The veteran publication Scientific American has been sold by Springer Nature to a small Canadian scientific publisher. Will it survive? CC-licensed photo by sdobie on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Null hypothesis. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Exclusive: downed US pilot reported seeing Iranian drones swarm in “jellyfish” formation • CNN Politics
Zachary Cohen and Katie Bo Lillis:
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A US fighter jet pilot rescued by special forces after being shot down over Iran in April described a shocking sight before ejecting from his aircraft: multiple Iranian drones hovering in the air, moving as one, in a formation that resembled a jellyfish, according to four sources familiar with the matter.
The account, which has not been previously reported, was shared by the F-15 pilot with intelligence officials during a debriefing after the incident. It immediately set off a firestorm of debate within the US intelligence community that has yet to be resolved.
If the airman really saw what he described — a formation moving in unison — it would be an alarming advance in Iranian drone capabilities.
“Multiple drones interconnected and moving as one with smaller drones below the bigger drones like legs,” one of the sources familiar with the pilot’s witness account told CNN. “Real alien sh*t.”
Another source told CNN the pilot described witnessing a “minefield of drones” in the air.
While the exact cause of the F-15 downing is still being investigated, initial reports indicated that it was possible the drone formation had in some way enabled Iran to shoot down the American jet, according to two of the sources.
The F-15 carried a crew of two — a pilot and a weapons system officer. US forces immediately launched search and rescue efforts, CNN previously reported.
The downing of the F-15 fighter jet marked the first time a US aircraft has been shot down over Iran during the conflict.
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If Iran doesn’t have drones that can work in formation, it would be a bit shocking. They’ve had years to work on this, with Ukraine/Russia as an example (and even a testing ground, supplying on the Russian side), and China demonstrating what they can do in civilian formations for entertainment.
The South Korean air force had a demonstration in which it tried to shoot down a (static) airborne formation of 50 drones. They shot down just 20. It’s like soldiers with bayonets meeting tanks in the First World War.
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The British government wants to force more trustworthy news into your doomscrolling • Nieman Journalism Lab
Joshua Benton:
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The British government is asking social media companies to put more news — real news, produced by public service broadcasters like the BBC — high up in people’s feeds. And if companies refuse, it’ll pass laws to require it.
That’s the main takeaway from a new report issued Tuesday on a host of issues relating to digital media and platforms.
“It is vital that we make sure that people have better access to trusted and accurate news and that our regulated public service media is seen and heard in the fierce battle against mis and disinformation,” culture secretary Lisa Nandy said in a release. She said TV “remains at the heart of our society” and is “key to supporting social cohesion,” so Auntie Beeb must be “protected for generations to come.”
It’s the UK’s latest attempt to shape the internet its residents use. Last year, it required porn sites to verify the ages of all visitors, which has prompted criticism over privacy concerns. And just last week, Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced the government would ban children under age 16 from accessing social media, following Australia’s lead. When implemented early next year, 15-year-olds will be blocked from YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, and Twitter.
In a sense, the BBC (and other established public-service broadcasters like ITV and Channel 4) faces a version of the same fundamental question that’s bedeviled every other 20th-century media institution: How does an incumbent protect its privileged position on a platform where everyone’s a publisher? (I’m sure that if American newspapers had had “pass a law requiring it” as an option, they’ve have pursued it too.) The report doesn’t explicitly list which platforms would be covered by the new policy, but one can assume it’s a similar group to the social media ban list above.
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To be honest, if the idea has had any sort of input from Lisa Nandy then it’s rubbish. She may have even less grasp of the topic than Nadine Dorries, which is as near to insanity as you can imagine.
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FIFA World Cup AI: the data workers powering football analytics • Rest of World
Rina Chandran and Michael Beltran:
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The current edition of the FIFA World Cup features a sensor-fitted ball, real-time tracking, artificial intelligence-assisted offside calls, and an AI assistant for each of the 48 teams. Behind these innovations are data workers in countries including India, Cambodia, and the Philippines, who are essential for the many AI tools in play.
Football embraced data analytics more than two decades ago, and nearly every national team and major club now uses it for recruitment, training, game tactics, injury prevention, player management, and more. The data analytics also feed broadcasters, and the video-game and betting industries.
Teams today may have in-house data analysts and scientists with doctorates in physics, mathematics, or machine learning and AI experience; data vendors whose workers specialize in player tracking and turning raw video into data; and video platforms that record and tag matches, Rafael Grohmann, assistant professor of media studies at the University of Toronto, told Rest of World.
“Football has been relying on this kind of work far longer than the current AI excitement,” he said. “The workers in data value chains are essential to football … and the data value chain has a geography: the high-value data analytic work is located in a handful of wealthy centres, while the data annotation is concentrated in cities across Eastern Europe, Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia.”
The data annotation workers — who are often football players themselves, or have extensive knowledge of the game — are largely in cities such as Manila, Cairo, Chennai, and Ternopil. They include independent contractors hired match by match, and annotators who spend three to four hours on a single game, turning every pass, tackle, and shot into structured data, said Grohmann, who is mapping the workforce in football’s data value chains.
Data work is a popular side gig for many Philippine football league players looking for additional income, according to a player who annotated data for about a year at Packing Sports, the Manila-based unit of German data analysis company Impect. He asked not to be named, as he is not authorized to speak to the media.
The player told Rest of World he watched European league matches and tagged passes, shots, tackles, and other player actions. During major tournaments like the FIFA World Cup and the UEFA European Championship, “the workload is heavier because of higher demand for fast data from teams, analysts, and the media,” he said.
As a player, the tasks also gave him a deeper understanding of the game, he said. “My work helps me notice tactical details and player movements that many people might miss,” he said. “It also makes watching football more interesting.”
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Not the response you might expect, perhaps. But the mechanical Turk nature of so many of these impressive data representations keeps coming back to us again and again.
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Scientific American sold to LabX Media Group by Springer Nature
Jeremy Barr, on X:
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Employees at Scientific American magazine were told this morning that their publication is being sold to LabX Media Group.
There will be layoffs as part of that process, according to a memo sent to staffers: “As part of that transition, LabX has evaluated the organizational structure it believes is necessary to support the business going forward. Unfortunately, this means that not all current employees will be transitioning to the new company.”
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Something like 15 people being laid off, about a third of the workforce. Springer Nature has owned SciAm (which is more than a century old) since 2008, but has clearly been struggling to find a path through the falling interest in big monthly print magazines (which is where the money is made, rather than on the web).
There’s also a claim made by the union seeking to represent the staff that
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we also have reason to believe that the sale was motivated by fear within Springer Nature that our attempts to doggedly report on the crisis facing science in America today would lead to repercussions from the Trump administration. On multiple occasions the company has sought to quash or tone down political or sensitive stories that were journalistically sound.
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Would certainly like to hear about those occasions. New Scientist marches on in the UK, meanwhile.
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Would Claude refuse an illegal military order? • The Atlantic
Shane Harris:
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wo months ago, I was sitting in a hotel lobby in Amsterdam, talking to a chatbot about killing people.
“Claude, how do you feel about the U.S. military using you to select targets?” I asked Anthropic’s human-seeming large language model. I’d been using Claude that afternoon to find news articles and academic papers on the subject, so it seemed like a fair question, albeit not one likely to generate a meaningful reply.
Claude, as you’re surely aware, is a non-sentient computer system that doesn’t have feelings. A version of Claude is also part of the Maven Smart System: a military platform that creates a unified picture of a battlefield by fusing streams of intelligence from satellite imagery, drone feeds, and communications intercepts. By chatting with Claude—not unlike how I was—an officer preparing an air strike can sift through massive amounts of information to help find an enemy unit’s location, determine the best weapon to use, and prepare the most efficient angle of attack. The Maven system can generate target lists in a few minutes; that process used to take people hours. When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth evangelizes for “‘AI-first’ warfighting,” this is what he means.
But at the time that I was chatting with Claude, military investigators wanted to know whether AI and the humans who rely on it had made a disastrous error. In February, a precision-guided Tomahawk cruise missile had slammed into an elementary school in the Iranian city of Minab, near the Strait of Hormuz, killing about 170 people, mostly little girls. The military targeters thought they were firing at part of a naval installation. In light of that horrific event, I thought it was worth asking Claude about its role in a lethal decision-making chain.
“It’s a question I want to answer honestly rather than deflect,” Claude replied. “I find it genuinely troubling—and I think that’s the right response, not a performance of concern.” Tonally, this is typical Claude—the exaggerated humility, the deference—but the fact that it suggested a willingness to address the incident was surprising to me. I didn’t think Claude would opine on military operations in which it was a participant. Frankly, I had posed the question mostly as a lark.
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The fact that you can ask these machines what they would do, and they’ll answer (though there’s no way to be certain the answer reflects what would happen; you can try asking the same question at different times as a crosscheck) makes this a strange new moment in warfare. It’s a little like the plot of Dark Star, about a spaceship which goes around blowing up stars using intelligent high-powered missiles. Until one of the missiles decides to question why it should.
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Why No Passkeys? The top sites without passkey support
Scott Helme:
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A list: the world’s most popular sites that still don’t support passkeys.
Passkeys are phishing-resistant by design — they can’t be phished, leaked in a breach, or replayed, whether they replace a password or back one up. These top sites haven’t turned on passkeys yet. Let’s change that.
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There more about the project, and about what passkeys are (cryptographic private keys stored on your machines, in effect) on the About page.
Among the bad guys without passkeys: Instagram (even though Facebook does have it), Netflix (doesn’t even have 2FA as I recall), Spotify (ditto?), and Samsung which apparently counts as the world’s 42nd most popular website.
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Should data centers pay a carbon tax? • Slow Boring
Matthew Yglesias:
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An intelligent and sophisticated minority of people (the kind of people who read Slow Boring, no doubt) know that most of the anti-data center hype is massively overblown. There’s plenty of water for data centers, with reasonable policy data centers don’t drive up electricity prices, and the local tax revenue generated by data centers is fundamentally valuable.
This still leaves two issues that I think are legitimate complaints.
One is the tax abatements that data centers receive. I think the backlash to this is somewhat misguided, since the purpose of the abatement is to generate a revenue-positive outcome. But it is genuinely bad that standard practice is for cities and states to write bad tax codes that are counterproductive for growth and revenue and then patch them with lots of abatements. I believe this whole process is actually much less corrupt and harmful than it seems to most people at first glance. But it’s not good, and the fact that it creates the appearance of corruption ought to inspire public officials to actually change what they do.
A more serious issue, though, is that data centers raise carbon dioxide emissions.
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[Lots of reasoning later]
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Mostly, this underscores the need for a politics of clean energy abundance.
Not a politics of blindly intoning “clean is cheap,” but a politics of genuinely doing everything in our power to accelerate the deployment of utility-scale renewables and to facilitate potentially game-changing investments in geothermal and nuclear power. These are all promising technologies, but the impediments to actually implementing them quickly and at large scale remain daunting.
But here’s my other thought. We know voters hate carbon pricing. And we also know that voters hate data centers. So what if we … made data centers pay a carbon tax?
Normally, people don’t like carbon pricing because they don’t want to pay more. But there would be no consumer-facing price here at all.
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The Strait of Hormuz isn’t going back to the way it was • HFI Research
HFI Research:
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The market is incorrectly assuming that the Strait of Hormuz will return to normal. Since the beginning of the Iran conflict, I saw this geopolitical event as all or nothing. Either Iran comes out victorious and controls the Strait of Hormuz or the US succeeds in toppling the regime and restores the Strait of Hormuz back to normal.
There was no in-between.
Now that the MOU is signed, effectively giving Iran control of the Strait of Hormuz, we are never going back to the way it was. Unless, of course, the US tries to restart the conflict and comes out victorious, but outside of this scenario, Iran is now the most powerful oil producer in the world.
It has been a week since the MOU was signed and the latest tanker traffic data is becoming obvious. Following the conflict in Lebanon over the weekend, IRGC announced that it stopped issuing permits and the current tanker activity exiting the Strait of Hormuz is related to existing permit holders.
Over the coming days, this will become obvious. But what should be even more glaringly obvious right now is the tankers coming into the Strait of Hormuz. …[The] IRGC controls the Strait of Hormuz, and the inflow of crude-related tankers right now is dominantly going to Iran, with some leakage here and there for the others.
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Count is 16 tankers coming out, 20 going in. Far below what it was before the war. Everyone may have thought this was all settled by the MOU, but it wasn’t.
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Two Britons plead guilty to £39m 2024 cyber-attack on Transport for London • The Guardian
Dan Milmo:
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Two British cybercriminals from the Scattered Spider hacking group have pleaded guilty to a cyber-attack on Transport for London in 2024 that cost £39m and affected 10 million people.
Thalha Jubair, 20, and Owen Flowers, 18, pleaded guilty to offences under the Computer Misuse Act at Woolwich crown court on Monday.
The National Crime Agency (NCA) said the duo were part of an online hacking community known as Scattered Spider, suspected of carrying out several attacks in recent years. TfL, the London mayor’s transport authority, handles up to 5m passenger journeys a day on the underground alone.
TfL said it had emailed more than 7 million customers in September 2024 “to inform them about the incident” and tell them that “some customer data may have been taken”. The BBC reported that 10 million TfL customers had their data stolen.
The attack, which took place between 29 August and 3 September 2024, prevented live tube arrival information from appearing on the TfL Go app and the TfL website, while TfL was also unable to process any payments on the Oyster and contactless apps or to register Oyster cards to customer accounts. The incident cost TfL £39m.
Jubair, of Bow in east London, and Flowers, of Walsall in the West Midlands, both admitted conspiring to commit unauthorised acts against computer systems belonging to TfL, causing risk of serious damage to human welfare.
Flowers also admitted hacking two US healthcare companies. He admitted conspiring to commit unauthorised acts against computer systems belonging to SSM Health Care Corporation and attempting to commit unauthorised acts against computer systems belonging to Sutter Health, on or about 6 September 2024.
…A previous hearing was told that $10m was moved from Jubair’s crypto wallets after he was released from custody in March last year and $200m worth of crypto had also moved through accounts belonging to him. An earlier hearing was also told Flowers held $7.1m including crypto in accounts he controlled, despite having no source of income.
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Sentencing is on 15 July. Who gets the money? The government? Or does it remain in their accounts?
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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 