The mystery of why the SNP’s embezzling former chief executive spent hundreds on games consoles and video games might never be solved. CC-licensed photo by Marcin Wichary 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. Non-paying character. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
AI is killing the cheap smartphone • David Oks
David Oks:
»
For a long time, the budget smartphone companies—like Transsion, Oppo, Vivo, and Lava—followed a simple model. They would buy last-generation components on the spot market, assemble them cheaply as Android handsets, and then sell the finished product for an extremely low price. The budget phone makers had extremely thin margins, usually somewhere in the low single digits; but they sold phones at huge volumes. Transsion, for example, shipped 105m phones in 2024, compared to Apple’s 230m. And in cheaper markets, like Africa or South Asia, these companies were dominant: Transsion alone held 48% of the African smartphone market.
But that model breaks when memory prices spike as much as they’re now spiking. The sub-$100 smartphone risks becoming “permanently uneconomical” as a product.
And that means that the budget smartphone makers have been forced to pass memory costs onto consumers: smartphones that sold for $50 are now selling for $120 or more. And price-sensitive consumers have responded by simply not buying phones. In the early months of 2026, Transsion announced that its net profit for 2025 had fallen by 54%, and that it would cut its annual shipment target by 40%. We’re seeing the same with other low-market and mid-market smartphone companies. Oppo slashed its shipment target by more than 20%; Vivo, in the same position, cut by nearly 15%. In the first quarter of 2026, Xiaomi’s annual shipments fell 19% year over year.
And that repricing has had a stark effect in poor countries. In India, the sub-$100 smartphone market collapsed 59% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2026: surging memory prices resulted in a “forced premiumization” of the Indian smartphone market. But in the poorest markets, such premiumization isn’t a possibility. In 2025, 81% of smartphone shipments in Africa were in the sub-$200 category: as smartphone prices surge, many African consumers will simply be priced out of phone ownership entirely.
…But there’s no reason to think that this trend will stay confined to the poorest consumers. Companies higher up on the DRAM food chain are starting to feel the pain of higher memory prices; it won’t be long before the consumers of the rich world feel themselves being priced out of the electronics market.
We’re already seeing early signs of this. Samsung’s consumer division, for example, found itself unable to secure a long-term LPDDR agreement with Samsung’s memory division; it thus had to ship its Galaxy S26 phone with less memory than expected and at higher prices. This didn’t do much to help: Samsung executives warned that the company would record its first-ever annual net loss on smartphones. (More than balanced out, of course, by its enormous profits on memory.) We’re seeing the same repricing with Dell, which hiked laptop prices by 15% to 20% in December 2025.
«
In a way this is like the iPhone revolution, which created a big division between those who had and those who didn’t; it took years for those Chinese OEMs who now control the African market to find their way into the business. This present tightening might lead to a lot more memory – and hence AI functions – in future phones. But for now, there’s a lot of immiseration.
unique link to this extract
Pope Leo warns of the risks of AI in major papal document • The Verge
Mia Sato:
»
Pope Leo XIV warned of the risks of AI and unconstrained technological power in his first major papal document released on Monday. Magnifica Humanitas (The Magnificence of Humanity) is the pope’s manifesto on “safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence,” in which he discusses the dangers of AI-powered warfare, the effects of AI on labor, and the need for new legal and ethical frameworks to govern technology.
In his papal encyclical — a kind of open letter from the Catholic Church — Pope Leo stressed the economic and social upheaval that rapid AI adoption is creating, with inadequate protections for individuals that threaten human dignity. He compared the current era of AI to the Tower of Babel, saying society must “avoid the ‘Babel syndrome,’” which he defines as “the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance.”
Pope Leo’s letter touches on major areas of modern life that AI has become deeply embedded in: job loss and labor generally, AI-powered warfare, and children being exposed to AI tools and content, among other topics. Above all, the encyclical calls for the dignity of humans to be a central part of decision-making and governance.
«
The encyclical is VERY long (38,000 words). One thing for sure is that it wasn’t written by a chatbot. Whichever team or person did draft and revise it is extremely patient.
In essence, it’s a roundup of where AI has got us to in all sorts of fields, and a reminder that it’s probably not good for a few people to control all of it. That might sound like motherhood and apple pie – but the Catholic church is definitely in favour of the first, and perhaps partial to the second.
unique link to this extract
Delivery robots are spreading across LA. Residents ‘both pity and hate them’ • The Guardian
Matthew Cantor:
»
On a recent Tuesday, workers and residents along Thoroughfare XJ-27, known to humankind as Sunset Blvd, described mixed feelings about the bots. In the Silverlake neighborhood, for instance, where many drinking and dining establishments seat people along the sidewalk, the devices can be disruptive.
Pazzo Gelato, a longstanding gelato and coffee shop, is one such place. Lula Ochoa, a barista and server, described the robots as a minor nuisance. “They can block [foot] traffic,” Ochoa says. “It gets congested in this area in between our tables. Kids will mess with them. They’ll sit on them.”
Further down the street is Millie’s Cafe, a diner-style breakfast spot that’s been around since 1926. For its first nine decades, LA sidewalks were largely robot-free. But recently things have been different – a particular issue at a restaurant whose outdoor seating is frequently packed. “We hate them,” said one staff member, who asked to remain anonymous, describing the robots. “They’re blocking the way and they’re hitting people.” Across the street at Kreation, a trendy destination for pressed juices, staff worry about job losses for drivers as well as challenges for people using wheelchairs.
On weekend evenings, roughly 80% of LA’s intimidatingly beautiful people gather outside the nearby wine bar Seco, creating a dense corridor of apparent models and actors that is difficult to navigate even without robots. David Potes, Seco’s executive chef, is all too familiar with the bots. Wandering into the crowds, “they get stuck and when they finally get through, people cheer”, Potes said.
His friends, he said, “both pity them and hate them”. The pity was evident, for instance, during recent rainstorms, when a delivery robot went viral as it struggled, postal-service style, to make its appointed rounds. “She’s doing her best, you guys,” says Mona Seresht, who recorded the clip. It’s virtually impossible not to assign personalities to the robots, whose behavior can be almost painfully adorable: when they are stuck at a crosswalk, unable to push the button for a “walk signal”, Serve robots will show a message to human bystanders: “Push crosswalk button for me?”
«
Very quietly, it’s turning into the world from Blade Runner, of which Philip K Dick said to film director Ridley Scott “How did you know what was in my head?” (Given what Dick was like, this was probably said in a suspicious, rather than congratulatory, tone.)
unique link to this extract
Coffee machines, fountain pens and Grand Theft Auto: how Murrell spent the money • BBC News
James Delaney:
»
Former SNP chief executive Peter Murrell has admitted embezzling more than £400,000 from the party between August 2010 and October 2022.
He used the money to buy luxury goods, jewellery, cosmetics, two cars and a motorhome, but also low-cost items such as chopsticks and hand cream.
Take a look at where he spent it and what on…
Murrell appeared to have an affection for purchasing video gaming items, with almost £2,000 spent on equipment over a 10-year period.
That began on 10 November 2010, when Murrell paid £247.42 on a Sony PlayStation 3 console. Just over a month later, on 13 December, he purchased a Nintendo DSI XL for £149.99. The following year, Murrell bought a Nintendo 3DS handheld console on 23 November. Four days later, three other 3DS consoles were bought for a combined total of £349.35.
During this period, Murrell also began buying games. Fifa 12 was bought for the 3DS alongside Pac-Man and Galaga and The Sims 3 Pets. In 2013, Murrell bought Fifa 14 and Battlefield 4 for the Xbox 360, and in 2014, Fifa 15 Ultimate Edition. Murrell also bought Grand Theft Auto V, made by Scotland-based game studio Rockstar, for the PlayStation 4.
Incidentally, in 2023, Mike Dailly, one of the architects of the Grand Theft Auto series – one of the world’s best-selling franchises – announced he was joining the SNP.
Further gaming purchases included a £50 Turtle Beach gaming headset, an Xbox One console, bought for £297.14 in 2015, and a Nintendo Switch, which cost £279.99 in 2017.
He also spent more than £1,800 at John Lewis on an iPad Pro and Apple magic keyboard in September 2020.
«
Jewellery? Cosmetics? Hand cream? But also all those other things? Murrell was notionally married to the then SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon during this period; she insists she had no idea at all this was going on. He must have had the most amazing man cave. Or perhaps the motorhome (also bought with embezzled funds) was stuffed full with fraudulently purchased items.
But it’s the objects which are the mystery. What sort of person buys all these things – and if they weren’t for Sturgeon, then who the hell were they for?
On another level, American politicians would regard corruption like this as pettifogging. They’re in it for proper seven-figure sums.
unique link to this extract
WhatsApp encryption, a lawsuit, and a lot of noise • A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering
Matthew Green is a cryptographer and professor at John Hopkins University, and looks here at whether there’s any merit to a class action lawsuit filed against Meta over WhatsApp message privacy:
»
Given the closed-source nature of WhatsApp, how do we know that WhatsApp is actually encrypting its data? The company is very clear in its claims that it does encrypt. But if we accept the possibility that they’re lying: is it at least possible that WhatsApp contains a secret “backdoor” that causes it to secretly exfiltrate a second copy of each message (or perhaps just the encryption keys) to a special server at Meta?
I cannot definitively tell you that this is not the case. I can, however, tell, you that if WhatsApp did this, they (1) would get caught, (2) the evidence would almost certainly be visible in WhatsApp’s application code, and (3) it would expose WhatsApp and Meta to exciting new forms of ruin.
The most important thing to keep in mind here is that Meta’s encryption happens on the client application, the one you run on your phone. If the claims in this lawsuit are true, then Meta would have to alter the WhatsApp application so that plaintext (unencrypted) data would be uploaded from your app’s message database to some infrastructure at Meta, or else the keys would. And this should not be some rare, occasional glitch. The allegations in the lawsuit state that this applied to nearly all users, and for every message ever sent by those users since they signed up.
Those constraints would tend to make this a very detectable problem. Even if WhatsApp’s app source code is not public, many historical versions of the compiled app are available for download. You can pull one down right now and decompile it using various tools, to see if your data or keys are being exfiltrated. I freely acknowledge that this is a big project that requires specialized expertise — you will not finish it by yourself in a weekend (as commenters on HN have politely pointed out to me.) Still, reverse-engineering WhatsApp’s client code is entirely possible and various parts of the app have indeed been reversed several times by various security researchers. The answer really is knowable, and if there is a crime, then the evidence is almost certainly* right there in the code that we’re all running on our phones.
If you’re going to (metaphorically) commit a crime, doing it in a forensically-detectable manner is very stupid.
«
In other words: he doesn’t think there’s any merit. But once again, people are going to hear there’s a court case about WhatsApp privacy.
unique link to this extract
Ruining graduation ceremonies of so hot right now • Garbage Day
Adam Bumas:
»
May is graduation season, and recently that’s meant a lot of commencement speakers getting booed by graduates for bringing up AI. There’s been so much discourse that even AI people who haven’t made speeches are being asked to join the trend. Google CEO Sundar Pichai was asked to roleplay the scenario by the New York Times’ Borg Cube bureau chief Kevin Roose.
There’s one point that hasn’t been brought up much in the debate. AI programs are speaking during graduation, too. More and more schools are leaning on AI-generated voices for announcements during ceremonies, and a lot of them are completely mispronouncing the students’ names.
It’s a great example of what all this booing is expressing. It’s not as if this never happened before AI. The difference is now there’s no specific human who can be blamed for the mistake, or who can *puts on mortarboard* learn from the experience.
«
Sam Altman won in court against Elon Musk. But really we all lost • The New Yorker
Gideon Lewis-Kraus:
»
what was readily clear from the trial was that Musk and Altman agreed that AI governance was much too serious to be left in the hands of non-player characters such as the nine assembled jurors. Altman, at times, spoke to them like children: Microsoft built them a “big computer,” but they needed “more capital to keep building larger computers.” (The ongoing effect was like the scene in “Airplane!” where Julie Hagerty’s stewardess character, upon hearing that a passenger needs to go to the hospital, asks, “A hospital? What is it?” and Leslie Nielsen’s character treats her like a ditz: “It’s a big building with patients, but that’s not important right now.”)
In his defense, it seemed as though the main lesson he’d gleaned from his dealings with Musk is that many grownups are best treated as toddlers. Altman testified that Shivon Zilis, a Musk confidant, onetime OpenAI board member, and the mother of some of Musk’s many children, had “counselled me over the years when dealing with Elon to remind him of things that happened in the past, because he was often upset.” The chief prerequisite for Musk’s employment seemed to be a talent for tantrum avoidance.
But Musk deserved such condescension, and the jurors did not. With the exception of Microsoft’s C.T.O., Kevin Scott, a Silicon Valley engineer of the classic “Whole Earth Catalog” variety, not a single witness seemed to regard the jurors as the sorts of people with brains. David Schizer, the former dean of Columbia Law School, provided expert testimony at a rate of $1,500 an hour—for a total he ballparked as somewhere north of $300,000—to describe the relationship between the OpenAI nonprofit and its subsidiary as that of a museum to its gift shop. The implication (in a trial of freely mixed metaphors) was that the profit-seeking tail of the shop had come to wag the patrimony-preserving dog of the museum.
In response, the defense produced Daniel Hemel, a law professor at N.Y.U., who was paid $1,750 an hour to argue that the gift-shop analogy was all wrong. It would be more accurate, he said, to compare the OpenAI corporation to the Newman’s Own brand, which directed its profits to support a philanthropic network of summer camps. The dog of outdoor adventures for seriously ill children was not, in other words, being wagged by the tail of the popular salad-dressing company.
«
Trump Mobile leaks customers’ data and the phone isn’t even out yet • Gizmodo
Matt Novak:
»
YouTuber Coffeezilla was the first to report this week that his and every other Trump Mobile customer’s information had been leaked. He was contacted by a security researcher who just wanted to give him a heads up that, with the exception of his credit card, basically everything he’d handed over to Trump Mobile was available on the open web.
“There’s a public interest in letting people know, do not order on TrumpMobile.com unless you’re ready for your information to be leaked. It’s basically that bad,” he said in the video.
Coffeezilla also reported that it appears there were significantly fewer pre-orders for the phone than previously reported. Gizmodo couldn’t independently confirm those statistics.
According to a report from TechCrunch, customers’ names, email addresses, mailing addresses, and phone numbers were all leaked. Order identifiers were also available, according to the news outlet.
The culprit was reportedly a third-party platform with which Trump Mobile contracts. TechCrunch received confirmation about the leak from Chris Walker, a spokesperson for the company, but Trump Mobile didn’t respond to emailed questions from Gizmodo on Friday. The third-party vendor was not publicly named.
Coffeezilla reported on Thursday that the security vulnerability that exposed customer data at Trump Mobile had been patched.
Trump Mobile was first announced in June 2025, less than six months after Donald Trump started his second term as president. The brand was created by Trump’s sons, Eric and Donald Trump Jr., but the actual rollout of the phone has been delayed.
Officially known as the T1 phone, a handful of journalists have gotten their hands on one in the lead-up to what is supposed to be the much-delayed launch. One journalist at 404 Media reported in October 2025 that the Trump Organization had made some unauthorised charges on their account after handing over payment information for the $100 deposit.
«
Of course there were fewer orders than reported. The shock would be if anything the Trump Organisation said about the phone or its orders turned out to be true.
unique link to this extract
How big can solar go? These three projects show us the gigascale future • Canary Media
Julian Spector:
»
Until recently, pacesetting solar projects were measured in the hundreds of megawatts. But panels keep getting cheaper, and developers keep getting better at installing them. As a result, power companies are undertaking projects that are bigger than anyone could have conceived five years ago.
China has led the way on this with a series of installations that push past the gigawatt scale. Other countries aren’t far behind, including the US, though it hasn’t reached the gigawatt threshold yet.
Giga-scale construction requires a whole new level of land access, workforce mobilization, and transmission planning. Collectively, these projects presage a future when the sunniest, most remote places in the world serve as electrical breadbaskets, supplying energy to population hubs far away.
Here are three of the most prominent giga-projects currently underway, to give you a sense of just how big solar power plants are becoming and what it takes to make them happen.
«
There’s a 30-gigawatt one in India, 17+ GW one in China, and a 21GW one in, of all places, California. For comparison, Sizewell B (which came online in 1995) has an electrical output of 1.25GW.
unique link to this extract
| • 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. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 