Want to know what parrots really like doing? Making videocalls with other parrots. CC-licensed photo by Jenni Konrad on Flickr.

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A selection of 10 links for you. Had a nice break? 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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As Iranian regime shuts down internet, even Starlink seemingly being jammed • Associated Press via The Times of Israel

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Just after 8 p.m. Thursday, Iran’s theocracy pulled the plug and disconnected the Islamic Republic’s 85 million people from the rest of the world.

Following a playbook used both in demonstrations and in war, Iran severed the internet connections and telephone lines that connect its people to the vast diaspora in the United States, Europe and elsewhere. Until now, even while facing strict sanctions over the country’s nuclear program, Iranians still could access mobile phone apps and even websites blocked by the theocracy, using virtual private networks to circumvent restrictions.

…This is the third time Iran has shut down the internet from the outside world. The first was in 2019, when demonstrators angry about a spike in government-subsidized gasoline prices took to the streets. Over 300 people reportedly were killed.

Then came the protests over the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini following her arrest by the country’s morality police over allegedly not wearing her hijab, or headscarf, to the liking of authorities. A month-long crackdown killed more than 500 people.

While the connectivity offered by Starlink played a role in the Amini demonstrations, the deployment of its receivers is now far greater in Iran. That’s despite the government never authorizing Starlink to function, making the service illegal to possess and use.

A year ago, an Iranian official estimated tens of thousands of Starlink receivers in the Islamic Republic, a figure that Los Angeles-based internet freedom activist Mehdi Yahyanejad said sounded right.

While many receivers likely are in the hands of business people and others wanting to stay in touch with the outside world for their livelihoods, Yahyanejad said some are now being used to share videos, photos and other reporting on the protests.

“In this case, because all those things have been disrupted, Starlink is playing the key for getting all these videos out,” Yahyanejad said.

However, Starlink receivers are facing challenges. Since its 12-day war with Israel last June, Iran has been disrupting GPS signals, likely in a bid to make drones less effective. Starlink receivers use GPS signals to position themselves to connect to a constellation of low-orbit satellites.

Amir Rashidi, director of digital rights and security at the Miaan Group and an expert on Iran, said that since Thursday, he had seen about a 30% loss in packets being sent by Starlink devices — basically units of data that transmit across the internet. In some areas of Iran, Rashidi said there had been an 80% loss in packets.

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Suggestion is that this is like Russia’s jamming of Starlink in Ukraine. It wouldn’t be a shock if Russia is helping Iran to do this; their interests (basically, mess up the West) are aligned. The messages that are getting out seem to be via Starlink, despite jamming.
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“Worst in Show” returns at CES 2026, calling out gadgets that make things worse • iFixit

Elizabeth Chamberlain:

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Repair.org, the repair industry trade association, announced the 2026 Worst in Show awards today, annual anti-awards that spotlight the most harmful, invasive, wasteful, and unfixable tech on display at CES.

Worst in Show is produced by the Right to Repair organization Repair.org with support from a coalition of consumer and tech advocacy organizations. The awards are hosted this year by Simone Giertz, the inventor, maker, and YouTuber known for building delightfully impractical robots and poking fun at tech hype.

This year’s winners include: an “open sesame” refrigerator that puts complexity (and ads) between you and your leftovers, a doorbell ecosystem expanding surveillance in all directions, a smart treadmill that shrugs at basic security assurances, a disposable electronic lollipop (yes, really), and two Bosch products that turn everyday convenience into subscription bait and lock-in. Voting for People’s Choice is still underway, and the People’s Choice award will be presented by Back Market and NowThis Editor-in-Chief Michael Vito Valentino.

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Among the rotten tomatoes: Amazon Ring AI (worst for privacy), a treadmill with an “AI fitness trainer” that says it can’t guarantee your personal information is safe, sweets that push sounds to you, the fridge that puts adverts in your way, and many more. CES is always terrible, but now it’s AI-enhanced terrible.
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Great Green Wall 2.0: China is geoengineering deserts with blue-green algae • South China Morning Post

Dannie Peng:

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Deserts are hard to reclaim because plants cannot survive on shifting sand, but scientists in northwest China are changing that – by dropping vast amounts of blue-green algae onto the dry terrain.

These specially selected strains of cyanobacteria can survive extreme heat and drought for long periods, according to China Science Daily. When rain finally comes, they spring to life, spreading rapidly and forming a tough, biomass-rich crust over the sand. This living layer stabilises the dunes and creates the perfect foundation for future plant growth.

This is the first time in human history that microbes are being used on a massive scale to reshape natural landscapes. As the “Great Green Wall” – China’s massive multi-decade initiative to plant trees and fight desertification – expands to include efforts in Africa and Mongolia, the unprecedented geoengineering technology could one day transform the face of our planet.

This artificial “crusting” technique was developed by scientists at a research station in Ningxia Hui autonomous region, located in northwest China on the edge of the Tengger Desert, according to China Science Daily.

Ningxia has adopted the technique as part of its sand control strategy under the Great Green Wall. The technique is expected to be used on a massive scale to treat around 5,333-6,667 hectares (13,178-16,475 acres) of desert over the next five years.

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You can never accuse the Chinese of thinking small or short-term. Going to be an interesting project to catch up on in a few years’ time.
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Birds of a feather video-flock together: design and evaluation of an agency-based parrot-to-parrot video-calling system for interspecies ethical enrichment • Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Rebecca Kleinberger et al:

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Over 20 million parrots are kept as pets in the US, often lacking appropriate stimuli to meet their high social, cognitive, and emotional needs. After reviewing bird perception and agency literature, we developed an approach to allow parrots to engage in video-calling other parrots.

Following a pilot experiment and expert survey, we ran a three-month study with 18 pet birds to evaluate the potential value and usability of a parrot-parrot video-calling system. We assessed the system in terms of perception, agency, engagement, and overall perceived benefits.

With 147 bird-triggered calls, our results show that 1) every bird used the system, 2) most birds exhibited high motivation and intentionality, and 3) all caretakers reported perceived benefits, some arguably life-transformative, such as learning to forage or even to fly by watching others. We report on individual insights and propose considerations regarding ethics and the potential of parrot video-calling for enrichment.

…In Phase 1 (“meet-and-greet”), each bird learned the association between ringing a bell, touching the photo of another bird on their tablet, and being connected with that bird on a video call. Caretakers were trained to end the call if their bird showed signs of stress, disengagement or left the space.

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Yes, really: parrots like video calls with other parrots. (This was done with Facebook Messenger. Wasn’t tested on Microsoft Teams.)
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Norway reaches 97% EV sales as EVs now outnumber diesels on its roads • Electrek

Jameson Dow:

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In 2017, Norway set a formal non-binding target to end fossil car sales in the country by 2025 – a target earlier than any other country in the world by several years. Norway was already well ahead of the world in EV adoption, with about a third of new cars being electric at the time – but it wanted to schedule the final blow for just 8 years later, fairly short as far as automotive timelines go.

At the time, many (though not us at Electrek) considered this to be an optimistic goal, and figured that it might get pushed back.

But Norway did not budge in its target (unlike more cowardly nations). And it turns out, when you set a realistic goal, craft policy around it, and don’t act all wishy-washy or change your mind every few years, you can actually get things done. (In fact, Europe currently has around the same EV sales level as Norway did 10 years ahead of its 100% goal – which means Europe’s former 100% 2035 goal is still eminently achievable.)

So, already by 2021, it looked like Norway was on track to have basically no fossil-only vehicle sales – though with various stragglers, including hybrid vehicles.

And now, the final blow has basically been struck, as Norway has reported its annual numbers showing a record year for car sales with virtually all of them being electric.

…OFV [Norway’s transport statistics agency] also announced that electric cars overtook diesel cars on Norway’s roads in early December, meaning that EVs are now the plurality vehicle in the country, making up 31.78% of the fleet. Diesels are 31.76%, gasoline cars are 23.9%, and hybrids are 12.56% altogether.

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Of course Norway isn’t famous for its warm sunny weather, which means those who think EVs don’t work in the cold are a bit stuck for an argument.
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A positive sign for flying in the future…and a cautionary one about aviation right now • Breaking the News

James Fallows:

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One week ago [in December], something happened for the first time in the century-plus history of civilian air travel. An airplane whose systems detected a problem with its human pilot found its own way toward a suitable airport not in its original flight plan.

In these circumstances, the plane’s automated controls managed a gradual circling descent to the appropriate altitude for an approach, as shown in the image above. These systems landed the plane smoothly and safely on the runway, with no harm to anyone aboard or to the aircraft itself. In fact, the same plane was able to fly again, under human pilot control, the next day.

Through this unplanned episode last weekend, software and avionics from the Garmin corporation’s “Autoland” system gave a real-world answer to a question that gives some travelers nightmares. Namely, what happens if the pilot passes out… or worse?

Here’s the background: after departure from the mountain airport in Aspen, Colorado, and a seemingly normal climb to 23,000 feet, a private plane began broadcasting unusual messages to Air Traffic Control (ATC). The plane was a Beechcraft King Air B200, a popular corporate turboprop that can carry six to eight passengers. The ATC messages were not in a standard calm-sounding pilot’s voice, as they had been from this airplane at the start of the flight. Instead they had an automated, robotic sound.

Over and over, this robo-voice repeated that because of “pilot incapacitation,” the plane was directing itself for an unexpected landing at Rocky Mountain Metro airport. That was not the closest airport, but the system’s software had chosen it as most suitable because of its runway length, alignment with prevailing winds, distance from Denver International’s crowded commercial airspace, and other factors.

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You can see how this might have helped in the situation where the pilot and passengers are unconscious – as here, or Payne Stewart, the professional golfer who died in October 1999 when his private jet lost pressure. (In fact, trigger it through pressure loss seems a simple move.)

And you can see this being done by machine learning systems more regularly, to the point where the pilot is even more of an adjunct than presently.
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Bird flu warnings are being ignored. I’ve seen this pattern before • The Conversation

Nikki Ikani is an assistant professor of intelligence and security at Leiden University and King’s College London:

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Bird flu still poses a low‑probability threat of sustained human transmission. But that doesn’t make the virus harmless. The H5 viruses are brutally lethal to birds – 9 million have died outright, and hundreds of millions have been culled to contain the spread. Alarming is the virus’s expanding reach into mammals. So far, at least 74 mammal species, from elephant seals to polar bears, have suffered die‑offs.

The individual cases are situated within a broader shift. Dense poultry farms create opportunities for the virus to hop species. Over a thousand US dairy herds have tested positive in the past two years, and viral fragments have even been detected in milk – a worrying route of spillover. Every jump is a probe for new footholds.

Europe is seeing a surge too. From early September to mid-November 2025, 1,444 infected wild birds were found across 26 countries: a quadrupling compared with the year before.

Human cases remain rare: only 992 confirmed H5N1 infections worldwide since 2003, though with a near‑50% fatality rate. But the numbers are increasing.

The Americas have logged 75 cases since 2022, and in November, the US recorded its first H5N5 death in a patient with existing health problems. And although no human cases have been reported in Europe, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control warns that the widespread animal circulation raises the risk of spillover.

My research focuses on how warnings collapse before catastrophe, from geopolitical shocks to intelligence failures and industrial accidents. The pattern is often the same. Frontline observers spot something early, but the signal fades as it moves upward, diluted by bureaucracy, competing interpretations, or institutional forgetfulness.

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Watching brief, you understand. (THanks Joe S for the link.)
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iOS 26 still struggles to gain traction with iPhone users • Cult of Mac

Ed Hardy:

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iOS 26 adoption is extremely low. Roughly four months after launching in mid-September, only about 15% of iPhone users have some version of the new operating system installed. That’s according to data for January 2026 from StatCounter. Instead, most users hold onto previous versions.

For comparison, in January 2025, about 63% of iPhone users had some iOS 18 version installed. So after roughly the same amount of time, the adoption rate of Apple newest OS was about four times higher.

And that’s not a fluke. In January 2024, some iOS 17 version was on 54% of iPhones. A year earlier, the iOS 16 adoption rate was 62%.

It’s not that millions of iPhone users around the world have somehow overlooked the launch of iOS 26 followed by iOS 26.1 and iOS 26.2. They are holding off installing the upgrades because this is Apple’s most controversial new version in many years. The reason: Liquid Glass — a translucent and fluid new interface. Many elements of the UI go semi-transparent, while clever effects make it seem like users are looking through glass at objects shown on the screen behind the Control Center and pop-up windows.

iOS 26 and Liquid Glass have fans. In a recent poll, Cult of Mac users showed strong support for them. But there are plenty of detractors. Social media is especially full of negative comments.

“It’s been 3 weeks since I reluctantly updated my iPhone iOS, and dislike the new Liquid Glass UI more every day,” writes kaarbona on Threads.

“Finally updated my iPhone to Liquid Glass,” said theseokitchen on Threads. “If you’re ever having imposter syndrome, this update is proof that even professionals at billion-dollar companies make huge mistakes.”

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It’s not due to a significantly larger population of phones, either. People either don’t know how to, or don’t want to.
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Living without America • Status-Q

Quentin Stafford-Fraser:

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let’s imagine that Trump decides to invade Greenland. I like to think that the whole of Europe would be up in arms and would start significant economic reprisals against the US, but even if our leaders continue to be as weak as they have been in response to some of Trump’s other actions, we can still perhaps imagine one of the following taking place:

• Your country’s leaders do have the guts to be outspoken about it, and Trump decides to switch off your country’s access to AWS or Azure or Google Cloud or iCloud, or double your IT costs by imposing 100% tariffs, or even just impose bottlenecks to slow down your internet access to US-based services.
• Your own government announces that you must promptly move your data out of any data centres controlled by US companies.
• Your employees, as a matter of principle, object to your company’s dependence on and financing of a US company, and go on strike until you sort it out.
• Your biggest clients decide that they will only purchase products or services from companies who are not at risk from repercussions of ‘the tense geopolitical climate’.

… and I’m sure you can think of other variations.  You may not find them all plausible.  But it only takes one.

…As I read about the threats to NATO and the talk of America possibly invading part of Europe, I became rather conscious of how much of my digital life is dependent on US-controlled infrastructure. Where do I host my blog? My email may be stored in this country, but what about the DNS service that tells people where to send it? I have Zoom and Teams calls with clients next week – what would happen if they became unavailable? I host a significant amount of my technical infrastructure myself, in preference to depending on cloud services, but I realised that even I have a long way yet to go.

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As David Bowie, ten years dead this month, sang: “I’m afraid of America”. Maybe an internet war (or ultimate balkanisation) would be the real World War 3, because nobody wants to drop nukes; who wants to reduce the potential advertising base, even in an unfriendly or uncooperative country?
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Bose open-sources its SoundTouch home theater smart speakers ahead of end-of-life • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

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In October, Bose announced that its SoundTouch Wi-Fi speakers and soundbars would become dumb speakers on February 18. At the time, Bose said that the speakers would only work if a device was connected via AUX, HDMI, or Bluetooth (which has higher latency than Wi-Fi).

After that date, the speakers would stop receiving security and software updates and lose cloud connectivity and their companion app, the Framingham, Massachusetts-based company said. Without the app, users would no longer be able to integrate the device with music services, such as Spotify, have multiple SoundTouch devices play the same audio simultaneously, or use or edit saved presets.

The announcement frustrated some of Bose’s long-time customers, some of whom own multiple SoundTouch devices that still function properly. Many questioned companies’ increasingly common practice of bricking expensive products to focus on new devices or to minimize costs, or because they’ve gone through acquisitions or bankruptcy. SoundTouch speakers released in 2013 and 2015 with prices ranging from $399 to $1,500.

Today, Bose had better news. In an email to customers, Bose announced that AirPlay and Spotify Connect will still work with SoundTouch speakers after EoL, expanding the wireless capabilities that people will still be able to access.

Additionally, SoundTouch devices that support AirPlay 2 will be able to play the same audio simultaneously.

The SoundTouch app will also live on, albeit stripped of some functionality.

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A rare piece of good news: smart hardware that doesn’t die just because the maker loses interest.
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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: followup on the number of Start Up postings by year, going back to 2014. The numbers might not all add up perfectly from before 2019. But close enough.

2014: 45 (didn’t really start until October)
2015: 239
2016: 233
2017: 228
2018: 216

2019: 235
2020: 240
2021: 255
2022: 215
2023: 215
2024: 220
2025: 225
2026: ??