Everything Bryan Ferry has done in the past 25 years is thanks to a pilot’s actions over the Sahara in 2000. But how many more lives could have been saved? CC-licensed photo by NRK P3 on Flickr.

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Coming tomorrow: how does this year’s Overspill supply compare with previous ones? See the end of Thursday’s post, the last this year.

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

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Oracle’s $10bn Michigan data centre in limbo after Blue Owl funding talks stall

Tabby Kinder and Rafe Rosner-Uddin:

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Oracle’s largest data centre partner Blue Owl Capital will not back a $10bn deal for its next facility, as the software group faces increased concerns about its rising debt and artificial intelligence spending.

Blue Owl had been in discussions with lenders and Oracle about investing in the planned 1 gigawatt data centre being built to serve OpenAI in Saline Township, Michigan.

But the agreement will not go forward after negotiations stalled, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The private capital group has been the primary backer for Oracle’s largest data centre projects in the US, investing its own money and raising billions more in debt to build the facilities. Blue Owl typically sets up a special purpose vehicle, which owns the data centre and leases it to Oracle.

Larry Ellison’s computing giant has deals to supply computing power from these data centres to AI groups such as OpenAI.

The breakdown of funding discussions with Blue Owl leaves the financing of the Michigan facility in doubt, as Oracle has not yet signed a deal with a new backer, according to the people close to the matter.

…People close to the Michigan deal said lenders pushed for stricter leasing and debt terms amid shifting market sentiment around enormous AI spending including Oracle’s own commitments and rising debt levels.

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Canary? Coal mine? Is this a New Century Financial moment? A Bear Stearns hedge fund moment? Data centre funding could be a domino falling.
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Mass hacking of IP cameras leave Koreans feeling vulnerable in homes and businesses • Korea JoongAng Daily

Michael Lee:

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When Kim Ha-eun, a mother of two, installed internet protocol (IP) cameras in her home after giving birth for the first time five years ago, she hoped the devices would ease the need for her and her husband to remain physically present around the clock to watch over their children.
 
“Being able to see what was happening inside the house in real time was important for us if we had to step outside, even for something as simple as a grocery run,” she said.
 
But news that hackers recently breached approximately 120,000 IP cameras across Korea — often found inside private homes like Kim’s — has left her and many others seething, prompting the government to take action.
 
As shocking the scale of the intrusions was the alleged motive behind them. Videos captured by the hacked cameras were allegedly sold to an overseas pornography website, exposing some of the most intimate moments of unsuspecting victims to anonymous viewers abroad.
 
Only 1,193 videos from the hacked cameras have been uncovered so far on overseas websites, raising concerns that many more remain undiscovered.
 
In response, an interagency task force comprising officials from the Ministry of Science and ICT, the Personal Information Protection Commission and the National Police Agency announced on Dec. 7 that it would pursue a multilayered reform package. The measures aim to shift responsibility beyond individuals and camera manufacturers to include business users and telecommunications providers.
 
Yet as policymakers scramble to overhaul regulations and reinforce technical safeguards, interviews with everyday users of IP cameras reveal a gap between how these devices are used and understood and the level of risk they actually pose.

For Kim, the five IP cameras in her home were initially meant to provide peace of mind. The cameras — one in each child’s bedroom, as well as units in the living room and kitchen — run continuously, providing a live feed accessible through a mobile app.
 
Privacy and data security, however, were not central considerations in her decision. Kim’s husband installed the system himself using online instructions, setting a password for the cameras that the couple has not changed since. Until learning of the hacking scandal during the interview, Kim had not even seen the news.

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A related story on the KJD site: “Taekwondo instructor who set up hidden camera in women’s locker room sent to prosecutors”. IP cameras: potentially toxic for anyone in range.
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Ford’s EV retreat highlights industry dilemma: build for the US or the world? • Reuters

Nora Eckert:

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Ford CEO Jim Farley walked through Ford’s Michigan design studio Monday afternoon, reflecting on how he was about to wipe out thousands of work hours on electric vehicles that he and his team had hoped would revolutionize the American auto industry.

Shortly after, his company announced it would kill several of those battery-powered models and take a $19.5bn writedown on electric vehicle (EV)-related assets. It marked the industry’s biggest electric-vehicle retreat since US President Donald Trump’s sweeping auto-policy changes iced already cooling EV demand.

Farley had spent years telling staff and investors that catching up to Tesla and China’s leading EV makers amounted to an existential struggle. Now – after losing about $13bn on EVs since 2023 – Farley says the path to survival lies in ditching these unprofitable models.

“We can’t allocate money for things that will not make money,” he told Reuters on Monday. “As much as I love those products, the customers in the U.S. were not going to pay for them. And that was the end of that.”

…On EVs, Farley hopes to thread the needle by killing most EV models but preserving a $30,000 midsize electric truck due out in 2027, which a specialised skunkworks team in California has engineered to take on EV powerhouses Tesla and China’s BYD. “As a global company competing against the Chinese and others, we do not have time,” Farley said.

Michael Dunne, a consultant and former General Motors executive who spent years in China, said US automakers have little choice but to balance raking in US profits from gas-powered trucks while competing overseas with Chinese and other EV makers. “EVs are not going to go away,” Dunne said. “So are we going to compete globally or are we just going to stay at home?”

US electric-vehicle sales have dropped sharply since the Sept. 30 expiration of a $7,500-per-car consumer tax credit, killed in Trump-supported legislation. That and other administration policies have cemented America’s status as an EV laggard relative to the world’s two other largest car markets. In China, EVs and plug-in hybrids account for roughly half of sales; in Europe, they comprise around 25%. US sales sank to around 5% after Trump policies took effect.

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The Americans are watching the Chinese companies eat their lunch abroad, and they’ll be coming for breakfast in the US presently.
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Is the collapse of Robin.AI a one-off or a sign of a legal tech AI bubble? • 3 Geeks and a Law Blog

Greg Lambert:

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Robin AI launched in 2019 with a compelling premise: a “lawyer-in-the-loop” contract review system that combined large language models with proprietary contract data. The founding team brought credibility: lawyer Richard Robinson and machine-learning researcher James Clough building something at the intersection of both worlds. In early 2024, they raised $26m in Series B funding. The marketing was aggressive: major enterprise clients, ambitious platform expansion across drafting and negotiation, claims of transformative efficiency gains.

By late 2025, the picture had changed dramatically. Internal reports suggested the company failed to secure another major funding round (targeting roughly $50m), laid off about a third of its workforce, and quietly listed itself for sale on a distressed marketplace.

That trajectory, from high-profile funding to forced sale in under two years, warrants closer examination. Robin AI never publicly disclosed its Series B valuation. In a market where lofty valuations typically accompany large deals, that absence now looks less like discretion and more like avoidance. Without a clear number, it’s impossible to assess whether investor expectations matched operational reality or whether growth projections were ever grounded in achievable metrics.

More telling were the employee accounts. Reviews on Glassdoor described a culture of overwork, inadequate support, and marketing claims that outpaced product capability.

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Canary? Coal mine?
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Sharp monocular view synthesis in less than a second • Apple’s Github

Lars Mescheder, Wei Dong and others:

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We present SHARP, an approach to photorealistic view synthesis from a single image. Given a single photograph, SHARP regresses the parameters of a 3D Gaussian representation of the depicted scene. This is done in less than a second on a standard GPU via a single feedforward pass through a neural network. The 3D Gaussian representation produced by SHARP can then be rendered in real time, yielding high-resolution photorealistic images for nearby views.

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This creates images that people using Apple’s Vision Pro headset can enter into and walk around in. There’s an ArXiv paper to go with it: perhaps something is happening on the Vision Pro under the surface.
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Apple Music is coming to ChatGPT, OpenAI announces • 9to5Mac

Marcus Mendes:

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In a Substack post published earlier today, Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of applications, said that Apple Music is among the upcoming partners that will integrate with ChatGPT.

Last October, OpenAI introduced apps in ChatGPT, with the first round of partnerships and integrations including Spotify, Booking.com, Canva, Coursera, Figma, Expedia, and Zillow. Back then, OpenAI also released a preview of the Apps SDK, which would soon let developers integrate their own apps into ChatGPT.

Soon, according to Simo, “even more apps will be available in a new directory, including Adobe, Airtable, Apple Music, Clay, Lovable, OpenTable, Replit, and Salesforce, and other developers will be able to submit their apps for review.”

This likely means that the Apps SDK is about to exit preview, and that OpenAI has been pursuing new high-profile integrations.

Interestingly, Simo mentions Adobe, which just released Photoshop, Express, and Acrobat apps in ChatGPT. At the time, the company claimed that new capabilities would be introduced in the coming weeks.

For Apple Music and ChatGPT, the app will most likely work similarly to how Spotify works within ChatGPT:

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When you start a message to ChatGPT with the name of an available app, like “Spotify, make a playlist for my party this Friday,” ChatGPT can automatically surface the app in your chat and use relevant context to help.

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This means that users will likely be able to send natural language prompts to ChatGPT, allowing it to create instantly playable playlists based on those requests.

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Better than Siri? Though is there any possibility of a hallucination trying to insert a track that doesn’t exist?
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Sherlocked before it was born: LightBuddy • Rambo Codes

Guillherme Rambo:

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A couple of months ago, I was a few minutes away from joining a video call in my office when I noticed I hadn’t set up my ring light yet.

I use a ring light for video calls because the lighting in my office comes mostly from the top. That lighting is perfectly fine for working, but it casts shadows under the eyes and chin that are exacerbated by the built-in camera in my Studio Display.

I don’t leave the ring light behind my desk all the time because it’s distracting and makes the office look messy. That means that I have to set it up every single time I want to look decent on a video call (#FirstWorldProblems).

So I thought to myself, “hey, I have a big device that’s essentially a programmable soft box right in front of my face, why don’t I use that?”. It wasn’t the first time that I thought of my display as a lighting fixture for video calls. In the past, I’d sometimes open up about:blank in Safari and leave the window open so that it would illuminate my face during a video call.

Being a Mac developer, the natural next step was to open up Xcode and go “File > New Project”. In about 15 minutes, I had a little prototype called “RingLightBuddy” that displayed an ugly white HDR round rect [rounded rectangle] around the edges of the screen. It would also mask it out when you moved the mouse over it so that it was still possible to interact with the computer when using the ring light.

I was actually really excited about the idea, and thought about turning it into a product, but after using it for a few minutes, I thought “meh, this is a stupid idea, never mind”, and just left it to rot in my projects folder.

This all happened in mid-July. Fast-forward to mid-November, during the beta cycle for macOS 26.2, Apple added the new Edge Light feature, which was basically the same idea, integrated into macOS.

My initial reaction was of disappointment with myself for not having moved forward with the app when I initially had the idea and made the prototype, as I had a chance to launch the feature before Apple did.

After thinking about it for a while, my feelings changed.

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But now: there is an app! And it actually looks useful for anyone who does those calls when it’s dark or dim. (For those who don’t know: “Sherlocked”.)
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The strange fate of BA Flight 2069 • New Statesman

Kate Mossman:

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Bill Hagan felt his head push beyond the pillow and into the headboard. As he came to consciousness, he realised it was not a headboard but the reinforced plastic bulkhead of a plane. At the moment he realised he was on a plane, he remembered that he was the captain of it. His feet were pitched up at 30 degrees in the flight crew’s bunk, at twice the angle of take-off. His first thought was that his two co-pilots had pulled up the aircraft’s nose because of oncoming traffic. When the plane banked sharply to the right, he wondered whether they’d swerved to avoid space debris. For a few seconds the aircraft seemed to level, then rose again, before turning sharply to the left and beginning to fall on its side.

Hagan had not been able to find his pyjamas before his rest break, and he entered the cockpit through the bunk’s adjoining door in his underpants, as British Airways Flight 2069 fell nose down at the rate of 30,000 feet per minute. “Something has been bothering me for a quarter of a century,” he texts me on a Sunday night 25 years later. “How did I manage to get into the cockpit with the aerobatics going on? I now realise I entered at the precise time the G-forces were changing from positive to negative, making me light on my feet.”

His co-pilot Phil Watson was strapped into the right-hand seat – the left should have been filled by his colleague Richard Webb but was empty – and another man was slumped over Watson’s lap, hooked on to the control column. Hagan pulled on the man’s shoulders, but three times he lost his grip. As the plane descended, he had a profound feeling of shame. He’d worked out that the Nairobi-bound flight would be somewhere over the Sahara Desert and this thought bothered him most. “Because it would be worse than Lockerbie. Because there is nothing there, just sand. The aircraft would be broken up, and bodies all over the place.” 

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This became a famous event at the time: those on board included Bryan Ferry, of Roxy Music fame, and Jemima Khan, erstwhile wife of Imran. But what people forget is when it happened, and what happened not long after. The subtitle is “How do you measure the cost of a disaster that didn’t happen?” You have to register an email or have a subscription to read the full article; it’s well worth your time.
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Trump Mobile is offering phones for $500… refurbished, three-year-old ones • The Independent

Io Dodds:

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True Donald Trump devotees who put down their $100 deposits are still awaiting the chance to receive one of his family’s $499 golden smartphones for “real Americans”.

But in the meantime, perhaps you’d like to buy a refurbished Apple or Samsung phone from several years ago, for up to $225 more than you could get on Amazon?

That’s the astonishing deal now on offer from Trump Mobile, the patriotic phone vendor launched this June by the President’s family business, the Trump Organization (currently run by his eldest sons Don Jr and Eric Trump).

There’s still no update on the company’s forthcoming T1, a “proudly American” Android handset retailing for $499 that was forced to remove its “MADE IN THE USA” branding after experts argued that the facilities to manufacture such devices wholly within the States simply do not exist.

That hasn’t stopped the firm hawking refurbished Samsung S23s, S24s, and Apple iPhone 15s and 16s, which appear to have no specific Trump branding and are billed as “brought to life right here in the USA”.

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How astonishing that Trump should be involved with something that appears to be a complete and utter con. The T1 was due to be delivered in June. Perhaps they meant a different June than 2025’s June.
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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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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified