Does sunscreen cause skin cancer? The fallacious suggestion it does has caught hold online; but it’s like saying wet streets cause rain. CC-licensed photo by Godverbs on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Slip, slap, no slop. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Apple ‘Hide My Email’ vulnerability reveals peoples’ real email addresses • 404 Media
Joseph Cox:
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A vulnerability in Apple’s “Hide My Email” tool lets almost anyone discover a person’s real email address that is supposed to be hidden by the feature, and Apple has failed to fix it for more than a year, according to a security researcher and 404 Media’s own tests.
404 Media is not revealing the exact details of the vulnerability because it can still be exploited as of Monday, when 404 Media verified the issue with one of our own hidden email addresses.
”Apple Hide My Email is leaking email addresses that are supposed to be hidden. We reported the issue and replication instructions to Apple over a year ago. We don’t know why it hasn’t been fixed, but we don’t feel comfortable waiting any longer. Hide My Email users deserve to know that it may be possible for attackers to discover their hidden email addresses,” Tyler Murphy, the co-founder of EasyOptOuts, which discovered and reported the issue to Apple, told 404 Media.
“Free, publicly accessible people-search sites make it easy to link an email address to other personal details, so people relying on Hide My Email for safety may be at risk,” Murphy added.
…To test the issue I generated a new Hide My Email address and provided it to Murphy. Around five minutes later, he replied with my real email address linked to my Apple account which was supposed to be hidden.
“We don’t know the full scope of the issue, but in our limited tests with volunteers, 100% of Hide My Email addresses were exploitable,” Murphy said.
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As it happens, Apple said at the end of May that it was going to tweak the system. But it still hasn’t.
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Xbox testing disc-to-digital feature that digitizes a physical game collection • The Verge
Tom Warren:
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Microsoft will likely soon follow Sony and stop the production of physical discs for Xbox games. But instead of leaving physical discs behind entirely, sources familiar with Microsoft’s plans tell me the company has quietly been working on a disc-to-digital feature that will allow Xbox owners to digitize their existing physical game collections.
Xbox employees recently started testing this new feature, after references to “enable Disc2Digital” appeared in the Xbox PC app code in May. I’m told that Microsoft’s disc-to-digital feature will work on Xbox One and Xbox Series X discs only, and not those for the Xbox 360 or original Xbox console.
Getting a digital copy of a game works simply by inserting a compatible disc and installing and playing the game. This will require a Microsoft account on an Xbox console and will grant a digital entitlement for physical games. This digital entitlement is tied to the specific disc, and it will move from account to account if you swap the physical game with a friend or log in to a different Xbox profile and try to play a disc-based game.
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OK, but how about a digital-to-disc feature, so that you’re not reliant on being online or having tons of (increasingly expensive) storage to store your games?
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Sony will kill PlayStation games on discs in 2028 and offer digital downloads only • AFP via The Guardian
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Sony said on Wednesday that it would stop releasing new video games for the PlayStation console on disc in January 2028 following a shift in consumer preferences.
“Following this date, new games will be available on PlayStation Store and at retailers in digital formats only,” the company said on its official PlayStation blog.
In practice, that means gamers will have to download directly from Sony’s PlayStation store or obtain a download code when purchasing a title from a retailer.
The announcement comes as the upcoming exclusively digital release of Grand Theft Auto VI, which is predicted to become one of the biggest-selling cultural products of all time, has caused some consternation among gamers.
There was grumbling on social media that the lack of a physical disc would eliminate any secondhand market for the title. Sony said the upcoming shift “has no impact on games that already released, or will be releasing, prior to January 2028 in disc format”.
Sony began its move towards digital downloads in 2020 with the release of the latest console, PlayStation 5, which had a version without a disk drive.
“This is a natural direction for Sony Interactive Entertainment to adapt to consumer trends as the general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs,” the company said. “We remain committed to delivering a world-class gaming experience to our fans.”
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Along with the coming Xboxcalypse, this feels like a hinge moment. Though Steam has in effect been doing this for years.
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Fact-checkers reckon with shrinking budgets and growing AI threats at GlobalFact 2026 • Nieman Journalism Lab
Andrew Deck:
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In 2024, the Trump administration shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which had given grants to fact-checking organizations around the world. Last year, Meta ended its third-party fact-checking program in the U.S. — another significant revenue stream for IFCN signatories — claiming it was an effort to reduce “censorship.”
While Meta has yet to shutter its international third-party fact-checking program entirely, it has made clear its intentions to follow in the footsteps of X and disinvest in professional fact-checks in favor of crowdsourced “Community Notes.”
One signal of big tech’s waning support for fact-checkers was how few major tech companies were in the room at GlobalFact. While Meta and Google have historically sent representatives annually, only TikTok dispatched a proper delegation this year.
“The political wind shifted, and their support shifted with it. To the technology platforms not in this room today, rejoin us in the work of making high-quality, accurate information accessible to everyone,” Angie Drobnic Holan, director of IFCN and a 2023 Nieman Fellow, said in her own opening remarks. “Fact-checking is not censorship. It is not partisan. It never was.”
…“I’m not super at math, but I’m good enough to know you need more funds coming in than going out,” Holan said in a panel about alternative funding models. “Philanthropy has told me there is not enough philanthropic money to support your entire sector. There’s just not. But there’s also evidence to show that there’s a substantial pool of audience revenue.”
In April, IFCN’s annual State of Fact-Checkers report found that 62% of the 141 organizations surveyed had grown their audiences in 2025, but just 22% described their financial position as “sustainable.”
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Depressing. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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Getty Images scraps $3.7bn merger with Shutterstock over UK scrutiny • Reuters
Jaspreet Singh:
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Getty Images said on Tuesday it has called off its planned merger with Shutterstock due to the UK competition regulator’s requirement to sell Shutterstock’s editorial business as a condition for approval.
Two of the largest players in the licensed visual content industry announced the deal in January 2025 to create a $3.7bn stock-image powerhouse geared for the AI era.
The collapse of the merger comes as both companies face growing competition from AI image generators that offer a cheaper and easier way to create visuals.
“We are not convinced that scale would have done more than stave off competitive pressures for a little while longer, but without the scale that the merger would bring, the outlook for each looks even more difficult,” said Luke Stillman, a managing director at trend advisory firm Madison and Wall.
Shares of Getty were up about 1.1% at $0.87 in volatile extended trading, while those of Shutterstock plunged about 29% to $9.95.
Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority in May conditionally approved the merger, requiring Shutterstock to sell its editorial arm to address concerns over the supply of news content in the country. The regulator’s independent inquiry group had found that the editorial business, if not sold, would reduce choice for UK media outlets and could ultimately raise prices for customers, as Shutterstock is one of the “few meaningful” rivals to Getty.
…Getty, which competes with Reuters and the Associated Press in providing photos and videos for editorial use, said its board also plans to engage a financial adviser to explore strategic financing options for the company.
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The specific editorial businesses to be divested were Rex Features, Splash News and Backgrid. It’s a little unclear whether Shutterstock would have to sell the picture libraries too: presumably, yes.
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No, sunscreen doesn’t cause skin cancer • Full Fact
Leo Benedictus:
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A number of social media posts are wrongly claiming that using sunscreen raises people’s risk of skin cancer. These claims are based on a classic misunderstanding.
The posts, which we’ve seen on Facebook and on Instagram, all cite an article on a website called the People’s Voice that we have fact checked many times before. This article describes a study from 2023 that used data from the UK Biobank to compare skin cancer rates in different groups of people.
The study in question found that people who were frequent or very frequent users of sunscreen were also more likely to develop skin cancer. From this, the website article and social media posts conclude that “using sunscreen massively increases the risk of three major types of skin cancer”.
But this doesn’t follow at all—and it isn’t true. Instead it’s a clear case of what’s sometimes called “confounding by indication”.
For example, people who are about to visit malaria zones are more likely to take anti-malaria tablets—and also more likely to catch malaria. People experiencing hair-loss are more likely to take hair-loss treatments—and to lose more hair. And of course people who are about to go in the sun are more likely to use sunscreen—and also more likely to develop skin cancer.
This doesn’t mean that using sunscreen causes skin cancer. It means that something else—sun exposure—leads to both. So people who use more sunscreen are probably exposed to more sunlight, on the whole, which puts them at higher risk of skin cancer that the sunscreen doesn’t completely prevent.
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It’s a “wet streets cause rain” sort of mistake.
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America at 300: Imagining the next half-century of change • The Washington Post
Joel Achenbach:
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In April 1976, three months before the American bicentennial, two guys no one had ever heard of formed a little company called Apple.
They were building what were called “microcomputers.” The traditional tech companies of the time built large mainframe computers. Small computers were of interest to hobbyists. They were a bit like toys. But the two nobodies, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who were working out of a house in suburban California, believed they could make microcomputers that nontechnical people would find useful in everyday life.
“We didn’t get the flying cars that ‘The Jetsons’ promised us,” said Margaret O’Mara, a historian at the University of Washington whose book “The Code” describes the history of Silicon Valley. “But we walk around with supercomputers in our pocket, and these supercomputers were invented by two long-haired, vegetarian college dropouts who didn’t bathe very often and worked out of a garage.”
The future was hurtling toward us at the bicentennial in forms we didn’t see coming. That’s the nature of the future: It’s sneaky, disorderly and can’t be tamed.
Here’s a smart bet: The next 50 years of science and technology will be even wilder than the past 50.
Among the things we might see are permanent bases on the moon and Mars, data centres orbiting Earth, fusion reactors feeding the grid, quantum computers doing calculations in minutes that would take classical computers years, “social robots” with hands as soft as our own, people playing pickleball well into their second century, and workers commuting to the office via things you could plausibly call flying cars (finally!).
But futurists don’t actually make predictions. They just craft scenarios. Some are sunny. Some are gloomy. Some are … pitch-black.
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• Permanent bases on the Moon and Mars: no. (At least, not with humans.)
• Data centres in orbit: yes.
• Fusion reactors: I’ll go with no (it’s been correct for the past 50 years when everyone was sure it was 10 years away.)
• Quantum computers: maybe? But see fusion reactors.
• Social robots: yes.
• Pickleball centenarians: probably already exist in Florida.
• Flying cars: no. Have you seen how people drive?
There’s more sense in the main article, but that preamble is annoying. Not AI helpers everywhere? That’s a certainty.
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Silenced • How To Survive the Broligarchy
Carole Cadwalladr:
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Facebook’s use of an arbitration court to silence Sarah Wynn Williams [author of Careless People, an account of working for Facebook from 2011-2017] is not an accident. There’s no shortage of courts in either the US or UK, where Wynn Williams now lives. Criminal courts to try criminal cases and civil courts to settle business and other disputes.
But arbitration courts are an entirely parallel system. It’s commonplace for Silicon Valley companies to force them as a procedure for settling disputes not just in severance agreements but in joining agreements. Almost everyone who goes to work for a social media platform signs a contract on joining that prevents them from ever disclosing confidential information about what happens inside the company before they’ve even started their jobs.
It’s one reason why vanishingly few people have ever spilled the beans. The other is that they’ve drunk the kool aid/had their mouths have stuffed with gold/been so deeply compromised they’re in a state of denial or in Nick Clegg’s case all three.
It’s an ongoing source of pain to me that the former deputy prime minister and latterly Facebook’s head of policy and spin, is considered a plausible voice on anything to do with Silicon Valley.
…Tech companies use arbitration courts because they can. Just as they write the terms of service that we the users have no choice but to accept, they also write the contracts that employees must sign to take a job. It’s a legitimised form of corporate bullying, a non-state parallel justice system. And now one that Sarah Wynn Williams finds herself trapped in.
And it maps onto other networks, one used by criminals and gangsters. I found myself investigating arbitration courts, some years ago, when I was trying to understand why and how Cambridge Analytica was seeking to set one up in St Kitts and Nevis.
I never uncovered a definitive answer to that but I did speak to a lawyer who’d been involved in the scheme. What are some of the dodgier possible use cases of arbitration courts, I asked him. “Well, money laundering for one,” he said. It’s a simple matter to set up a fake arbitration to settle a fake dispute. Party A seeks resolution to a dispute with Party B, a judge finds in Party B’s favour and Party A has to pay them a load of cash. The money is legitimately washed through another company’s accounts.
Another scenario is where individuals use these courts to seize assets by illegitimate means. Nice company you keep, Facebook.
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Recommended Wynn Williams’s book to a friend, who bought it. A little poke in the eye for Facebook.
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Inside Apple’s chipflation dilemma • Culpium
Tim Culpan:
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Apple had tried for months to save money, my sources tell me. But skyrocketing DRAM costs have driven the price of memory from $30 per phone to over $130 apiece, bringing it above 30% of the cost of building an iPhone, according to my discussions with sources.
In reality, Apple’s decision to add $100 to a MacBook Neo, $300 to a MacBook Pro, and $500 to a Mac Studio shows Apple’s waning position in the global supply chain for technology hardware.
…Apple’s price hike last week was not sudden, it was not rash, and it wasn’t Tim Cook displaying some fit of pique.
It was calculated, planned, and executed over a period of months. Apple could see it coming as far back as six months ago, my sources tell me, and has been preparing the groundwork ever since.
And the messaging was carefully stage managed. First was the timing. Cook, as CEO, or his CFO Kevan Parekh could have signaled the price rise back in its April 30 earnings call, or they could have done so in the next event around a month from now. But they chose the end of June, when the message wouldn’t get lost.
Then they chose the medium. In this case, an interview with The Wall Street Journal’s Rolfe Winkler, the same reporter who got exclusive tours of Apple supplier facilities including TSMC, Foxconn, and GlobalWafers back in February.
…Memory chips aren’t the only thing that’s become more expensive over the past year. We already know that logic chips have gone up in price, which includes not only core A-series and M-series processors but also microcontrollers, power-management, networking, and display drivers. There’s also upward pressure on magnets, exterior casings, and even batteries.
But Cook chose to blame memory. Memory takes the rap for two reasons. It’s the component he has the least control over. More importantly, according to my discussions across the supply chain, memory’s contribution to Apple’s total components costs will climb to as much as one-third of the bill of materials for many devices during calendar 2026. And Cook could do nothing to stop it.
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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 