A major British car insurer has discovered that AI is being used to create millions in bogus claims. CC-licensed photo by sylvar on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Trustworthy. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
UK 16- and 17-year-olds to be encouraged to follow midnight social media curfew • The Guardian
Robert Booth:
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Sixteen and 17-year-olds are to be encouraged to observe a midnight social media curfew, in the latest stage of Labour’s bid “to protect the next generation” from online harms, including poor sleep caused by night-time scrolling.
From next spring, Britain’s oldest children will be urged to refrain from using certain apps with a midnight to 6am block being switched on by default. But the curfew will not be mandatory and can be overridden. The move is an extension of the under-16 social media ban announced last month, which included restrictions on platforms such as Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X.
The government has also stopped short of restricting the use of virtual private networks, which allow children to avoid social media age gates by pretending they are in a country where there is no ban. The government’s own research found that only 7-10% of children reported using a VPN specifically to bypass age checks. It is also concerned that restrictions could damage free speech.
The Molly Rose Foundation, an internet safety campaign group, said the latest measures were part of “yet another piecemeal set of announcements, not the comprehensive plan for children’s safety that’s required”.
The specific apps covered by the default curfew have not been named in the announcement from the technology secretary, Liz Kendall, in one of the final acts of the Keir Starmer government. Kendall said features that can keep users scrolling for longer – such as videos that automatically play when another one ends and feeds that continually serve up personalised content – will also be switched off by default for older teenagers. However, they will also be able to override that restriction in a couple of clicks. The government is concerned to avoid a “cliff edge” of teenagers suddenly being exposed to social media’s most addictive features the moment they turn 16.
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Call me picky, but a midnight curfew sounds about two hours too late, and a 6am restart about two hours too early. But maybe we could just do this nationally, and turn the internet off between those hours. (Or, only on during them.)
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OnePlus is reportedly bailing on the US • The Verge
Jay Peters:
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OnePlus and its parent company, Oppo, plan to announce in the coming days that OnePlus brand will be leaving the US and European markets, according to a machine translation of a WinFuture report.
Should the exit actually happen, it will mark a conclusion to months of rumors about the future of OnePlus. Android Headlines said in January that OnePlus was being “dismantled,” though OnePlus, in a statement at the time, said that “OnePlus North America continues to operate, with full guarantee of users’ after-sales support, software updates, and rights commitments.”
In March, 9to5Google reported that OnePlus might cease operations in global markets. In April, Android Authority detailed how top staffers at OnePlus had recently left in Europe and the UK, with a company spokesperson saying in a statement that “OnePlus Europe is evaluating its regional roadmap and product strategy.”
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The 9to5Google story basically has it all: the company is withdrawing back into China. US, Europe, UK, India: all going, going, gone. Probably not just a casualty of the RAM market, but won’t be sorry not to be competing in the wider world.
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Book publishers sue Google for copyright infringement over Gemini AI training • The Guardian
Emma Loffhagen:
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A group of major publishers have filed a lawsuit against Google, accusing the company of illegally using millions of copyrighted books to help build its Gemini artificial intelligence models, in “one of the most prolific infringements of copyrighted materials in history”.
The case, filed in federal court in New York, has been brought by three publishers – Hachette Book Group, Cengage Learning, and Elsevier – and bestselling American author Scott Turow.
The publishers argue that Google repurposed books that had been supplied for limited services such as Google Books, Google Play Books and Google Scholar. Those services allowed Google to use the works in specific ways – for example, to display searchable snippets or sell ebooks – but not, the lawsuit claims, to copy them for training commercial AI products.
“Desperate to maintain its online dominance, Google abandoned its early motto of ‘Don’t be evil’ and engaged in one of the most prolific infringements of copyrighted materials in history,” the suit states.
According to the complaint, the tech company made copies of copyrighted books to train Gemini without permission or payment, despite internal discussions acknowledging the legal risks. The filing claims Google flagged internally that it could face “$10Bs-$100Bs in potential fines” for using texts provided by publishers for Google Play Books.
The publishers say Google’s actions are harming authors and the wider publishing industry, arguing that AI-generated content could negatively impact book sales.
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Pretty easy to argue already that AI-generated content is harming book sales: there’s so much slop polluting Amazon’s ebook charts that it can’t be expanding the number of books read; it must be replacing other, human-written work. That’s a slam dunk, as they say.
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US military sent explosive drone boats into combat for the first time • Ars Technica
Jeremy Hsu:
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For the first time in its history, the US military sent explosive-laden drone boats into combat by attacking an Iranian midget submarine and naval port. The unprecedented use of such kamikaze sea drones by the United States comes nearly a decade after Iranian and Houthi forces first demonstrated such weapons.
The US military shared a video showing three “one-way attack surface drones” exploding after approaching an Iranian midget submarine and ship maintenance facility at Iran’s Bandar Abbas Naval Base on the night of July 12. US Central Command, the US military combat command responsible for Middle East operations, described the strikes in a social media post as the “first time American forces have employed sea drones in combat operations.”
The US drone boats were able to “make a low-speed, uncontested approach” to their targets before exploding, according to USNI News, a news service from the nonprofit US Naval Institute. USNI News also identified one of the targets as an Iranian Ghadir-class midget submarine that was out of the water while being suspended from a gantry.
The technology behind the strikes involved Saronic Corsair autonomous surface vessels developed by Saronic Technologies, a defense company based in Austin, Texas. The company’s website describes the drone boat as being 24 feet in length and capable of carrying up to 1,000 pounds over 1,000 nautical miles at a top speed surpassing 34 knots.
Such Corsair drone boats supposedly have the capability to operate autonomously without direct human control, including long-range navigation and patrol missions along with regulating power consumption and engine use to loiter at a specific position, according to a Saronic blog post.
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The warfare version of Keeping up with the Joneses.
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20s man stabs stock YouTuber over investment losses • Chosun
Kwon Tae-wan:
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A man in his 20s was arrested by police in Busan [south Korea] on suspicion of attacking a stock investment YouTuber with a weapon. Investigations revealed he harbored resentment after suffering losses from investments he made based solely on the YouTuber’s advice.
The Busan Nambu Police Station announced on the 14th that it had detained a man in his 20s, identified as Mr. A, on charges of attempted murder.
Mr. A is accused of stabbing a man in his 40s, identified as Mr. B, multiple times with a weapon around 8:09 a.m. on the 13th at a commercial building in Busan’s Nam District before fleeing the scene.
Mr. B was reportedly a stock investment YouTuber. Mr. A, a subscriber to Mr. B’s YouTube channel, allegedly acted on revenge after incurring significant losses from investments made solely based on Mr. B’s recommendations.
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There are rumours going around that lots of people – as in a few% – of South Korea’s population is very overextended and liable to losing a lot of money if there is a margin call caused by a significant fall in the Korean stock exchange. Which is the sort of thing that won’t happen, and isn’t likely to happen, until one day all at once it does.
These days anyway you’d think people would just have piled into SK Hynix. Are there any others?
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Aviva detects record £230m in bogus insurance claims as use of AI rises • The Guardian
Joanna Partridge:
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Bogus insurance claims worth more than £230m were detected by the insurance firm Aviva last year as scammers tried new tricks including using artificial intelligence to fake car accident scenes, documents and to exaggerate damage.
The insurer identified more than 18,400 suspect claims across its brands in 2025, with a combined value of £233m. The fraud claims level was a record for the insurer, although this was the first year that it included the Direct Line brands it acquired last summer.
Pete Ward, the head of claims counter fraud at Aviva, said fraud “isn’t a victimless crime – it drives up the cost of insurance for everyone”. He added: “We’re seeing fraud become more sophisticated, from exaggerated claims to the use of AI‑generated documents.”
Looking at Aviva’s UK general insurance business only, excluding Direct Line brands, motor insurance fraud accounted for most bogus claims detected, representing more than seven in 10 cases.
Fraudsters were moving away from staged collisions and towards exaggerated claims for vehicle damage, repair costs, credit hire and injury, often using wider cost pressures as justification, the insurer said. As a result, the value of motor fraud detected rose by 39%.
The insurer also reported a growing number of claims supported by AI‑generated images and manipulated documents, particularly in motor insurance, with fraudsters using AI tools to fabricate accident scenes and damage imagery. In response, the company is using AI tools and advanced analytics, overseen by humans, to thwart suspicious claims faster.
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A brand new arms race.
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David Potter, the man who put Psion in the palm of your hand, logs off at 82 • The Register
Liam Proven:
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A bold 1983 advertisement claimed: “The best software on earth comes from Psion.” However, [David] Potter realized early on that the instability of the rapidly moving home computer market posed a problem for the company, as he explained in a 1991 interview in Personal Computer World:
“What’s the longevity of this market, what’s the utility of these products, where’s it going to? And the more we asked these questions the fewer answers we could get. And we came to the conclusion that these products were of tremendous educational value, a lot of fun, but there was no real long-term utility and the market was not long term because of that. So we decided to diversify and put a lot of our development resources into two very new areas for us. One was applications software. The second area was quite a new, radical concept of a handheld computer”.
This led it to create the first of the multiple ranges of pioneering hand-held pocket computers for which it is better remembered today. In 1984, Psion launched the Organizer range, and in 1986, its successor the Organizer II, which came with two slots for what were arguably the computer industry’s first replaceable SSDs. In 1989, Psion introduced all-solid-state MC laptops. Although unsuccessful, the MC’s hardware was miniaturized to create the pocket-sized Psion Series 3 in 1991, and Psion’s bespoke GUI OS became EPOC16. The machines sold in the millions, which in turn led to the Psion 5 and netBook.
The Register’s magisterial history of the development of the Series 5, Psion: the last computer, covers this evolution in depth. For the Series 5, Psion designed and implemented EPOC32, a realtime-capable 32-bit Arm OS in C++. Later, EPOC32 was renamed Symbian and powered the first wave of smartphones, as The Reg covered in depth in 2010 in a two-part history: Symbian, The Secret History: Dark Star, followed by Symbian’s Secret History: The battle for the company’s soul.
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A bit late to this, but what a legacy: real handheld computers (which were really good!) and oversaw the creation of the OS that powered Nokia, once the biggest mobile phone company in the world. And look for the nuggest about what “Psion” stood for: the first three letters are Potter Scientific Instruments.
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IBM’s mainframe sales get mugged by AI hardware panic, stock sheds more than a quarter of its value • The Register
Carly Page:
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IBM says customers spooked by soaring demand for AI infrastructure raided their mainframe budgets to stockpile servers, storage, and memory instead, knocking Big Blue’s flagship Z business off course.
Ahead of its full calendar Q2 earnings release next week, IBM took the unusual step of publishing preliminary quarterly results alongside a letter from CEO Arvind Krishna explaining why the numbers fell short of expectations.
The biggest disappointment came in Infrastructure, where revenue fell 7%, despite what IBM had previously described as the strongest launch of a mainframe generation in its history.
The disclosure led to a more-than 25% plunge in Big Blue’s share price on Tuesday.
The Q2 culprit wasn’t a sudden loss of affection for mainframes, according to Krishna, but a last-minute scramble to secure hardware increasingly caught up in the AI spending boom.“In the last few weeks of June, we saw clients shift their quarterly capex spend toward servers, storage, and memory purchases to secure supply-constrained infrastructure ahead of expected price increases,” Krishna wrote. “This dynamic impacted client buying patterns.”
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IBM hardware is less attractive than other hardware. That’s a bit worrying for IBM. “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” becomes “You’ll get fired if you buy IBM”.
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Phoebe Gates’s startup Phia was just accused of ‘cookie stuffing.’ Here’s what happens next • Inc
Esther Lian:
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AI shopping browser extension Phia is under fire for reportedly taking credit for sales that it did not generate.
Co-founded by Sophia Kianni and Phoebe Gates, the daughter of billionaire Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Phia is a free browser tool that compares prices across over 220,000 sites and auto-applies the best discount codes for products. Its marketing on the App Store promises users that they will “never overpay.”
However, recent independent testing by Bloomberg, Capital One Shopping, and researcher and consultant Ben Edelman found that Phia generated affiliate clicks on retail websites without meaningful user interaction.
During the checkout process, Phia allegedly opened a background tab and inserted its own referral code, sometimes even overriding legitimate referrals from other publishers.
Capital One Shopping, which operates a coupon tool that competes with Phia, declined to comment on its specific communications with the company. A spokesperson told Inc. that its testing and disclosure of Phia’s alleged conduct reflected its commitment to platform integrity.
…According to Bloomberg, after the publication tested the browser extension and contacted Phia, subsequent testing found that the company had stopped automatically claiming referral credit in all the cases where the behavior had previously occurred.
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How peculiar! How very peculiar! Just goes to show that even the kids of the very rich find it hard to make an honest buck these days.
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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 