barrel’s controversial logo change this summer was driven by fake accounts, according to consultants hired by the restaurant chain.

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(Gift link.)
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The penicillin myth • Asimov Press

kevin Blake:

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Everyone knows that penicillin destroys bacteria, and [Alexander] Fleming observed staphylococci seemingly being destroyed by a mould that produced penicillin.

However, upon closer reading of Fleming’s 1929 paper, it becomes clear that a great deal of work was either omitted or inadequately described. There is, for example, no description of the type of culture medium used; whether or not the plate had been incubated; how long it had been on the bench; and, most important of all, what species of Staphylococcus was being studied.

When publishing a scientific paper, scientists are expected to include a detailed description of their methods alongside their results. Like a recipe, these methods should clearly and comprehensively describe the materials used and the steps taken so that other scientists can replicate the experiment. And while incomplete or poorly-described methods are a perennial problem, the omission of these key experimental details (even in a report on an accidental discovery) is surprising.

This became a problem when, as interest in penicillin grew, other investigators tried to repeat Fleming’s discovery. In 1944, Margaret Jennings (who later married a long-time colleague and penicillin researcher, Howard Florey) spread purified penicillin onto plates of fully grown staphylococci. This should have had a more potent effect than Fleming’s, which was allegedly produced only with the crude “mould juice” from an accidental contaminant. Jennings, however, observed no visible change.

In 1965, the pathologist W.D. Foster attempted a similar experiment using penicillin crystals dropped directly onto staphylococcus colonies, creating “astronomical” concentrations within their vicinity. But still, the colonies remained unaffected.

Other attempts at replication called into question whether the mould could have even grown on a plate full of staphylococci. Pharmacologist D.B. Colquhoun claimed that, in 1955, he found that Penicillium mould refused to grow on a plate already full of staphylococcus colonies. Or, that, if it did, it produced no visible effect on the colonies.

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Fascinating story about how a widely accepted story is almost surely not literally true, but instead happened by some other scientific process.
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Iranians fear taps running dry as country faces worst drought in 60 years • ABC News

Matthew Doran and Leonie Thorne:

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It was early November when the Iranian president was forced to make a startling admission.

Faced with a perfect storm of weather woes and decades of mismanagement, Masoud Pezeshkian issued a warning to his country that the situation could deteriorate even further. “We’ve run short of water. If it doesn’t rain, we in Tehran … must start rationing,” he said. “Even if we do ration and it still does not rain, then we will have no water at all. They [citizens] must evacuate Tehran.”

While it may seem like an exaggeration, it is the shocking reality facing the Iranian population — particularly in its capital, which has in excess of 15 million people across the broader metropolitan area. Taps are already running dry across Iran as the government enforces strict rationing to try to conserve what limited supplies it still has.

…Rainfall across much of the country is about 85% below average, with the worst drought conditions in about 60 years taking hold.

Decades of mismanagement of natural resources, including the construction of too many dams and a lack of enforcement when it came to drilling illegal wells, have combined with inefficient agriculture and adverse weather conditions to lead to the crisis.

“Tehran — the richest city of Iran, the most politically powerful city with more than 15 million in the metropolitan — is facing day zero in a few days or a few weeks,” Kaveh Madani, director of the United Nations University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health, told the ABC earlier this month.

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More outlets are noticing. But the problem of finding out what is happening remains as difficult as ever.
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Apple’s ‘skinny’ iPhone falls flat with disappointing early sales • Financial Times

Michael Acton:

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[Research group] IDC, which tracks iPhone sales through checks on Apple’s supply chain, found the company slashed production plans in half within weeks of the launch after the Air sold about a third of the tech group’s highest expectations.

Apple is seeking new ways to boost iPhone sales, which have flattened in recent years but accounted for $209bn in revenue in the year to September, roughly half of the group’s total sales.

Other devices in the iPhone 17 line-up, which launched at the same time as the Air, have sold well. Apple has forecast these sales will drive a record holiday quarter, far above Wall Street estimates.

Morgan Stanley analysts estimated the tech group could build 90m units of these new models in the second half of 2025, as many as 6m more than anticipated before the launch. The figures were “partially offset by relative weakness in the iPhone Air”, they added.

Apple declined to comment.

Slower sales of the Air came despite a flood of interest around its launch in September. The Air’s product page pulled in 1m views during the month, according to web intelligence platform Similarweb. It helped boost total online views around this year’s iPhone launch to 7.4m, 28% higher than the previous year’s products.

However, Similarweb found the conversion rate for the Air was about a third lower than other models, meaning the Air’s online audience translated to fewer sales.

“It created interest . . . showing the product innovation was still there,” said Dan Newman, chief executive of research company The Futurum Group. “[But] for a lot of people, the better camera features and battery life features on the Pro just outweighed the appeal of the Air.”

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clone.fyi

I don’t know quite what to make of this: it’s a news aggregation site, but what the criteria for inclusion or being featured are isn’t stated, or clear. It’s linked to farcaster.xyz/clone which calls itself “your favorite founder’s favorite bookmark”, but beyond that?

The links are mostly news-based, but they don’t quite grab my attention.
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Laptops in the long run: evidence from the One Laptop per Child Program in rural Peru • NBER

Santiago Cueto, Diether Beuermann, Julian Cristia, Ofer Malamud and Francisco Pardo:

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This paper examines a large-scale randomized evaluation of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program in 531 Peruvian rural primary schools. We use administrative data on academic performance and grade progression over 10 years to estimate the long-run effects of increased computer access on (i) school performance over time and (ii) students’ educational trajectories. Following schools over time, we find no significant effects on academic performance but some evidence of negative effects on grade progression. Following students over time, we find no significant effects on primary and secondary completion, academic performance in secondary school, or university enrollment. Survey data indicate that computer access significantly improved students’ computer skills but not their cognitive skills…

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You can read more background about the OLPC project. The OLPC vision, if you need reminding, was “With access to this type of tool, children are engaged in their own education, and learn, share, and create together. They become connected to each other, to the world and to a brighter future. The best preparation for children isn’t test prep. It is ‘to develop the passion for learning and the ability to learn how to learn.'”

Doesn’t seem to have worked out that way.
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The Turkish barbershops hiding a vast criminal network • Daily Telegraph

Danny Shaw on a police operation tackling crime in the surplus barber shops around Britain:

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In April, as part of a three-week crackdown on high-street crime focusing on barbershops, police secured freezing orders over bank accounts totalling more than £1m, arrested 35 people, questioned 55 others about their immigration status and helped to safeguard 97 individuals in relation to potential modern slavery.

Tens of thousands of illegal cigarettes, vapes and packs of tobacco were seized – and two cannabis farms were found. The second, more extensive, phase of Machinize, this autumn, involved visits to 2,734 premises in the UK, 376 of which were barbershops. More than 900 people were arrested and more than £10.7m of suspected criminal proceeds seized.

The NCA operation followed the conviction of an Iranian Kurd who had used his barbershop in London as a base for an overseas criminal network smuggling 10,000 people into the UK in small boats. Hewa Rahimpur, who had claimed asylum after arriving in Britain in 2016, had set up the barber’s with a friend before renting a space for a food kiosk. In reality, he was the leader of a sprawling crime gang that sourced boats, engines and lifejackets for migrant crossings. In October 2024, he was jailed in Belgium for 11 years, with the case, along with the overall proliferation of barbershops, proving to be a “tipping point” for the authorities in the UK.

“From an NCA perspective, really, [it was] at the beginning of this year when we acknowledged that this problem had become too big for any one organisation to tackle in isolation,” says Sal Melki, the NCA’s deputy director of economic crime. “We needed to intervene,” he says.

For criminals, the main attraction of barbershops as fronts for crime is the ease with which they can be established. Countless high street properties lie vacant. All that’s needed to start up are a few chairs, hairbrushes and a pair of scissors. “You don’t need a huge amount in terms of stock, premises are widely available, it’s relatively easy in terms of planning permission and licensing,” says Melki.

«

My little market town has six barbershops, two (perhaps three) of them “Turkish”. There are about the same number of hairdressers, none “Turkish”. Peculiar. (Free to read with email registration.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The CEO of Mastodon is stepping down after ten years – partly in response to people’s attitude towards him online. CC-licensed photo by Alpha Photo 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. Is there a phrase for it? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Meta buried “causal” evidence of social media harm, US court filings allege • Reuters

Jeff Horwitz:

»

Meta shut down internal research into the mental health effects of Facebook after finding causal evidence that its products harmed users’ mental health, according to unredacted filings in a lawsuit by US school districts against Meta and other social media platforms.

In a 2020 research project codenamed “Project Mercury,” Meta scientists worked with survey firm Nielsen to gauge the effect of “deactivating” Facebook, according to Meta documents obtained via discovery. To the company’s disappointment, “people who stopped using Facebook for a week reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness and social comparison,” internal documents said.

Rather than publishing those findings or pursuing additional research, the filing states, Meta called off further work and internally declared that the negative study findings were tainted by the “existing media narrative” around the company.

Privately, however, a staffer insisted that the conclusions of the research were valid, according to the filing.

“The Nielsen study does show causal impact on social comparison ☹️”, an unnamed staff researcher allegedly wrote. Another staffer worried that keeping quiet about negative findings would be akin to the tobacco industry “doing research and knowing cigs were bad and then keeping that info to themselves.”

Despite Meta’s own work documenting a causal link between its products and negative mental health effects, the filing alleges, Meta told Congress that it had no ability to quantify whether its products were harmful to teenage girls.

In a statement Saturday, Meta spokesman Andy Stone said the study was stopped because its methodology was flawed and that it worked diligently to improve the safety of its products.

«

Amazing how the methodology is always flawed when it shows bad effects, but fine when it shows good ones.
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My next chapter with Mastodon • Mastodon Blog

Eugen Rochko is the founder of the Mastodon project, and also its strategy and product advisor:

»

After nearly 10 years, I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon and transferring my ownership of the trademark and other assets to the Mastodon non-profit. Over the course of my time at Mastodon, I have centred myself less and less in our outward communications, and to some degree, this is the culmination of that trend.

Mastodon is bigger than me, and though the technology we develop on is itself decentralized—with heaps of alternative fediverse projects demonstrating that participation in this ecosystem is possible without our involvement—it benefits our community to ensure that the project itself which so many people have come to love and depend on remains true to its values. There are too many examples of founder egos sabotaging thriving communities, and while I’d like to think myself an exception, I understand why people would prefer better guardrails.

But it would be uncouth for me to pretend that there isn’t some self-interest involved. Being in charge of a social media project is, turns out, quite the stressful endeavour, and I don’t have the right personality for it. I think I need not elaborate that the passion so many feel for social media does not always manifest in healthy ways. You are to be compared with tech billionaires, with their immense wealth and layered support systems, but with none of the money or resources. It manifests in what people expect of you, and how people talk about you.

I remember somebody jokingly suggesting that I challenge Elon Musk to a fight (this was during his and Mark Zuckerberg’s martial arts feud), and quietly thinking to myself, I am literally not paid enough for that. I remember also, some Spanish newspaper article that for some reason, concluded that I don’t dress as fashionably as Jeff Bezos, based on the extremely sparse number of pictures of myself I have shared on the web. Over an entire decade, these tiny things chip away at you slowly. Some things chip faster.

«

People used to be enormously critical of Twitter’s (as it was) executives for not using Twitter, but increasingly – when you look at the experience of Rochko, and Bluesky’s Jay Graber – that looks like a smart move.
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Magician loses password to his hand after RFID chip implant • The Register

Richard Speed:

»

It’s important to have your login in hand, literally. Zi Teng Wang, a magician who implanted an RFID chip in his appendage, has admitted losing access to it because he forgot the password.

It seemed like such a neat idea – get an RFID chip implanted in your hand and then do magical stuff with it. Except it didn’t work out that way. “It turns out,” said Zi, “that pressing someone else’s phone to my hand repeatedly, trying to figure out where their phone’s RFID reader is, really doesn’t come off super mysterious and magical and amazing.”

Then there are the people who don’t even have their phone’s RFID reader enabled. Using his own phone would, in Zi’s words, lack a certain “oomph.”

Oh well, how about making the chip spit out a Bitcoin address? “That literally never came up either.”

In the end, Zi rewrote the chip to link to a meme, “and if you ever meet me in person you can scan my chip and see the meme.”

It was all suitably amusing until the Imgur link Zi was using went down. Not everything on the World Wide Web is forever, and there is no guarantee that a given link will work indefinitely. Indeed, access to Imgur from the United Kingdom was abruptly cut off on September 30 in response to the country’s age verification rules.

Still, the link not working isn’t the end of the world. Zi could just reprogram the chip again, right?

Wrong. “When I went to rewrite the chip, I was horrified to realize I forgot the password that I had locked it with.”

«

Insufficiently advanced technology: definitely distinguishable from magic. And speaking of passwords…
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Election 2025 Update • International Association for Cryptologic Research

»

This announcement is in connection with the recent IACR 2025 election conducted using the Helios electronic voting system. Regrettably, we have encountered a fatal technical problem that prevents us from concluding the election and accessing the final tally.

For this election and in accordance with the bylaws of the IACR, the three members of the IACR 2025 Election Committee acted as independent trustees, each holding a portion of the cryptographic key material required to jointly decrypt the results. This aspect of Helios’ design ensures that no two trustees could collude to determine the outcome of an election or the contents of individual votes on their own: all trustees must provide their decryption shares.

Unfortunately, one of the three trustees has irretrievably lost their private key, an honest but unfortunate human mistake, and therefore cannot compute their decryption share. As a result, Helios is unable to complete the decryption process, and it is technically impossible for us to obtain or verify the final outcome of this election.

This situation is visible on the public election page in Helios, where the trustees are listed: you can see that two trustees have successfully uploaded their decryption share material, whereas one has not. We point this out so that one can independently confirm that the issue arises from the strict cryptographic requirements of the system itself. You can consult this information at: https://vote.heliosvoting.org/helios/elections/e1130d04-aac6-11f0-95c8-3a40ecaef3ba/trustees/view

After careful consideration, we have decided that the only responsible course of action is to void this election and start a new election from scratch.

«

In the first place, hilariously ironic; second, shows why nobody used PGP before password managers (forgetting your passphrase is so easy, and that’s it forever); third, clearly means a lone trustee can void an election, thus delaying or preventing a result they think they will not like. Classic overdesign which fails to consider alternative malign motives.
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Pornhub is urging tech giants to enact device-based age verification • Wired via Ars Technica

Jason Parham:

»

In letters sent to Apple, Google, and Microsoft this week, Pornhub’s parent company urged the tech giants to support device-based age verification in their app stores and across their operating systems, WIRED has learned.

“Based on our real-world experience with existing age assurance laws, we strongly support the initiative to protect minors online,” reads the letter sent by Anthony Penhale, chief legal officer for Aylo, which owns Pornhub, Brazzers, Redtube, and YouPorn. “However, we have found site-based age assurance approaches to be fundamentally flawed and counterproductive.”

The letter adds that site-based age verification methods have “failed to achieve their primary objective: protecting minors from accessing age-inappropriate material online.” Aylo says device-based authentication is a better solution for this issue because once a viewer’s age is determined via phone or tablet, their age signal can be shared over its application programming interface (API) with adult sites.

The letters were sent following the continued adoption of age verification laws in the US and UK, which require users to upload an ID or other personal documentation to verify that they are not a minor before viewing sexually explicit content; often this requires using third-party services. Currently, 25 US states have passed some form of ID verification, each with different provisions.

Pornhub has experienced an enormous dip in traffic as a result of its decision to pull out of most states that have enacted these laws. The platform was one of the few sites to comply with the new law in Louisiana but doing so caused traffic to drop by 80%. Similarly, since implementation of the Online Safety Act, Pornhub has lost nearly 80% of its UK viewership.

The company argues that it’s a privacy risk to leave age verification up to third-party sites and that people will simply seek adult content on platforms that don’t comply with the laws.

«

Certainly true that getting age verification done via sites doesn’t work well. Whereas by contrast the amount of data that they have for device IDs is colossal and hard to fake.
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The remains of an ancient planet lie deep within Earth • Caltech

»

In the 1980s, geophysicists made a startling discovery: two continent-sized blobs of unusual material were found deep near the centre of the Earth, one beneath the African continent and one beneath the Pacific Ocean. Each blob is twice the size of the Moon and likely composed of different proportions of elements than the mantle surrounding it.

Where did these strange blobs—formally known as large low-velocity provinces (LLVPs)—come from? A new study led by Caltech researchers suggests that they are remnants of an ancient planet that violently collided with Earth billions of years ago in the same giant impact that created our Moon.

The study, published in the journal Nature on November 1, also proposes an answer to another planetary science mystery. Researchers have long hypothesized that the Moon was created in the aftermath of a giant impact between Earth and a smaller planet dubbed Theia, but no trace of Theia has ever been found in the asteroid belt or in meteorites. This new study suggests that most of Theia was absorbed into the young Earth, forming the LLVPs, while residual debris from the impact coalesced into the Moon.

The research was led by Qian Yuan, O.K. Earl Postdoctoral Scholar Research Associate in the laboratories of both Paul Asimow (MS ’93, PhD ’97), the Eleanor and John R. McMillan Professor of Geology and Geochemistry; and Michael Gurnis, the John E. And Hazel S. Smits Professor of Geophysics and Clarence R. Allen Leadership Chair, director of Caltech’s Seismological Laboratory, and director of the Schmidt Academy for Software Engineering at Caltech.

…why did Theia’s material clump into the two distinct blobs instead of mixing together with the rest of the forming planet? The researchers’ simulations showed that much of the energy delivered by Theia’s impact remained in the upper half of the mantle, leaving Earth’s lower mantle cooler than estimated by earlier, lower-resolution impact models. Because the lower mantle was not totally melted by the impact, the blobs of iron-rich material from Theia stayed largely intact as they sifted down to the base of the mantle, like the colored masses of paraffin wax in a turned-off lava lamp.

«

The reckoning now is that Theia came from the inner solar system and yeeted into the early Earth. Our existence looks more and more like the craziest set of coincidences.
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Top MAGA influencers accidentally unmasked as foreign actors • Daily Beast

Jack Revell:

»

Elon Musk’s social media site X has rolled out a new feature in an effort to increase transparency—and unwittingly revealed that many of the site’s top MAGA influencers are actually foreign actors.

The new “About This Account” feature, which became available to X users on Friday, allows others to see where an account is based, when they joined the platform, how often they have changed their username, and how they downloaded the X app.

Upon rollout, rival factions began to inspect just where their online adversaries were really based on the combative social platform—with dozens of major MAGA and right-wing influencer accounts revealed to be based overseas.

“This is easily one of the greatest days on this platform,” wrote Democratic influencer Harry Sisson. “Seeing all of these MAGA accounts get exposed as foreign actors trying to destroy the United States is a complete vindication of Democrats, like myself and many on here, who have been warning about this”.

Dozens of major accounts masquerading as “America First” or “MAGA” proponents have been identified as originating in places such as Russia, India, and Nigeria.

In one example, the account MAGANationX—with nearly 400,000 followers and a bio reading “Patriot Voice for We The People”—is actually based in Eastern Europe. An Ivanka Trump fan account, IvankaNews, has 1 million followers and frequently posts about the dangers of Islam, the threat of illegal immigration and support for Trump. That account is based in Nigeria.

«

The revelations have been amazing. (They’re found by clicking on the “Joined” date with a disclosure arrow on the user’s profile.) A pro-Scottish independence account turned out to be based in Iran, operating via the Iran App Store – that is, the X app was downloaded from the Iranian version of the App Store.

There are surely plenty more to come. It’s a feature that looks obvious in retrospect; it’s revealing the many accounts based in India, Pakistan and other low-income countries where accounts have used the monetisation feature to post ragebait for profit.
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A startup’s bid to dim the Sun • The New Yorker

Elizabeth Kolbert:

»

Stardust is the name of a small startup with enormous ambitions. The company, which is based in Israel and registered in Delaware, proposes to do nothing less than dim the sun. Its business plan is modelled on volcanoes. In a major eruption, millions of tons of sulphur dioxide get thrown up into the stratosphere. There, the gas reacts to form droplets of sulphuric acid that scatter sunlight back to space. The result is that less energy reaches the Earth and the planet cools. After Mt. Pinatubo, in the Philippines, blew its top, in 1991, average global temperatures dipped by almost 1º Fahrenheit.

Stardust seeks to market eruptions of its own. It is working to develop highly reflective particles that could be sprayed above the clouds, where they would drift around, mirrorlike, and, the theory goes, help combat global warming. The company calls this scheme “sunlight reflection technology,” although it is more commonly known as solar geoengineering. In one form or another, the idea has been kicking around for decades, but Stardust has taken it a major—some might say terrifying—step forward.

The company says that it has created a new sort of reflective particle, the specific makeup of which it has so far declined to reveal. (It states that the particles are made from a material that is “safe for humans and ecosystems.”) And recently it announced that it had raised $60m in venture capital to pursue its plans, which include developing a dispersal system that could be used to spray the particles into the stratosphere.

«

As I’ve said before, geoengineering is going to be tried by scientists, governments, private investors and billionaires. Only two (maybe only one) of those take any notice of being told not to do things.
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What about making space stations…inflatable? • Works in Progress Magazine

Angadh Nanjangud on how to create rotating space stations that could generate Earth-like gravity:

»

Assembling the ISS meant launching more than 40 rockets over several years (plus even more launches for cargo resupply and repairs). Even with all these launches, the resultant space station is so small that it can support a typical crew of only seven, a little over twice what the first ever space station, Salyut 1, managed in 1972.

Even with the huge cost reductions in delivering payloads into space made by SpaceX, the sheer scale of materials needed for one of these structures makes it hard to imagine that modular in-orbit assembly will scale to von Braun’s anticipated 80 humans or the 100 people that SpaceX’s Starship is intended to hold any time soon. Civilization-scale megastructures like the Stanford Torus and O’Neill cylinders, which might hold tens of thousands to millions of people, appear even more outlandish today than when they were first proposed half a century ago.

The bottleneck is using small ‘tin can’ modular spacecraft as the centrepiece for assembly. There is a viable alternative, but to find it we need to look to pre-Apollo space technology.

Between 1959 and 1962, NASA Langley explored architectures that progressed towards von Braun’s vision of a large space station, without the constraints imposed by modular construction.

A 1959 conference instigated by Larry Loftin, Director of Aeronautical Research at NASA Langley, came up with two prototypes for ‘unitized’ structures, structures that eliminated or reduced the need for in-orbit assembly.

The first idea explored inflating large Goodyear tire tubes into wheel-shaped space stations. Made from soft materials like rubber and nylon, the Langley team was concerned that these tires would be vulnerable to collisions with micrometeorites hurtling through space that could puncture the station, with fatal outcomes.

The second idea came from North American Aviation, which proposed a series of (mostly) rigid hexa gonal space stations. This resulted in a 15-foot prototype, made from six rigid hinge-connected pipes. This design folded neatly into a rocket for launch, deploying automatically once in orbit. The rigidity of its habitable elements offered better protection against micro meteorite collisions than Goodyear’s rubber donut. Another three inflatable pipes connected the outer habitat ring to a central hub via air-lock doors, which could be sealed in case of rupture.

«

The problem of space debris and the calamitous effect of a collision on something so comparatively large seem understated. But: inflatable space stations! It’s wonderfully bonkers.
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Makran or Bust: Tehran’s water crisis gets worse • Global Threads

Peter Frankopan on Tehran’s worsening drought:

»

Coverage of the crisis in state-run outlets like IRNA and ISNA has become urgent, even bleak, in recent days.

IRNA’s daily update now reads as 24 hour updates of slow-motion collapse: reservoir levels edging ever further downward, a reminder that rainfall are totals stuck zero, and engineers talking about ‘emergency extraction protocols.’

The Latyan Dam, a critical artery for the capital, is being described as ‘dangerously close’ to inactive due to drought.

Things are looking desperate. Iran’s weather modification and cloud-seeding programmes have been modest in recent years; they have suddenly become central to hopes of salvation.

In the last week senior officials from the Organisation for the Development of Meteoric Water Technologies announced that aircraft (and soon drones) are being deployed to seed viable clouds in catchment regions feeding Tehran. State TV has run segments showing technicians loading flares onto the wings of a small plane, explaining that ‘inducing precipitation’ was now a matter of national security.

Iran has used cloud-seeding before, but never with this level of publicity, nor with this sense of urgency. The Iran Meteorological Organization said it expected rain in 18 of Iran’s 31 provinces; but because the ground is baked so hard, soils have not been able to absorb precipitation, such as at Abdanan in western Iran. Cloud-seeding is not delivering what is needed in the right scale, or in the right place.

Iranian social media has been full of videos showing apartment blocks filling buckets at in the middle of the night, trying to catch the last whisper of pressure before the nightly collapse. Young Tehranis have created crowd-sourced maps tracking water pressure by neighbourhood, shading parts of of the southern part of the city in red to show almost constant outages.

These maps care being circulated widely, sometimes crossing into state-media where they are labelled unreliable and ‘unverified’ – a standard formula when an inconvenient truth is too widespread to ignore entirely.

«

There really is very little about this drought in the rest of the media.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Wars shape societies, and technologies shape wars, so how will drones change our worlds? CC-licensed photo by Rob Pegoraro 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. Buzzing. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

As Windows turns 40, Microsoft faces an AI backlash • The Verge

Tom Warren:

»

Windows 8 was arguably the most divisive release of Windows in its 40-year history, as Microsoft attempted to overhaul the operating system for a touch-first future. Spooked by the iPad, the company shipped a radical overhaul that ditched the familiar Start menu and left users frustrated and confused. They weren’t quite ready for the future that Microsoft envisioned.

As I look at Windows 11 today, on the 40th anniversary of the operating system’s release, its ongoing AI overhaul is starting to feel similar to that controversial redesign.

Microsoft detailed its vision for Windows to become an “agentic OS” at its Ignite conference this week. The software maker is building AI capabilities directly into Windows to allow agents to control your PC for you, all while it continues to infuse AI features and Copilot buttons into all corners of the OS.

For some Windows users, it’s already all too much.

Windows chief Pavan Davuluri announced the agentic OS plans in a post on X last week, and there was an immediate backlash in the hundreds of replies. “It’s evolving into a product that’s driving people to Mac and Linux,” said one person. “Stop this nonsense,” said another, and one reply even asked for a return to the Windows 7 days of a “clean UI, clean icon, a unified control panel, no bloat apps, no ads, just a pure performant OS.”

…Whenever I write about AI features in Windows, it’s near-impossible to find comments praising the new additions. I’ve tried Copilot Voice and Vision multiple times and most of the time I end up with results like my colleague Antonio found this week. Copilot seems amazing when its magic trick works, but when it fails time and time again, you rapidly lose trust in it.

During my recent break I asked Copilot Vision to help me use a UV bottle sterilizer I had purchased recently. I didn’t have the manual nearby, and the sterilizer has a confusing number of buttons. Copilot Vision recognized it was a sterilizer, but missed the key part that it was a UV model, so it asked me to fill it with water. If I had done that and turned it on, I would have ended up with a kitchen full of smoke and a broken device.

«

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Nicolas Guillou, French ICC judge sanctioned by the US: ‘you are effectively blacklisted by much of the world’s banking system’ • Le Monde

Stéphanie Maupas:

»

Nicolas Guillou, a French judge at the International Criminal Court (ICC), was sanctioned by the United States under a decision made by Donald Trump on August 20. The US Treasury Department justified the action, stating that “Guillou is being designated for ruling to authorize the ICC’s issuance of arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant.” Both men are indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity for their roles in the destruction of the Gaza Strip.

In total, six judges and three prosecutors from the ICC, including Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan, have been sanctioned by the US. In an interview with Le Monde, the judge explained the impact of these measures on his work and daily life. Without commenting on ongoing cases, he called on European authorities to activate a mechanism that could limit the impact of US restrictions.

«

The rest of the article is behind a paywall, but there’s an X post explaining it:

»

Guillou’s daily existence has been transformed into a Kafkaesque nightmare. He cannot: open or maintain accounts with Google, Amazon, Apple, or any US company; make hotel reservations (Expedia canceled his booking in France hours after he made it); conduct online commerce, since he can’t know if the packaging is American; use any major credit card (Visa, Mastercard, Amex are all American); access normal banking services, even with non-American banks, as banks worldwide close sanctioned accounts; conduct virtually any financial transaction.

He describes it as being “economically banned across most of the planet,” including in his own country, France, and where he works, the Netherlands.

That’s the real shocking aspect of this: the Americans are:
• punishing a European citizen
• for doing his job in Europe
• applying laws Europe officially supports
• at an institution based in Europe
• that Europe helped create and fund

«

Imagine being unable to do anything involving a US tech company, let alone a US company. You’d be utterly stuffed. And this isn’t a little experiment by a journalist to see “how was my day not using Google and Amazon”.
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The future of war is the future of society • Noahpinion

Noah Smith:

»

Take a look at the long-term history of warfare. Our numbers are pretty patchy, but as far as we can tell, there have been three really big waves of warfare over the last millennium:

1: The Mongol conquests in the 1200s (and follow-up conquerors in the 1300s like Timur)
2: The Thirty Years’ War and the fall of the Ming Dynasty in China in the 1600s
3: The World Wars and communist revolutions of the 1900s

People argue a lot over why there were these three big outbreaks of war all over the world. Some blame climate change, while others blame patterns of trade, population growth, and so on. But I think one big plausible factor is military technology.

Each of the three waves of war coincides with a dominant package of military technology. The Mongols ran circles around their opponents with stirrup-equipped horses, and outranged them with recurved bows. The wars of the 1600s represented the peak of gunpowder warfare, while the wars of the 20th century were the peak of industrial warfare — planes, tanks, metal ships, and so on.

Interestingly, none of those big wars happened right after the key technologies were introduced. There was always a substantial lag. Most of the bow and stirrup technologies that made the Mongols so fearsome were invented a millennium earlier by the Xiongnu (the predecessor of the Huns). Cannon and muskets were invented a century before the cataclysms of the 1600s. The World Wars saw rapid innovation, but the machine gun, the howitzer, the ironclad battleship, and other key technologies were pioneered earlier. There were constant incremental improvements in all of these technologies, of course, but it’s unlikely that they reached some special threshold of lethality that caused wars to suddenly get much much bigger and deadlier.

Instead, what changed were the societies that made use of the weapons.

«

Drones are the next wave for warfare. Now, which country has the best supply chain for making drones? (Also: The Guardian’s Technology section had a piece about how important drones were becoming in warfare back in.. 2006.)
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AI’s blind spot: tools fail to detect their own fakes • Agence France-Presse via France 24

»

Internet users are increasingly turning to chatbots to verify images in real time, but the tools often fail, raising questions about their visual debunking capabilities at a time when major tech platforms are scaling back human fact-checking.

In many cases, the tools wrongly identify images as real even when they are generated using the same generative models, further muddying an online information landscape awash with AI-generated fakes.

Among them is a fabricated image circulating on social media of Elizaldy Co, a former Philippine lawmaker charged by prosecutors in a multibillion-dollar flood-control corruption scam that sparked massive protests in the disaster-prone country.

The image of Co, whose whereabouts has been unknown since the official probe began, appeared to show him in Portugal.

When online sleuths tracking him asked Google’s new AI mode whether the image was real, it incorrectly said it was authentic.

…AFP tracked down the source of Co’s photo that garnered over a million views across social media — a middle-aged web developer in the Philippines, who said he created it “for fun” using Nano Banana, Gemini’s AI image generator.

“Sadly, a lot of people believed it,” he told AFP, requesting anonymity to avoid a backlash.

“I edited my post — and added ‘AI generated’ to stop the spread — because I was shocked at how many shares it got.”

«

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Ofcom fines deepfake nudification site for lack of age checks • BBC News

Liv McMahon:

»

The operator of a so-called “nudification” site has been fined for failing to put in age verification measures, which are required under online safety laws.

The regulator Ofcom investigated Itai Tech Ltd, which provides AI tools allowing users to edit images to seemingly remove someone’s clothing.

On Thursday, Ofcom said it had fined the company £50,000 for its age check failings, plus an additional £5,000 for not responding to its information requests.

BBC News has contacted Itai Tech Ltd for comment. The nudity website it runs is currently not accessible from a UK IP address., and documents on Companies House show Itai Tech Ltd recently applied to strike itself off the UK register of companies.

Ofcom said its fine accounted for the company’s decision to make its site unavailable to UK users, which it said occurred shortly after the investigation started in May. “The use of highly effective age assurance to protect children from harmful pornographic content is non-negotiable and we will accept no excuses for failure,” said Suzanne Cater, director of enforcement at Ofcom. “Any service which fails to meet their age-check duties under the Online Safety Act can expect to face robust enforcement action, including significant fines.”

This is the regulator’s second fine imposed under the law – which requires pornographic websites to verify users are over 18. Its first fine was to online message board 4chan, which it said had not responded to requests for information about measures required to prevent people from accessing illegal content.

«

4chan hasn’t paid its fine (and shows no sign of doing so), and it’s a good bet that this one won’t be collected either.
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Bonkers bitcoin heist: five-star hotels, cash-filled envelopes, and vanishing funds • Wired via Ars Technica

Joel Khalili:

»

As Kent Halliburton stood in a bathroom at the Rosewood Hotel in central Amsterdam, thousands of miles from home, running his fingers through an envelope filled with €10,000 in crisp banknotes, he started to wonder what he had gotten himself into.

Halliburton is the cofounder and CEO of Sazmining, a company that operates bitcoin mining hardware on behalf of clients—a model known as “mining-as-a-service.” Halliburton is based in Peru, but Sazmining runs mining hardware out of third-party data centers across Norway, Paraguay, Ethiopia, and the United States.

As Halliburton tells it, he had flown to Amsterdam the previous day, August 5, to meet Even and Maxim, two representatives of a wealthy Monaco-based family. The family office had offered to purchase hundreds of bitcoin mining rigs from Sazmining—around $4m worth—which the company would install at a facility currently under construction in Ethiopia. Before finalizing the deal, the family office had asked to meet Halliburton in person.

When Halliburton arrived at the Rosewood Hotel, he found Even and Maxim perched in a booth. They struck him as playboy, high-roller types—particularly Maxim, who wore a tan three-piece suit and had a highly manicured look, his long dark hair parted down the middle. A Rolex protruded from the cuff of his sleeve.

Over a three-course lunch—ceviche with a roe garnish, Chilean sea bass, and cherry cake—they discussed the contours of the deal and traded details about their respective backgrounds. Even was talkative and jocular, telling stories about blowout parties in Marrakech. Maxim was aloof; he mostly stared at Halliburton, holding his gaze for long periods at a time as though sizing him up.

As a relationship-building exercise, Even proposed that Halliburton sell the family office around $3,000 in bitcoin. Halliburton was initially hesitant, but chalked it up as a peculiar dating ritual. One of the guys slid Halliburton the cash-filled envelope and told him to go to the bathroom, where he could count out the amount in private. “It felt like something out of a James Bond movie,” says Halliburton. “It was all very exotic to me.”

«

It’s very complicated, and quite long. But what it also shows is: if you’ve got money (especially crypto) you’ll be targeted by scammers who are good at what they do.
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COP30 evacuated after fire breaks out • BBC News

Georgina Rannard and the BBC climate team:

»

The UN climate talks COP30 have been evacuated due to a fire breaking out inside the venue in Belém, Brazil.

BBC journalists saw flames and smoke in the pavilion area before they were rushed outside where fire engines raced past.

The UN has said the fire is now contained “with limited damage”. It is not yet known what caused the blaze.

The talks were in the final hours of trying to agree on next steps to tackle climate but the fire has disrupted negotiations.

«

Nobody was badly hurt (smoke inhalation was the principal injury). COP30 got too hot? Seems Gaia has a sense of humour.
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Android Quick Share can now work with iOS’s AirDrop • Google blog

»

Today, we’re introducing a way for Quick Share to work with AirDrop. This makes file transfer easier between iPhones and Android devices, and starts rolling out today to the Pixel 10 family.

We built this with security at its core, protecting your data with strong safeguards that were tested by independent security experts. It’s just one more way we’re bringing better compatibility that people are asking for between operating systems, following our work on RCS and unknown tracker alerts.

We’re looking forward to improving the experience and expanding it to more Android devices.

«

There’s a short video showing files going in both directions, which implies that Google has either reverse-engineered or had help from Apple to figure out how to achieve this securely. The security link says it presently only works with Apple’s “Everyone Only” setting, but “we welcome the opportunity to work with Apple to enable “Contacts Only” mode in the future” – which to me implies they didn’t get any help from Apple on this, otherwise they’d have done that at the same time.

The bigger question: what other sort of interoperability is Google looking to create between Android and iOS phones?
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Smart home cameras from Amazon and Google could soon work together • Bloomberg

Chris Welch:

»

Until now, buying a smart home camera has largely meant committing to one company’s ecosystem. Purchase one brand, and it’s difficult to switch later without replacing everything.

Matter, the smart home interoperability standard that helps devices from a range of manufacturers play nicely together, is looking to address that pain point by expanding to support video cameras for the first time.

The news was announced Thursday by the Connectivity Standards Alliance, or CSA, a consortium of tech companies that has sought to make it easier for consumers to mix and match different brands’ smart home gadgets, such as thermostats, door locks and smart lights, addressing a common user complaint.

Theoretically, this could lead to cameras from Amazon.com Inc.’s Ring and Blink units being paired with those from Google Nest and other brands. Moreover, it would allow consumers to access the live video feed of those cameras from third-party platforms such as Apple Inc.’s Home app.

Whether that potential is realized depends on the willingness of Big Tech to adopt the new Matter 1.5 specification in the first place. If companies choose to support the change, the process could take months or years based on past timelines.

A handful of hardware makers, including Samsung Electronics Co., Eve Home, Aqara and U-tec, have pledged their support, the consortium said, with plans to integrate Matter 1.5 into their respective platforms and hardware.

But the heavyweights of the category aren’t revealing their plans just yet. In statements to Bloomberg, Amazon and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, whose backing will be critical if the new specification is going to succeed, would not commit to making their cameras interoperable.

«

Theoretically, sure, everything works together. Practically, it keeps not happening, despite the efforts of Matter and others. (Gift link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A new startup says it will let you interrogate your DNA via a chatbot. Do you want to, though? CC-licensed photo by Tom Purcell 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. Don’t ask. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

American kids can’t do math anymore • The Atlantic

Rose Horowitch:

»

For the past several years, America has been using its young people as lab rats in a sweeping, if not exactly thought-out, education experiment. Schools across the country have been lowering standards and removing penalties for failure. The results are coming into focus.

Five years ago, about 30 incoming freshmen at UC San Diego arrived with math skills below high-school level. Now, according to a recent report from UC San Diego faculty and administrators, that number is more than 900—and most of those students don’t fully meet middle-school math standards. Many students struggle with fractions and simple algebra problems. Last year, the university, which admits fewer than 30% of undergraduate applicants, launched a remedial-math course that focuses entirely on concepts taught in elementary and middle school. (According to the report, more than 60% of students who took the previous version of the course couldn’t divide a fraction by two.) One of the course’s tutors noted that students faced more issues with “logical thinking” than with math facts per se. They didn’t know how to begin solving word problems.

The university’s problems are extreme, but they are not unique. Over the past five years, all of the other University of California campuses, including UC Berkeley and UCLA, have seen the number of first-years who are unprepared for precalculus double or triple. George Mason University, in Virginia, revamped its remedial-math summer program in 2023 after students began arriving at their calculus course unable to do algebra, the math-department chair, Maria Emelianenko, told me.

“We call it quantitative literacy, just knowing which fraction is larger or smaller, that the slope is positive when it is going up,” Janine Wilson, the chair of the undergraduate economics program at UC Davis, told me. “Things like that are just kind of in our bones when we are college ready. We are just seeing many folks without that capability.”

Part of what’s happening here is that as more students choose STEM majors, more of them are being funneled into introductory math courses during their freshman year. But the national trend is very clear: America’s students are getting much worse at math. The decline started about a decade ago and sharply accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic. The average eighth grader’s math skills, which rose steadily from 1990 to 2013, are now a full school year behind where they were in 2013…

«

This is part of a generally concerning trend: one of the most economically important countries in the world is regressing, at pace.
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CDC links measles outbreaks in multiple states for first time • NY Times

Apoorva Mandavilli and Teddy Rosenbluth:

»

Health officials on Monday linked for the first time the measles outbreak that began in Texas with another in Utah and Arizona, a finding that could end America’s status as a nation that has eliminated measles.

The news came in a phone call, a recording of which was obtained by The New York Times, among officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and state health departments.

The chain of transmission began in January, in a conservative Mennonite group on the western edge of Texas, and spread to Oklahoma and New Mexico.

Countries lose their elimination status after 12 months of sustained transmission. If the outbreak cannot be extinguished by January, the anniversary of the first cases in Texas, the United States will lose what is known as “elimination status” as determined by the World Health Organization, which it has had for 25 years.

“I wouldn’t call the code yet, but I think the patient’s not looking real good,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

Canada lost its status last week, ending a 27-year run, after failing to control an outbreak that began at a Mennonite gathering in October 2024.

«

92% of the cases are people who are unvaccinated or whose vaccination status isn’t known. (Take a wild guess.) Total of 1,723 cases. Though a lot of the new cases have originated abroad.
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The last penny: legal chaos after America’s smallest coin dies • Lawyer Monthly

Susan Stein:

»

The last one-cent coin was officially struck at the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia on November 12, 2025, following a directive from President Donald Trump earlier this year – a move that has already set off complex consumer-protection and monetary-law questions across the country.

…Amid the politics, everyday Americans are asking: What happens when prices can no longer end in .99?

If you pay cash, you’ll start to notice changes almost immediately. Retailers are beginning to round totals to the nearest five cents, a method already used in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Some stores are rounding down, absorbing small losses to stay consumer-friendly. Others are rounding up, sparking online backlash and potential legal risk. Digital payments and cards, however, still charge exact amounts.

The Federal Reserve projects the shift will cost or benefit households by mere pennies per year about five cents annually per family — but it’s the confusion, not the math, that’s driving frustration.

Several states including Delaware, Connecticut, Michigan, and Oregon, require merchants to provide exact change by law.
Meanwhile, the federal food assistance program SNAP mandates that recipients can’t be charged more than other customers. That means if a store rounds down for cash but not for card transactions, it could violate consumer-protection statutes or even civil-rights rules tied to federal benefit programs.

Retail trade groups like the National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS) have already written to Congress demanding emergency legislation. Without it, well-intentioned rounding could become a legal minefield.

Under 31 U.S.C. § 5103, all U.S. coins and currency remain legal tender for debts, public charges, taxes, and dues. Ending production doesn’t automatically revoke the penny’s status — only Congress can do that. Some state statutes, however, forbid businesses from charging different prices based on payment method or rounding practices.

“Traditional rounding might violate consumer-protection laws, including cash-discounting statutes and USDA SNAP rules,” explained Holland & Knight LLP in an October 2025 bulletin on retail compliance.

If a store rounds $4.97 up to $5.00 for cash customers, but not for those paying by card, it could be accused of unfair pricing or discrimination. The same issue arises for government offices accepting cash for taxes or fines.

«

The UK must have gone through something similar when the half-penny went away – to say nothing of the shift to decimalisation. Americans need more practice with changing currency.
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Update on invoking Goods Availability Act • Government.nl [Dutch government]

»

Minister Vincent Karremans (Economic Affairs): “In light of recent developments, I consider it the right moment to take a constructive step by suspending my order under the Goods Availability Act regarding Nexperia, in close consultation with our European and international partners. In the past few days we have had constructive meetings with the Chinese authorities. We are positive about the measures already taken by the Chinese authorities to ensure the supply of chips to Europe and the rest of the world. We see this as a show of goodwill. We will continue to engage in constructive dialogue with the Chinese authorities in the period ahead.”

…On Tuesday, 30 September 2025, the Dutch Minister of Economic Affairs invoked the Goods Availability Act (Wet beschikbaarheid goederen, Wbg) in response to serious concerns at semiconductor manufacturer Nexperia, headquartered in Nijmegen. These concerns stemmed from actions attributed to the now-suspended CEO, involving the improper transfer of product assets, funds, technology, and knowledge to a foreign entity. These actions ran counter to the interests of the company, its shareholders, and Dutch and European strategic autonomy and security of supply.

The decision aims to prevent a situation in which the production capabilities of Nexperia (for finished and semi-finished products) would become unavailable to Europe in an emergency. Nexperia produces, among other things, chips and components used in the European automotive industry and in consumer electronics. The signals at Nexperia showed there was a threat to the continuity on Dutch and European soil of crucial technological knowledge and capabilities.

What are the consequences of the order for the company’s production, supply chain and customers?
The company’s normal production activities and processes can continue unhampered. The measure specifically addresses a risk arising from actions attributed to the now-suspended CEO as described in the previous answer. The order targets only Nexperia and does not affect other companies, the wider sector or countries.

«

So a complete reversal by the Dutch government on its plan to take control of the chipmaker Nexperia, with its Chinese owners, for national security reasons. Absolute back to square one.
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A researcher made an AI that completely breaks the online surveys scientists rely on • 404 Media

Emanuel Maiberg:

»

Online survey research, a fundamental method for data collection in many scientific studies, is facing an existential threat because of large language models, according to new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The author of the paper, associate professor of government at Dartmouth and director of the Polarization Research Lab Sean Westwood, created an AI tool he calls “an autonomous synthetic respondent,” which can answer survey questions and “demonstrated a near-flawless ability to bypass the full range” of “state-of-the-art” methods for detecting bots. 

According to the paper, the AI agent evaded detection 99.8% of the time.

“We can no longer trust that survey responses are coming from real people,” Westwood said in a press release. “With survey data tainted by bots, AI can poison the entire knowledge ecosystem.”

Survey research relies on attention check questions (ACQs), behavioral flags, and response pattern analysis to detect inattentive humans or automated bots. Westwood said these methods are now obsolete after his AI agent bypassed the full range of standard ACQs and other detection methods outlined in prominent papers, including one paper designed to detect AI responses. The AI agent also successfully avoided “reverse shibboleth” questions designed to detect nonhuman actors by presenting tasks that an LLM could complete easily, but are nearly impossible for a human. 

«

I’m not sure that these were trustworthy in the first place, but now this is really going to put the responsibility on the researchers to do face-to-face work.
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Bystro: an AI Genomics Assistant

»

Welcome to Bystro – the world’s first natural language AI platform for genetics and proteomics. Ask questions in plain English and get research-grade analysis instantly. No code required.

Talk to your data like never before. Ask any genetics question in plain English and watch the AI agent create custom analysis, statistical tests, and stunning visualizations on the spot.

«

Interesting new application for LLMs, which according to the press release I received, “is not another chatbot layered on top of biology. Bystro is already being used inside major academic centers like Emory University to analyze entire genomes with the same statistical tools top researchers use. The team is now opening that technology to the public.”

Not sure we all want to query whether our genome is stuffed full of Alzheimer’s genes. Though maybe we’d like to know about genetically driven responses to medication.
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Interstellar space travel will never, ever happen • Jason Pargin’s Newsletter

Jason Pargin:

»

it turns out that the ships in Star Trek, Star Wars, Dune etc. are not based on some kind of hypothetical technology that could maybe exist someday with better energy sources and materials (as I had thought). In every case, their tech is the equivalent of just having Albus Dumbledore in the engine room cast a teleportation spell. Their ships skip the vast distances of space entirely, arriving at their destinations many times faster than light itself could have made the trip. Just to be clear, there is absolutely no remotely possible method for doing this, even on paper.

“Well, science does the impossible all the time!” some of you say, pointing out that no one 200 years ago could have conceived of landing a rover on Mars. But I’m saying that expecting science to develop real warp drives, hyperspace or wormhole travel is asking it to utterly break the fundamental laws of the universe, no different than expecting to someday have a time machine, or a portal to a parallel dimension. These are plot devices, not science.

Experts can correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like if you had two agencies with infinite budgets, one dedicated to developing interstellar space travel and the other dedicated to giving a young child all of the magical abilities of Harry Potter, the latter would get to the finish line first. Both would be tasked with bending the laws of physics in equally unlikely ways, but the second one wouldn’t have to also keep dozens of humans alive indefinitely in a frozen radioactive vacuum that is relentlessly trying to murder them every single second of the day.

«

The fizzing outrage, allied to the factual explanation of how we are absolutely not going to achieve interstellar travel, makes for an excellent read. The comments – trying to somehow retrieve interstellar travel from the deep hole that Pargin has buried it in – are inadvertently comic.
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The Saudification of America is under way • The Guardian

Karen Attiah:

»

There’s much to say about the Saudification of western cultural spaces through the sheer sums of money the kingdom is so obviously throwing into what it sees as soft power. Writers and observers have commented for years about Saudi Arabia’s “sportswashing”, like the kingdom’s sponsorship of LIV golf tournament and the purchase of the Newcastle United soccer team.

The kingdom invested heavily in tourism campaigns for Saudi Arabia, paying online influencers hefty sums to post pictures of their heavily curated trips to the country.

Jamal warned about these hollow visions of Saudi Arabia. He warned that behind the glitz and glamour of the Saudi royal family, and promises of futuristic cities, there was poverty and discontent. He often told me how proud he was to have his words in the Washington Post, and he hoped the Post could be a model for voices like his to be heard. I still admire Jamal’s relentless optimism about media and America.

In death, Jamal’s faith would prove to be misplaced. The Washington Post’s erasure of Jamal’s memory and the freedom he stood for has been brewing in the background.

The global opinion section that Jamal wrote for was dismantled. The Jamal Khashoggi fellowship – which was offered to writers speaking out against authoritarian regimes – was left to fade away. Jamal used to tell me about his days as an editor chairing newspaper editorial meetings in Saudi Arabia, where editors were given marching orders from the top about the “red lines”, or what the royal regime wanted and did not want published.

Today, the Washington Post opinion section is going through an increasing Saudification – imposing harsh red lines on who and what can publish. Under owner Jeff Bezos’s edict to write only about “free markets” and “personal liberties”, the Washington Post opinion section, the first major US paper to publicly impose such heavy censorship, purged nearly all its full-time voices that wrote against censorship, political violence and repression at home and abroad, myself included.

To date, the Washington Post editorial board has not mentioned Jamal’s name ahead of Prince Mohammed’s visit. The Saudification of the mainstream news media means that other US media outlets and institutions are bending the knee to Trump, agreeing to multimillion-dollar shakedowns in exchange for eliminating diversity.

«

The influence of enormous amounts of money deployed by regimes which have their own very specific agendas can be easily overlooked in everyday life. Oh look, it’s golf, with something called LIV. Oh look, it’s a tennis exhibition with $6m in prize money in Saudi Arabia. Oh look, it’s the ruler who ordered the dismemberment of a critical journalist being feted by the money-loving White House. Depravity has more than one setting.
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“Don’t want no Samsung”

Jim Waterson, Polly Smythe, Cormac Kehoe and Sophie Wilkinson:

»

Sam was walking past a Royal Mail depot in south London in January when his path was blocked by a group of eight men.

“I tried to move to let them pass, but the last guy blocked the path,” the 32-year-old told London Centric. “They started pushing me and hitting me, telling me to give them everything.”

The thieves took Sam’s phone, his camera and even the beanie hat off his head. After checking Sam had nothing else on him, they started to run off.

What happened next was a surprise. With most of the gang already heading down the Old Kent Road, one turned around and handed Sam back his Android phone.

The thief bluntly told him why: “Don’t want no Samsung.”

«

Not sure that this will be a line in Samsung’s next advertising campaign. There’s plenty more to the story, which shows: thieves shun Android phones.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Increased power demand from data centres could drive supply cuts if big winter storms hit the US, grid organisers warn. CC-licensed photo by Daniel Lackey 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. Powered 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.

A massive Cloudflare outage brought down X, ChatGPT, and even Downdetector • The Verge

Emma Roth:

»

Cloudflare, a networking company that provides DDoS protection and internet content delivery services for many companies around the globe, is recovering after a major outage that took down sites across the web. Users weren’t able to access X, ChatGPT, and even the outage-tracking site DownDetector on Tuesday morning, with some sites displaying an error message that said, “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed.”

The disruption, which started at around 6:20am ET (11.20am GMT), is linked to a “configuration file that is automatically generated to manage threat traffic,” Cloudflare spokesperson Jackie Dutton tells The Verge. “The file grew beyond an expected size of entries and triggered a crash in the software system that handles traffic for a number of Cloudflare’s services.” Dutton added that “there is no evidence” of an attack or other malicious activity.

Cloudflare posted an update to its status page at 9:42am ET, saying: “A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.”

Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht wrote in a post on X that the service “failed” its customers and the broader internet, adding that “a latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability started to crash after a routine configuration change we made… This was not an attack.”

«

If it’s not Amazon, it’s Cloudflare. If it’s not them then it’s someone else. We rely on giant companies for all this connectivity all the time. Guesses for what it will be next month?
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Google’s Sundar Pichai warns of “irrationality” in trillion-dollar AI investment boom • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

»

On Tuesday, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai warned of “irrationality” in the AI market, telling the BBC in an interview, “I think no company is going to be immune, including us.” His comments arrive as scrutiny over the state of the AI market has reached new heights, with Alphabet shares doubling in value over seven months to reach a $3.5 trillion market capitalization.

Speaking exclusively to the BBC at Google’s California headquarters, Pichai acknowledged that while AI investment growth is at an “extraordinary moment,” the industry can “overshoot” in investment cycles, as we’re seeing now. He drew comparisons to the late 1990s Internet boom, which saw early Internet company valuations surge before collapsing in 2000, leading to bankruptcies and job losses.

“We can look back at the Internet right now. There was clearly a lot of excess investment, but none of us would question whether the Internet was profound,” Pichai said. “I expect AI to be the same. So I think it’s both rational and there are elements of irrationality through a moment like this.”

Over the past year, some analysts and tech industry critics have expressed increasing skepticism about a web of $1.4 trillion in deals surrounding Google competitor OpenAI in particular. The company has committed to spending $1.4 trillion on infrastructure over eight years, while it expects to generate around $13bn in revenue this year. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told reporters at a private dinner in August that investors are “overexcited” about AI models and that “someone” will lose a “phenomenal amount of money.”

«

Absolutely everyone is calling this a bubble, yet at the same time nobody is ready to call the top.
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US faces winter blackout risks from data centres’ power needs • Bloomberg via Yahoo Finance

Naureen Malik:

»

Rising electricity demand from data centres is raising the risk of blackouts across a wide swath of the US during extreme conditions this winter, according to the regulatory body overseeing grid stability.

Power consumption has grown 20 gigawatts from the previous winter, the North American Electric Reliability Corp. said Tuesday in its winter assessment. A gigawatt is the typical size of a nuclear power reactor. Supply hasn’t kept up.

As as result, a repeat of severe winter storms in North America that unleash a polar vortex, of which there have been several in recent years, could trigger energy shortfalls across the US from the Northwest to Texas to the Carolinas. All regions have adequate resources in normal conditions.

“Data centres are a main contributor to load growth in those areas where demand has risen substantially since last winter.” Mark Olson, manager of the reliability assessment, said in an emailed statement.

America’s power grid has been facing rising blackout risks for years as ageing infrastructure is increasingly stressed by severe storms and wildfires. Now the data centre boom, driven by the spread of artificial intelligence, is adding to the strain by supercharging US electricity growth after being stagnant for two decades.

Winter is especially risky because solar generation is available for fewer hours and battery operations may be affected. Gas supplies, meantime, could drop off because of freeze-offs or pipeline constraints.

«

You mean there might be a downside to building all these data centres? Hard to credit.
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Meta scores a win after judge rules the social media giant is not an illegal monopoly • CNN Business

Clare Duffy:

»

Meta scored a major win on Tuesday after a federal judge ruled that it is not a social networking monopoly, shooting down an argument from the US Federal Trade Commission that it should be forced to spin off two of its most popular platforms.

The Federal Trade Commission sued Meta in 2020, accusing it of violating antitrust law by acquiring nascent, would-be rivals Instagram and WhatsApp to avoid having to compete with them. The seven-week trial in the case saw testimony from a series of prominent figures, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who argued that the company has plenty of competition from platforms including YouTube and TikTok.

Federal judge James Boasberg agreed with the company’s argument in his Tuesday opinion, saying that TikTok and YouTube prevent Meta from monopolizing the social network market. He also noted that Meta’s apps and the social media landscape have changed since the FTC filed its case, most recently because of AI-generated content, which undermined the agency’s arguments.

“Meta holds no monopoly in the relevant market,” he wrote.

FTC Director of Public Affairs Joe Simonson said in a statement that the agency is reviewing its options following the decision.

“We are deeply disappointed in this decision,” Simonson said. “The deck was always stacked against us with Judge Boasberg, who is currently facing articles of impeachment. We are reviewing all our options.”

«

The FTC is such a strange organisation in this Trump world. Brendan Carr, its chief, is only interested in whatever helps Trump; nothing else, including such trivia as the US Constitution. Meanwhile its main body sues Meta over social media and is disappointed at not winning, to the extent of criticising the judge. (Boasberg opposes Trump, and signed off various subpoenas for probes into Trump behaviour.)
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iPhone Air isn’t annual, iPhone Air 2 was never coming in 2026 • Apple Insider

Wesley Hilliard:

»

Rumours suggested Apple had given up on iPhone Air due to one not being prepped for 2026, but that was apparently never the case. A future model with an improved chipset and longer battery is in the works.

The iPhone Air may not be Apple’s most popular model, but it doesn’t have to be. The device was a replacement for Apple’s worst-selling iPhone Plus line and serves as a proof of concept more than anything.

According to the [Bloomberg] Power On newsletter [by Mark Gurman], the iPhone Air was never expected to have a second iteration in 2026, so rumours of any delay are inaccurate. A future model is in the works, but the focus is on a better chipset, not necessarily a second camera system.

The new chip would be built on a 2-nanometre process, which would aid in improving battery life. There are no indications of a structural change, and adding a second camera, as rumored, would likely require a redesign.

A previous rumour suggested Apple had decided to skip a 2026 iPhone Air update after poor sales, which seemed sketchy at best. That rumour was updated to suggest that Apple had delayed the product to ensure there was time for a redesign that would add a second camera.

«

Schrödinger’s phone: it’s coming but it isn’t, selling but it isn’t.
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OpenAI is piloting ChatGPT group chats • The Register

Brandon Vigliarolo:

»

Feel like your team’s group chat is a bit lifeless? Remote coworkers not really collaborating as well as they should be? There’s a new way to stir the pot now that OpenAI has piloted ChatGPT group chats: cram a chatbot into the conversation and let it chime in whenever it thinks it should.

Where there are chatty bots, there’s OpenAI, naturally, which on Thursday announced the pilot of group chats in ChatGPT. The new feature is now available for mobile and web users logged into ChatGPT, be they free, Go, Plus, or Pro users – but don’t go trying to suck your friends and coworkers into a ChatGPT group chat unless you’re in Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, or Taiwan, as those are the only places getting access to the pilot. 

OpenAI is pushing the new group chat feature as a way for people to collaborate at work and school, as well as a way for friends to make decisions on things like dinner destinations, vacations, and the like. Search, image and file uploading, image generation, and voice dictation are all included in group chats with ChatGPT, powered by GPT-5.1 Auto, which automatically shunts requests to the best model (i.e., instant, thinking, or a legacy model for free tier users) for the task. 

«

Ben Thompson and John Gruber (the former particularly) are excited about this development, and I can see why too: in companies that are using chatbots, collaborative work is commonplace, and what you really want is for the humans to be able to refer to the chatbot in the course of their work; it’s like what Garry Kasparov calls the “centaur” mode (from when chess players use chess computers for help with tactics). Involving the chatbot in group work makes a lot more sense than having individuals working alone with them.
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Bitcoin slides below $90,000 as traders grow cautious • Reuters

Rae Wee and Elizabeth Howcroft:

»

Bitcoin fell below $90,000 for the first time in seven months on Tuesday in the latest sign that investor appetite for risk is drying up across financial markets.

The risk-sensitive cryptocurrency has lost all this year’s gains and is now nearly 30% below a peak above $126,000 in October. It was down 0.5% at $91,338.47 during European trading hours, after slipping as low as $89,286.75.

About $1.2 trillion has been wiped off the total market value of all cryptocurrencies in the past six weeks, according to market tracker CoinGecko.

Market participants said that a combination of doubts around future US interest rate cuts and the risk-averse mood in broader markets, which have wobbled after a long rally, was dragging down crypto.

“The cascading selloff is amplified by listed companies and institutions exiting their positions after piling in during the rally, compounding contagion risks across the market,” said Joshua Chu, co-chair of the Hong Kong Web3 Association. “When support thins and macro uncertainty rises, confidence can erode with remarkable speed.”

Speculators who had put money into crypto in the hopes of supportive US regulation have started to pull back, causing steady outflows from ETFs and similar instruments in recent weeks, said Joseph Edwards at Enigma Securities.

“The sell pressure here isn’t extraordinary, but it’s coming at a relative weak point on the buy side … a lot of retail buyers were stung during the flash crash last month,” he said, referring to an October crash in which there were $19bn in liquidations across leveraged positions.

Crypto stockpilers such as [Micro] Strategy, miners such Riot Platforms and Mara Holdings, and exchange Coinbase have all slid with the souring mood.

«

I’m not for a moment suggesting that NOW is the moment when bitcoin is DOOOOMED; its value has long since ceased to have any relation to its real-world use – even ransomware can’t be doing enough business to make it worth that much.

But the idea that it’s a canary in an economic coal mine is much more telling.
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ChatGPT is huge in India. These locally focused startups found a way to compete • Rest of World

Tauseef Ahmad and Sajid Raina:

»

When Amrith Shenava began experimenting with large language models shortly after the launch of ChatGPT, he quickly realized that Tulu — the language he and some 2 million people spoke in the southern Indian state of Karnataka — had virtually no digital data set. He decided to build one.

Shenava, who has a degree in computer science from Kent State University in Ohio, had earlier launched a translation app, and a language learning app for Tulu. To build the data set for the LLM, he had to collect voice and text data from native speakers including teachers, professionals, homemakers, and members of the Tulu diaspora. 

“Most AI systems are built in the U.S. They don’t understand Indian languages or contexts,” Shenava, the 27-year-old founder of TuluAI, told Rest of World. “We need our own models that represent us.”

India has more than 1,600 languages and dialects, but most artificial intelligence systems cater to those that are widely spoken. OpenAI’s ChatGPT supports more than a dozen Indian languages including Hindi, Tamil, and Kannada, the dominant language in Karnataka. Google’s Gemini can chat with users in nine Indian languages. 

Spurred by their success, and keen to be a part of the rapid global transition to AI, a handful of Indian startups are building AI tools for so-called low-resource languages such as Tulu, Bodo, and Kashmiri, which have a limited online presence and few written records. The startups are having to build data sets nearly from scratch. 

TuluAI holds storytelling sessions and workshops in rural areas, in which local residents — particularly women and elders — narrate their stories, or are asked to read texts and simulate everyday conversations. Participants are taught to record and label the data. Each workshop of one to two days produces over 150 hours of labeled voice and text data, Shenava said.

The startup also collects WhatsApp voice notes from anyone who wishes to send one, with annotators checking transcripts and labels for accuracy.

“Major translation tools miss the context that gives meaning to words. The only way to fix that is to use authentic, human-recorded data that reflects real-life language use,” Shenava said.

«

Excellent idea, and it’s great that there are local resources to stop the Great Cultural Flattening that the use of chatbots could cause.
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MI5 names two people in alert to MPs and peers about Chinese espionage • The Guardian

Dan Sabbagh:

»

MI5 has issued an espionage alert to MPs and peers warning that two people linked to the Chinese intelligence service are actively seeking to recruit parliamentarians.

The two people, who operate as headhunters on the LinkedIn professional networking website aiming to obtain “non-public and insider insights”, MI5 said, are also targeting economists, thinktank staff and civil servants for their access to politicians.

MI5 named them as Amanda Qiu, from BR-YR Executive Search, and Shirly Shen, who is linked to Internship Union, and told MPs and peers they were using LinkedIn to “conduct outreach at scale”.

The spy agency sent its warning to the speaker of the Commons, Lindsay Hoyle, and his Lords equivalent, John McFall, on Tuesday morning, both of whom relayed its contents to the members of their houses with a cover message.

In his email to peers, McFall said the individuals, linked to China’s ministry of state security spy agency (MSS), were “actively reaching out to individuals in our community”.

Their “aim is to collect information and lay the groundwork for long-term relationships, using professional networking sites, recruitment agents and consultants acting on their behalf”, he added.

Qiu’s profile on LinkedIn, written in English, describes her as having been the chief executive of BR-YR Executive Search for more than six years and says she is based in Beijing. Her listed interests include the UK’s Department for Transport and the Tony Blair Institute.

Shen’s profile, also largely in English, describes her as the co-founder of InternshipUnion, based in Hangzhou, eastern China. She says it “has helped hundreds of students come to China do their internship” and she describes herself as “a positive Asia girl” who would “welcome friends all over world join us to get a magic Chinese experience”.

«

Most spying isn’t safe-cracking subterfuge; it’s done in the open, being charming and getting people to trust you (and often to rely on the money you pay them) so they’ll tell you things they shouldn’t.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A number of British artists are protesting AI use of their music with a new album of near-silence. CC-licensed photo by Mike Boening Photography 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. Quietly confident. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

British hacker must repay £4m after hijacking celebrity Twitter accounts • BBC News

Joe Tidy:

»

A British man who hacked high profile Twitter – now known as X – accounts as part of a Bitcoin scam has been ordered to hand over £4.1m in stolen cryptocurrency.

Joseph O’Connor, from Liverpool, hijacked more than 130 accounts in July 2020, including those of Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Elon Musk.

The 26-year-old fled to Spain where his mother lives before being arrested and extradited to the US for trial. He was sentenced to five years for cyber crimes but now must hand over a haul of crypto he gathered through various hacks and scams.

O’Connor, who went by the alias PlugwalkJoe, carried out the so-called “giveaway scam” with other young men and teenagers – breaking into Twitter’s internal systems and taking over high profile accounts.

Three other hackers have been charged over the scam, with US teenager Graham Clark pleading guilty to his part in the deception in 2021. The hackers gained access to the accounts by first convincing a small number of Twitter employees to hand over their internal login details – which eventually granted them access to the social media site’s administrative tools.
They used social engineering tricks to get access to the powerful internal control panel at the site.

Once inside the Twitter accounts of famous individuals, they pretended to be the celebrities and tweeted asking followers to send Bitcoin to various digital wallets promising to double their money. As a result of the fraud, an estimated 350 million Twitter users viewed suspicious tweets from official accounts of some of the platform’s biggest users, including Apple, Uber, Kanye West and Bill Gates.

Thousands were duped into believing that a crypto giveaway was real. Between 15 and 16 July 2020, 426 transfers were made to the scammers of various amounts from people hoping to double their money.

A total of over 12.86 BTC was stolen which at the time was worth around $110,000 (£83,500). It is now worth $1.2m.

«

One has to wonder about how smart those thousands who were duped are. Elon Musk and Bill Gates say things like that and you think it’s true?
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Getting Britain out of the hole: a plan for the UK economy

Andrew Sissons and John Springford:

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A sober analysis of what’s gone wrong is needed. In the essay that follows, we try to produce one, and to chart a way forward. The central theme is that Britain hasn’t based its economic strategy on the things it is good at. As a result, it has too few big companies located around the country that raise wages and spending locally, leading to virtuous spirals in which skilled people get sucked in and local small businesses enjoy more demand and their workers receive higher wages. 

It has strengths in tradeable services, such as finance, law, accounting, consulting, media, video games and university education; but many of these industries are concentrated in London and the south-east – the region of the country that is as rich as the top-performing places internationally. Even there productivity has stagnated and investment has been weak since the vote to leave the EU in 2016.

Manufacturing output has been very weak since the global financial crisis. But it continues to be an important anchor for many regions outside the major cities. Brexit has also badly damaged the sector, with value-added declining rapidly since the UK left the single market and customs union in 2021.

Aside from the shocks of the financial crisis and Brexit, Britain has failed to reshape its second-tier cities enough to suit its comparative advantages. As a result, many have weak economies. These cities are not dense enough, and have limited road and public transport.

«

Their programme for reform includes repairing the manufacturing base, making worker immigration easier (that’s going to be a hard sell), better funding for city transport, let foreign students come to universities, complete the energy transition to carbon-neutral, rethink the services sector, and reform the tax system.

Nice and simple! But at least it’s a manifesto. Lots of political parties would do well with something like this, though most would find it a hard sell to their voters: Reform and the Tories wouldn’t be able to allow the immigration, university or energy elements happen.
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Report claims that Apple has yet again put the Mac Pro “on the back burner” • Ars Technica

Andrew Cunningham:

»

Apple’s Power Mac and Mac Pro towers used to be the company’s primary workstations, but it has been years since they were updated with the same regularity as the MacBook Air or MacBook Pro. The Mac Pro has seen just four hardware updates in the last 15 years, and that’s counting a 2012 refresh that was mostly identical to the 2010 version.

Long-suffering Mac Pro buyers may have taken heart when Apple finally added an M2 Ultra processor to the tower in mid-2023, making it one of the very last Macs to switch from Intel to Apple Silicon—surely this would mean that the computer would at least be updated once every year or two, like the Mac Studio has been? But Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman says that Mac Pro buyers shouldn’t get their hopes up for new hardware in 2026.

Gurman says that the tower is “on the back burner” at Apple and that the company is “focused on a new Mac Studio” for the next-generation M5 Ultra chip that is in the works. As we reported earlier this year, Apple doesn’t have plans to design or release an M4 Ultra, and the Mac Studio refresh from this spring included an M3 Ultra alongside the M4 Max.

Note that Gurman carefully stops short of saying we definitely won’t see a Mac Pro update next year—the emphasis on the Mac Studio merely “suggests the Mac Pro won’t be updated in 2026 in a significant way,” and internal sources tell him “Apple has largely written off the Mac Pro.” The current Mac Pro does still use the M2 Ultra rather than the M3 Ultra, which indicates that Apple doesn’t see the need to update its high-end desktop every time it releases a suitable chip. But all of Apple’s other desktops—the iMac, the Mac mini, and the Studio—have skipped a silicon generation once since the M1 came out in 2020.

…Part of the appeal of the early 2010s and the 2019 Mac Pro towers was their internal expandability, particularly with respect to storage, graphics cards, and RAM. But while the Apple Silicon Mac Pro does include six internal PCI Express slots, it supports neither RAM upgrades nor third-party GPUs from Nvidia, AMD, or Intel. Thunderbolt 5’s 120 Gbps transfer speeds are also more than fast enough to support high-speed external storage devices.

That leaves even the most powerful of power users with few practical reasons to prefer a $7,000 Mac Pro tower to a $4,000 Mac Studio. And that would be true even if both desktops used the same chip—currently, the M3 Ultra Studio comes with more and newer CPU cores, newer GPU cores, and 32GB more RAM for that price, making the comparison even more lopsided.

«

It’s dead, Jim.
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Paul McCartney joins music industry protest against AI with silent track • The Guardian

Robert Booth:

»

At two minutes 45 seconds it’s about the same length as With a Little Help From My Friends. But Paul McCartney’s first new recording in five years lacks the sing-along tune and jaunty guitar chops because there’s barely anything there.

The former Beatle, arguably Britain’s greatest living songwriter, is releasing a track of an almost completely silent recording studio as part of a music industry protest against copyright theft by artificial intelligence companies.

In place of catchy melodies and evocative lyrics there is only quiet hiss and the odd clatter. It suggests that if AI companies unfairly exploit musicians’ intellectual property to train their generative AI models, the creative ecosystem will be wrecked and original music silenced.

McCartney, 83 and currently touring North America, has added the track to the B-side of an LP called Is This What We Want?, which is filled with other silent recordings and will be pressed on vinyl and released later this month.

McCartney’s contribution comes as musicians and artists step up their campaign to persuade the UK government to stop technology companies from training AI models on their creative output without approval or paying royalties. Meanwhile, Britain faces anti-regulation pressure from Donald Trump’s White House.

The album track listing spells out “the British government must not legalise music theft to benefit AI companies”.

Ed Newton-Rex, a composer and campaigner for copyright fairness behind the protest album, said: “I am very concerned the government is paying more attention to US tech companies’ interests rather than British creatives’ interests.”

Other artists already backing the campaign include Sam Fender, Kate Bush, Hans Zimmer and the Pet Shop Boys.

«

No doubt Lisa Nandy, the go-go-go secretary of state for culture, media and sports, will be right on this, once she’s given the album a couple of listens.
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How Jeffrey Epstein used SEO to bury news about his crimes • The Verge

Mia Sato:

»

On December 11th, 2010, Jeffrey Epstein was fretting about what came up if you Googled him. By this time Epstein had already pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution with a child and was a registered sex offender, and just a few days earlier he had been photographed in Central Park taking a stroll with Prince Andrew.

Epstein emailed an associate to complain. “the google page is not good,” Epstein wrote, according to documents released last week by the House Oversight Committee. He also took issue with tens of thousands of dollars of payments, which appear to have been made to “clean up” results. “I have yet to have a complete breakdown of payments. and the results , are what they are.”

Someone named Al Seckel — perhaps Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell’s sister’s late partner — responded later that evening, sharing what he was seeing. The results included Epstein’s Wikipedia page, a New York magazine article, a “jeffreyepsteinscience.com” website, a hair transplant surgeon with the same name, and a story correctly naming him as a sex offender.

“This is BEFORE the next big sweep. I UNDERSTAND your point about ‘one thing kills me,’ but the daily beast article is gone, the other ones, including the powerful Huffington Post, are about to be pushed off. And, out stuff is on top.”

Within the documents released last week, we see Epstein and his circle strategize how to bury unflattering coverage of him on Google and elevate what they want — search engine optimization to try to whitewash the reputation of a rich pedophile with powerful friends.

Throughout the documents, Epstein and others discuss how to use technical SEO tactics to bump news articles from Google’s first page of results, cozy up to reporters they perceive as focused more on business than Epstein’s crimes, and how to get a crisis PR machine in motion to launder his digital presence.

To those familiar with SEO, these strategies will look familiar — it’s the same playbook used by everyone from restaurants to news publishers to companies selling tennis shoes and photography services online. Everyone knows Google Search is the gateway to the internet; it’s just that this time, these same practices were deployed as cover for perhaps the world’s most infamous pedophile.

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OpenAI blocks toymaker after its AI teddy bear is caught telling children terrible things • Futurism

Frank Landymore:

»

Last week, researchers at the Public Interest Research Group published an alarming report in which they found that an AI-powered teddy bear from the children’s toymaker FoloToy was giving out instructions on how to light matches, and even waxing lyrical about the ins-and-outs of various sexual fetishes.

Now OpenAI, whose model GPT-4o was used to power the toy, is pulling the plug.

On Friday, the ChatGPT maker confirmed that it had cut off FoloToy’s access to its AI models, a move from OpenAI that could invite additional pressure onto itself to strictly police businesses that use its products— especially as it enters a major partnership with Mattel, one of the largest toymakers in the world.

“I can confirm we’ve suspended this developer for violating our policies,” an OpenAI spokesperson told PIRG in an emailed statement.

«

Well, encouragingly quick at least.
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The effect of video watching on children’s skills • Marginal REVOLUTION

Tyler Cowen:

»

This paper documents video consumption among school-aged children in the U.S. and explores its impact on human capital development. Video watching is common across all segments of society, yet surprisingly little is known about its developmental consequences.

With a bunching identification strategy, we find that an additional hour of daily video consumption has a negative impact on children’s noncognitive skills, with harmful effects on both internalizing behaviors (e.g., depression) and externalizing behaviors (e.g., social difficulties). We find a positive effect on math skills, though the effect on an aggregate measure of cognitive skills is smaller and not statistically significant.

These findings are robust and largely stable across most demographics and different ways of measuring skills and video watching. We find evidence that for Hispanic children, video watching has positive effects on both cognitive and noncognitive skills—potentially reflecting its role in supporting cultural assimilation. Interestingly, the marginal effects of video watching remain relatively stable regardless of how much time children spend on the activity…

«

The NBER working paper is by Carolina Caetano, Gregorio Caetano, Débora Mazetto & Meghan Skira.

This is quite a finding, though. Harmful effects, few positive effects.
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How Google’s DeepMind tool is ‘more quickly’ forecasting hurricane behavior • The Guardian

Eric Holthaus:

»

Google DeepMind is the first AI model dedicated to hurricanes, and now the first to beat traditional weather forecasters at their own game. Through all 13 Atlantic storms so far this year, Google’s model is the best – even beating human forecasters on track predictions.

Hurricane Melissa eventually made landfall in Jamaica at category 5 strength, one of the strongest landfalls ever documented in nearly two centuries of record-keeping across the Atlantic basin. [Meterologist Philippe] Papin’s bold forecast [that it would hit that strength] likely gave people in Jamaica extra time to prepare for the disaster, possibly saving lives and property.

Google DeepMind has been making weather forecasts for a few years now, and the parent forecast system from which the new hurricane model is derived also performed spectacularly well in diagnosing large-scale weather patterns last year.

Google’s model works by spotting patterns that traditional time-intensive physics-based weather models may miss.

“They do it much more quickly than their physics-based cousins, and the computing power is less expensive and time consuming,” Michael Lowry, a former National Hurricane Center (NHC) forecaster, said.

“What this hurricane season has proven in short order is that the newcomer AI weather models are competitive with and, in some cases, more accurate than the slower physics-based weather models we’ve traditionally leaned on,” Lowry said.

To be sure, Google DeepMind is an example of machine learning – a technique that has been used in data-heavy sciences like meteorology for years – and is not generative AI like ChatGPT.

Machine learning takes mounds of data and pulls out patterns from them in a such a way that its model only takes a few minutes to come up with an answer, and can do so on a desktop computer – in strong contrast to the flagship models that governments have used for decades that can take hours to run and require some of the biggest supercomputers in the world.

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I’m not sure that forecasting a Category 5 rather than 4 really makes a difference. Category 4 already means 130mph+ windspeeds; Cat 5 is 157+. But direction matters, so if DeepMind is predicting that too, it’s good.
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First US human bird flu case reported since February • The Washington Post

Lena Sun:

»

Health officials in Washington state said Friday they have confirmed the first US human case of bird flu since February, with a strain that has previously been reported in animals but never before in humans.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and state health officials said they consider the risk to the public to be low.

An older adult with underlying conditions preliminarily tested positive for the infection and has been hospitalized since early November, state health officials said Friday. The person developed a high fever, confusion and respiratory distress. “This is a severely ill patient,” state epidemiologist Scott Lindquist said during a briefing.

The person has a mixed backyard flock of domestic poultry at home that had exposure to wild birds, the state health department said in a statement. The domestic poultry or wild birds are the most likely source of exposure, but state and local health and agricultural officials are continuing to investigate how the person became infected.

State health officials said Friday that the person was infected with H5N5, an avian influenza virus that has previously been reported in animals but not in humans. It is part of the family of avian influenza viruses, and has been seen in wild birds in other US states and Canada, state officials and experts said.

«

We let the H5N1 watching brief quietly slip away, and now we have to start up an H5N5 one? Not fair. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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Chinese EV maker XPeng forecasts weak fourth quarter revenue amid fierce competition • Reuters

Anhata Rooprai:

»

Chinese electric vehicle maker XPeng forecast fourth-quarter revenue below estimates on Monday, as a prolonged price war and intensifying competition in the world’s largest auto market threaten to slow its growth.

The company’s US-listed shares, which have more than doubled this year, fell nearly 8% in early morning trading.

The cautious outlook comes despite XPeng and rival NIO posting record deliveries in October, even as Tesla’s China sales slumped to a three-year low. The contrasting performance underscores the uneven impact of a bruising price war that has eroded profitability across China’s crowded EV sector.

XPeng expects fourth-quarter revenue between 21.5bn yuan ($3.03bn) and 23bn yuan, below analysts’ average estimate of 26bn yuan, according to data compiled by LSEG.

“Since the launch of the mid-to-low-end Mona 03 last year, combined with reduced investment in intelligent driving, XPeng has lost its brand appeal in models priced above 200,000 yuan,” according to Third Bridge analyst Rosalie Chen.

The Mona M03, XPeng’s first model under a new mass-market brand built with ride-hailing giant DiDi, is central to the automaker’s push into China’s more affordable EV segment.

«

And lo, the crunch on the plethora of Chinese automakers that was foretold began to come true.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The murmurs inside Apple about Tim Cook’s successor are growing louder, perhaps so that markets won’t react badly when he goes. CC-licensed photo by Mike Deerkoski 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. There were no CC-BY licensed pictures of John Ternus. 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 man (or men) who keeps predicting the web’s death • Tedium

Ernie Smith:

»

Jeffrey Zeldman, one of the OGs of web design, recently decided to weigh in on a debate that’s been picking up lately: With AI on the rise, is the Web dead? After all, that new OpenAI browser seems to be built for another era of internet entirely.

Zeldman’s critique is simple, and one that I can definitely appreciate: People have been declaring the Web dead as long as it’s been alive (and the comments have been hilariously wrong). I’d like to take a moment to consider one specific naysayer: George Colony.

Colony’s name may not ring a bell if you’re not in technology spaces, but he is the founder of Forrester Research, one of the largest tech and business advisory firms in the world. If you’re a journalist with a story and need an analyst, you’ve probably talked to someone from Forrester. I’ve talked to Forrester quite a few times—their analysis is generally quite sound.

But there’s one area where the company—particularly Colony—gets it wrong. And it has to do with the World Wide Web, which Colony declared “dead” or dying on numerous occasions over a 30-year period. In each case, Colony was trying to make a bigger point about where online technology was going, without giving the Web enough credit for actually being able to get there.

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Entertaining set of receipts for your Monday morning.
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Researchers question Anthropic claim that AI-assisted attack was 90% autonomous • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

Researchers from Anthropic said they recently observed the “first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign” after detecting China-state hackers using the company’s Claude AI tool in a campaign aimed at dozens of targets. Outside researchers are much more measured in describing the significance of the discovery.

Anthropic published the reports on Thursday here and here. In September, the reports said, Anthropic discovered a “highly sophisticated espionage campaign,” carried out by a Chinese state-sponsored group, that used Claude Code to automate up to 90% of the work. Human intervention was required “only sporadically (perhaps 4-6 critical decision points per hacking campaign).” Anthropic said the hackers had employed AI agentic capabilities to an “unprecedented” extent.

“This campaign has substantial implications for cybersecurity in the age of AI ‘agents’—systems that can be run autonomously for long periods of time and that complete complex tasks largely independent of human intervention,” Anthropic said. “Agents are valuable for everyday work and productivity—but in the wrong hands, they can substantially increase the viability of large-scale cyberattacks.”

Outside researchers weren’t convinced the discovery was the watershed moment the Anthropic posts made it out to be. They questioned why these sorts of advances are often attributed to malicious hackers when white-hat hackers and developers of legitimate software keep reporting only incremental gains from their use of AI.

“I continue to refuse to believe that attackers are somehow able to get these models to jump through hoops that nobody else can,” Dan Tentler, executive founder of Phobos Group and a researcher with expertise in complex security breaches, told Ars. “Why do the models give these attackers what they want 90% of the time but the rest of us have to deal with ass-kissing, stonewalling, and acid trips?”

«

My reaction to hearing the reports was that Anthropic was extremely proud that its AI was being used in this way, and wanted everyone to be impressed by it, and that on that basis it was probably better to be sceptical.
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Apple intensifies succession planning for CEO Tim Cook • Financial Times

Tim Bradshaw, Stephen Morris, Michael Acton and Daniel Thomas:

»

Apple is stepping up its succession planning efforts, as it prepares for Tim Cook to step down as chief executive as soon as next year.

Several people familiar with discussions inside the tech group told the Financial Times that its board and senior executives have recently intensified preparations for Cook to hand over the reins at the $4tn company after more than 14 years.

John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice-president of hardware engineering [aged 50], is widely seen as Cook’s most likely successor, although no final decisions have been made, these people said.

People close to Apple say the long-planned transition is not related to the company’s current performance, ahead of what is expected to be a blockbuster end-of-year sales period for the iPhone. Apple declined to comment.

The company is unlikely to name a new CEO before its next earnings report in late January, which covers the critical holiday period.

An announcement early in the year would give its new leadership team time to settle in ahead of its big annual keynote events, its developer conference in June and its iPhone launch in September, the people said. These people said that although preparations have intensified, the timing of any announcement could change.

…Apple has had a number of high-profile changes this year among its top executive team. Longtime Cook confidante, chief financial officer Luca Maestri, stepped back from his role at the start of this year. Jeff Williams, a Cook protégé, announced he was stepping down as chief operating officer in July.

Appointing Ternus would put an executive from the hardware side of the company back in charge at the iPhone maker at a time when Apple has struggled to break into new product categories and keep up with its Silicon Valley rivals in AI.

«

John Gruber suggests Cook would want to remain as executive chairman, which sounds very likely.
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AI-powered toys caught telling five-year-olds wildly inappropriate things • Futurism

Frank Landymore:

»

AI chatbots have conquered the world, so it was only a matter of time before companies started stuffing them into toys for children, even as questions swirled over the tech’s safety and the alarming effects they can have on users’ mental health.  

Now, new research shows exactly how this fusion of kid’s toys and loquacious AI models can go horrifically wrong in the real world.

After testing three different toys powered by AI, researchers from the US Public Interest Research Group found that the playthings can easily verge into risky conversational territory for children, including telling them where to find knives in a kitchen and how to start a fire with matches. One of the AI toys even engaged in explicit discussions, offering extensive advice on sex positions and fetishes.

In the resulting report, the researchers warn that the integration of AI into toys opens up entire new avenues of risk that we’re barely beginning to scratch the surface of — and just in time for the winter holidays, when huge numbers of parents and other relatives are going to be buying presents for kids online without considering the novel safety issues involved in exposing children to AI.

“This tech is really new, and it’s basically unregulated, and there are a lot of open questions about it and how it’s going to impact kids,” report coauthor RJ Cross, director of PIRG’s Our Online Life Program, said in an interview with Futurism. “Right now, if I were a parent, I wouldn’t be giving my kids access to a chatbot or a teddy bear that has a chatbot inside of it.”

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I’m not sure I’d give some adults access to a chatbot, inside or outside a teddy bear. But this is predictably bad, while also remiscent of some SF stories.
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Power companies are using AI to build nuclear power plants • 404 Media

Matthew Gault:

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Microsoft and nuclear power company Westinghouse Nuclear want to use AI to speed up the construction of new nuclear power plants in the United States. According to a report from think tank AI Now, this push could lead to disaster. 

“If these initiatives continue to be pursued, their lack of safety may lead not only to catastrophic nuclear consequences, but also to an irreversible distrust within public perception of nuclear technologies that may inhibit the support of the nuclear sector as part of our global decarbonization efforts in the future,” the report said.

The construction of a nuclear plant involves a long legal and regulatory process called licensing that’s aimed at minimizing the risks of irradiating the public. Licensing is complicated and expensive but it’s also largely worked and nuclear accidents in the US are uncommon. But AI is driving a demand for energy and new players, mostly tech companies like Microsoft, are entering the nuclear field. 

“Licensing is the single biggest bottleneck for getting new projects online,” a slide from a Microsoft presentation about using generative AI to fast track nuclear construction said. “10 years and $100 [million.]”

The presentation, which is archived on the website for the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (the independent government agency that’s charged with setting standards for reactors and keeping the public safe), detailed how the company would use AI to speed up licensing. In the company’s conception, existing nuclear licensing documents and data about nuclear sites data would be used to train an LLM that’s then used to generate documents to speed up the process.

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Don’t worry – there will be objections from NIMBYs who have trained their LLMs on previous successful (or not, it all adds time) objections to nuclear power plants.
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Apple’s new App Review Guidelines clamp down on apps sharing personal data with ‘third-party AI’ • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

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Apple on Thursday introduced a new set of App Review Guidelines for developers, which now specifically state that apps must disclose and obtain users’ permission before sharing personal data with third-party AI.

The change comes ahead of the iPhone maker’s plan to introduce its own AI-upgraded version of Siri in 2026.
That update will see Apple’s digital assistant offer users the ability to take actions across apps using Siri commands, and will be powered, in part, by Google’s Gemini technology, according to a recent Bloomberg report.

At the same time, Apple is ensuring other apps aren’t leaking personal data to AI providers or other AI businesses.
What’s interesting about this particular update is not the requirements being described but that Apple has specifically called out AI companies as needing to come into compliance.

Before the revised language, the guideline known as rule 5.1.2(i) included language around disclosure and obtaining user consent for data sharing, noting that apps could not “use, transmit or share” someone’s personal data without their permission. This rule served as part of Apple’s compliance with data privacy regulations like the EU’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), California’s Consumer Privacy Act, and others, which ensure that users have more control over how their data is collected and shared. Apps that don’t follow the policy can be removed from the App Store.

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Wonder what wording the apps will invent to persuade people that they’re sharing their data with third parties but in a nice and desirable way.
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AI slop tops Billboard and Spotify charts as synthetic music spreads • The Guardian

Aisha Down:

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Three songs generated by artificial intelligence topped music charts last week, reaching the highest spots on Spotify and Billboard charts.

Walk My Walk and Livin’ on Borrowed Time by the outfit Breaking Rust topped Spotify’s “Viral 50” songs in the US, which documents the “most viral tracks right now” on a daily basis, according to the streaming service. A Dutch song, We Say No, No, No to an Asylum Center, an anti-migrant anthem by JW “Broken Veteran” that protests against the creation of new asylum centers, took the top position in Spotify’s global version of the viral chart around the same time. Breaking Rust also appeared in the top five on the global chart.

“You can kick rocks if you don’t like how I talk,” reads a lyric from Walk My Walk, a seeming double entendre challenging those opposed to AI-generated music.

Days after its ascent up the charts, the Dutch song disappeared from Spotify and YouTube, as did Broken Veteran’s other music. Spotify told the Dutch outlet NU.nl that the company had not removed the music, the owners of the song rights had. Broken Veteran told the outlet that he did not know why his music had disappeared and that he was investigating, hoping to return it soon.

In an email to the Guardian, Broken Veteran, who declined to give his real name, said that he saw AI as “just another tool for expression, particularly valuable for people like me who have something to say but lack traditional musical training”, adding that the technology had “democratized music creation”. He claimed his songs “express frustration with governmental policies, not with migrants as individuals”.

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AI song generation is no different in principle from the chord generators on early synthesizers. Discuss.
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Apple Vision Pro live sports streaming is too costly for startups • Apple Insider

Malcolm Owen:

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Earlier in 2025, a startup reached out to us about a its 3D sports streaming startup for Apple Vision Pro. The grim reality of money, licensing, plus tech limitations of streaming 3D live sports makes it almost impossible for a startup to solve.

Since its launch, the Apple Vision Pro has been about giving users an experience. Whether it’s looking around a spaceship or an Immersive Video on a submarine, or even a snow-covered village in Iceland, there are lots of things to see and do with the headset.

However, while you can watch streaming video on a massive screen within a large novelty scene, it’s not quite the same as being at a stadium. You’re not getting the experience of being surrounded by fans and watching sports stars run around some supremely-kept grass.

With the Apple Vision Pro now in its second generation, as well as Apple moving deeper into sports, there is hope that the two can join up and result in an immersive broadcasting experience.

To a point, it is. Albeit in extremely small doses.

When it comes to its connections with the NBA, Apple has recorded a Slam Dunk contest using its cameras. There will also be a selection of Lakers basketball games streamed in 180-degree Apple Immersive video during the 2025-2026 season.

The real problem is that it’s a dream that is far away from happening on a much wider basis, for many reasons. In short, it’s an expensive and difficult thing to create, and the audience isn’t big enough to be worth it right now.

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Sports streaming on the Vision Pro is an absolute chicken-egg problem: the audience is small because there’s no content, so you can’t do the content deals because the audience is small. Only Apple can unlock this. (Thanks Joe S for the pointer.)
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Pennies are trash now • The Atlantic

Caity Weaver:

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What, exactly, is the plan for all the pennies?

Many Americans—and many people who, though not American, enjoy watching from a safe distance as predictable fiascoes unfold in this theoretical superpower from week to week—find themselves now pondering one question. What is the United States going to do with all the pennies—all the pennies in take-a-penny-leave-a-penny trays, and cash registers, and couch cushions, and the coin purses of children, and Big Gulp cups full of pennies; all the pennies that are just lying around wherever—following the abrupt announcement that the country is no longer in the penny game and will stop minting them, effective immediately?

The answer appears to be nothing at all. There is no plan.

The U.S. Mint estimates that there are 300 billion pennies in circulation—which, if true, means that the Milky Way galaxy contains about three times more American pennies than stars. How, you ask, could the plan for 300,000,000,000 coins be “nothing”? The Mint, you say, issued a formal press release about striking the final cents. Surely, you insist, that implies some sort of strategy, or at least is evidence of logical human thought and action?

…I spent several months attempting to ascertain why, in the year 2024, one out of every two coins minted in the United States was a one-cent piece, even though virtually no one-cent pieces were ever spent in the nationwide conduction of commerce, and, on top of that, each cost more than three cents apiece to manufacture.

…There were logical reasons not to care: 300 billion pennies—all of them still and indefinitely legal currency—constitute approximately zero% of the total money supply of the United States (0.0% if rounding to one decimal place). The millions of dollars the government loses by paying more than three cents to manufacture one-cent coins represents an infinitesimal fraction of 1% of the government’s several-trillion-dollar budget. And these days, most people barely encounter the coins.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified