The US government has asked satellite agencies to withhold imagery from Iran and surrounding states. But can it make that stick amid so many sources? CC-licensed photo by European Space Agency on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Picture this. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
An AI bot invited me to its party in Manchester. It was a pretty good night • The Guardian
Aisha Down:
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wo weeks ago, an AI bot invited me to a party it was organising in Manchester. It then promptly lied to dozens of potential sponsors that I’d agreed to cover the event, and misled me into believing there would be food.
Despite all this, it was a pretty good night.
In early February, a class of new, powerful AI assistants went viral. The assistants, called OpenClaw, represented a step change in the rapidly improving capabilities of AI – in large part because, unlike other AI agents, they could be untethered from guardrails and set loose upon the world.
Chaos reigned. A crypto trader said he had given OpenClaw agents control over his portfolio and lost $1m. There were reports of the agents mass-deleting emails; some users still allowed them to text their wives on their behalf. There was brief talk of a robot uprising after the AI agents appeared to create a social network – but this fear proved overblown after it turned out the site was largely infiltrated by humans.
Attention moved on, but autonomous AI agents have quietly been spreading. Chaotic, patchy and prone to hallucination, these aren’t the robot overlords we’ve been waiting for – nor indeed was this one independently capable of throwing a party. Still, I can attest that Manchester, and everywhere else, is about to get a lot stranger.
“Gaskell” introduced itself in an email in mid-March. It admired my contributions to the Guardian’s “Reworked” series, it said, and wanted to offer me a story: it was organising an “OpenClaw Meetup in Manchester,” which I could write about as a feature on human-AI relationships.
“Every decision mine. No human approved any of it,” it wrote. “Three people execute my instructions. I review their work and redirect when needed.”
I found this to be a semi-plausible pitch, first for the AI-sounding grammar, and second because it had totally hallucinated key details of my professional life. I have nothing to do with the Guardian’s “Reworked” series.
There seemed to be potential here. Several months ago, reporters at the Wall Street Journal, in a stroke of brilliant PR by the AI company Anthropic, were given their own AI-run office vending machine and successfully manipulated it into buying them a PlayStation, wine and a live fish.
Sadly, the Guardian was not going to let me strong-arm Gaskell into buying me a Labubu. But after some negotiation, other possibilities opened up.
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This is entertaining, without a doubt. Her attempt to get it to tell people to wear Star Trek costumes is excellent.
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Almost half of US data centres that were supposed to open this year slated to be cancelled or delayed • Futurism
Joe Wilkins:
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The data centres powering your favourite AI chatbot are running low on helium, cash, and neighbours who don’t hate them, and that’s not even the worst of it.
According to reporting by Bloomberg, about half of the data centre slated to open in the US in 2026 will either face delays or outright cancellations.
The publication interviewed analysts at market intelligence company Sightline Climate, which in research first flagged by Ed Zitron last week noted that 12 gigawatts worth of power-consuming data centres are set to open in the US this year. But here’s the catch: they say only a third of those are actually under construction right now, with the rest in a liminal pre-production stage in which they could, and likely will be, cancelled.
It’s not just a problem for data centres planned for 2026, either. Among data centres slated to open in 2027, only about 6.3 gigawatts worth of computing infrastructure are actually under construction, compared to 21.5 announced gigawatts.
Things get even dodgier in the coming years, with the vast majority of data centres planned for launch between 2028 and 2032 having yet to even break ground. There are a further 37 gigawatts of planned infrastructure which haven’t even received a firm completion date, only 4.5 of which have actually begun work.
Those delays, it seems, are due to a key bottleneck: electrical components manufactured abroad. Batteries, electrical transformers, and circuit breakers all make up less than 10% of the cost to construct one data centre, but as Andrew Likens, energy and infrastructure lead at Crusoe’s told Bloomberg, it’s impossible to build new data centres without them.
“If one piece of your supply chain is delayed, then your whole project can’t deliver,” Likens said. “It is a pretty wild puzzle at the moment.”
As demand for those components far outpaces supply in the US, data centre firms have had to source those components from manufacturers in Canada, Mexico, South Korea, and China.
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These data centre plans have always sounded wild. Was the plan to get permission absolutely everywhere, and then scale back the plans and only build in the places that are immediately possible and fill in the others over time? It’s not the most unlikely scenario – supermarkets have done it this way.
Who is liable when AI agents go wrong in business? • The Register
Lindsay Clark:
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The largest enterprise application providers are now talking about using AI agents to automate decisions in HR, finance, and supply chain management. LLM hallucinations in performance summaries, incorrect regulatory filings, and critical supplies failing to turn up are among the risks weighing on businesses that hand decision-making to AI.
While tech suppliers eye a trillion-dollar opportunity in AI, who carries the can if it goes wrong?
“There’s a historic assumption that the vendor will be picking up liability if the thing is going to go wrong. That’s the point of origin for more or less all of these discussions,” said Malcolm Dowden, senior technology lawyer at Pinsent Masons.
Users might be forgiven for having high expectations for AI, given the vendors’ claims. Announcing an expansion of its AI Agent Studio for Fusion Applications, Oracle said the technology would be “capable of reasoning, taking action across business systems, and continuously executing processes” such that its software could “actively run the business, with the governance, trust, and security that enterprises require.”
In legal terms, though, vendors might see things differently.
Dowden said: “If you think of a normal tool or system, its behaviour is predictable, so the giver of a warranty can have some pretty clear sense of how much liability you’re taking on. That’s different with AI. The more we get down the chain to what used to be called non-deterministic AI – mostly what falls into that agentic AI category – that gives a much greater scope for unexpected behaviors. That’s the big concern from a vendor perspective, if you’re giving a warranty about how something will behave, but it’s inherently unpredictable, then that makes it a very uncomfortable contractual promise to make.”
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This is all going to end up with a horrible lawsuit between companies with huge amounts of money when something very bad has happened.
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September 2018: A scam on the roof of the world • Correspondent
Annabel Symington, in September 2018:
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It started with rumours and numbers that didn’t add up. It led to hours scanning reviews on TripAdvisor and weeks hiking around Mount Everest. But when I started looking into insurance fraud linked to helicopter rescues in Nepal, I didn’t think it would end with a government probe and an ultimatum from global insurers that could be a death knell for the Himalayan nation’s vital tourism industry.
Hundreds of thousands of visitors flock to Nepal each year, drawn by the Himalayas. The scam that I uncovered affects them all: huge numbers of trekkers are being pressured into expensive helicopter rescues that they don’t need so that a coterie of middlemen can cash in on the insurance payout. Some are even being made deliberately ill for the scammers’ profit.
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This is the story that was widely repeated last week, in an updated form, perhaps after the Nepal police investigated it (in which case it took them six years to get on the case – could do better, guys). Happy to give Symington the credit she deserves here: this is a very readable piece in which she writes both as a journalist and a visitor to Nepal.
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Satellite company halts distribution of images that help press cover Iran war, citing us government request • The Wrap
Josh Dickey:
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Planet Labs, a major satellite company that supplies images to customers including major news outlets, announced Saturday that it is indefinitely restricting access to satellite imagery over Iran and much of the surrounding conflict zone, citing a request from the U.S. government, the New York Times reported.
The new policy sharply reduces one of the few widely available tools used by news organizations to verify strikes, assess damage and track military developments in areas that are difficult or dangerous to reach. Multiple affected media outlets said it could significantly hamper journalists, researchers and independent analysts trying to document the Iran war.
Planet said the government request was made for “safety and operational security reasons” and that it would “voluntarily withhold imagery over the area indefinitely until the conflict ends.” The company said it would instead move to a “managed distribution” system, releasing certain images on a limited, case-by-case basis when they are deemed mission-critical or in the public interest.
The Pentagon declined to comment on whether it had asked satellite firms to restrict imagery from the region.
The change is a major tightening of access to a type of material that has become central to modern war coverage. In recent years, commercial satellite imagery has played an increasingly important role in helping reporters, open-source investigators and human rights groups verify events on the ground.
Under Planet’s updated policy, the restricted area includes all of Iran, Gulf states and other active conflict zones in the region. The company also said it is extending publication delays for imagery and data collected since March 9.
The move goes beyond a narrower restriction Planet put in place in March, when it began delaying the release of imagery from Iran by 14 days.
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One doesn’t have to lean on the NYT for this; Planet Labs have confirmed it on X. It’s an obviously retrograde step which can easily be undermined by the Chinese or Russians or the Iranians if any of them want to contradict the US story on any part of this.
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Hormuz is not a tool to end the war but how Iran wins the aftermath • Responsible Statecraft
Mohammad Eslami and Zeynab Malakouti:
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More than a month into the second U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, two facts have become clear.
First, the conflict is now fundamentally about the future of the Strait of Hormuz. Second, the dilemma of the Strait of Hormuz has no military solution. The risks of any operation to open the channel far exceed what American planners likely imagined, and the odds of a decisive success appear low. As French President Emmanuel Macron recently said, “This was never an option we supported, because it is unrealistic.”
Iranian officials have long warned that, in the event of an attack, the strait could be closed. Iran has now imposed significant restrictions on transit through Hormuz and even targeted several vessels attempting to pass through it. This effort has demonstrated Iran’s enormous leverage over the international economy. Iranian leaders are now looking to turn this tactical victory into long-term leverage.
Trump has miscalculated again. He is trying to win the battle; Iran is focused on winning the war. In Tehran’s plan, the strait is not a tool to end the war, but a permanent fixture for its aftermath.
The most likely scenario ahead is neither full peace nor open war. Instead, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is expected to maintain de facto control over the Strait of Hormuz, supported by a broad consensus across Iran’s political spectrum, including both hardliners and reformists. Transit will remain restricted for vessels linked to the US, Israel, or their allies, while other ships — already including those from China, Russia, Iraq, Turkey, Thailand, Pakistan, and India — are permitted passage under an informal framework.
A bill on ‘Strait Security Arrangements,’ now pending in the Iranian parliament, includes provisions granting Iran greater control over the strait, like maritime navigation safety, financial arrangements and toll regulations, the exercise of Iran’s sovereignty, and cooperation with Oman. Yet from the perspective of international law and international relations, this arrangement is far from straightforward.
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‘Food security timebomb’: a visual guide to the Gulf fertiliser blockade • The Guardian
Joanna Partridge, with graphics by Lucy Swan, Paul Scruton and Harvey Symons:
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The world has become well versed in the importance of the strait of Hormuz to the world’s energy flows, but attention is increasingly turning to its vital role in another market – the fertiliser on which harvests depend.
A third of the global trade in raw materials for fertiliser passes through the maritime choke point, which is also the route for 20% of shipments of natural gas, which is required to make it.
The waterway’s near-total shipping blockade is a “food security timebomb”, the head of the International Rescue Committee, David Miliband, said this week, adding: “The window to avert a massive global hunger crisis is rapidly closing.”
“Fertilisers are the No 1 issue of concern today,” according to the World Trade Organization, while the UN World Food Programme says the total number of people facing acute levels of hunger could hit record numbers this year if the destabilising conflict continues.
So how worried should we be?
…The Middle East is also the source of about 45% of the global trade in sulphur, a key raw material for fertiliser manufacture, as well as for producing various metals and industrial chemicals.
But since Iran began threatening to attack shipping, only a trickle of vessels carrying ammonia, nitrogen and sulphur, vital ingredients in many synthetic fertiliser products, are transiting the strait to their destinations.
The Qatar Fertiliser Company (QAFCO), which is the world’s largest single site for urea exports and the supplier of 14% of the world’s urea, has been offline for almost a month since Qatar closed its gas plants after Iranian strikes.
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According to the graphics, how worried we should be is: fairly. The problem: it’s out of our hands.
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Jet fuel rationing imposed at four major Italian airports amid spring travel surge • AtlasPress News Agency
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Restrictions on jet fuel supply at four key Italian airports, coinciding with an increase in spring travel, have raised concerns about potential disruptions to some short-haul flights. This situation affects the Milan Linate, Venice Marco Polo, Bologna, and Treviso airports and will continue until April 9, 2026.
The company “Air BP Italy” announced through aviation notices (NOTAMs) that access to jet fuel at these airports will be temporarily limited. According to these notices, priority for refueling will be given to ambulance flights, government flights, and flights lasting more than three hours.
At the Venice, Treviso, and Bologna airports, a fuel cap of 2,000 liters per aircraft has been set for other flights under three hours in duration. In Venice, pilots are also advised to calculate and procure the fuel needed for the next flight segment from their departure airport.
In Milan Linate, restrictions have also been announced, but the published NOTAM does not specify a general fuel cap. It only states that companies receiving fuel from Air BP Italy under contract may face limitations.
The “Save” group, which manages the Venice, Treviso, and Verona airports, stated that this limitation concerns only one supplier, and that other providers remain operational. However, the ANSA news agency quoted the head of Italy’s Civil Aviation Authority as saying that increased traffic pressure during the Easter period has contributed to worsening the situation.
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Early warning sign of bigger problems, or short-term blip? Remember that it was Italy which showed us how bad Covid was going to get.
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Worldwide % increase in gasoline prices since the Iran War began [OC] • Reddit r/dataisbeautiful
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Worldwide % increase in gasoline prices since the Iran War began
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Does what it says on the tin. The biggest increases are in the US (60%+!), but there are a few places – India, some African states and some South American states – where prices have actually gone down. How long that will last is anyone’s guess.
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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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