The polling company YouGov withdrew a survey about young people’s church attendance last week. The reason why is concerning: it’s bots. CC-licensed photo by barnyz on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Unbelievable. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
‘Soon publishers won’t stand a chance’: literary world in struggle to detect AI-written books • The Guardian
Amelia Hill:
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The news last week that Mia Ballard’s “femgore” horror novel Shy Girl could be up to 78% AI-generated, however, has forced literary agents and publishers alike to consider whether sharp eyes alone can detect AI-generated work.
“The question of how Shy Girl slipped through Hachette’s net is something the publisher has to answer themselves, but in reality, it was only a matter of time before this happened,” said Anna Ganley, the chief executive of the Society of Authors.
Wildfire, a UK imprint of Hachette, had published Shy Girl in November 2025. It was due for US publication in April, but the controversy led to its UK discontinuation and US cancellation earlier this month. Ballard has denied using AI to write Shy Girl, telling the New York Times, which first reported the story, that an acquaintance she hired to edit a self-published version of the novel had used it.
An editor at one of the “big five” publishing houses said a “cold shiver went down my spine” when the Shy Girl story broke. “It really is a case of ‘there but for the grace of God go I,’” they said.
“It’s an issue publishers are keenly aware of. We make it very clear to authors what we expect, we get them to sign contracts and we run their work through multiple AI detection tools, but we know all this is fallible.
“Hence the cold shiver: if an author is determined to use AI, then cover their tracks, there’s very little we can do.”
Prof Patrick Juola, a US computer scientist known for his work on authorship attribution, agreed. “I don’t want to call AI detection tools a scam, but it’s a technology that simply doesn’t work.”
He likened the failure to antibiotic resistance: “AI is a learning system continually upgraded by its manufacturers. If there was a detection technology that worked, then people would simply build better AI tools to fool it.”
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The antibiotic resistance analogy is a good one.
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Running on empty: Australia’s hard truths on security • The New Daily
Amy Remeikis:
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It was the right [wing Australian political parties] that derailed Australia’s energy transition, that prioritised fossil fuels above the nation, that fought reality and convinced a slew of Australians it was common sense to put their faith in a finite resource that was not only contributing to killing the planet, but causing harm to millions in the fights over who controlled it.
It is a fantasy to think that any nation that does not control its energy supply has security. Australia could have been well on its way to securing its energy, if John Howard [of the centre-right Liberal party] and his ilk hadn’t had a tantrum over a changing world, and succumbed to their desires to keep everything the same.
The Morrison government [Liberal party 2018-2022] gave instant tax write-offs to encourage the take-up of big dumb utes [SUVs: “ute” = utility vehicle], while fighting against vehicle emission standards and delaying the take-up of EVs.
The agriculture industry was not encouraged to move away from its reliance on diesel. A general ennui swept middle Australia, lulled by the right into fighting for its own interests.
Nor is [the centre-left party] Labor blameless. Instead of fighting for science and for the future, it took defeats over the carbon price and emissions trading scheme and assumed the only way to beat them was to join them.
Neither party has seen fit to unhook Australia from US foreign policy, and Anthony Albanese [leader of the Labor party, now in power] was one of the first leaders in the world to throw his support behind the American and Israeli decision to bomb Iran, despite not knowing of it in advance, its justification, its legality or even its objectives.
…Australia is no closer to a serious conversation about energy security, even with this latest crisis.
The opposition won’t push the government on it, because that would reveal its major role as a wrecker for politics’ sake in the past three decades. Angus Taylor [leader of Australia’s now-in-opposition Liberal party] can’t even spearhead the “how will you get fuel to Australians?” conversation, because of his own previous culpability in not only derailing the energy transition, but because he decided to store Australia’s fuel reserves in Texas and Louisiana to help strengthen our relationship with the US.
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It is an incredible irony that Trump’s impetuous and badly advised Iranian adventure may finally get a lot of countries to face up to their reliance on oil and gas, and to move away from it as fast as possible. Strong medicine never tastes good, though, and no politician wants to be the one administering it.
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I decompiled the White House’s new app • Thereallo
Thereallo:
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The White House released an app on the App Store and Google Play. They posted a blog about it: “Unparalleled access to the Trump Administration.”
It took a few minutes to pull the APKs with ADB, and threw them into JADX.
Here is everything I found.It’s a React Native app built with Expo (SDK 54), running on the Hermes JavaScript engine. The backend is WordPress with a custom REST API. The app was built by an entity called “forty-five-press” according to the Expo config.
The actual app logic is compiled into a 5.5 MB Hermes bytecode bundle. The native Java side is just a thin wrapper.…The app has a WebView for opening external links. Every time a page loads in this WebView, the app injects a JavaScript snippet. …It hides: Cookie banners; GDPR consent dialogs; OneTrust popups; privacy banners; login walls; signup walls; upsell prompts; paywall elements; CMP (Consent Management Platform) boxes.
It forces body { overflow: auto !important } to re-enable scrolling on pages where consent dialogs lock the scroll. Then it sets up a MutationObserver to continuously nuke any consent elements that get dynamically added.
So: an official United States government app is injecting CSS and JavaScript into third-party websites to strip away their cookie consent dialogs, GDPR banners, login gates, and paywalls.
[And] …Has a full GPS tracking pipeline compiled in that polls [the phone’s location] every 4.5 minutes in the foreground and 9.5 minutes in the background, syncing lat/lng/accuracy/timestamp to OneSignal’s servers.
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This is clearly thrown together by a relatively inexperienced development house – it loads some Javascript from a totally random user’s Github page, which if compromised would compromise everyone using the app. I haven’t seen an analysis of the iOS version, but it’s probably a work of equal knife-and-fork programming, though one would hope that iOS’s stronger permissions settings would prevent some of the more egregious behaviour.
Every time you think this administration can’t get worse, it does something worse.
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When Jimmy Carter was president, he had a plan to.. seize Kharg Island • X
Shashank Joshi is The Economist’s defence editor, and unearthed a fun document at the CIA’s clippings library:
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Fun story from 1980: Carter’s supposed plan to seize Kharg island. “The plan was originally designed to compensate for not getting the hostages, kind of a tit for’ tat,” explained a top source. “They’d have the hostages; we’d have their key oil depot.”
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This is the document – in fact a clipping of a newspaper report. As Joshi points out, times have changed: back in February 1980 Carter wanted better ground pictures of the target, so ordered a spy satellite to be shifted to cover it.
That took four months. Ultimately they decided it was too risky. (The whole discussion under the post is very worthwhile. One hopes there are some people left in the US military who know how to find 46-year-old documents, if journalists on X can.)
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Sony shuts down nearly its entire memory card business due to Flash memory shortage • PetaPixel
Jaron Schneider:
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The global shortage of solid state memory has claimed its first photographic victim, as Sony has announced that it is suspending fulfillment of all orders for nearly its entire SD and CFexpress memory card product lines.
Sony Japan published the notice on its website on March 27:
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Thank you for your continued patronage of Sony products.
Due to the global shortage of semiconductors (memory) and other factors, it is anticipated that supply will not be able to meet demand for CFexpress memory cards and SD memory cards for the foreseeable future. Therefore, we have decided to temporarily suspend the acceptance of orders from our authorized dealers and from customers at the Sony Store from March 27, 2026 onwards.
Regarding the resumption of order acceptance, we will consider it while monitoring the supply situation and will announce it separately on the product information page.
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The suspension includes all of Sony’s memory card lines, including CFexpress Type A, CFexpress Type B, and SD cards. The 240GB, 480GB, 960GB, and 1920GB capacity Type A cards have been suspended, as have the 480GB and 240GB Type B cards. The full gamut of Sony’s high-end SD cards has also been suspended, including the 256GB, 128GB, and 64GB TOUGH-branded cards and the lower-end 512GB, 256GB, 128GB, and 256GB plainly-branded Sony cards, which cap out at V60 speeds. Even Sony’s lower-end, V30 128GB and 64GB SD cards have been suspended, showcasing that the SSD shortage affects all types of solid state, not just the high-end ones.
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Hope you weren’t planning to take any photographs of all the conflicts on your professional camera.
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UK ‘weeks away’ from medicine shortages if Iran war continues, experts say • The Guardian
Julia Kollewe:
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Britain is “a few weeks away” from medicine shortages ranging from painkillers to cancer treatment if the Iran war continues, according to experts, while drug prices could also rise.
The conflict has disrupted the supply of a myriad of crucial raw materials, including oil, gas, crop fertiliser and helium – and health essentials could be next.
David Weeks, the Texas-based director of supply chain risk management at the analytics group Moody’s, said: “It’s the perfect storm. We have the conflict in the Gulf that caused the strait of Hormuz to shut down, and India is known as the pharmacy of the world. They produce a lot of the generic [off-patent] drugs and APIs [active pharmaceutical ingredients]. With the geopolitical situation, it’s harder and harder to get those out.”
With airports in Dubai, Doha and Abu Dhabi initially closed and now operating a limited schedule, pharmaceutical companies have had to reroute their shipments via air, and some are now relying on sea transport, lengthening journey times.
Shipping – the main route for most medicines – is also under strain because of the near total closure of the strait of Hormuz.
“We’re not in a crisis currently but it’s still a serious situation,” said Mark Samuels, the chief executive of Medicines UK, which represents manufacturers of the cheap, off-patent drugs known as generics that make up 85% of medications used by the NHS.
He said that if the conflict dragged on then drug shortages could emerge in only a few weeks’ time. Medical distributors typically stock six to eight weeks of stocks to avoid shortfalls; while suppliers to hospitals in England have to hold eight weeks’ worth.
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It seems that every crisis – the Suez blockage, the RAM shortage, now the strait of Hormuz – makes us discover that the western world is hugely dependent on a few crucial chokepoints which we just assume are always going to work fine.
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Young men, bad data and moral panic • Chris Curtis
Chris Curtis:
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Last week, YouGov retracted a poll suggesting church attendance had risen sharply among younger people in England and Wales. The poll, published as part of a Bible Society report called Quiet Revival, claimed that the share of young people going to church had jumped from 4% in 2018 to 16% in 2024.
It was later withdrawn because of what YouGov described as “a number of respondents who we can now identify as fraudulent”. I should say at the outset that I think YouGov deserves real credit for how it responded to questions about their research. They investigated what went wrong, admitted the problem, and were transparent about the findings. And the problem they are grappling with here is very far from being just a YouGov issue, but an industry-wide one, and one with wide ranging consequences.
…YouGov began polling when the internet was a very different place. More people were asking Jeeves than Googling, Charlie had not yet been born, let alone bitten anyone’s finger, and if you tried to make a phone call while someone else was online you were greeted by that dreadful dial-up screech.
And since then, a new problem has been growing fast: fake accounts set up to harvest survey incentives. We called them “bots”, but in practice they are often just large numbers of fake or semi-automated accounts, controlled by one person, all trying to extract those payments at scale.
There have always been people on the internet trying to game any system with a cash reward attached to it. And like everyone else online, research agencies have always had tools to try to catch and block people who are playing the system. But AI has made it much easier to do this at scale, and much harder to spot who is real and who is not.
So what has this got to do with young men?
If you are setting up these fake accounts, you want to be invited to the most surveys, so that you can make the most money. And if you want to be invited to the most surveys, you set those accounts up claiming to belong to a demographic that is underrepresented on panels.
And the most underrepresented group is almost always young men… If you believed every headline, you would think the average 24-year-old man was attending church in the morning, investing in crypto by lunch, and overthrowing liberal democracy by teatime.
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Curtis (who explains that he worked in polling 2015-2024, including at YouGov between 2015 and 2020) points out that polling definitely has a problem. But if polling has a problem, then all of us have a bigger problem: we can’t know what is true.
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Analysis: EVs just outsold petrol cars in EU for first time ever • Carbon Brief
Molly Lempriere:
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Sales of electric vehicles (EVs) overtook standard petrol cars in the EU for the first time in December 2025, according to new figures released by industry group the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA).
The figures show that registrations of battery EVs – sometimes referred to as BEVs, or “pure EVs” – reached 217,898, up 51% year-on-year from December 2024, as shown in the chart below.
Meanwhile, sales of standard petrol cars in the bloc fell 19% year-on-year, from 267,834 in December 2024 to 216,492 in December 2025. (Note that this definition, from ACEA, excludes “hybrid” cars that only run on petrol, but also have a small battery.)
Overall in 2025, EVs reached 17.4% of the market share in the bloc, up from 13.6% the previous year.
(EVs run purely from a battery that is charged from an external source, plug-in hybrids have both a battery that can be charged and an internal combustion engine, while regular hybrids cannot be plugged in, but have a smaller battery that is charged from the engine or braking.)
According to ACEA, 1,880,370 new battery-electric cars were registered last year, with the four biggest markets – Germany (+43.2%), the Netherlands (+18.1%), Belgium (+12.6%), and France (+12.5%) – accounting for 62% of registrations.
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That doesn’t include diesel cars, of course, or anything happening in trucks. But as fuel prices rise, EVs are going to look increasingly attractive to anyone who can find a way to buy one and charge it cheaply.
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Exposé of parasite SEO firm Clickout Media removed from Google • Press Gazette
Dominic Ponsford:
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A Press Gazette investigation into parasite SEO firm Clickout Media has been removed from Google’s search index after a spurious legal complaint.
On Wednesday (25 March), Press Gazette revealed how UK-based Clickout Media has bought a number of news websites in order to exploit their reputations in Google and promote online casinos.
In some cases, journalists have been fired and replaced with AI-powered writers. Some sites were removed from Google’s search results as a result of Press Gazette’s reporting, effectively killing the sites off.
Now Press Gazette’s own reporting of this issue has been removed from the Google archive after a bogus copyright complaint.
A search of the exact Press Gazette headline: “The SEO parasites buying, exploiting and ultimately killing online newsbrands” does not bring the article up.
A note at the bottom of the Google search results page reveals for this query states: “In response to multiple complaints that we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 2 results from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaints that caused the removals at LumenDatabase.org: Complaint, Complaint.”
According to the Lumen Database, a public archive of legal complaints sent to internet platforms, the article was removed by Google following a complaint sent via the “US Hub” of an unnamed “private” entity. This suggests the complaint originated outside the US.
The spurious and completely ungrounded complaint suggested Press Gazette’s entirely original investigation infringed the copyright of a 2024 article on The Verge about a similar topic (even though The Verge is not the complainant).
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The right to please, please, please be forgotten.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 