The showing by Apple of an NBA game specially for the Vision Pro headset was a failure – in a predictable way. When will it learn? CC-licensed photo by Jeramey Jannene on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Rebound! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
I was kidnapped by idiots • The Atlantic
Elizabeth Tsurkov:
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Four men searched my mouth for implanted tracking devices. I had told them I didn’t have any—that, as far as I knew, such things existed only in movies. They asked if I had fillings, and I confessed that I did. They looked again. “No, you don’t,” one of them corrected me, having failed to find any glint of silver. My fillings are white. The men, wearing dark civilian clothes and balaclavas, seemed convinced that these unfamiliar fillings posed a threat to their operational security. That’s when I knew that my kidnapping was going to be a little bit different.
I was violently snatched on March 21, 2023, from the outskirts of Baghdad, where I had been conducting fieldwork for my Ph.D. at Princeton University. When my kidnappers delivered me to my cell, they cut the restraints they’d placed around my arms and legs, and lifted the cloth bag off my head. The secret prison where I was brought was run by Kataib Hezbollah, an Iraqi militia backed by Iran.
…This mix of woeful ignorance and expert brutality may appear odd, but it is a hallmark of regimes that are born of marginalized, typically rural, victims of prior rulers. The downtrodden take power and exact revenge against the previous elites, and mete out violence against every suspected opponent. Such a regime existed in Iraq previously: Under Saddam Hussein, the Baath leadership was drawn largely from the Sunni minority, but the lower ranks of the security agencies, the interrogators and torturers, were recruited from the poor Shia-majority provinces. In Syria, an equivalent system existed under the Assad dynasty, in which rural Alawites (a heterodox sect that emerged from Shiism) dominated the security agencies that policed a Sunni majority. Going further back in history, Maoist China and Khmer Rouge Cambodia followed the same pattern.
Under such regimes, the state uses indiscriminate barbarity to instill constant terror in the population. The purpose is to deter resistance, but the arbitrary nature of the violence can stem from the unreliable information produced by ignorant interrogators: Informers may be settling personal scores; torture victims will, like me, say anything. Security agencies staffed by dumb thugs are typically inept at identifying genuine subversive threats.
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I read this without looking at the name at the top, and assumed it was a man; most of all because of the torture (which has left permanent effects) carried out. Realising that this was done to a woman is shocking. But as Tsurkov points out, these are not clever people. They are idiots. But they are idiots who had her imprisoned and could do what they wanted.
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Taiwan push to power AI with green energy hurts rural communities – Rest of World
Hsiuwen Liu:
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For generations, Li Cheng-chieh and his family have lived off the tidal flats along Taiwan’s west coast, harvesting oysters and selling them to homes and in local markets. Four years ago, thick cables to transmit power from a new offshore wind project landed ashore, and workers dug trenches to bury them, churning up layers of sediment and debris that slowly killed nearly all their oysters.
“I often say I will be the last generation of oyster farmers here,” Li told Rest of World as he walked through his field, his feet sinking deep into the cold, thick mud. “There’s no way we can fight this.”
Li lives in the coastal township of Fangyuan in Changhua county, which is on the frontline of Taiwan’s offshore wind expansion. With its shallow waters and steady winds, it has drawn billions of dollars of investment in recent years, becoming the island’s most concentrated wind power zone. The energy is needed to meet the demand from the semiconductor industry, which produces advanced chips that power artificial intelligence systems worldwide. The sector’s energy demand is expected to grow eightfold by 2028.
…Renewable energy contributed to about 12% of Taiwan’s power mix at the end of 2024, with wind accounting for a growing share. About 170 wind turbines operate off Changhua’s coast, built by state-backed and foreign developers including Taiwan Power Company, and Denmark’s Ørsted and CIP. That number is set to reach more than 400 this year.
The rapid expansion has already disrupted rural communities. Since installation of the offshore cables began around 2022, silt buildup has increased, coating oyster shells with mud, shrinking viable farming areas and cutting yields, Li and three other oyster farmers in Fangyuan told Rest of World. It is set to get worse for the more than 500 oyster farmers in the area.
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The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe • no.heger
Norbert Heger:
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A lot has already been said about the absurdly large corner radius of windows on macOS Tahoe. People are calling the way it looks comical, like a child’s toy, or downright insane.
Setting all the aesthetic issues aside – which are to some extent a matter of taste – it also comes at a cost in terms of usability.
Since upgrading to macOS Tahoe, I’ve noticed that quite often my attempts to resize a window are failing.
This never happened to me before in almost 40 years of using computers. So why all of a sudden?
It turns out that my initial click in the window corner instinctively happens in an area where the window doesn’t respond to it. The window expects this click to happen in an area of 19×19 pixels, located near the window corner.
If the window had no rounded corners at all, 62% of that area would lie inside the window.
But due to the huge corner radius in Tahoe, most of it – about 75% – now lies outside the window:
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Heger is the developer of LaunchBar and Little Snitch, two enormously useful Mac utilities. He’s pointing to one of the many, many design flaws in the updated version of macOS. John Gruber has a longer take which makes the point again: under the now thankfully departed Alan Dye, bad design which ignored usability ran rampant. The challenge now is to rein it back in.
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Apple: you (still) don’t understand the Vision Pro • Stratechery
Ben Thompson:
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When I started [watching] the broadcast [of a Lakers-Bucks NBA game shown in the Apple Vision Pro’s immersive view] I had, surprise surprise, a studio show, specially tailored for the Apple Vision Pro. In other words, there was a dedicated camera, a dedicated presenter, a dedicated graphics team, etc. There was even a dedicated announcing team! This all sounds expensive and special, and I think it was a total waste.
Here’s the thing that you don’t seem to get, Apple: the entire reason why the Vision Pro is compelling is because it is not a 2D screen in my living room; it’s an immersive experience I wear on my head. That means that all of the lessons of TV sports production are immaterial. In fact, it’s worse than that: insisting on all of the trappings of a traditional sports broadcast has two big problems: first, because it is costly, it means that less content is available than might be otherwise. And second, it makes the experience significantly worse.
…I have, as I noted, had the good fortune of sitting courtside at an NBA game, and this very much captured the experience. The biggest sensation you get by being close to the players is just how tall and fast and powerful they are, and you got that sensation with the Vision Pro; it was amazing.
The problem, however, is that you would be sitting there watching Giannis or LeBron or Luka glide down the court, and suddenly you would be ripped out of the experience because the entirely unnecessary producer decided you should be looking through one of these baseline cameras under the hoop:
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Thompson’s post is free to read (and worth reading in full) and suggests to me that either nobody at Apple has the imagination to see how this device could be used to cover sports – hard to believe, because absolutely everyone who has watched sports through it says the same things as Thompson – or they don’t care, or they’re too tightly locked in to TV production and can’t tell the people doing it to stop treating it like normal sports.
My guess is it’s something to do with the last one. But I don’t know how they keep ignoring what people say.
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Iranian-linked Scottish accounts fall silent again • UK Defence Journal
Lisa West:
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A network of social media accounts posing as Scottish independence supporters has fallen silent once again, closely mirroring a fresh shutdown of internet access inside Iran and reinforcing evidence that parts of the online constitutional debate are being manipulated from outside the UK.
The disappearance follows a brief surge of highly emotive and often extreme claims about events in Scotland, published in the days immediately before Tehran severed international connectivity. As with the Iranian blackout in June last year, the same accounts that had been posting intensively stopped almost simultaneously once Iran went dark.
Iran’s latest shutdown began late Thursday evening, when authorities disconnected the country from the global internet amid growing domestic unrest. International reporting described the move as a near total blackout, with even satellite services such as Starlink believed to be disrupted. Within hours, multiple X accounts claiming to be Scottish users ceased activity.
In the days before that silence, the accounts had escalated their messaging sharply.
One account, presenting itself as a Scottish independence supporter under the name “fiona”, posted a series of claims framed as scandals and emergencies.
…As Iran shut down internet access, the accounts stopped posting.
This pattern has been observed before. In June 2025, dozens of pro independence accounts went dark immediately after Iranian connectivity collapsed following Israeli and US strikes. At the time, Cyabra, a disinformation analysis firm, reported that “26% of profiles discussing Scottish independence were fake”.
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Iran really does spend a lot of money bothering other countries when it should be looking after itself.
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Named: 50 “experts” and linked brands publishers should treat with caution • Press Gazette
Rob Waugh:
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Press Gazette today names more than 50 apparently fake experts who have offered commentary to the British press in recent years and featured more than 1,000 times in newspapers, magazines and online titles.
Our PR Hall of Shame is a live document highlighting brands and spokespeople who should be treated with a high degree of caution by journalists.
For this list we have focused strictly on cases where the ‘expert’ does not appear to exist, rather than the many other cases where the expert does not have the knowledge they claim.
We are now appealing to journalists and PR professionals to notify us whenever they encounter brands depoying fake experts to help us to warn others and curb the threat of fake AI-enhanced ‘experts’ which threatens both the credibility of the press, and the trust between journalists and PRs.
If you have been approached by people touting experts who seem not to exist, please get in touch via pged@presssgazette.co.uk – we will check your story out and add to the database.
And if you represent a brand or expert who you believe unfairly appears on the below, please get in touch. Press Gazette has attemped to get in touch with all the brands listed below.
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Meanwhile:
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Journalists have reported being bombarded with dozens and sometimes hundreds of dubious press releases a week, with the organisations behind them never replying to follow-ups and moving to different email addresses to avoid being blocked.
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As Press Gazette notes, the aim is generally SEO – get the company mentioned, perhaps even linked to, in the story. And it says it will have more examples in the coming days.
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The Trump phone just missed another release date • The Verge
Dominic Preston:
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When we started writing about Trump Mobile regularly, it all began with a simple post pointing out that the company’s T1 Phone had missed its original release date. Now, three months later, it’s missed another one.
When it was announced in June, the Trump phone was promised to launch in both August and September (one of the many impossible details in the launch announcement). At some point that was updated on the Trump Mobile site to instead say “later this year.”
That was last year.
As 2026 dawns, we’re into uncharted territory. Trump Mobile has repeatedly shifted the goalposts on the T1 Phone 8002 (gold version)’s release, but it has always had goalposts. The website still says “later this year,” but how are we meant to trust it now?
The Financial Times asked Trump Mobile’s customer service about the delay, and was reportedly told that “the recent US government shutdown had delayed deliveries of the phone.” If true, that probably means the T1 Phone was, like many other gadgets, prevented from getting FCC clearance to launch.
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Let’s go with “nope” and be surprised if it turns out to be true. The Verge says it’s going to write about it every week, just to annoy those stupid enough to have given Trump money for one.
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EV roadside repairs easier than petrol or diesel, new data suggests • Market insight
Aimee Turner:
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Electric vehicles are more likely to be fixed at the roadside than petrol or diesel cars despite public fears to the contrary, according to new breakdown data from the AA.
New research from Autotrader and the AA, carried out in December among more than 2,000 consumers, found 44% of respondents are concerned about the risk of breakdowns or roadside repairs when considering switching to an EV.
Concern was highest among drivers aged 75 and over, with 56% saying they were worried.
The North East recorded the highest level of concern at 52%, while women were slightly more likely to express reservations than men – 46% versus 41%.
Even so, AA call-out data indicates EVs are more likely to be successfully repaired at the roadside than a 12-volt battery in a petrol or diesel car.
Separately, industry data continues to indicate growing readiness to service electric cars.
A recent Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) survey of aftermarket businesses found 81.2% of UK workshops are already equipped to work on EVs, according to the campaign partners.
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Great – so now we just need a huge buildout of chargers, don’t we. Apparently they’re up 19.1% – nearly 88,000 devices at 45,000-odd locations.
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Apple picks Google’s Gemini to run AI-powered Siri coming this year • CNBC
Samantha Subin:
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Apple is joining forces with Google to power its artificial intelligence features, including a major Siri upgrade expected later this year.
The multi-year partnership will lean on Google’s Gemini and cloud technology for future Apple foundational models, according to a statement obtained by CNBC’s Jim Cramer.
“After careful evaluation, we determined that Google’s technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models and we’re excited about the innovative new experiences it will unlock for our users,” the tech giants said in a joint statement on Monday.
The models will continue to run on Apple devices and the company’s private cloud compute, they added.
Apple declined to comment on the terms of the deal. Google referred CNBC to the joint statement.
In August, Bloomberg had reported that Apple was in early talks with Google to use a custom Gemini model to power a new iteration of Siri. The news outlet later reported that Apple was planning to pay about $1bn a year to utilize Google AI.
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This falls under the category of “very expected news”. Mark Gurman wrote last year about the deal with Google – allegedly after Apple found OpenAI’s model to be better. But if Google is paying Apple for browser search clicks, it’s easy to slice a little off for the AI side.
Will we stop calling it Siri? It certainly won’t be the Siri that people have known (and often hated) since 2011.
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Cuba is already on the brink. Maduro’s ouster brings it closer to collapse • WSJ
Deborah Acosta and José de Córdoba:
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Elderly Cubans are digging through garbage for scraps of food in Havana. In the country’s second city, Santiago, crowds have gathered, blaring music by Cuban exiles such as Gloria Estefan and Willy Chirino, who sings “Our day is coming soon.”
The U.S. ouster of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro has jolted this country of fewer than 10 million people, which has long relied on Venezuela for oil imports that have barely kept its tiny economy from collapsing.
It opens a new and perilous chapter for the island’s Communist regime during an economic implosion that already rivals the crisis suffered by Cuba after the collapse of the Soviet Union more than three decades ago.
In poorer cities, people are openly speculating about whether the U.S. will topple the government of Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, the successor to Raúl and Fidel Castro, the siblings who led the Cuban Revolution in 1959 that sent shock waves across Latin America.
“They are nervous,” Manuel Cuesta Morúa, a Havana-based political activist, said of the government. “Repression will increase, it’s the typical response.”
Cuba’s state security apparatus has long had a tight grip on all levels of society, from workplaces to schools or concert halls. But Maduro’s capture risks upending the government’s control of every street, its deep surveillance system and its vast network of snitches, say Cuban dissidents and former officials.
…Cuba has been in a perpetual economic crisis, which has intensified since the Covid-19 pandemic. More than 2.7 million people—about a quarter of the island’s population, the majority of them young and ambitious—have fled the island since 2020, most to the U.S. It is “demographic hollowing out,” said Cuban demographer Juan Carlos Albizu-Campos. He estimates Cuba’s population is now eight million.
The combined result of mass emigration and decreased female fertility is that live births in Cuba plunged to levels below those of 1899, when Cuba emerged from a bloody three-year war of independence that decimated its population, said Albizu-Campos.
…Venezuela has been providing some 35,000 barrels of oil a day of the estimated 100,000 barrels a day the island needs. Cuba produces about 40,000 barrels a day of sulfur- and metals-laden heavy crude that feeds the country’s decrepit power plants. Mexico, which sent about 22,000 barrels a day to Cuba last year, has since lowered shipments to some 7,000, while Russia sends about 10,000 barrels a day, he said.
Cutting off Venezuelan oil would devastate Cuba’s economy.
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Unnoticed here in Europe, but the collapse of the Cuban government would be enormous for the Caribbean, and Cubans abroad. It feels as though everything is happening at once this year.
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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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