Wars shape societies, and technologies shape wars, so how will drones change our worlds? CC-licensed photo by Rob Pegoraro on Flickr.
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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:
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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:
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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.
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The rest of the article is behind a paywall, but there’s an X post explaining it:
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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:
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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 1900sPeople 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.
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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
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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:
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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.
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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:
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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.”
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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:
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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.
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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
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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.
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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:
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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.
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Theoretically, sure, everything works together. Practically, it keeps not happening, despite the efforts of Matter and others. (Gift link.)
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 
Ars Technica says that Google’s “AirDrop” works because iOS now supports something called WiFi Aware, due to nudging from EU.
They also claim that WiFi Aware is based on Apple’s proprietary AWDL which was developed for AirDrop ages ago, as nothing like that existed back then.
Getting contacts only to work might quite difficult technically, even if Apple cooperates.
(If Apple introduced AirDrop now, it would not be allowed in EU. Ecosystem differentiation and innovation is now mostly illegal, even if you are the underdog in terms of marketshare.)