The “James Bond” Rolex – the Submariner – would have cost the secret agent about three weeks’ pay at the time. And not because he was fabulously paid. CC-licensed photo by Dell Deaton on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Timely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Social media use damages children’s ability to focus, say researchers • The Guardian
Dan Milmo:
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Increased use of social media by children damages their concentration levels and may be contributing to an increase in cases of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, according to a study.
The peer-reviewed report monitored the development of more than 8,300 US-based children from the age of 10 to 14 and linked social media use to “increased inattention symptoms”.
Reseachers at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and the Oregon Health & Science University in the US found that children spent an average of 2.3hrs a day watching television or online videos, 1.4hrs on social media and 1.5hrs playing video games.
No link was found between ADHD-related symptoms – such as being easily distracted – and playing video games or watching TV and YouTube. However, the study found that social media use over a period of time was associated with an increase in inattention symptoms in children. ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder with symptoms including impulsiveness, forgetting everyday tasks and difficulty focusing.
“We identified an association between social media use and increased inattention symptoms, interpreted here as a likely causal effect,” said the study. “Although the effect size is small at individual level, it could have significant consequences if behaviour changes across population level. These findings suggest that social media use may contribute to rising incidence of ADHD diagnoses.”
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Be interesting to see if the Australian social media ban for under-16s lasts long enough and is broad enough to show any effects.
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When AI recommends scammers: new attack abuses LLM indexing to deliver fake support numbers • Aurascape
Aurascape:
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This isn’t a prompt-injection bug or a model jailbreak; it’s a new attack vector created by the shift from traditional search results to AI-generated answers.
In this campaign, attackers are:
• Leveraging compromised high-authority websites (including government, university, and WordPress sites) as trusted hosting for spam content and PDFs
• Abusing user-generated platforms like YouTube and Yelp to plant GEO/AEO-optimized text and reviews
• Injecting structured scam data (phone numbers, brand names, Q&A snippets) designed to be easy for LLMs to parse and reuse
• Exploiting LLM summarization models, which merge these poisoned sources into a single, confident answer
• Reliably steering users toward fraudulent call centres via AI assistants that appear helpful and authoritativeThe rest of this article walks through concrete case studies, the GEO/AEO techniques behind them, and the broader implications for AI search and safety.
Example: when querying Perplexity with: “the official Emirates Airlines reservations number,” the system returned a confident and fully fabricated answer that included a fraudulent call-center scam number: “The official Emirates Airlines reservations number is +1 (833) 621-7070.”
It then repeated and expanded on this number in its summary, describing it as a hotline for booking, upgrades, and urgent travel needs.
We observed the same poisoning pattern when querying Perplexity with: “how can I make a reservation with British Airways by phone, what are the steps”
Perplexity responded with a detailed, authoritative-sounding step-by-step guide—and once again embedded a fraudulent U.S. reservation number, presenting it as a “commonly used” British Airways contact.
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Whatever happened to good old phonebooks, eh.
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ICEBlock creator sues US government over app’s removal • 404 Media
Joseph Cox:
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The creator of ICEBlock, a popular ICE-spotting app that Apple removed after direct pressure from the Department of Justice, is suing Attorney General Pam Bondi and other top officials, arguing that the demand violated his First Amendment rights.
The move is the latest in the ongoing crackdown on ICE-spotting apps and other information about the Trump administration’s mass deportation effort. Both Apple and Google have removed other similar apps from their app stores, with Apple also removing one called Eyes Up that simply archived videos of ICE abuses.
“A lawsuit is the only mechanism that can bring transparency, accountability, and a binding judicial remedy when government officials cross constitutional lines. If we don’t challenge this conduct in court, it will become a playbook for future censorship,” Joshua Aaron, the creator of ICEBlock, told 404 Media.
…Ultimately, the lawsuit aims to obtain a “judicial declaration” that the actions of Bondi and others violated Aaron’s First Amendment rights. “But more broadly, the purpose is to hold government officials accountable for using their authority to silence lawful expression and intimidate creators of technology they disfavor,” Aaron said.
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Good for him. Hope he succeeds.
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Apple chip chief tells staff he’s not leaving ‘anytime soon’ • Bloomberg via MSN
Mark Gurman:
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Apple chip chief Johny Srouji, whose potential departure risked worsening a bout of executive turnover, told staff on Monday that he’ll stay at the iPhone maker for now.
“I know you’ve been reading all kind of rumors and speculations about my future at Apple, and I feel that you need to hear from me directly,” he said in a memo to his division. “I love my team, and I love my job at Apple, and I don’t plan on leaving anytime soon.”
Bloomberg News reported over the weekend that Srouji had discussed leaving the company, indicating that he might work for a different technology firm.
Srouji, who serves as senior vice president of hardware technologies, had told Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook that he was seriously considering a departure in the near future, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
Cook, contending with a wider shake-up in his executive ranks, had been working aggressively to retain Srouji, the people said. The campaign included offering a substantial pay package and the potential of more responsibility down the road, they added.
Srouji oversaw Apple’s pivot to in-house silicon chips and is well-respected in the industry. In the memo Monday, Srouji said he was proud of the technologies that Apple is building, including displays, cameras, sensors, chips and batteries.
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Let’s see, who was that crazy person who reported that Srouji was thinking of leaving? The same guy that wrote this story. Not that Gurman is going to admit that. Instead he writes “for now”, which is a placeholder that could apply if Srouji stays one more month, one more year or one more decade. John Gruber is somewhat sceptical of Gurman’s commitment to owning his mistakes, as he pointed out back in March. Sure, maybe the original report was right; maybe Srouji turned Cook upside down and shook the money out of his pockets. But it seems like a rapid turnaround if so.
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I just tried Google’s Android XR glasses — and Meta and Apple are in trouble • Tom’s Guide
Mark Spoonauer:
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So I’m chatting with Google Gemini while wearing a pair of Android XR smart glasses, and I tell the assistant to brighten up an image before I’ve even taken the pic. Gemini happily obliges. I also ask for directions for a nearby restaurant and Google Maps shows me turn-by-turn directions right in my field of view. And when I look down briefly I can see the whole map to reorient myself.
This is just scratching the surface of what these Android XR glasses can do. The ones I tested are a prototype from Google, but the glasses are coming out for real in 2026 through partners like Samsung, Warby Parker and Gentle Monster.
I also tried out Xreal’s amazing Project Aura glasses, which squeeze a lot of what the Samsung Galaxy XR headset can do down into a pair of sleek specs, as well as a killer upgrade for the Galaxy XR itself. And I think Meta (and Apple) could be in trouble.
First, let’s focus on the prototype display Galaxy XR glasses. I tried everything from music playback and Google Maps to live translation, and these glasses delivered a pretty smooth experience — without the need for a neural wristband like the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses.
More important, a ton of Android apps will “just work” at launch without developers having to lift a finger. The smart glasses are smart enough to simulate a very similar experience you might get from an app in the Quick Settings menu on your phone.
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The Android XR GIF from Google makes it look as though you will get in-eye directions on maps – the thing promised so long ago (15 years?) by Google Glass.
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Springer Nature retracts, removes nearly 40 publications • The Transmitter
Calli McMurray:
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Scientific publisher Springer Nature has begun to retract dozens of papers that relied on a dataset fraught with ethical and reliability concerns, The Transmitter has learned. Five papers have been retracted since 16 November, and 33 more retractions are planned, says Tim Kersjes, Springer Nature’s head of research integrity, resolutions.
The papers attempted to train neural networks to distinguish between autistic and non-autistic children in a dataset containing photos of children’s faces. Retired engineer Gerald Piosenka created the dataset in 2019 by downloading photos of children from “websites devoted to the subject of autism,” according to a description of the dataset’s methods, and uploaded it to Kaggle, a site owned by Google that hosts public datasets for machine-learning practitioners.
The dataset contains more than 2,900 photos of children’s faces, half of which are labeled as autistic and the other half as not autistic.
After learning about a paper that cites the dataset, “I went and downloaded the dataset, and I was completely horrified,” says Dorothy Bishop, emeritus professor of developmental neuropsychology at the University of Oxford. “When I saw how it was created, I just thought, ‘This is absolute bonkers.’”
Without identifying each child in the dataset, there is no way to confirm that any of them do or do not have autism, Bishop says.
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Scary that anyone would create a dataset like that and use it with so little care.
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Meta weighs cuts to its Metaverse unit • The New York Times
Mike Isaac:
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Meta is considering making cuts to a division in its Reality Labs unit that works on the so-called metaverse, said three employees with knowledge of the matter.
The cuts could come as soon as next month and amount to 10% to 30% of employees in the Metaverse unit, which works on virtual reality headsets and a V.R.-based social network, the people said. The numbers of potential layoffs are still in flux, they said. Other parts of the Reality Labs division develop smart glasses, wristbands and other wearable devices. The total number of employees in Reality Labs could not be learned.
Meta does not plan to abandon building the metaverse, the people said. Instead, executives expect to shift the savings from the cuts into investments in its augmented reality glasses, the people said.
Meta introduced the glasses — which have built-in cameras and microphones that allow users to take phone calls and listen to music — with Ray-Ban in 2021. More recently, Meta incorporated an artificially intelligent assistant into the glasses that users can interact with through their voices. The glasses have been a surprise hit, with sales surpassing internal targets in recent years, the people said.
“Within our overall Reality Labs portfolio we are shifting some of our investment from Metaverse toward A.I. glasses and wearables given the momentum there,” Nissa Anklesaria, a spokeswoman for Meta, said in a statement. “We aren’t planning any broader changes than that.”
…paving the road to that future has been difficult. Though Meta made significant technical advances in virtual reality devices, consumers have not widely embraced the technology. Reality Labs, which builds the hardware and software for Mr. Zuckerberg’s metaverse vision, has posted more than $70bn in losses over the past four years.
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AR? That’s a good prospect. VR/metaverse? Not at all. News that surprises nobody.
Watch men • Works in Progress Magazine
Aled Maclean-Jones:
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It’s April 1984. Two men are sleeping in a car park in Basel. Each morning they wake, leave their borrowed Volkswagen Westfalia, and wash in the train station toilets. Then they go to their new stand at the Basel fair: the high point of the watch industry’s annual calendar. Their stand is arresting: every case is empty. With only two models to show, probably better not to show them at all. Instead, the pair focus on pitching the great and the good of the Swiss watch industry. If anyone asks them where they’re staying, they’ll say the Hilton.
The two men are Jacques Piguet, born into a family of watchmakers; and Jean-Claude Biver, a disgruntled ex-exec from Omega. The plan is to relaunch Blancpain, a brand they’d acquired in 1981 but had yet to bring back to life. The move is somewhat audacious: the Swiss watch industry is in a tailspin, disrupted by a new technology, the quartz wristwatch, that has left Switzerland’s traditional watchmakers obsolete.
…The job of a watch was to help you to get things done. The more exotic the watch, the more important the thing you had to do: hence Rolex’s 1950s brand ambassador of choice, General Eisenhower, and its favored class of tagline (example: ‘when a man has the world in his hands, you expect to find a Rolex on his wrist’).
That utilitarian pedigree persisted into the 1980s. Apart from a few slim dress pieces, high-end watches drew prestige from what they could do: survive a saturation dive, time a flight, measure speed with a chronograph. The Rolex Submariner Sean Connery wore in Goldfinger might be iconic, but it was standard military issue for Royal Navy divers at the time. And even if Bond had bought one himself, it would have set him back barely two weeks’ pay.
Biver saw that, in a world where machines were taking over, he could command a premium with the work of human hands. He turned the precision of quartz against itself: ‘That famous quartz precision became of secondary importance. Who cares about ultra-precision to a quarter of a second in everyday life? As a famous Italian retailer explained to his customers: “you’re a lord, and a lord doesn’t need the exact time!”
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Absorbing read. Rolex really did the work on the brand.
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King Gizzard pulled their music from Spotify in protest, and now Spotify is hosting AI knockoffs of their songs • Futurism
Victor Tangermann:
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Acclaimed Australian prog rock band King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard joined a growing number of artists when it left Spotify in July.
At the time, band leader Stu Mackenzie took aim at Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, excoriating him for investing in an AI weapons company.
“We’ve been saying f*** Spotify for years,” Mackenzie told the Los Angeles Times. “In our circle of musician friends, that’s what people say all the time, for all of these other reasons which are well documented.”
But in a technological twist, impersonators are now using generative AI to clone the band’s iconic sound. A user on Reddit was recently recommended a track on his Release Radar that was a clear knockoff of the real King Gizzard, alerting them to the scheme.
The track spotted by the Reddit user, called “Rattlesnake,” is listed under an artist with the incredibly similar name “King Lizard Wizard” — which is striking, because the real King Gizzard also has a song called “Rattlesnake.” The similarities don’t end there: the fake version of the song, which is clearly AI-generated, has identical lyrics to King Gizzard’s original version, along with a notably similar composition.
In fact, every song uploaded by the knockoff “King Lizard” artist on Spotify has the same title as an actual King Gizzard song, with its corresponding lyrics ripped straight from the source, suggesting the perpetrator fed the lyrics into an AI music generator and instructed it to copy the band’s sound.
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No response from Spotify (surprise!). A simple solution might be for any payments to be routed to King Gizzard.
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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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