In the US, sales of EVs are surging as fuel prices have rocketed following the attacks on Iran. CC-licensed photo by Olaf Arndt on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Shocking. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
The war is turning Iran into a major world power • The New York Times
Robert Pape is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago who studies military strategy and international security:
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For decades, the Persian Gulf had a simple arrangement: Oil producers exported, markets priced, and the United States secured the route. That system allowed rivalry without instability. Now, it is falling apart.
Gulf states depend heavily on energy exports for state revenue. When insurance rates spike and shipping becomes uncertain, the fiscal impact is immediate. Governments adjust. Cargoes are rerouted. Contracts are renegotiated.
If uncertainty persists, the Gulf arrangement will inevitably change, giving way to a different regional order — one in which the Gulf states increasingly accommodate the actor that can most directly influence the reliability of their exports. That actor is now Iran.
The global consequences will be most pronounced in Asia. Japan, South Korea and India depend heavily on Gulf energy. China, though more diversified, also depends on the region for a large share of its energy imports. Those dependencies are embedded in infrastructure — refineries, shipping routes and storage systems that cannot be quickly reconfigured.
If disruption to the energy supply persists, the effects will be widespread. Higher insurance and freight costs will raise prices. Trade balances will worsen. Currencies will weaken. Inflation will rise. Energy dependence will begin to shape policy. Governments will prioritize access to energy. Diplomatic choices will narrow. Actions that risk further instability will become harder to sustain. A 1970s world in which oil shocks lead to years of stagflation will no longer be a distant memory but a nearing reality.
Again, Iran will benefit.
China depends on Gulf energy to sustain growth. Russia benefits from higher and more volatile energy prices. Iran gains leverage from its position at the Hormuz choke point.
Each of these three nations has incentives that run counter to the economic stability of the United States and its allies.
…Other plausible scenarios in the emerging new world order are darker still. Imagine Iran with control of about 20% of the world’s oil, Russia with about 11% and China able to soak up much of that supply. They would form a cartel to deny the West 30% of the world’s oil. You don’t need sophisticated analysis to recognize the catastrophic consequences: precipitously declining power for the United States and Europe, and a global shift toward China, Russia and Iran.
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After fighting malware for decades, this cybersecurity veteran is now hacking drones • TechCrunch
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai:
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“I often call this ‘cybersecurity Tetris,’” he tells the audience with a serious face, rattling off the rules of the classic video game. When you complete a whole line of bricks, the row vanishes, leaving the rest of the bricks to fall into a new line.
“So your successes disappear, while your failures pile up,” he tells the audience during his keynote at Black Hat in Las Vegas in 2025. “The challenge we face as cybersecurity people is that our work is invisible … when you do your job perfectly, the end result is that nothing happens.”
Hyppönen’s work, however, has certainly not been invisible. As one of the industry’s longest serving cybersecurity figures, he has spent more than 35 years fighting malware. When he started in the late 1980s, the term “malware” was still far from everyday parlance; the terms instead were computer “virus” or “trojans.” The internet was still something few people had access to, and some viruses relied on infecting computers with floppy disks.
Since then, Hyppönen estimated he has analyzed thousands of different kinds of malware. And thanks to his frequent talks at conferences all over the world, he has become one of the most recognizable faces and respected voices of the cybersecurity community.
While Hyppönen has spent much of his life trying to keep malware from getting into places it is not supposed to, now he is still doing much of the same, albeit a slightly different tack: His new challenge is to protect people against drones.
…In mid-2025, Hyppönen pivoted from cybersecurity to a different kind of defensive work. He became the chief research officer at Sensofusion, a Helsinki-based company that develops an anti-drone system for law enforcement agencies and the military.
Hyppönen told me that was what motivated him to get into drone security, a developing new industry, because of what he saw happening in Ukraine, a war defined by drones. As a Finnish citizen, who serves in the military reserves (“I can’t tell you what I do, but I can tell you that they don’t give me a rifle because I’m much more destructive with a keyboard,” he tells me), and with two grandfathers who fought the Russians, Hyppönen is acutely aware of the presence of an enemy just over his country’s border.
“The situation is very, very important to me,” he tells me. “It’s more meaningful to work fighting against drones, not just the drones that we see today, but also the drones of tomorrow,” he said. “We’re on the side of humans against machines, which sounds a little bit like science fiction, but that’s very concretely what we do.”
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An AI company set out to fix news deserts. Instead, it copied local journalists’ work • Poynter
Angela Fu:
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Artificial intelligence company Nota — whose clients include organizations like The Boston Globe and the Institute for Nonprofit News — is scrapping its network of local news sites after learning that they contained dozens of instances of plagiarism.
The closure comes after Axios Richmond and Poynter alerted CEO Josh Brandau that multiple stories on Nota’s sites included reporting and photographs lifted from local news outlets. The 11 sites — collectively called Nota News — launched in September as an effort to bring “bilingual local reporting and civic tools to underserved communities,” according to a press release.
Each site focused on a specific county — or in one case, two counties — identified as lacking local news coverage. Until Monday, two part-time editors worked across the 11 sites, generating articles using Nota’s AI tools. The stories covered topics ranging from local affordable housing initiatives to public school events and were published in both English and Spanish.
The articles were supposed to be based on publicly available civic information, such as press releases and videos of city council meetings. In reality, Poynter found more than 70 stories dating back to October that included reporting, writing and photography from local journalists without attribution.
Some of the copied material came from outlets owned by Nota’s own clients. Nexstar, for example, had a $600,000 deal with Nota, according to Nota’s website. (Information about the deal was removed this week.)
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Oh dear. Goes from bad to worse.
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Iran threatens ‘complete and utter annihilation’ of OpenAI’s $30bn Stargate AI data center in Abu Dhabi • Tom’s Hardware
Mark Tyson:
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Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has issued a clear public warning to the US that any damage inflicted on Iran’s power infrastructure will be met with decisive retaliation. Specifically, IRGC spokesperson Brigadier General Ebrahim Zolfaghari threatened the “complete and utter annihilation” of U.S. and Israeli facilities. The “hidden” $30 billion Stargate AI datacenter in Abu Dhabi was singled out as a juicy target for Iranian destruction later in the video. The threats come on the heels of Iran reportedly delivering enough damage via rocket strikes to some Amazon AWS data centers that they have shut down.
…Zolfaghari make the headlining threats against US action in Iran. “Should the USA proceed with its threats concerning Iran’s power plant facilities the following retaliatory measures shall be promptly enacted,” declares the military spokesperson. “All power plants, energy infrastructure, and information and communications technology of the Zionist regime, and all similar companies within the region that have American shareholders shall face complete and utter annihilation.”
After the remarks from Zolfaghari, the video switches to a shot of the Earth from space, which zooms into Abu Dhabi on Google Maps. A zone not far from the coast is then centred on, showing an apparently “empty” area of desert. However, a message is overlaid on this bleak view, stating “Nothing stays hidden to our sight, though hidden by Google.” The video then switches to a “night vision” view of the same area of the map with the full extent of the Stargate AI datacenter in Abu Dhabi clear to see.
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Iran’s propaganda game puts the US to shame. They’re also pretty good at aiming drones. At this point one tends to wonder what they’re bad at.
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The real intelligence failure in Iran • The Atlantic
Shane Harris:
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Trump’s “excursion,” as he calls the biggest U.S. military operation of his second term, has unleashed a parade of horribles. Iran now controls the strait, where it plans to charge vessels a toll and can govern global flows of oil, natural gas, fertilizer, and chemicals that are crucial for manufacturing. A regime that Trump claims to have replaced still remains in the hands of hard-liners, whose repression of the Iranian people will be strengthened for having survived a decapitation strike by the world’s only superpower. And neighboring countries in the Gulf, whose livelihoods depend on exporting energy and creating safe places for people to visit, live, and work, will amass new weapons and reconsider their strategic partnerships with the United States.
Two decades ago, a president embraced information that turned out to be wrong, and disaster followed. Today, a president disregards assessments that proved to be right, and the predictable comes to pass. There’s a failure of intelligence there too—just not the kind we’re used to seeing.
…“The regime already had missiles capable of hitting Europe and our bases, both local and overseas, and would soon have had missiles capable of reaching our beautiful America,” Trump said before a Medal of Honor ceremony at the White House on March 2. But the Defense Intelligence Agency had concluded that building a missile that could hit the United States would take Iran until 2035, and only then if it was determined to do so, which analysts concluded it was not.
When Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard—hardly the model of an apolitical presidential adviser—testified before Congress a few weeks later, she reported that Iran had missile technology that “it could use to begin to develop a militarily viable ICBM before 2035,” but did not say that it had done so. That timeline is crucial to understand, because to hit the United States with the ultimate weapon, Iran would have to place a nuclear warhead on top of an intercontinental ballistic missile.
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So predictable, sadly. (Gift link.)
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Oats, sardines and crisps: emergency foods to stockpile – and why you should share them • The Guardian
Damian Carrington:
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People should have an emergency stockpile of food in their homes in case conflicts, extreme weather or cyber-attacks shut down supplies, leading UK experts have told the Guardian.
In an ever more turbulent world, they say it is essential to choose long-life items that can be eaten without cooking – think tinned beans, vegetables and fish, rice crackers, and oats that can be soaked. But it is also important to choose items you actually like to eat, and some treats such as chocolate or crisps to keep your spirits up. You will also need water – lots of it – not just to drink but for washing too.
Perhaps the most surprising advice is to be prepared to share your stockpile with neighbours. With one in seven households with children already suffering food insecurity in the UK, many people cannot afford to build up a stockpile and, without food, civil unrest soon follows.
“Yes, do store food, but be prepared to share to maintain social solidarity,” says Prof Tim Lang. “All resilience theory and experience, in shocks, wars, or sub-war conflicts, shows it is essential to maintain social cohesion if you want to maintain social order.”
One shock could spark social unrest and even food riots in the UK, according to a report from dozens of the country’s top food experts, published in February. They said chronic issues like low incomes and fragile “just-in-time” supply chains have left the food system a “tinderbox”. The Iran war, hitting vital fuel and fertiliser supplies to farmers, has added to the pressure.
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Important to choose items you like to eat? What an idea.
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Nonfiction publishing, under threat, is more important than ever • The New Republic
Paul Elie:
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Another recent cut has gotten less attention. In January, [publishers] Simon & Schuster laid off several prominent editors of nonfiction books. Among them were two renowned editors who had breakthrough books early in their careers: Colin Harrison, of the Scribner imprint, who published Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead (an account of a Marine’s service during the Gulf War), and Eamon Dolan, who at Houghton Mifflin published Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation (as bold a work of investigative reporting as ever ascended the bestseller lists).
Recently at Simon & Schuster, Dolan published Mary L. Trump’s memoir Too Much and Never Enough (where she observed that the election of her uncle Donald turned “this country into a macro version of my malignantly dysfunctional family”); Harrison published Mikhail Zygar’s The Dark Side of the Earth: Russia’s Short-Lived Victory Over Totalitarianism, about the ways Vladimir Putin has perpetuated the Cold War to his advantage.
The layoffs followed what New York Times publishing reporter Elizabeth A. Harris called a “difficult year” for nonfiction—a year in which only one of the 10 strongest-selling nonfiction books was a new book: the Kamala Harris campaign memoir 107 Days. “The decline in sales of new nonfiction might reflect a changing information ecosystem,” Elizabeth Harris observed. “People looking for information can now easily turn to chatbots, YouTube, podcasts and other free online sources.” Last December, The Guardian cited NielsenIQ figures indicating a one-year drop of 8.4% in nonfiction book sales (twice that of fiction) and quoted a writer who had “heard publishers have soured on any nonfiction that isn’t ‘Hollywood friendly.’”
These developments suggest a rough future for a certain kind of writing: nonfiction that’s based on reportage more than on personal experience or celebrity—a.k.a. long fact, literary nonfiction, or narrative nonfiction. The form is as essential as it is hard to define. Nonfiction books of this kind are the basis for much of our understanding of the world we live in, and their impact extends far beyond bookstores, book review sections, libraries, and universities. They are a crucial bulwark against the surging public culture of “alternative facts,” outright lies, and the brazen embrace of ignorance.
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Sales of used EVs surge in US as petrol prices pass $4 a gallon • Financial Times
Christian Davies:
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Sales of used electric vehicles are surging in the US as models bought during a post-pandemic boom flood back on to the market, offering prospective buyers relief from a sharp rise in petrol prices.
First-quarter used EV sales rose 12% compared with the same period last year and 17% on the previous quarter, according to Cox Automotive estimates. Sales of new EVs in the first quarter are estimated to have slumped by 28% year on year following the Trump administration’s withdrawal in 2025 of a $7,500 consumer tax credit.
Analysts attribute the surge to a glut of hundreds of thousands of cheap pre-owned EVs that were purchased on leases in the early 2020s and which are now returning to market as those leases expire. According to credit bureau Experian, EVs will account for 15% of all off-lease vehicles at the end of this year, up from 7.7% in the first quarter.
The supply glut helped drive the average price of a used EV down by 8.5% between February 2025 and February 2026, according to Cox, closing the average price gap between used EVs and used petrol-powered vehicles from $4,923 to $1,334.
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Didn’t take long for people to respond to fuel price. Imagine how much more quickly this would have happened if the US put a duty on fuel sales as happens in the UK.
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LinkedIn hidden code secretly searches your browser for installed extensions • Cybersecurity News
Guru Baran:
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Every time you open LinkedIn in a Chrome-based browser, hidden JavaScript silently scans your computer for installed software without your knowledge, without your consent, and without a single word in LinkedIn’s privacy policy.
A revealing investigation conducted by the European advocacy group Fairlinked e.V., under the campaign name “BrowserGate,” has uncovered what researchers describe as one of the largest corporate espionage and data breach scandals in digital history.
Microsoft’s LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional networking platform with over one billion users, is running covert code that probes visitors’ browsers for thousands of installed extensions, compiles the results, encrypts them, and transmits everything back to LinkedIn’s servers and to third-party companies.
The mechanism is technically precise and deliberately invisible. Each time a user loads a LinkedIn page, a fingerprinting script executes silently, probing for known browser extension identifiers by attempting to access files that extensions can optionally expose to websites. If a file loads, the extension is confirmed present. If not, it isn’t. The entire scan takes milliseconds, and the user sees absolutely nothing.
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Only on Chromium-based browsers – though that is a lot: Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge, and Brave, Opera and Arc. (But not Firefox or Safari.) Specifically what it looks for:
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• 509 job search tools — including extensions for Indeed, Glassdoor, and Monster — exposing users secretly looking for work on the very platform where their current employer can see their profile
• Religious belief indicators — extensions that identify practicing Muslims and other faith communities
• Political orientation markers — news source selectors and partisan fact-checking tools revealing users’ political leanings.Disability and neurodivergent tools — ADHD management apps, autism support extensions, and screen readers
• 200+ direct competitor products — including Apollo, Lusha, ZoomInfo, and Hunter.io, which LinkedIn uses to map which companies use rival sales intelligence platforms.«
This is probably illegal under GDPR. And there’s more, in the article.
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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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