If you want to buy a Hermes Birkin bag, be prepared to be treated with suspicion by the company itself. And don’t wear the wrong watch. CC-licensed photo by Yvette Ilagan on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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

How WhatsApp took over the global conversation • The New Yorker

Sam Knight:

»

British politics and, arguably, the British state are coördinated by WhatsApp. Ninety-two% of U.K. internet users are on the platform. Police officers banter on it. The National Health Service relies on it. On the afternoon of March 13, 2020—ten days before the U.K. entered its first covid lockdown—Dominic Cummings, a senior adviser to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, formed a five-man WhatsApp group that came to more or less run the country.

That fall, a reporter from the Daily Mail asked a government spokesperson, via WhatsApp, whether it was true that national policies were being conceived this way. The spokesperson WhatsApped Simon Case, the country’s most senior civil servant, with a suggested response: “the PM does not make government decisions via WhatsApp.” Case replied on WhatsApp less than a minute later: “Erm—is that true? I am not sure it is. I think we will have to ignore.”

…WhatsApp is phatic before it is anything else. It is an architecture of presence. It winks with life, informing you who is online and when they were last seen. Tiny bundles of data—relayed on the app’s servers through sockets, or continuous connections—tell you that your best friend is typing. Koum introduced “read receipts,” to show that texts were being sent and seen. At first, he imagined miniature icons that would represent a message’s odyssey through the network—showing servers and hard drives—but Borzov suggested something simpler: one check mark to show that WhatsApp had received your message and two to show that it had been delivered. When the message was opened, the check marks turned blue.

Blue check marks have saved some lives (WhatsApp is often the platform of choice for disaster responders) and tested many relationships. Whether to respond to a message that someone knows you have read with a heart, a thumbs-up, or a crying-face emoji is a modern-day imponderable, although I’m pretty sure that Malinowski would have taken a hard line on the subject. (In phatic conversation, he notes, “taciturnity means not only unfriendliness but directly a bad character.”)

…Sociologists who study WhatsApp family groups sometimes call them W.F.G.s. In 2023, Galit Alkobi and Natalia Khvorostianov, of the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, published a study of Israeli W.F.G.s and suggested that there were three archetypal roles in these groups: kin-keepers, who are committed to online family life; flickerers, who are seemingly indifferent; and silent warm experts, who are problem solvers. We all know who we are. Alkobi conducted forty-three interviews with family members about their W.F.G.s and found that groups encompassing three generations showed extremely similar traits: problematic-discourse avoidance, an exaggerated writing style (exuberant celebrations, morose commiserations), and routine ejections.

«

And there’s plenty more. For the American readers of the New Yorker, of course, all this talk of WhatsApp is puzzling: they tend to use iMessage because the iPhone predominates, or possibly Signal. But now, as Knight points out, it’s growing fast, and there are more than 100 million users there.
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Grok was finally updated to stop undressing women and children, X Safety says • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

Late Wednesday, X Safety confirmed that Grok was tweaked to stop undressing images of people without their consent.

“We have implemented technological measures to prevent the Grok account from allowing the editing of images of real people in revealing clothing such as bikinis,” X Safety said. “This restriction applies to all users, including paid subscribers.”

The update includes restricting “image creation and the ability to edit images via the Grok account on the X platform,” which “are now only available to paid subscribers. This adds an extra layer of protection by helping to ensure that individuals who attempt to abuse the Grok account to violate the law or our policies can be held accountable,” X Safety said. Additionally, X will “geoblock the ability of all users to generate images of real people in bikinis, underwear, and similar attire via the Grok account and in Grok in X in those jurisdictions where it’s illegal,” X Safety said.

X’s update comes after weeks of sexualized images of women and children being generated with Grok finally prompting California Attorney General Rob Bonta to investigate whether Grok’s outputs break any US laws.

In a press release Wednesday, Bonta said that “xAI appears to be facilitating the large-scale production of deepfake nonconsensual intimate images that are being used to harass women and girls across the Internet, including via the social media platform X.” Notably, Bonta appears to be as concerned about Grok’s standalone app and website being used to generate harmful images without consent as he is about the outputs on X.

Before today, X had not restricted the Grok app or website. X had only threatened to permanently suspend users who are editing images to undress women and children if the outputs are deemed “illegal content.” It also restricted the Grok chatbot on X from responding to prompts to undress images, but anyone with a Premium subscription could bypass that restriction, as could any free X user who clicked on the “edit” button on any image appearing on the social platform.

«

Marianna Spring, the BBC’s disinformation correspondent, remarked on a podcast that she could see the problem that was coming when Grok’s image-editing was made widely available, and that UK regulator Ofcom should have too – to say nothing of X and Elon Musk. But Musk is incapable of understanding the malice that exists out there, partly because he’s immersed in it; it’s like asking a fish to comment on the water.
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The Atlantic, Penske, and Vox Media sue Google for adtech antitrust violations • The Verge

Lauren Feiner:

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Lawsuits seeking damages from Google’s illegal ad tech monopoly are piling up following the Justice Department’s successful antitrust case. Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company, is the latest in a wave of media companies that have filed suit against Google, seeking to be reimbursed for the monopoly profits the tech company allegedly made at publishers’ expense.

“Absent Google’s conduct, Vox Media would be able to make available even more, higher quality impressions for purchase on Vox Media’s webpages and create more high-quality, premium journalism,” Vox Media alleges in its lawsuit, filed Wednesday in the Southern District of New York. The Atlantic, which is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, filed a similar lawsuit in the same district this week, as did Penske Media, which is an investor in Vox Media and owns brands including Rolling Stone, Billboard, and The Hollywood Reporter. Later on Wednesday, two more publishers — McClatchy Media Company and Condé Nast owner Advance Publications — filed similar lawsuits. Google is also facing lawsuits from ad tech providers like PubMatic and OpenX, some of which testified in the trial about how Google’s dominance shut out competition.

…The publishers claim Google’s dominance lets it “depress prices for publisher inventory below competitive levels”
The lawsuits underscore the ways that the highly technical subject of the 2024 trial impacts an ecosystem of publishers and tech providers. For example, the media company complaints outline how Google’s illegal monopoly of the market for publisher ad servers, used to manage ad space for sale on publisher websites, has effectively stymied any viable competitors they might consider moving to.

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Microsoft is closing its employee library and cutting back on subscriptions • The Verge

Tom Warren:

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Microsoft’s library of books is so heavy that it once caused a campus building to sink, according to an unproven legend among employees. Now those physical books, journals, and reports, and many of Microsoft’s digital subscriptions to leading US newspapers, are disappearing in a shift described inside Microsoft as an “AI-powered learning experience.”

Microsoft started cutting back on its employee subscriptions to news and reports services in November, with some publishers receiving an automated email cancellation of a contract. “This correspondence serves as official notification that Microsoft will not renew any existing contracts upon their respective expiration dates,” reads an email from Microsoft’s vendor management team. “We would like to take this opportunity to express our sincere appreciation for your partnership, collaboration, and continued support throughout our engagement.”

Strategic News Service (SNS), which has provided global reports to Microsoft’s roughly 220,000 employees and executives for more than 20 years, is no longer part of Microsoft’s subscription list. In an email to Microsoft employees that relied on SNS reports, the publisher notes that “Microsoft has just released an automated announcement that all library contracts, of which the SNS Global Report is perhaps the most strategic for your own use, are to be turned off.”

Microsoft employees I’ve spoken to recently have lost access to digital publications like The Information. They’re also unable to perform digital checkouts of business books from the Microsoft Library. While Microsoft often rotates the publishers it uses in its Library service, this time it’s part of a much broader change that seems like corporate cost cutting mixed with the continued push for AI.

«

Steven Sinofsky, who worked at Microsoft through its crucial growth years and led the Office team (among others), called it “a crown jewel of the early days”, which bought every PC book and two copies of any piece of software and would get any magazine or article you wanted, if they didn’t have it.

But don’t worry, CoPilot is here to make them up!
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My work went from air-conditioned offices to delivering food on a bike. The culture shock is significant • The Guardian

David Rayfield started working as a bike messenger in Melbourne:

»

When you deliver for companies like Uber Eats, no two shifts are the same. I’d say 80% of my deliveries are fast food – a combination of McDonald’s, KFC, Hungry Jacks and coffee. Lots of coffee. My new workplace couldn’t be more different than the grey blur of an office, surrounded by the same walls and same people week after week. The culture shock of going from comfy chairs and morning teas to trying not to get killed in traffic was significant.

After being made redundant four times in six years, months passed with hundreds of unsuccessful job applications. Bills needed to be paid. The big ones were still looming, but the small costs could be covered by delivering for Uber Eats. My Xbox was gathering dust so I sold it at Cash Converters and put the money towards a half-decent mountain bike.

The first thing that hits you riding is the feeling of independence. In between delivering Grey Goose vodka and KFC Zinger burgers, there’s the realisation that it’s just you out there. After four months, I haven’t talked to anyone at Uber Eats. I signed up on my phone, they sent me a fluoro thermal bag, and off I went. I don’t have to worry about anybody making me redundant because there is no anybody – there’s just me. If I want to spend hours in the park eating lunch, I will. Need more sleep? That’s between me and my doona. Granted, my wages are much lower, but what value can be placed on listening to Wu-Tang Clan with wind in my hair versus dreading another company restructure?

Just to be clear, my hair is secure underneath a helmet. Which was good for when I collided with a car and ended up with a face full of road. There are lots of bike paths in Melbourne, but far too many of them are squeezed in between moving traffic and parked traffic. They’re less than a metre wide and often occupied by wavering cars, massive trucks or in this case, part of a parked Ford Fiesta. Before I could react, a driver had opened their door into the bike lane without looking. I couldn’t do anything except stop my bike dead while my body crashed into the bitumen.

Things like this happen too often.

…I always knew urban planning was designed around cars but now I feel it in my bones. Not only is the amount of space dedicated to cars immense, society focuses on cars first. Shopfronts and advertisements face the road, hundreds of car parks take up thousands of metres and I avoid countless potholes in bike lanes while the cars right next to me drive on pristine asphalt.

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The third audience is generative AI • Dries Buytaert

Dries Buytaert is the founder of Drupal, the website and blogging platform:

»

I used Claude Code to build a new feature for my site this morning. Any URL on my blog can now return Markdown instead of HTML.

I added a small hint in the HTML to signal that the Markdown version exists, mostly to see what would happen. My plan was to leave it running for a few weeks and write about it later if anything interesting turned up.

Within an hour, I had hundreds of requests from AI crawlers, including ClaudeBot, GPTBot, OpenAI’s SearchBot, and more. So much for waiting a few weeks.

For two decades, we built sites for two audiences: humans and search engines. AI agents are now the third audience, and most websites aren’t optimized for them yet.

We learned how to play the SEO game so our sites would rank in Google. Now people are starting to invest in things like Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO).

…The speed of adoption tells me AI agents are hungry for cleaner content formats and will use them the moment they find them. What I don’t know yet is whether this actually benefits me. It might lead to more visibility in AI answers, or it might just make it easier for AI companies to use my content without sending traffic back.

«

That’s the worry, isn’t it? The first audience is real humans. The second is search engines. And now the third one is generative AI, eagerly slurping up anything new or changed. But as Buytaert says, will that bring traffic?
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Home address, social media checks: how Hermes stalks would-be buyers before (and after) selling a Birkin • NDTV

Dristi Sharma:

»

At first glance, buying a luxury handbag should be simple enough if you have the money. Walk into a boutique, choose what you like, pay, leave. But at Hermes, one of the world’s most powerful luxury houses, money alone rarely guarantees access. Instead, shoppers are quietly inducted into what even loyal clients jokingly call the “Hermes game” a complex, opaque system where patience, perception and behaviour matter as much as spending power.

The conversation around this unwritten game sharpened last week when Hermes hosted an ultra-exclusive private sale in Paris, open only to a shrinking and tightly vetted circle of clients. At the same time, prices for leather goods and ready-to-wear quietly rose, according to Glitz. The timing was telling. This was not a routine price hike, but another signal of how firmly Hermes is tightening control over access, scarcity and status.

…Ironically, while Hermes emphasises “relationships”, clients increasingly find it difficult to build genuine rapport with sales associates. Staff are encouraged to avoid overt familiarity, as relationships deemed too close can trigger managerial suspicion around favouritism or resale risks.

This creates a structural mistrust that stiffens interactions and undermines the warm, personalised experience luxury retail typically promises. From the brand’s perspective, this rigidity serves a purpose. Control is central to the Hermes model. The goal is not merely to sell bags, but to protect the symbolic power of scarcity that surrounds them.

The booming second-hand luxury market and stricter anti-money-laundering regulations have intensified this scrutiny. As one sales associate at a major Paris boutique told Glitz, “Every new client is automatically a suspect.” Staff now collect and assess far more data than before, from home addresses and their perceived prestige to social media activity and online presence. Sales associates are trained to evaluate whether a client’s buying journey appears coherent.

Rapid accumulation of non-quota bags to hit a spending threshold raises red flags, as does shopping across multiple boutiques or countries. Furniture purchases, interestingly, score highly, signalling long-term commitment rather than quick flips. Loyalty to one store, cross-category shopping and a clear alignment with the Hermes universe all work in a client’s favour.

Even subtle signals matter. Wearing an Audemars Piguet or Richard Mille watch is read positively, while a flashy Rolex may be judged ostentatious.

«

Please enjoy this glimpse into another, weirdly suspicious world.
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How to manipulate prediction markets for your greater good • Polemic Paine

Polemic Paine:

»

It’s 8PM Eastern Time on January 14th, 2026. In four hours, a Polymarket bet will resolve.

Earlier today, an account called “mutualdelta”, so fresh it still had that new-car smell, dropped over $160,000 on “Yes” for a US military strike on Iran by end of day. They scaled it to over $240,000 as the day progressed. The odds, which had been languishing around 14%, shot up to 25%. Twitter lost its mind.

Real-time tracking threads. Speculation about insider knowledge. The whole circus.

The market closes at 11:59 PM ET tonight. As I write this, no strike has occurred. The bet is most likely going to zero.

And somewhere, I’m fairly certain, someone is counting their money.

Just not from Polymarket.

«

As you’ll now know, the attack didn’t happen, and so the money was lost. So why make the dramatic money-losing bet? In order to make money somewhere else, as the writer explains. It’s complicated, but makes total sense, and shows why you really shouldn’t pay too much attention to Polymarket (a predictions betting market) – or at least not take it entirely seriously.
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New UK offshore wind farms could significantly cut power prices • Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit

»

The 8.4GW of offshore wind power announced this week in the Contracts for Difference (CfDs) auction Allocation Round 7 (AR7) is set to boost clean power output, such that – had these wind farms been operating over the last year – gas power generation could have been a third (35%) lower, cutting day-ahead wholesale electricity prices by up to £11 per MWh (13%), down to £72/MWh, according to analysis by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU).

The price reductions caused by these new renewables would have been on top of the savings delivered by operational wind farms pushing gas off the system, which cut the average price by around £38/MWh in 2025, down from £121/MWh to £83/MWh. [3]

Taken together, these results suggest that, had Britain deployed no wind power over recent decades and had instead relied more on gas, power prices could have been up to £49/MWh (67% i.e. two-thirds) higher in 2025 compared to if renewables had been rolled out faster. [4]

Jess Ralston, Energy Analyst at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, said: “It might not be itemised on bills, but more British renewables squeezing gas off the system has the effect of reducing wholesale power prices, lowering those costs for both industry and households.

“There’s lots of large numbers being bandied around, but the reality is that the offshore wind projects secured today are likely to see levies on bills break-even. And in the event of another gas price spike, which given uncertainty in petro-states worldwide is possible, could see billpayers paid back.”

«

Various 19th century loons have come out of the woodwork at the announcement of this nuclear power station’s worth of wind, which they’re sure could be more cheaply done with gas, ignoring the volatility of gas prices and its greenhouse effects.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The rising popularity of vinyl has also led to “listening parties” which ban phones and other distractions. CC-licensed photo by Tom Collins on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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

Why listening parties are everywhere right now • Dazed

Josh Crowe:

»

Listening parties [for new albums] have rapidly evolved from industry-only previews into a central pillar of modern album rollouts. Artists from Billie Eilish and Frank Ocean to independent collectives are increasingly favouring immersive listening experiences over traditional launches. In an era where listening to music largely happens via streaming services, these in-person events offer an alternative which demands time and attention – and, crucially, fosters community.

Streaming has transformed how music is consumed, but in doing so, many argue it has also flattened the album format. While access has never been easier, depth of engagement has become harder to sustain. Listening parties push back against this logic. They ask audiences to slow down, to sit with an album in its entirety, and to experience it collectively.

For fans, the collective element can be as powerful as the music itself. Lysette, who attended Rosalía’s LUX listening party the day before the album’s release, describes the event as a rare space for connection. Listening to the record together heightened that sense of shared experience. “We could see everyone’s reactions to each song. They’re all so different on this album, so it was really special to experience that collectively, then talk about it afterwards.” For Lysette, the palpable attention to detail – from the organisation to the atmosphere – only deepened the emotional impact. “It really built excitement for the album. It’s such a great way to connect, not only with the music but with other people who love that artist in similar ways.”

She also points to the scalability of these events. “It felt unique, but also doable. It’s not a long event, but it supports fan communities in cities all around the world — especially places that aren’t physically close to where the artist is based.” In that sense, listening parties offer global reach without sacrificing intimacy. And intimacy is increasingly important: for Gen Z especially, these events tap into a broader desire for ‘analogue’ experiences.

«

Taking phones completely out of the equation – as is demanded at listening parties – makes a huge difference. But there’s definitely a hunger for the analogue experience among younger generations. In the town where I live there’s a vinyl record shop, and many of its most regular customers are under 30. One of them, the owner told me, comes in with his (parents’?) pop albums, sells them to the shop (which can resell them – that’s where most vinyl comes from now), and buys prog rock albums from the 1970s and 1980s. Everything old is new again.
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Home secretary says she has no confidence in West Midlands police chief • BBC News

Susie Rack and Alex McIntyre:

»

At appearances on 1 December and 6 January, [West Midlands police chief constable Craig] Guildford told the Home Affairs Select Committee the force “do not use AI”, rather that it was a Google search that provided the erroneous information [that Maccabi Tel Aviv football fans had rioted in a match against West Ham – a fixture which never happened].

In his letter to the chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee published on Wednesday, Guildford said the information “arose as a result of a use of Microsoft Copilot” and offered a “profound apology” for the mistake.

A Microsoft spokesperson told the BBC: “We are not able to replicate what is being reported. Copilot combines information from multiple web sources into a single response with linked citations. It informs users they are interacting with an AI system and encourages them to review the sources.”

[Police and Crime Commissioner] Sir Andy [Foster’s] review found eight inaccuracies in a report from the force to Birmingham’s safety group, including a reference to the non-existent Tel Aviv-West Ham game.

Others included overstating the number of Dutch police officers deployed during a Maccabi match in Amsterdam and claims Muslim communities had been intentionally targeted by Tel Aviv fans.

The decision on the ban from the safety group – which is made up of representatives from the council, police and other authorities – prompted political outrage, including from Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer.

«

This is surely the first time that AI, and specifically Microsoft CoPilot, has been held responsible for a policing mistake. Or should one say – the first time that we know of.
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Bandcamp’s mission and our approach to Generative AI • Bandcamp blog

»

Bandcamp’s mission is to help spread the healing power of music by building a community where artists thrive through the direct support of their fans. We believe that the human connection found through music is a vital part of our society and culture, and that music is much more than a product to be consumed. It’s the result of a human cultural dialog stretching back before the written word.

Similarly, musicians are more than mere producers of sound. They are vital members of our communities, our culture, and our social fabric. Bandcamp was built to directly connect artists and their fans, and to make it easy for fans to support artists equitably so that they can keep making music.

Today we are fortifying our mission by articulating our policy on generative AI, so that musicians can keep making music, and so that fans have confidence that the music they find on Bandcamp was created by humans.

Our guidelines for generative AI in music and audio are as follows:

• Music and audio that is generated wholly or in substantial part by AI is not permitted on Bandcamp. 

• Any use of AI tools to impersonate other artists or styles is strictly prohibited in accordance with our existing policies prohibiting impersonation and intellectual property infringement.

«

The proof is in the pudding, of course, but the expectation will be that the community will report suspicious content.
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Getting data out of a PDF figure • Adam Kucharski on Substack

Adam Kucharski:

»

Want to get the data out of a PDF figure? As in, the actual data – not a rough trace-along-the-lines version?

A few years ago I made a somewhat popular R package that allowed users to extract the underlying geometry of a PDF figure, so they could get the exact data points that went into the original figure. (Which came in handy for public health emergencies, when governments often release crucial data buried in PDF figures.)

But the user experience was still a bit clunky – it required ghostscript to be set up, and there were some intermediate output files that required manual edits.

So I rebuilt it with Claude Code. Everything runs locally in the browser, and hopefully now a much smoother experience!
Try it out here: https://adamkucharski.github.io/pdf2plot/.

«

This is sure to come in useful for some people, even if increasingly one might think that this capability will be sucked natively into chatbots. (This is the first time of quoting a Substack Note rather than Substack article, I think.)
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How London finally cracked mobile phone coverage on the Underground • Ian Visits

Ian Mansfield:

»

Dotted around London, there are a number of private hotels that aren’t the sort of hotel you might expect – they’re needed to make mobile phones work on the London Underground.

They’re not for humans, but for huge racks of computer and electronics equipment – and each of the UK’s mobile networks is renting space inside them, as this was one of the innovations that allowed phones to work underground in the first place.

While many newer underground railways have had mobile coverage in their tunnels for years, fitting it into the London Underground kept running into the same problem – it costs a lot of money and needs a lot more space in the stations than is available.

Classically, each of the mobile networks would install its own kit in each station and manage it, but there simply wasn’t enough space for that in London’s old tube stations, many of which were built before the wireless telegraph was even invented.

However, as radio equipment has become smaller and cleverer, it’s now possible for several networks to share the same equipment, and in 2021 Boldyn Networks (then BAI Communications) signed a deal to build a “neutral network” that can be leased to mobile networks.

Bodyn has a 20-year concession with Transport for London (TfL) to build and operate the network, and, aside from internal staff time spent managing the project, it’s being delivered at no cost to TfL.

…Although it’s taken four years to get about half of the London Underground covered with a phone signal, they now expect the rest to take just a year to complete. That’s in part thanks to experience speeding things up, and also because a lot of the equipment has already gone in over the past four years. All they need are the final bits to complete the job and switch it on… So, most of it should be live by the end of 2026.

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CreepyLink

»

CreepyLink: the URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible.

Normal links are too trustworthy. Make them creepy.

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I pasted in a search term and it yielded https://netflix.c1ic.link/urgent_8yvNSS_photo_viewer_update.zip which, despite appearances, does actually go to the search page. (I checked with curl because you want to just be careful, don’t you.)

Nice to see that people can still have fun online.
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Australia’s march toward 100% clean energy • WIRED

Julian Spector:

»

Australia has put itself on a realistic path to achieving what climate activists around the world have long dreamed of: running its power grid entirely on renewable energy.

The Australian Energy Market Operator oversees the nation’s power markets. Chief among them, the National Electricity Market serves about 90% of customers, minus remote areas and the west coast. At its peak, the system uses 38 gigawatts of power—more than New York state’s peak consumption. Over the last five years, AEMO has rigorously studied how the country, whose coal fleet is aging and which banned nuclear energy decades ago, can run this grid on renewables alone.

“This is not a climate-zealot kind of approach,” AEMO CEO Daniel Westerman told Canary Media. ​“Our old coal-fired power stations are breaking down; they’re retiring,” he said. ​“They’re getting replaced by the least-cost energy, which is renewable energy, backed with storage, connected in with transmission. We’ll have a bit of gas there for the winter doldrums. That is just what’s happening.”

Australia’s efforts could offer a proof of concept for how a nation with a bustling, modern economy can rapidly shift its electricity from fossil fuels—mostly coal with some gas—to wind, solar, storage, and other renewable sources like hydropower.

“There’s nothing impossible about 100% renewable supply,” said Jesse Jenkins, a Princeton University professor who has studied net-zero pathways for the US. ​“Australia has a better chance of this than almost anywhere.”

So far, renewables have surged to about 35% of annual electricity production, while coal still leads with 46%, according to the International Energy Agency. Because this transition is primarily driven by market forces, rather than a legislative or regulatory requirement, Westerman couldn’t say for sure when Australia will hit the 100% mark. He does expect 90% of Australia’s coal generation will be gone by 2035, and the rest could shutter later that decade.

«

Westerman was in charge of the UK National Grid when it began running without coal in 2017; seven years later the last coal-powered power station shut down. Gradually and then suddenly.
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Digg launches its new Reddit rival to the public • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

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The reboot of the early internet online community Digg, a one-time rival to Reddit, is moving forward. The company, which is today back under the ownership of its original founder, Kevin Rose, along with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, is launching its open beta to the public on Wednesday.

Similar to Reddit, the new Digg offers a website and mobile app where you can browse feeds featuring posts from across a selection of its communities and join other communities that align with your interests. There, you can post, comment, and upvote (or “digg”) the site’s content.

Originally a Web 2.0-era news aggregation site, Digg was once valued at $175m in 2008 but was ultimately outpaced by Reddit. That earlier version was split up in 2012, with its largest stake sold to the incubator Betaworks, while LinkedIn and The Washington Post picked up other pieces. This iteration of Digg drew additional investment in 2016 but was later sold to a digital advertising company in 2018.

…the rise of AI has presented an opportunity to rebuild Digg, Rose and Ohanian believe, leading them to acquire Digg last March through a leveraged buyout by True Ventures, Ohanian’s firm Seven Seven Six, Rose and Ohanian themselves, and the venture firm S32. The company has not disclosed its funding.

They’re betting that AI can help to address some of the messiness and toxicity of today’s social media landscape. At the same time, social platforms will need a new set of tools to ensure they’re not taken over by AI bots posing as people.

«

So this is at least the third incarnation (at least) of Digg, which fell away from its original success due to a mistaken redesign in 2010 which lost out to Reddit. This feels like another attempt to get the band back together, but nobody’s interested in the songs they’re playing.
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Experts predict major shift in global energy production: “[it] will dominate the future” • The Cooldown

Cody Januszko:

»

Within the next few years, renewable energy sources are expected to surpass coal, oil, and gas on a global scale.

According to the International Energy Agency’s 2025 report, “Global renewable power capacity is expected to double between now and 2030, increasing by 4,600 gigawatts.” 

The agency observed that this is roughly equivalent to the combined power generation of China, the European Union, and Japan. 

However, the outlook isn’t entirely rosy. The 2025 World Energy Outlook considers three scenarios. The first considers current policies, the second considers policies that have been spoken about in the political arena, and the third considers countries aiming for net-zero emissions by 2050. 

In the first scenario, the IEA projected the highest increase in demand for energy sources like oil and natural gas. While the other two scenarios saw less of these energy types, all three predicted that the threshold of 1.5ºC (2.7ºF) of warming by 2050 set forth in the Paris Climate Agreement will be surpassed. 

«

So, good news and bad news.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A new report reckons diesel fuel could disappear from some filling stations by 2030, as EVs replace older vehicles. CC-licensed photo by Rick Obst on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. Use them wisely. 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 didn’t want to write about child sexual abuse images • Whatever Works

Naomi Alderman:

»

[Grok producing sexualised images] is not like a cigar or even going to an adult sex club, and I am going to explain the two key reasons why.

My knowledge about this comes from the time I spent working at the children’s charity Barnardo’s in the 2000s, when they were researching the early internet and specifically I did some work with their child abuse team when they were learning how the internet was affecting abuse of children. I was never a front-line worker, but I wrote for and edited reports on their findings. The report I worked on was called Just One Click and you can read the recent update to that report here.

Reason 1: abusers use these images to groom and manipulate their victims

Abusers want to convince kids not to talk about what’s happening, to have them so confused that they think they ‘wanted it’ on some level or made it happen and are too ashamed to tell another adult. This is how abusers remain hidden.

Child abuse images can be an important tool for them. When I learned about this at Barnardo’s they explained to me that abusers show the images to children and say “look, this child is enjoying what is happening here”. That is a very powerful way to convince a child that what’s happening to them is normal.

In an incredibly stupid comment yesterday, shadow Technology Secretary Julia Lopez said that Grok isn’t a problem because: “from crude drawing to Photoshop, Grok is not the only tool capable of generating false or offensive imagery”.

People have always been able to make horrible images, yes. But “could someone make something distasteful to whack off to?” is not the test. The test is “could this image convince a child that it is real, so that the child believes that other children do this and enjoy it?”

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“Allowing AI image generation of child sexual abuse images will cause more children to be abused”, Alderman says. It’s a crucial point which has apparently escaped politicians such as Kemi Badenoch (who offered the adult sex club metaphor: “just keep the kids out of social media!” she offered) or her colleague Lopez. (There’s another reason why it’s bad; the outcome is the same.)

As a side note, Alderman is one of those rare very smart people who can distill complex problems down into their key strands and isolate the ones that do and don’t matter. Worth following.
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Instagram AI influencers are defaming celebrities with sex scandals • 404 Media

Emanuel Maiberg:

»

AI generated influencers are sharing fake images on Instagram that appear to show them having sex with celebrities like LeBron James, iShowSpeed, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. One AI influencer even shared an image of her in bed with Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro. The images are AI generated but are not disclosed as such, and funnel users to an adult content site where the AI generated influencers sell nude images. 

This recent trend is the latest strategy from the growing business of monetizing AI generated porn by harvesting attention on Instagram with shocking or salacious content. As with previous schemes we’ve covered, the Instagram posts that pretend to show attractive young women in bed with celebrities are created without the celebrities’ consent and are not disclosed as being AI generated, violating two of Instagram’s policies and showing once again that Meta is unable or unwilling to reign in AI generated content on its platform. 

Most of the Reels in this genre that I have seen follow a highly specific formula and started to appear around December 2025. First, we see a still image of an AI-generated influencer next to a celebrity, often in the form of a selfie with both of them looking at the camera. The text on the screen says “How it started.” Then, the video briefly cuts to another still image or videos of the AI generated influencer and the celebrity post coitus, sweaty, with tussled hair and sometimes smeared makeup. Many of these posts use the same handful of audio clips. Since Instagram allows users to browse Reels that use the same audio, clicking on one of these will reveal dozens of examples of similar Reels. 

LeBron James and adult film star Johnny Sins are frequent targets of these posts, but I’ve also seen similar Reels with the likeness of Twitch streamer iShowSpeed, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, MMA fighters Jon Jones and Connor McGregor, soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo, and many others…

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We are in a very strange place. OK, Meta, time to get on top of this. (Remember when deepfakes were just a theory? First use of “deepfake” here was December 2017.)
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Meta is closing down three VR studios as part of its metaverse cuts • The Verge

Jay Peters:

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Meta is laying off about 10% of its Reality Labs metaverse division, and the cuts include closing down some of its VR gaming studios.

Twisted Pixel Games, the developer of Marvel’s Deadpool VR, Sanzaru Games, the developer of the Asgard’s Wrath franchise, and Armature Studio, which worked on the Resident Evil 4 VR port, are all being closed down, according to an internal memo viewed by Bloomberg. The team behind the VR fitness app Supernatural will no longer develop new content or features for it, though the “existing product” will still be supported, Bloomberg says. Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton confirmed to The Verge that Bloomberg’s reporting is accurate.

Laid off staffers have posted about the closures online.

…Meta acquired Supernatural developer Within in 2023 (after a fight with the FTC), Twisted Pixel and Armature in 2022, and Sanzaru in 2020. The company closed Echo VR developer Ready at Dawn, which it also acquired in 2020, in 2024.

In a statement about the broader Reality Labs layoffs, Clayton said that “We said last month that we were shifting some of our investment from Metaverse toward Wearables. This is part of that effort, and we plan to reinvest the savings to support the growth of wearables this year.”

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Translation: Zuckerberg is bored of the metaverse because it turned out he got it wrong, and it’s going to vanish under the waves in short order.
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You can now reserve a hotel room on the Moon for $250,000 • Ars Technica

Eric Berger:

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A company called GRU Space publicly announced its intent to construct a series of increasingly sophisticated habitats on the Moon, culminating in a hotel inspired by the Palace of the Fine Arts in San Francisco.

On Monday, the company invited those interested in a berth to plunk down a deposit between $250,000 and $1 million, qualifying them for a spot on one of its early lunar surface missions in as little as six years from now.

It sounds crazy, doesn’t it? After all, GRU Space had, as of late December when I spoke to founder Skyler Chan, a single full-time employee aside from himself. And Chan, in fact, only recently graduated from the University of California, Berkeley.

All of this could therefore be dismissed as a lark. But I must say that I am a sucker for these kinds of stories. Chan is perfectly earnest about all of this. And despite all of the talk about lunar resources, my belief is that the surest long-term commercial activity on the Moon will be lunar tourism—it would be an amazing destination.

So when I interviewed Chan, I did so with an open mind.

…If all that sounds audacious and unrealistic, well, it kind of is. But it is not without foundation. GRU Space has already received seed funding from Y Combinator, and it will go through the organization’s three-month program early this year. This will help Chan refine his company’s product and give him more options to raise money. Regarding his vision, you can read GRU Space’s white paper.

Presently, the company plans to fly its initial “mission” in 2029 as a 10-kg payload on a commercial lunar lander, demonstrating an inflatable structure capability and converting lunar regolith into Moon bricks using geopolymers. With its second mission, the company plans to launch a larger inflatable structure into a “lunar pit” to test a scaled-up version of its resource development capabilities.

«

Longtime readers will recall that the Moon is really, really inhospitable. See “The Moon smells like gunpowder” from February 2023:

»

lunar dust is the shattered remains of rocks, broken repeatedly by tiny meteorites striking the surface. It’s sharp. So sharp, in fact, that it slashed the seals on some of the vacuum-sealed bags meant to preserve moon dust on the way home; they wound up being contaminated with oxygen by the time the Apollo missions made their three-day trip back to Earth.

It clung so severely to the moonwalking space suits, that even brushing each other off before returning to the module effectively did nothing to remove the dust.

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LLM predictions for 2026, shared with Oxide and Friends • Simon Willison

Simon Willison:

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In 2023, saying that LLMs write garbage code was entirely correct. For most of 2024 that stayed true. In 2025 that changed, but you could be forgiven for continuing to hold out. In 2026 the quality of LLM-generated code will become impossible to deny.

I base this on my own experience—I’ve spent more time exploring AI-assisted programming than most.

The key change in 2025 (see my overview for the year) was the introduction of “reasoning models” trained specifically against code using Reinforcement Learning. The major labs spent a full year competing with each other on who could get the best code capabilities from their models, and that problem turns out to be perfectly attuned to RL since code challenges come with built-in verifiable success conditions.

Since Claude Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.2 came out in November and December respectively the amount of code I’ve written by hand has dropped to a single digit percentage of my overall output. The same is true for many other expert programmers I know.

At this point if you continue to argue that LLMs write useless code you’re damaging your own credibility.

«

There are predictions for the one-year, three-year and six-year timeline. Earlier on Tuesday, Willison pointed to one of his three-year predictions – “Someone will build a new browser using mainly AI-assisted coding and it won’t even be a surprise” – and observed “MiniJinja isn’t anywhere close to the scope of a web browser, but it’s still a noteworthy step towards this three year prediction I made last week”.

Observe that his six-year prediction is “Typing code by hand will go the way of punch cards”. Worth reading through all his predictions! There’s good new for parrots (this week’s theme, apparently – send in your parrot links) included.
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Mastodon creator shares what went wrong with Threads and ponders the future of the fediverse • Coy Wolf

Jon Henshaw interviews Eugen Rochko, creator of Mastodon:

»

JH: I know the general answer to why people aren’t there [on Mastodon rather than other social networks]: their audience isn’t. And for many companies, they can’t advertise, and I know that’s important to them. With all that said, what do you think it’s gonna take in society, with technology, something political, or whatever, to get people to finally move over into something like we’re experiencing on Mastodon?

ER: Good question. I’ve been saying this for a long time: if everybody were using smoke signals, we’d all be on smoke signal dot social. The features matter a lot less than the people who are using the platform, and it’s always been that way.

It can sometimes be a bit misleading when you get a lot of ideas and feature requests in a community, and the conversations become, “We definitely need feature X to grow because that’s what’s stopping people from using the platform.” While that’s true in some cases, the sad reality is that any flaw can be overlooked as long as the people you want to reach are there. And that’s why so many people are still using X, which, by the way, is an absolutely god-awful platform.

The most basic answer to the question is that there needs to be more knowledge about what the Fediverse gives you, and that requires more knowledge about what the other platforms take away from you. I think there are promising developments on this front because more and more people care about digital sovereignty. People no longer want to rely on US tech companies, especially if they live in Europe, Asia, or anywhere else on Earth. And what Mastodon and the fediverse offer is a social media platform in your country, local to you, not subject to whatever is happening in the US or to any third-party developers of the software. And I think as more people and organizations realize this, the easier it becomes to convince others to join and use Mastodon on a personal and organizational level.

JH: I love that answer. It’s gonna take education. That answer actually excites me.

«

As Benedict Evans observes, this is exactly like the Marxist idea of “false consciousness”. Who’s going to educate these people into disliking the networks they’ve been on for ages to switch over to one where they’d have to start all over again?
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Coal power generation falls in China and India for first time since 1970s • The Guardian

Jillian Ambrose:

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Coal power generation fell in China and India last year for the first time since the 1970s, in a “historic” moment that could bring a decline in global emissions, according to analysis.

The simultaneous fall in coal-powered electricity in the world’s biggest coal-consuming countries had not happened since 1973, according to analysts at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, and was driven by a record roll-out of clean energy projects.

The research, commissioned by the climate news website Carbon Brief, found that electricity generated by coal plants fell by 1.6% in China and by 3% in India last year, after the boom in clean energy across both countries was more than enough to meet their rising demand for energy.

“The drop in coal power and record increase in clean energy in China and India marks a historic moment,” according to the report, which could be “a sign of things to come”.

Together, the countries drove more than 90% of the increase in global carbon emissions between 2015 and 2024, meaning a permanent reduction in coal use could bring a peak in the world’s coal consumption and global emissions.

China added more than 300GW of solar power and 100GW of wind power last year – together, more than five times the UK’s total existing power generation capacity – which are both “clear new records for China and, therefore, for any country ever”, the report said.

India added 35GW of solar, 6GW of wind and 3.5GW of hydropower last year, according to the analysis. The faster clean-energy growth made up 44% of the reduction in India’s coal and gas, compared with the previous five years, marking the first time that clean-energy growth has played a significant role in driving down India’s coal-fired power generation.

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Some petrol stations set to stop selling diesel fuel by 2030 •The Independent

Neil Lancefield:

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Some filling stations in London will stop selling diesel within the next four years as demand dwindles, according to a new report.

The analysis by electric vehicle (EV) think tank New AutoMotive also predicted that many of the roughly 8,400 filling stations across the UK will have stopped selling the fuel by 2035. It predicted this will encourage more motorists to switch to EVs.

Diesel vehicle numbers and fuel use are consistently falling nationwide. In 10 years, there will only be about 250,000 diesel cars left on the roads, the report forecast, down from 15.5 million as of the end of June 2025.

London is expected to be the UK’s first city with no diesel cars. The expansion of the ultra-low emission zone in 2023 means using a diesel car registered before September 2015 anywhere in the capital incurs a £12.50 daily fee.

The report stated: “It is likely that some, and perhaps many, filling stations in London will stop stocking diesel before the end of the decade.” It added: “Nationwide, it is clear that diesel fuel sales are falling, and this is being driven by the reduction in car numbers. Whilst it is impossible to accurately predict when the majority of filling stations will stop stocking diesel, it is clear that there is a distinct possibility that many will over the 2030s.”

Some filling stations now offer EV charging. The Petrol Retailers Association (PRA) said last year only 57% of its members believe fuel will be a core source of their revenue in a decade.

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I think close to 0% of filling stations find fuel is a core source of their profits. The same might be true for electricity – but people will probably take longer to charge their cars (at least to begin with), offering more time to sell things to customers.
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2025 Holiday PC shipments exceed expectations as vendors accelerate inventory purchases amid supply concerns • IDC

»

Global PC shipments grew 9.6% year-over-year in the fourth quarter of 2025, reaching 76.4m units, according to preliminary results from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker. The results cap off a tumultuous year for the PC market, marked by the end of support for Windows 10, which drove a wave of upgrade demand, and early year tariff concerns that prompted vendors to pull forward more inventory than originally planned. While the holiday season typically drives stronger demand, the surge in late 2025 was further amplified by emerging memory shortages that led buyers and brands to secure inventory ahead of anticipated price increases in 2026.

“IDC expects that the PC market will be far different in 12 months given how quickly the memory situation is evolving,” said Jean Philippe Bouchard, research vice-president with IDC’s Worldwide Mobile Device Trackers. “Beyond the obvious pressure on prices of systems, already announced by certain manufacturers, we might also see PC memory specifications be lowered on average to preserve memory inventory on hand. The year ahead is shaping up to be extremely volatile.”

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For perspective: the peak of the PC market was in 3Q-4Q 2011, when 95m PCs were sold in each quarter. Since then, sales have fallen; the 76.4m figure is large in that 15-year period. (Last year would have been about 70m.) RAM prices have risen on a hockey stick curve since then – by about fourfold. The reason why was well expressed in this X post:

»

The reason why RAM has become four times more expensive is that a huge amount of RAM that has not yet been produced was purchased with non-existent money to be installed in GPUs that also have not yet been produced, in order to place them in data centers that have not yet been built, powered by infrastructure that may never appear, to satisfy demand that does not actually exist and to obtain profit that is mathematically impossible.

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Don’t compare it to the US bank/housing bubble though!
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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:

»

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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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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.

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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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: ??