The Environment Agency was far too slow to respond to thousands of tonnes of illegally dumped waste near the river Cherwell. CC-licensed photo by Howard Stanbury on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Rubbish. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
OpenAI CEO declares “code red” as Gemini gains 200 million users in three months • Ars Technica
Benj Edwards:
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The shoe is most certainly on the other foot. On Monday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly declared a “code red” at the company to improve ChatGPT, delaying advertising plans and other products in the process, The Information reported based on a leaked internal memo. The move follows Google’s release of its Gemini 3 model last month, which has outperformed ChatGPT on some industry benchmark tests and sparked high-profile praise on social media.
In the memo, Altman wrote, “We are at a critical time for ChatGPT.” The company will push back work on advertising integration, AI agents for health and shopping, and a personal assistant feature called Pulse. Altman encouraged temporary team transfers and established daily calls for employees responsible for enhancing the chatbot.
The directive creates an odd symmetry with events from December 2022, when Google management declared its own “code red” internal emergency after ChatGPT launched and rapidly gained in popularity. At the time, Google CEO Sundar Pichai reassigned teams across the company to develop AI prototypes and products to compete with OpenAI’s chatbot. Now, three years later, the AI industry is in a very different place.
Google released Gemini 3 in mid-November, and the model quickly topped the LMArena leaderboard, a crowdsourced vibemarking site that allows users to compare two AI models and select the one with outputs that please them most. The launch has been accompanied by measured praise from some and bombastic hype from others. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff wrote Sunday on X that he was switching to Gemini 3 after using ChatGPT daily for three years. “I’m not going back,” Benioff wrote. “The leap is insane.”
…Not everyone views OpenAI’s “code red” as a genuine alarm. Reuters columnist Robert Cyran wrote on Tuesday that OpenAI’s announcement added “to the impression that OpenAI is trying to do too much at once with technology that still requires a great deal of development and funding.” On the same day Altman’s memo circulated, OpenAI announced an ownership stake in a Thrive Capital venture and a collaboration with Accenture. “The only thing bigger than the company’s attention deficit is its appetite for capital,” Cyran wrote.
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Shades of Facebook when Google announced Google+?
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Rubbish mountain • The Value of Nothing
Martin Robbins goes to Oxford to look at the gigantic amount of waste dumped there by criminals some time earlier this year:
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Eyewitness reports speak of convoys of lorries turning up at the site, delivering the rubbish to waiting excavators that moulded it into the extraordinary monument we see today. When I visited the area last weekend I estimated the pile to be around 170m long (roughly the length of the Gherkin in London), 12m wide and perhaps 5 or 6 deep, making it somewhere north of ten thousand cubic metres in size. It would take four or five hundred of the largest bin lorries to shift it all. This was not a few dodgy geezers in white vans, but a large criminal operation that must have involved dozens of people.
The sheer scale of the crime scene makes its location rather ironic, because this giant landfill sits just twelve hundred yards from the headquarters of Thames Valley Police in Kidlington, just north of Oxford. In fact visiting the town was a surreal experience in its own right – the local Sainsbury’s is such a notorious crime spot that the supermarket has installed a highly visible CCTV monitoring station in front of the exit, with a uniformed guard watching TV screens as you wander by with your shopping. Presumably this security theatre is supposed to comfort shoppers, but it made the place feel like some lawless outpost, a town in visible decline.
In fairness to the police, it’s hard to imagine a more convenient or secluded site to carry out this crime. Surrounded by trees, it was completely screened off from view until leaves began falling in the Autumn. In theory a public footpath crosses the land, but in practice nobody would ever walk down it – one end is hidden behind a crash barrier on the main road half a mile out of town, while the other terminates at the end of a field in the middle of nowhere, coming out on a small road with no parking nearby and no other paths to connect with.
In any case, Thames Valley Police have shown little interest in the crime – perhaps too busy with the local Sainsbury’s – and the job of dealing with it has fallen to the Environment Agency, the public body responsible for waste crime. They swung into action at the start of July, and in the spirit of being as fair as I possibly can, I’ll tell you their side of the story first.
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There’s an embedded 10-minute YouTube video which shows this story in full, with terrific drone footage. It will surely make you angry at the sheer incompetence and indifference of the Environment Agency, which shows absolutely no interest in discovering the people behind this or using simple detection methods such as wildlife cameras. I’ve put more effort into finding a lost dog than they did into uncovering those behind a criminal enterprise that will poison a river.
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UK ministers aim to ban cryptocurrency political donations over anonymity risks • The Guardian
Rowena Mason:
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Ministers are working to ban political donations made with cryptocurrency but the crackdown is not likely to be ready for the elections bill in the new year, Whitehall sources have said.
The government increasingly believes that donations made with cryptocurrency pose a risk to the integrity of the electoral system, not least because the source can be hard to verify.
However, the complex nature of cryptocurrency means officials do not believe a ban will be workable by the time of the elections bill, due to be published shortly, which is set to lower the voting age to 16 and reduce loopholes in political finance.
The government’s ambition to ban crypto donations will be a blow to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, which became the first to accept contributions in digital currency this year. It is believed to have received its first registrable donations in cryptocurrency this autumn and the party has set up its own crypto portal to receive contributions, saying it is subject to “enhanced” checks.
Government sources have said ministers believe cryptocurrency donations to be a problem, as they are difficult to trace and could be exploited by foreign powers or criminals.
Pat McFadden, then a Cabinet Office minister, first raised the idea in July, saying: “I definitely think it is something that the Electoral Commission should be considering. I think that it’s very important that we know who is providing the donation, are they properly registered, what are the bona fides of that donation.”
The Electoral Commission provides guidance on crypto donations but ministers accept any ban would probably have to come from the government through legislation.
Earlier this year, the Electoral Commission initially appeared to believe the risks of donations in cryptocurrency were manageable, saying they could be assessed like any other asset such as a work of art or donations in kind.
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Interesting point: if donations are anonymous, then how can they be influence? But this is yet another form of hawala – the trust-based system of money transfer. You tell your target, in a secure way, that you’re making a donation of a specified amount; the donation turns up subsequently in a crypto transfer. The Electoral Commission is overoptimistic.
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Google is experimentally replacing news headlines with AI clickbait nonsense • The Verge
Sean Hollister:
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Did you know that BG3 players exploit children? Are you aware that Qi2 slows older Pixels? If we wrote those misleading headlines, readers would rip us a new one — but Google is experimentally beginning to replace the original headlines on stories it serves with AI nonsense like that.
I read a lot of my bedtime news via Google Discover, aka “swipe right on your Samsung Galaxy or Google Pixel homescreen until you see a news feed appear,” and that’s where these new AI headlines are beginning to show up.
They’re not all bad. For example, “Origami model wins prize” and “Hyundai, Kia gain share” seem fine, even if not remotely as interesting as the original headlines. (“Hyundai and Kia are lapping the competition as US market share reaches a new record” and “14-year-old wins prize for origami that can hold 10,000 times its own weight” sound like they’re actually worth a click!)
But in the seeming attempt to boil down every story to four words or less, Google’s new headline experiment is attaching plenty of misleading and inane headlines to journalists’ work, and with little disclosure that Google’s AI is rewriting them.
The very first one I saw was “Steam Machine price revealed,” which it most certainly was not! Valve won’t reveal that till next year. Ars Technica’s original headline was the far more reasonable “Valve’s Steam Machine looks like a console, but don’t expect it to be priced like one.”
…The good news is, this is a Google experiment. If there’s enough backlash, the company probably won’t proceed. “These screenshots show a small UI experiment for a subset of Discover users,” Google spokesperson Mallory Deleon tells The Verge. “We are testing a new design that changes the placement of existing headlines to make topic details easier to digest before they explore links from across the web.”
But the overall trend at Google has been to prioritize its own products at the expense of sending clicks to news websites.
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Google used to be about the open web. More and more, it’s about keeping people inside its properties.
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‘Unauthorized’ edit to Ukraine’s frontline maps point to Polymarket’s war betting • 404 Media
Matthew Gault:
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A live map that tracks frontlines of the war in Ukraine was edited to show a fake Russian advance on the city of Myrnohrad on November 15. The edit coincided with the resolution of a bet on Polymarket, a site where users can bet on anything from basketball games to presidential election and ongoing conflicts. If Russia captured Myrnohrad by the middle of November, then some gamblers would make money. According to the map that Polymarket relies on, they secured the town just before 10:48 UTC on November 15. The bet resolved and then, mysteriously, the map was edited again and the Russian advance vanished.
The degenerate gamblers on Polymarket are making money by betting on the outcomes of battles big and small in the war between Ukraine and Russia. To adjudicate the real time exchange of territory in a complicated war, Polymarket uses a map generated by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a DC-based think tank that monitors conflict around the globe.
One of ISW’s most famous products is its live map of the war in Ukraine. The think tank updates the map throughout the day based on a number of different factors including on the ground reports. The map is considered the gold standard for reporting on the current front lines of the conflict, so much so that Polymarket uses it to resolve bets on its website.
…ISW acknowledged the stealth edit, but did not say if it was made because of the betting markets. “It has come to ISW’s attention that an unauthorized and unapproved edit to the interactive map of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was made on the night of November 15-16 EST. The unauthorized edit was removed before the day’s normal workflow began on November 16 and did not affect ISW mapping on that or any subsequent day. The edit did not form any part of the assessment of authorized map changes on that or any other day. We apologize to our readers and the users of our maps for this incident,” ISW said in a statement on its website.
ISW did say it isn’t happy that Polymarket is using its map of the war as a gambling resource.
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Gamblers are weird, weird people.
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Companies have found a new way to advertise: ragebaiting. You’ll hate it • The Washington Post
Tatum Hunter and Nitasha Tiku:
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Tech founder Avi Schiffmann spent around a million dollars this autumn papering New York City’s subways with ads proclaiming that Friend, an AI device worn like a necklace, is a better support system than human companions.
The ads were less about selling the device, he said, than getting people to talk about it — for good or ill.
On those terms, at least, it worked. Riders, angry at the encroachment of AI, vandalized many of the ads with scrawled messages such as “Stop capitalizing on loneliness” and “AI wouldn’t care if you lived or died.” Anti-AI social media chatter featuring photos of the defaced ads started gaining traction online.
Schiffmann, 23, sat back and watched the attention roll in. When subway workers started washing the graffiti off the ads, he raced on foot to the West 4th Street station to beg them to stop.
“I wanted Friend to be a scapegoat for everything people don’t like about the world right now,” Schiffmann said. The campaign’s viral success, he added, was primarily the work of online posters rushing to smear Friend’s product and presentation. All he did was set the bait.
Schiffmann is hardly alone. Ragebait — the art of making people mad on social media — has graduated this year from a growth hack for online influencers to a corporate marketing strategy. This week Oxford University Press declared “rage bait” 2025’s word of the year, finding the term’s usage has tripled in the last 12 months.
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Does it make you angry? Does it? (Most of this stuff is very resistible, if we’re honest.)
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The Taiwan crisis of 2025 is here • National Security Journal
Robert E. Kelly:
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Japan and China are now locked in a protracted spat over China’s claims to Taiwan.
What started as a minor flap is growing into a major contest in which regional players are desperately trying to avoid taking sides between the two rivals and are increasingly staking out opposed positions.
China’s designs on Taiwan are well known, but Beijing appears to have suddenly decided to force the issue in the region.
Beijing is using new Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s words—that a Chinese assault on Taiwan would inevitably become a security issue for Japan—to bully the region to accept the Chinese position on Taiwan, namely, that it should be permitted to invade and conquer it with no outside intervention.
Japan is China’s primary antagonist in the region. No other economy is large enough to compete with China, and the US alliance with Japan is the linchpin of the US position in East Asia.
This position is turning into a major showdown. If Beijing can humble Japan—if it can force Takaichi, via trade coercion and military threats, to retract her words—then it will establish rhetorical dominance over its regional rival.
A Japanese capitulation will signal to other regional powers, such as South Korea and the Philippines, that they, too, should find an accommodation with Beijing.
For this reason, Japan is unlikely to back down. It cannot afford to swerve in a direct chicken contest with its primary competitor. This stalemate will therefore likely continue for a while.
That Japan and China might fall into a cold war over the future of East Asia is not a new observation.
The chill began under the premiership of Shinzo Abe in Japan and the presidency of Xi Jinping of China. But both sides had strong economic incentives to keep security competition muffled.
Their trade relationship is substantial. Both would suffer from a prolonged fallout. When the history of this standoff is written, much focus will be on why China chose this moment to plant its flag. Does it now feel ready to take Japan on directly?
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Occasionally, geopolitics intrudes. This is important, even if it goes under the radar of all the Trumpist nonsense across the world. (Kelly is an analyst based in Korea who achieved fame when his children intruded on his BBC talking head spot in 2017.)
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Nuclear Taskforce Tracker • Centre for British Progress
Centre for British Progress:
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Tracking the progress of government departments, regulators and industry in implementing the UK Nuclear Regulatory Taskforce’s recommendations. The content in this tracker is partially AI-generated based on the Nuclear Regulatory Taskforce report. We have worked hard to ensure it is accurate, but some of the titles, descriptions, etc. may be slightly different or truncated.
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The Centre for British Progress describes itself as “a non-partisan think tank researching and producing concrete ideas for an era of British growth and progress.” So far everything’s on track! Though that’s only one recommendation completed. Many, many more to come.
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Why Zipcar gave up on London • London Centric
Jim Waterson and Polly Smythe:
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Zipcar’s planned closure date coincides with the mayor’s decision to introduce a new £13.50 daily congestion charge on electric vehicles, a move that would hit any Zipcar that is picked up outside the zone and driven through central London. The company had already said it would pass on the cost to drivers, substantially raising the price of a car journey through the heart of the capital — and making it much less financially attractive.
…The congestion charge extension might have been the final nail in Zipcar’s coffin. But looking at the company’s UK accounts, it’s clear the business model had been in deep trouble for several years due to rising costs and flatlining revenue.
Zipcar’s UK income fell by £3.95m to £47m in 2024, due to customers taking fewer and shorter trips in their cars. Costs increased, meaning post-tax losses widened dramatically to £11.6m. The company said the cost-of-living crisis “reduced members’ disposable income and impacted their demand for leisure activities”. Electric vehicles proved to be costly to buy and difficult to resell.
The arrival of Uber in the mid-2010s ate into Zipcar’s business model of enabling people nipping around London for short car trips. It’s also reasonable to assume that some people who might have been tempted by a one-way Zipcar Flex in the past are now choosing to pop on a much cheaper Lime e-bike. IKEA started doing delivery.
All in all, People just aren’t travelling as much and while a substantial number of Londoners came to rely on Zipcar as an emergency back-up travel option, that wasn’t enough to sustain it as a profitable business.
Parent company Avis Budget, which is already in financially dire straits, simply appears to have had enough and pulled the plug on this comparatively small part of its UK operation at short notice.
But what’s the impact going to be?
Moving house with one of Zipcar’s van and the help of a couple of friends became a rite of passage for many young Londoners. Zipcar claimed each of its vehicles removed 27 barely-used privately owned cars from the capital’s roads, with 12,000 businesses supposedly using its services.
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Reading this, and an earlier London Centric report on how TfL isn’t hitting its (lowering) carbon emission targets unless it gets more EVs on the roads, one despairs a little of anybody being able to come up with a scheme where the left hand and right hand are in communication.
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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 