It might be a crazy idea, but what if FIFA’s latest hugely unpopular financing idea was driven by losing the videogame deal with Electronic Arts? CC-licensed photo by EA SPORTS FIFA on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Whistleblowing. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
The accidental architect of the internet’s brain • The New Yorker
Carson Griffith:
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Steven Pruitt spends his evenings identifying errors that most people never notice and making fixes that hardly anyone ever thanks him for. He toils at a desk in a town house in Alexandria, Virginia, surrounded by books—the kind of working clutter that suggests a long relationship with paper rather than a fetish for screens. And yet his work is necessarily digital; after dinner, and sometimes late into the night, he uses his desktop computer to correct dates, clean up syntax, standardize categories, and occasionally write entire biographies of people on Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia.
Wikipedia is not his employer, of course. Like all editors on the site, Pruitt is a volunteer. “At this point, I won’t say I don’t have any skin in the game,” he told me. “But it’s a lot lower stakes than a job because if I get something wrong, it’s fairly easy to fix it. I can fix it myself. I can do what I want to do on my own time.” Still, he holds himself to some rules: “I do try to get in at least one edit a day.”
Pruitt is 42, and works full time as a records-management contractor for the federal government. After graduating from the College of William & Mary, in 2006, he moved back in with his parents, owing to the cost of real estate in Alexandria. In recent years, he helped his mother care for his father. (While I was reporting this story, Pruitt’s father died.) In effect, Pruitt—the person who has done more than anyone else to shape the English-language Wikipedia—lives a life that is, by most outward measures, unremarkable.
According to public tallies, Pruitt has made more than six million edits to Wikipedia and created more than 30,000 articles. He is widely regarded as the most prolific Wikipedian in the entire world.
…Among the people who stick around—and who make consistent contributions to the site—are the Wiki-obsessives known colloquially as “super editors.” These individuals are responsible for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of edits. Although there are more than 132m registered accounts on Wikipedia, a study found that 1% of these users are responsible for roughly 80% of the site’s content.
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And because Wikipedia content is licensed for free reuse, all the AI companies have ingested it into their models. Which means, in effect, that Pruitt’s forms of description and connection and writing have become embedded in how chatbots will talk to us in future.
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May 2025: Breaking the Game: the legal fallout of the EA-FIFA divorce • Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts
Santi Pedrazas Arenas, in May 2025:
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For nearly three decades, the FIFA video game series stood as both a cultural phenomenon and a revenue juggernaut, melding the world’s most popular sport with cutting‑edge digital technology. Yet on May 10th, 2022, Electronic Arts (EA) and Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) announced that their long‑running licensing agreement would not be renewed at the end of that year. This departure was far more than a simple rebranding exercise; it reflected a complex tug‑of‑war over intellectual property (“IP”) rights, brand equity, and digital distribution in an age when gaming companies increasingly rival traditional sports institutions in global influence.
Beyond the headlines, the EA‑FIFA breakup offers a rich case study in contract negotiations, trademark strategy, and the evolving contours of digital IP. By examining the key legal fault lines, from licensing fees and player likenesses to trademark dilution and collective bargaining with player unions, we can trace how tech giants assert greater autonomy over digital assets once held by legacy organizations.
EA first partnered with FIFA in 1993, releasing FIFA International Soccer for the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Over the ensuing years, the franchise evolved into EA’s flagship title, particularly following the introduction of FIFA Ultimate Team (FUT) in 2009, a game mode that grew to dominate the company’s monetization strategy.
…Under the terms of the licensing deal, FIFA granted EA exclusive rights to use its trademark, official competition names (including the World Cup), and related branding elements. In return, reports suggested that annual licensing fees ran into the billions of dollars per World Cup cycle. Meanwhile, EA negotiated separate agreements with player associations (FIFPro), major leagues (Premier League, LaLiga, Bundesliga), and individual clubs to secure likeness rights, kits, and stadiums — a sprawling web of sublicenses that gave the series’ authenticity.
This dual‑track licensing approach meant that while FIFA owned the name, EA controlled the experience. As digital distribution overtook physical sales, EA began to question the value of the FIFA trademark itself. The core gameplay, player likenesses, leagues, and clubs that fans cared about were secured through separate agreements and remained intact regardless of the FIFA name. In this context, the branding offered by FIFA was increasingly seen as symbolic rather than essential. For EA, long-term value lay in recurring in‑game revenues from microtransactions and content updates, not in legacy naming rights.
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You might have heard that EUFA (51 European football nations) and the North/Central American and Caribbean footballing nations are absolutely furious over FIFA chief Gianni Infantino’s plan to invite the Trump-adjacent Kushner family to take stakes in FIFA, in return for, well, who knows.
Is it too much to suggest that being dumped by Electronic Arts triggered it all?
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Read this before you buy that cheap TV streaming stick • Krebs on Security
Brian Krebs:
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Security experts have been sounding the alarm for years about the risks of using generic TV boxes that promise unlimited content streaming for a one-time fee, warning that they secretly rent the user’s Internet connection out to strangers. But a groundbreaking new analysis finds these devices also routinely spoof themselves as mobile phones clicking ads on AI-generated websites as part of a sprawling operation that seeks to defraud online merchants and advertising networks.
Pedro Falé is a threat researcher with the security firm Bitsight. Falé told KrebsOnSecurity he was able to peer inside a vast and complex ad fraud network by registering an expired domain name that was used to coordinate fake ad clicks across a particularly popular brand of these streaming devices known as H96.
Falé said the domain he scooped up was previously used for telemetry, periodically collecting full hardware information and the entire list of installed apps from tens of thousands of H96 streaming sticks plugged into television sets around the globe. But upon inspecting the traffic being funneled to the domain, he discovered nearly all of the TV boxes transmitting data claimed to be mobile phone models from a variety of manufacturers, including Samsung, Vivo, Huawei, and Xiaomi.
“We noticed something was wildly wrong,” Falé said. “Multiple devices reporting to this factory Android TV Box backdoor were ‘phones.’”
The researcher found all of the devices reported having the same two apps installed, and that those apps were made by a company called Zhejiang Fengwo IoT Technology Ltd, an entity founded in 2019 in mainland China which operates an ad-publishing portfolio under the name Fengwo Group. Further investigation into the Fengwo Group revealed it has registered multiple patents that match the inner workings of these apps.
…Falé said an analysis of the apps shows they help to coordinate an ad fraud network that uses these H96 devices as a captive traffic source to click on ads at AI-generated websites operated by the Fengwo Group.
Bitsight discovered the websites contain machine-generated news articles and graphics across a range of categories, including finance, health, education, gaming, music and food blogs. But they also found none of those sites displayed ads unless the device visiting the page matched the spoofed mobile profile of these H96 devices.
…Despite repeated warnings from the FBI and security industry leaders about the security and privacy risks of using these streaming devices, major e-commerce providers like Amazon, Best Buy, Newegg and others continue to sell hundreds of different models and brands that bundle unofficial versions of Google’s Android operating system and are frequently marketed (via online influencers) as a way to access a broad array of streaming services and live broadcasts without a subscription.
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People won’t care that their streaming stick is being used for ad fraud or botnetting. Which is why it does require law enforcement to take action. Perhaps with this knowledge, they can.
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The age of average • Alex Murrell
Alex Murrell:
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In the early 1990s, two Russian artists named Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid took the unusual step of hiring a market research firm. Their brief was simple. Understand what Americans desire most in a work of art.
Over 11 days the researchers at Marttila & Kiley Inc. asked 1,001 US citizens a series of survey questions. What’s your favourite colour? Do you prefer sharp angles or soft curves? Do you like smooth canvases or thick brushstrokes? Would you rather figures that are nude or clothed? Should they be at leisure or working? Indoors or outside? In what kind of landscape?
Komar and Melamid then set about painting a piece that reflected the results. The pair repeated this process in a number of countries including Russia, China, France and Kenya. Each piece in the series, titled “People’s Choice”, was intended to be a unique a collaboration with the people of a different country and culture.
But it didn’t quite go to plan.
Describing the work in his book Playing to the Gallery, the artist Grayson Perry said: “In nearly every country all people really wanted was a landscape with a few figures around, animals in the foreground, mainly blue.”
Despite soliciting the opinions of over 11,000 people, from 11 different countries, each of the paintings looked almost exactly the same. After completing the work, Komar quipped: “We have been travelling to different countries, engaging in dull negotiations with representatives of polling companies, raising money for further polls, receiving more or less the same results, and painting more or less the same blue landscapes. Looking for freedom, we found slavery.”
This, however, was the point. The art was not the paintings themselves, but the comment they made. We like to think that we are individuals, but we are much more alike that we wish to admit.
Thirty years after People’s Choice, it seems the landscapes which Komar and Melamid painted have become the landscapes in which we live.
This article argues that from film to fashion and architecture to advertising, creative fields have become dominated and defined by convention and cliché. Distinctiveness has died. In every field we look at, we find that everything looks the same.
Welcome to the age of average.
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It’s a very persuasive article. Above average!
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Why AI companies are destroying millions of old books • Daily Telegraph
Chris Stokel-Walker:
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Time almost stands still in Pieter de Vries’s antiquarian map and book shop in the historic centre of Haarlem [in Holland]. The 60-year-old Dutchman specialises in maps, illustrations and prints, many dating back to the 16th and 17th centuries. He also boasts a flourishing sideline in rare books.
Among his collection is a book on the history of Rome, published in 1558; travel books from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries; precious first editions; books on natural history; and, until recently, a limited edition of The Highgrove Florilegium – a stunning two-volume illustrated guide to the diverse plant life grown in the gardens of the King’s beloved Highgrove House in Gloucestershire, signed by the then Prince Charles.
On an average day, the dealer will make one book sale. Footfall in the store never exceeds a slow trickle. Once in a while, the telephone will ring. Which is what made the email De Vries received in mid-June, containing a list of around 3,000 titles, so unusual.
The sender identified herself as “Nataly” from a company called 2077AI. “I’m taking part in a new project focused on collecting books in multiple languages, currently mostly in English,” Nataly wrote. “We have put together a very large list of editions we are currently trying to source (the list is attached), and are planning on making a fairly large order.”
…It turned out to be part of the latest extraordinary attempt by Silicon Valley to boost the power of its AI machines. De Vries soon discovered that he was just one of hundreds of rare book dealers around the world who, this year, have been approached by companies hoovering up the globe’s supply of second-hand books on behalf of California’s tech giants.
The books are then fed into high-speed scanning machines that cut the spines off and shred or pulp the originals. The secret project, which was exposed by tech news site 404 Media this week, has been set up to train new AI models. But social media users have responded with horror at the scale of the operation.
According to 404 Media, one service called ISBNdb offered the ability to order up to one million books at a time, including rare books with almost no surviving copies. As one X user put it this week: “Books that survived wars, fires and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.”
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Amazon finds cases of AI causing runaway spending on tech projects • Financial Times
Rafe Rosner-Uddin:
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Amazon staff have identified cases of what they called “catastrophically expensive” cost overruns caused by mistakes in how the company has deployed AI and a lack of spending controls.
Senior engineers told colleagues in a staff meeting on Tuesday that attempts to switch tasks from conventional programming to using AI models had led to “unplanned” spending, said multiple people familiar with the matter.
Engineers were working to create “automated” guardrails for future projects, among other measures to keep a lid on costs, the people said.
The episode highlights the difficulty that even the biggest tech companies are having integrating AI into their daily operations without overspending.
“It’s difficult to figure out how much anything [AI related] costs,” one senior Amazon employee told the FT.
During a presentation this week, employees were told about one instance in which the company spent $1.8mn on matching author details with listings on the group’s ecommerce website using Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet AI model despite the deployment failing, the people said.
The spending represented an 860% cost overrun compared to the project’s budget and took five months to detect, they added.
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Hilarious to have Amazon, whose AWS billing has been an utter mystery to many for years, discover that the same thing can happen to it, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.
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US government map of Africa mislabels every country at global conference • Reuters via The Guardian
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A US government map of Africa mislabeled every country during a state department presentation at a global conference in Brazil this week, causing a stir among attenders who took screenshots and posted them online.
Reuters viewed a video of the presentation given at the Aids 2026 conference in Rio de Janeiro, which shows the errant map displayed halfway during a presentation about the state department’s new health agreements.
A Reuters analysis found the image of the map included in the presentation contained an artificial intelligence watermark that signals it was made with OpenAI tools. The company did not respond to a request for comment.
The state department said it took “full responsibility” for the confusion caused and that the map had been produced by a team member who hastily changed the slide deck before the event.
The map showed Nigeria, where the US currently has several hundred troops deployed, as landlocked in the Sahara desert. Mozambique, which is in south-eastern Africa, was relocated to the Horn of Africa, while Côte d’Ivoire in west Africa was placed on the other side of the continent.
Screenshots of the map first appeared in a Substack post by the Aids expert Emily Bass and were widely shared on LinkedIn, with one post garnering about 40,000 views.
“Whoever created and approved this slide did not know where countries in Africa are and did not care to check their work,” wrote Matt Petit, who focuses on AI and geopolitics at the Atlantic Council, in the post.
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Don’t know and don’t care? You’d have to round up pretty much the whole Trump administration – any of them fits the profile.
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Ships stranded in Strait of Hormuz by Iran war could result in invasive-species explosion, scientists warn • The Washington Post
Todd Frankel:
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New research warns that thousands of ships stranded for months by the ongoing war with Iran and the closed Strait of Hormuz could result in “a massive marine invasive species event.”
The study, led by scientists at the University of Maryland and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, said the estimated 1,500 commercial vessels idled by war are likely now coated with marine microbes, algae and invertebrates.
The ships have sat submerged in the same waters for months, creating idle conditions for what the scientists call “biofouling.”
The scientists are now worried about what could happen when these ships eventually resume their journeys around the world. The study cites “the high likelihood” that the vessels will speed the spread of “economically and ecologically damaging invasive species.”
The threats posed by stranded ships are well-known and long-documented.
In 2023, the International Maritime Organization passed a resolution recommending that ships that sat idle for a period of typically 18 to 30 days take “immediate actions” to reduce the dangers of biofouling.
During World War II, ships from New Zealand that were held in English ports while waiting for escorts were blamed for spreading an Australasian barnacle to Western Europe. That invasive species threatened to outnumber native barnacle species.
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Mark Zuckerberg predicts that billions of people will have personal AI agents in five years • TechCrunch
Amanda Silberling:
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Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is trying to sell investors on his prediction for the future — one where billions of people will have their own personal AI agents in the next five years. (Let’s hope that future also comes with data centers efficient enough to power all those agents — without triggering a fresh wave of climate disasters.)
“I think that it’s extremely unlikely if you look out five years from now, for example — whatever period of time you want — that you don’t have billions of people with a personal agent that understands your goals and that is just working on your behalf 24/7 to achieve your goals in whatever the domain is that you care about,” Zuckerberg said on Wednesday’s quarterly earnings call with investors.
He added that he could see people using these agents to help them with their finances, health, interpersonal relationships, and household management.
“As we move toward a future where we’re all interacting with multiple agents, I think that WhatsApp and our other messaging surfaces are going to become increasingly important,” he said, noting that WhatsApp is already the leading platform where users interact with Meta AI.
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This feels like another “Zuck talks nonsense” thing, but he was right back in 2016 when he said “I wouldn’t be surprised if you fast-forward five years and most of the content that people see on Facebook and are sharing on a day-to-day basis is video.” Video is big on social media. But personalised AI agents is a much bigger step, towards something that doesn’t yet exist, whereas video was plentiful in 2016.
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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 