For the elderly and infirm, affordable exoskeletons could soon change their lives. CC-licensed photo by Sandia Labs on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Different drum. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Trust in news hits new low globally, research suggests – BBC News
Paul Glynn:
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Trust in the news has fallen to an all-time low globally – the lowest since annual reports by the Reuters Institute began more than a decade ago (2015).
The research published on Tuesday suggests that public trust worldwide is at 37%, three points down on this time last year. In the UK, it has fallen by five points to 30% – 20 points lower than 10 years ago.
More than half of respondents said they now get their news from third-party platforms like social media and video networks, although a similar number still use news websites and TV news as well. Traditional sources are still more popular in the UK.
“Our data points to a mix of anxiety, disengagement and cynicism from audiences, many of whom don’t like the way publishers are covering long-running news stories such as immigration, inflation and international conflict,” the institute said.
“But the report also finds openness to new sources and formats, and a belief in what news at its best can offer.”
Despite more people accessing news via social media, confidence in that format is much lower than in news overall, at 22%. And just 10% of those who took part said most of their news needs were met by creators and influencers, suggesting they are complementing rather than replacing traditional media.
Meanwhile, faith in answers from AI chatbots from respondents around the world is at 20%, although weekly use of these has grown from 7% to 10% (and to 16% among people under 35). And support for impartial news remains high, appearing largely unaffected by changes in news consumption, with support falling by 3% since 2020.
In the US, trust in news stands at 25%, and is even lower (15%) among politically right-leaning Americans.
Some major news outlets have seen big drops, with trust in both CBS News and Fox News down 10 points from 2025, and CNN falling by six.
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There’s no obvious solution to this. People don’t trust news but they don’t trust social media platforms either.
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Wired launching forum-style app as added subscriber benefit • Press Gazette
Charlotte Tobitt:
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Wired is launching a new forum-style app which lets readers interact with its editorial team.
The app, said to be launching “very soon”, is set to feature forums on which subscribers can interact with Wired journalists about the title’s key coverage areas across tech and politics.
Arielle Goldstein, audience development manager at Wired, said the app will serve as a “community power play” and is one of several ways the brand is aiming to keep readers on its own platforms rather than social media.
She told the Audiencers Festival in London: “We envision that we will have forums on the app where people can come and interact with other Wired readers based on subject matters, and also Wired staff, Wired writers on that same subject matter as well.
“So you might be thinking to yourself, can’t people just go to Reddit for that? The answer is no, because our journalists aren’t hanging out on Reddit. They will be in the app, they will be able to answer your questions in the app, and really drive discussion.”
She added that this means a paid subscription will offer a “rapport with the subject matter expert who you’ve been reading for years, and who you want to continue to build a relationship with”.
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Oh, sure, the thing every journalist absolutely wants more than anything else in the world is to have readers directly contacting them in a forum to tell them what they thought of what they wrote, and interacting with each other to discuss the content. More. Than. Anything. And has the Audience Development Manager (who one suspects has not done a lot of direct interacting with that audience) considered how the forum is going to be moderated and who is going to pay for that? Does she not know the history of what happened to comments on news sites?
This is a terrible idea. How long do we give it to survive from launch – six months? Nine?
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Nothing on the internet is secure anymore • The Atlantic
Matteo Wong:
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As AI tools have become extremely good at writing code, they’ve also become extremely good at pulling off cyberattacks. (Malware, after all, is still software.) The result has been a change in the scale, speed, and sophistication of hacks that is difficult to overstate: Among its tens of thousands of clients, the cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks identified a fourfold increase in daily attacks from 2024 to 2025. Hackers are developing AI-enhanced computer viruses that adapt on the fly to avoid detection. They are automating cyber-espionage campaigns on foreign governments. They are stealing data in minutes instead of hours. “There’s a crazy amount of offensive activity happening right now,” Alex Stamos, a former chief security officer of Yahoo and Facebook, told me. “Companies are getting hacked every single day.”
If the NSA is perturbed by the rise in cyberattacks, which it apparently is, then surely my savings are vulnerable. There could be any number of weaknesses in my bank’s IT systems to directly hack. Or perhaps an AI-written phishing email targeted at an employee, personalized to sound like a family member or manager, could let hackers into the back end to empty my coffers. Even if the bank has great cybersecurity, an attack on another business—a medical clinic I visited, a car-rental company, a newsletter subscription—could steal my payment information and, potentially, much more. The attack angles are seemingly infinite. And no one is adequately prepared.
…traditional cybersecurity methods don’t cut it anymore. Before, you might scramble for a week to patch a hole, Giovanni Vigna, a cybersecurity expert at UC Santa Barbara, told me. “Now you could have hundreds of those every week.” Moody’s Ratings has found that the time attackers take to exploit a publicly known vulnerability (the digital equivalent of a robber plotting how to get around a bank’s guards and cameras after obtaining a key) fell from more than 700 days in 2020 to just 44 days in 2025—faster than the average time cybersecurity teams take to patch the bug.
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Everything is going just great. Maybe we’ll just have to turn the internet off for some period of the day?
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Apple to raise prices due to memory chip crunch, Tim Cook says • Wall Street Journal via MSN
Rolfe Winkler:
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Apple plans to raise prices on its products to offset the surging costs of memory and storage chips, Chief Executive Tim Cook said in an exclusive interview with The Wall Street Journal.
“Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” he said. “We’re doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we’ve been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable.”
Cook declined to offer details on the timing or scale of the planned price increases, nor which products will be affected. Apple’s next major product launch is likely to be in September when it releases the iPhone 18 lineup, expected to include a new foldable iPhone.
Price increases, especially for Macs and iPads, could come sooner. Apple raised the starting price of the Mac Mini last month in between launch events.
Skyrocketing demand for memory and storage chips from AI companies has pushed up their cost so much that Apple would have to raise device prices substantially to maintain its profit margins. Passing the higher cost on to consumers while maintaining its profit margin would add about $270 to the price of the next iPhone Pro model, estimates research firm TechInsights.
…Morgan Stanley estimates a 15% bump for prices of smartphones and PCs in the US this year. This price hike will have a limited impact on the consumer price index, which has only a small weighting for such devices. Yet any price increase on the popular iPhone is likely to grab Washington’s attention.
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The WSJ has an estimate of $1,299 for the upcoming iPhone 18 Pro. Last year the base model of the 17 Pro was $1,099. Who doesn’t love an 18% increase? But it goes to prove too that even Apple isn’t immune to the supply crunch.
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Fox’s $22bn Roku acquisition aims to expand its reach into smart TVs, advertising • Ars Technica
Scharon Harding:
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Fox Corporation has agreed to buy Roku Inc. for $160 per share, an approximate enterprise value of $22bn, the firms announced today.
The acquisition would unite Fox’s broadcast channels, including Fox, Fox News, Fox Business, and FS1, as well as its streaming businesses, including Tubi, a free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) platform that Fox bought in 2020, with Roku’s own FAST service, The Roku Channel, and Roku’s streaming hardware business, including its streaming sticks and smart TVs. Roku says it has 100 million households using its platform.
The most valuable part of Roku’s business isn’t its hardware, which lost $19.1m in the quarter ending March 31, 2026, but its the operating system (Roku OS) and advertising business. In that same quarter, Roku’s advertising and subscriptions business posted a gross profit of $584.1m, with the advertising business pulling in $371m in revenue. The COVID-19 pandemic helped Roku become profitable in 2021, but the company didn’t see annual profitability again until 2025.
The planned merger aims to help Roku scale and maintain profitability more easily by enabling Roku “to execute on our strategy faster than we would otherwise by ourselves, even though we’re doing extremely well,” Anthony Wood, Roku’s CEO, said during a call with investors today.
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This is a Murdoch family acquisition; it feels like nothing more than a plotline from Succession where the Logan media empire is trying to buy a Scandinavian tech company, and finds that it has instead been eaten by the tech company. That’s unlikely to happen here, but it’s hard to feel that Fox really gets Roku.
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AI-referred US shoppers browse longer, spend more per visit, data shows • Reuters
Arriana McLymore:
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US shoppers who use large language models, including Google’s Gemini or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, for purchase recommendations are lingering more on retailers’ websites and are more likely to spend, according to May data from Adobe Analytics.
Consumers who are referred to retail websites from LLMs generated 53% more revenue per visit than shoppers from non-AI sources, the data firm said, emphasizing the need for brands to invest in AI-readable webpages.
Retailers whose products show up in LLM suggestions are able to “drive more personalization” to shoppers who leave the platforms to complete their purchases on the native websites, Vivek Pandya, director of digital insights at Adobe, said.
• AI traffic to retail websites increased 138% in May from last year, the highest share of total retail visits since Adobe Analytics began tracking in October 2024.
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That latter statistic either indicates far more use by a slowly growing number of people, or rapidly growing adoption with consistent use.
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How the social media ban might collapse • Goodall and Good Luck
Lewis Goodall is sceptical about the under-16s social media ban:
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Many of the details trouble me as rushed and ill-considered. Does anybody believe that Starmer would be acting so precipitously, without a white paper, unless he was legacy shopping? Is it really credible to say that 16 year olds are able to vote and marry, but prohibited from posting about it on Instagram after 8pm? What will happen with the data which is collected? How will the age verification actually work and can it be done in such a way which is not onerous for adults? And do we really think it’s credible or desirable to ban YouTube for teenagers, which is basically just their…TV?
The exact application of the details matter as do good answers to all these questions because if they are not ironclad, ironically enough, it is now on social media that they are pulled apart and discredited in dog-year time. For a case study in exactly what I mean, we need look no further than digital ID cards, proposed by the government last September. That was, until Keir Starmer advocated it, a very popular proposal.
The PM came out in favour of it, just before party conference, to get himself out of the latest political hole in which he found himself. It was announced out of the blue, with virtually no real plan for how it would be affected or explained to the country, certainly not a comms strategy. It was torn apart online, conspiracy about government control quickly spread, propelled by eccentric but influential accounts with the algorithms on their side- and virtually nothing was done at the top of government to stop it.
Within weeks, its polling collapsed. In the broadcast era, governments could roll out technocratic reforms through institutional trust and message discipline. In the algorithmic era, every enforcement mechanism, every minor controversy instantly becomes content — clipped, distorted, radicalised and fed back into politics at scale. With the weird fusion of political content and the hothouse of Westminster, there is increasingly a third body of the British Parliament. A sort of algorithmic veto. One of the explanations as to how and why the Starmer government has struggled, is because it hasn’t been able, through political skill, to combat and overcome it.
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This is the other element: even if the public supports it, is the political drive there to make it happen?
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Tech titans are hacking their bodies for a longer life. But is there science behind their methods? • Nature
Chris Stokel-Walker:
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Tech entrepreneur and billionaire Peter Thiel told Bloomberg News in 2014 that he takes human growth hormone in hopes of living for 120 years, despite the Mayo Clinic, a renowned US medical centre, warning of substantial risks and saying that there is little evidence that the drug helps healthy adults to regain youth or energy. Thiel did not respond to Nature’s questions about whether he still takes the hormone or what he makes of the Mayo Clinic’s guidance.
In hopes of enhancing cognition, some Silicon Valley tech leaders have touted methylene blue, a compound with a long history as a textile dye that has been approved for limited medical use, mainly to treat a rare blood disorder. And they are promoting nicotine pouches — marketed as an alternative to smoking — as a way to optimize focus and energy, despite well-documented concerns about addiction.
These wealthy longevity evangelists are often seen as translators of early-stage science to the public, who turn preliminary or anecdotal findings into so-called stacks that combine supplements, other compounds, protocols and therapies, long before FDA approval. “It’s a trickle-down effect due to the nature of platforms they use to spread their content,” says Margje Camps, a researcher at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands who studies health influencers.
But there is a danger to this growing phenomenon: researchers who study ageing and longevity warn that these biohacks have not been clinically tested, meaning that it’s unclear whether they work or might harm people.
There is no medical intervention that is proven to extend human life by targeting ageing itself, says Andrew Steele, an independent longevity researcher based in Berlin and author of the book Ageless (2022). “There probably are things on our radars that might work, but nothing has ever been tried in humans.”
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Me and my exoskeleton: the rise of wearable robotics • Financial Times
Patti Waldmeir:
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We are entering the age of the everyday exoskeleton: light, wearable robotic devices that can change what it means to grow old.
Last week I strapped on a pair of bionic trainers to help me walk, and a robotic hip belt to make climbing easier. Not that I need assistance with either function now — but one day, I probably will. I applaud the idea of wearable robots that can help stave off immobility, as well as the social isolation and physical and mental decline it often brings.
Full exoskeletons have been around for decades, designed for military, workplace or medical rehabilitation uses. But now lighter and more affordable (if not cheap) joint-specific wearable exoskeletons are entering the market, aimed not at those who cannot walk, but those who struggle to go as far or as comfortably as they’d like.
“Living longer is a biology problem, but living well is a design problem,” Anna Roumiantseva, co-founder of Skip, a wearable robotics company, tells me. Modern science has added decades to human life “but we haven’t redesigned the products and systems around us. It’s the classic ‘lifespan vs healthspan’ thing,” she says.
Her company is accepting pre-orders for $5,000 “powered trousers” as part a “movewear” collection that integrates exoskeleton technology into consumer products. The goal is to “enhance the experience of ageing,” she says, adding, “a lot of the time, that comes down to social elements: not feeling like people have to wait for me, or taking that trip I’ve been putting off.”
Ankle-assist, hip-assist, knee-assist and other such devices are meant to be worn every day, like hearing aids — not just in a crisis. Roumiantseva says it’s important for the company to attract users “who still take the stairs occasionally”.
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There’s a video of Waldmeir (who doesn’t give her age) strolling along a city street walking her dog. They certainly look more elegant than those mobility scooters people use. Look, if they’re good enough for Sigourney Weaver fighting aliens..
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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 