The car hire company Zipcar is shutting down its UK arm, partly blaming high electricity prices for charging its EVs. CC-licensed photo by Michael Coghlan on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Discharged. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
your phone is a fake house • The Etymology Nerd
Adam Aleksic:
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Only I have the motor memory to immediately open the Notes app on my phone. A stranger would have to look for it, but my fingers subconsciously understand where to go. Much like with my childhood home, I have an embodied knowledge of my home screen.
That phrase—“home screen”—has been on my mind recently. The language of the smartphone invites you to think of it as a house. You can “choose your wallpaper,” just like with a real house; you can “lock” your phone like a front door. The metaphor is that this is a private refuge from the outside world. It is a tiny dwelling in your pocket, which you can customize like an actual dwelling to affirm your identity. In doing so, you “tame” the technology, making it feel natural in your everyday life.
The phone, like your house, is a focal point. Everything revolves around it. When you need comfort in the physical world, you go back to the home; in the digital world, you go back to your home screen. There is something calming about a deeply personal environment. It provides a grounding presence which we can retreat to.
A computer, meanwhile, remains more functional. Phrases like “desktop” and “taskbar” create a metaphor that this is a workstation; you have “trash” and “files.” Of course, there are still work-like aspects to the phone and home-like aspects to the computer, but the phone takes on a far more domestic role in our lives. It is not a utility: it is an extension of self.
In his book The Poetics of Space the philosopher Gaston Bachelard argues that our intimate spaces are deeply intertwined with our imagination and sense of being. When you curl up in a comfortable nook in your home, for example, your consciousness is gathered inward. You have control over this small space, in contrast to the wild, turbulent outdoors. You can focus attention differently in miniature.
As I move between apps on my phone, I notice a vague emotion that I am entering different rooms, each with its own character. The settings app is the basement; the dating apps are the bedroom. No matter where I go, though, there is that coziness of being in a nook. This is my corner of the world; I am free to do what I want. I can let my mind relax, for I am safe and secure from the vast, terrifying world.
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The subtlety of language; the seductiveness of the faux-private space. But is it really private?
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The AI boom is based on a fundamental mistake • The Verge
Benjamin Riley:
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The AI hype machine relentlessly promotes the idea that we’re on the verge of creating something as intelligent as humans, or even “superintelligence” that will dwarf our own cognitive capacities. If we gather tons of data about the world, and combine this with ever more powerful computing power (read: Nvidia chips) to improve our statistical correlations, then presto, we’ll have AGI. Scaling is all we need.
But this theory is seriously scientifically flawed. LLMs are simply tools that emulate the communicative function of language, not the separate and distinct cognitive process of thinking and reasoning, no matter how many data centers we build.
Last year, three scientists published a commentary in the journal Nature titled, with admirable clarity, “Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought.” Co-authored by Evelina Fedorenko (MIT), Steven T. Piantadosi (UC Berkeley) and Edward A.F. Gibson (MIT), the article is a tour de force summary of decades of scientific research regarding the relationship between language and thought, and has two purposes: one, to tear down the notion that language gives rise to our ability to think and reason, and two, to build up the idea that language evolved as a cultural tool we use to share our thoughts with one another.
Let’s take each of these claims in turn.
When we contemplate our own thinking, it often feels as if we are thinking in a particular language, and therefore because of our language. But if it were true that language is essential to thought, then taking away language should likewise take away our ability to think. This does not happen. I repeat: taking away language does not take away our ability to think. And we know this for a couple of empirical reasons.
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This one will run and run. Is a word a representation of an idea? Is manipulating words in multidimensional space thinking, or is it just shuffling a dictionary?
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Zipcar to exit UK car sharing market • Financial Times
Kana Inagaki:
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Zipcar, the car-sharing giant owned by US rental group Avis Budget, has said it plans to exit the UK market, in the latest hit to the struggling industry.
In an email to customers on Monday, James Taylor, the general manager of Zipcar UK, said it would suspend new bookings beyond December 31, pending the outcome of a consultation with British employees.
The group claims to be the UK’s biggest car-sharing club with more than 650,000 members, who can rent cars and vans for between an hour and seven days.
According to its latest accounts, the company had 71 employees last year, down from 92 in 2023. It cited high electricity costs as it reported an operating loss of £4m last year, compared with a profit of £303,000 in the previous 12 months.
“This particularly affected the company due to the size of the electric fleet and the fact that fuel costs are included in the cost of the rental,” it said.
In a statement on Monday, Avis Budget said Zipcar’s operations outside of the UK will not be affected.
…The company began operations in London in 2007 and now operates more than 1,000 electric vehicles in the city as part of a fleet of more than 3,000.
Zipcar’s plan to end its UK operations comes ahead of London’s introduction of a £13.50 a day congestion charge from January 2 for EVs, marking the first time the battery-powered cars will be hit with a fee for entering the city’s centre.
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Christmas bookings assured; everything afterwards, not so much.
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Airbus A320 recall: what the solar flare software update is all about • Gulf News
Jay Hilotin:
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Airbus, the European planemaker, issued an urgent Alert Operators Transmission (AOT) on November 29, 2025, mandating immediate software updates or hardware protections for around 6,000 A320 family aircraft — over half the global fleet.
The move came after a detailed probe into a JetBlue A320 nosedive incident on October 30 revealed that intense solar radiation could corrupt key flight control data in the Elevator Aileron Computer (ELAC). Intense solar radiation incidents are sometimes blamed for the incineration of dozens of satellites.
The vulnerability affects aircraft with specific ELAC B software versions exposed to high-altitude radiation from solar flares. This, the planemaker said, risks uncommanded pitch or roll manoeuvres.
Airbus is collaborating with regulators like EASA, which has formalised an Emergency Airworthiness Directive effective 6pm CT on November 30, 2025.
…JetBlue A320 from Cancun (Mexico) to Newark (US) suddenly lost altitude mid-flight due to corrupted ELAC data. The incident, blamed on solar radiation, injured passengers and prompted an FAA investigation; this led to the global recall.
Intense solar radiation is seen behind data corruption in the ELAC (Elevator Aileron Computer) flight control system, potentially causing uncommanded manoeuvres like sudden altitude drops.
About 6,000 active A320s worldwide require fixes before next flights, impacting operators like IndiGo (338 affected), Air India (138), American Airlines (209 of 480), Jetstar, Wizz Air and others across Asia, Europe, Americas and the US.
Most software rollbacks take 2-3 hours per plane, but ~1,000 need hardware changes lasting weeks; this has caused thousands of cancellations and delays worldwide, stranding millions during holidays, though many airlines aim for completion by November 30.
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A surprising little result of the solar flare activity. Sure to be written in to a streaming service’s cheap film in a year or two.
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The triumph of logical English • Works in Progress Magazine
Henry Oliver:
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The Elizabethans and Victorians wrote long tangled sentences that resembled the briars growing underneath Sleeping Beauty’s tower. Today we write like Hemingway. Short. Sharp. Readable. Pick up an old book and the sentences roll on. Go to the office, read the paper, or scroll Twitter and they do not. So it is said. I would like to suggest that this account is incomplete.
I propose a different story. The great shift in English prose took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, probably driven by the increasing use of writing in commercial contexts, and by the style of English in post-Reformation Christianity. It consisted in two things: a ‘plain style’ and logical syntax. A second, smaller shift has taken place in modern times, in which written English came to be modelled more closely on spoken English.
What this should demonstrate is that shortness is the wrong dimension to investigate. We think we are looking at a language that got simpler; in fact we are looking at one that has created huge variation in what it can express and how, by adding new ways of writing. Lots of English writing has got simpler through use of the plain style, sticking to a logical shared syntax, especially the syntax of speech. But all the other ways of writing are still there, often showing up when we don’t expect them.
…You might have read this essay and largely agreed with me but still been left with the feeling that something is different about modern prose as compared to the writing of the 1700s, not just the fact that we use less obscure vocabulary or the substituting full stops for colons and semicolons. Something else is still different. I think that something is that we increasingly write like we speak.
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Write as we speak. Notwithstanding, it’s a fascinating (long) article. Furthermore, Works in Progress is rapidly becoming a must-read. They also do a print version.
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Meet Rey, the admin of ‘Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters’ • Krebs on Security
Brian Krebs:
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A prolific cybercriminal group that calls itself “Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters” has dominated headlines this year by regularly stealing data from and publicly mass extorting dozens of major corporations. But the tables seem to have turned somewhat for “Rey,” the moniker chosen by the technical operator and public face of the hacker group: Earlier this week, Rey confirmed his real life identity and agreed to an interview after KrebsOnSecurity tracked him down and contacted his father.
Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters (SLSH) is thought to be an amalgamation of three hacking groups — Scattered Spider, LAPSUS$ and ShinyHunters. Members of these gangs hail from many of the same chat channels on the Com, a mostly English-language cybercriminal community that operates across an ocean of Telegram and Discord servers.
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Krebs ranges far and wide, pulling in tiny pieces of information – passwords reused here, email scams used there – to eventually track down the person..
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Specifically, Rey mentioned in several Telegram chats that he had Irish heritage, even posting a graphic that shows the prevalence of the surname “Ginty.”
Spycloud indexed hundreds of credentials stolen from cybero5dev@proton.me, and those details indicate that Rey’s computer is a shared Microsoft Windows device located in Amman, Jordan. The credential data stolen from Rey in early 2024 show there are multiple users of the infected PC, but that all shared the same last name of Khader and an address in Amman, Jordan.
The “autofill” data lifted from Rey’s family PC contains an entry for a 46-year-old Zaid Khader that says his mother’s maiden name was Ginty. The infostealer data also shows Zaid Khader frequently accessed internal websites for employees of Royal Jordanian Airlines. The infostealer data makes clear that Rey’s full name is Saif Al-Din Khader.
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He’s 16, or claims to be.
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Dutch study finds teen cybercrime is mostly just a phase • The Register
Connor Jones:
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Young threat actors may be rebels without a cause. These cybercriminals typically grow out of their offending ways by the time they turn 20, according to data published by the Dutch government.
In a report examining the social cost of adolescent crime, the Dutch House of Representatives cited various research papers to show that teenagers tend to explore their criminal tendencies at similar ages, regardless of the type of crime.
The report stated that cybercriminals tend to develop their skills at an early age – no shocks there – and do so through “hacking games.” The number of teenage cyber offenders is similar to those involved in weapons or drug offenses; together they are the three least common offence types for adolescents. Property offences such as theft were the most common.
Young cybercriminals reach peak criminality at around age 20, although this tends to fluctuate by a few years, depending on the decade. For example, between 2010-2012 and 2018-2021, the peak age floated between 17 and 19, but, in between, it remained at 20.
Research also shows that these peak ages broadly apply to all crimes, cyber or otherwise.
In 2013, one study of 323 cybercriminals found that 76% of offenders reached peak offending at age 20, before veering away from the trade gradually in the following years.
Only around 4% of those who embark on an early black hat career maintain a high likelihood of continuing that into ages well beyond the 20 mark.
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So only a couple more years for Krebs’s target. But you know there will be more to come.
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Out of Eden Walk • Center for Geographic Analysis
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The Out of Eden Walk is a 24,000-mile journalistic endeavor to create a global record of human life at the start of a new millennium as told by villagers, nomads, traders, farmers, soldiers, and artists who rarely make the news. Sponsored and hosted by National Geographic Society, the project is led by Pulitzer Prize winning writer Paul Salopek who is walking the path of human migration across the globe, and recording what he encounters in the form of writing, photographs, video, and audio.
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One of the most impressive parts is the 2013 “Walk Through Time” which shows human migration from the East Africa Rift valley through Africa and then the rest of the world.
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Michel Bettane: Chinese wine now outshines France in technical precision • Vino Joy News
Vino Joy News:
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French wine critic Michel Bettane says the overall technical standard of Chinese wines now surpasses what he and his team often encounter in their annual tastings in France — a sign, he believes, that China is undergoing an “astonishing awakening of terroir.”
The sixth edition of the Bettane + Desseauve China Wine Tasting concluded in Beijing and Shangri-La, Yunnan, in September 2025. Led by Bettane, the panel of six international experts and local judges evaluated more than 300 premium Chinese wines — a process that, he said, revealed how far the country’s winemaking has come.
Chinese wines, Bettane noted, have reached a level of maturity unimaginable 15 years ago. When he first visited, the market “was dominated by a few major brands” and “people focused on the label, not the land.” Today, from the deserts of Xinjiang to the mountains of Yunnan, he said, producers are “confidently expressing their terroir.”
What impressed him most, however, was the technical precision. “We encountered almost no wines with serious flaws,” he said. “The overall solidity of the winemaking standard is, in fact, superior to what we often find in our annual tastings in France.”
Among China’s emerging wine regions, Bettane highlighted two with strikingly different identities: Ningxia and Yunnan’s Deqin County.
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How long before we’re seeing Chinese wine on our supermarket shelves? Though French wine has, to some tastes, been going downhill for a while.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 