If the BBC is to survive, should it embrace a subscription model like Netflix and seek international viewers? CC-licensed photo by Yukiko Matsuoka on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. Tuned in. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Trump administration and Anthropic have not discussed the government taking a stake in it, source says • Reuters

Karen Freifeld and Alexandra Alper:

»

The Trump administration and AI giant Anthropic have not ​discussed the government taking stakes in the firm, a source familiar with the matter said on Thursday.

The White House and the Commerce Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Anthropic declined to ​comment.

The comment comes after the Financial Times reported earlier on ​Thursday that OpenAI has discussed giving the U.S. government a 5% stake, raising questions about whether other AI firms are having ​such discussions.

The companies are facing scrutiny in Washington over the likely ​misuse of advanced models and whether Americans would benefit from the industry’s massive valuations.

The Commerce Department in June lifted export controls on two of Anthropic’s most advanced ​models imposed weeks earlier amid concerns the powerful AI tools ​did not have adequate safeguards to prevent misuse.

Washington has stepped up oversight of new model releases to identify potential threats amid concerns that advanced AI models could be misused by military intelligence in China, Russia or other countries of concern. Still, submission of new models for review ​is voluntary.

Last month, President Donald ​Trump said he was exploring options to give the public a stake in leading AI companies, in response to ​concerns that individual Americans will not share in ​the sector’s expected profits.

«

Peculiar that Anthropic can’t say this itself, isn’t it? If they haven’t discussed it, what’s stopping Anthropic or the government, or both, just saying so? Also, the idea that the government should have part ownership of private companies seems like a slippery slope towards, oh, socialism or communism or something, which surely the Republican party in the US would repudiate.

Let’s wait a few days or weeks and see if non-discussion turns out to be a non-non-discussion.
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Google hit with $2bn antitrust judgment for skewing shopping searches in Sweden • Los Angeles Times

Karin Matussek and Christopher Jungstedt:

»

Alphabet Inc.’s Google was ordered to pay almost $2bn to Klarna Group Plc’s Pricerunner unit in a dispute over the search-engine giant’s abuse of power in the market for comparison shopping services.

The Patent and Market Court in Stockholm, which issued the judgment on Wednesday, dismissed most parts of the claim in which Pricerunner sought 80 billion Swedish kronor, or roughly $8.2bn, in the wake of a European Union antitrust crackdown.

Still, Judge Linda Kullberg said this is “without a doubt the largest claim that has been ordered in a Swedish competition case.”

Klarna shares rose 5.3% in premarket trading after the ruling.

The ruling can be appealed. The Swedish price-comparison website argued that Google has been abusing its dominant position as a search engine by favoring its own comparison shopping service over competing portals for more than a decade.

Wednesday’s award compensates for lost revenue caused by Google’s preferential treatment of its own comparison-shopping service over independent price-comparison services, conduct that also drives up costs for consumers, Klarna said in a statement after the judgment.

«

And meanwhile, separately: Google loses long-running appeal of record EU fine, will have to cough up $4.7bn, by Ryan Whitwam at Ars Technica:

»

Back in 2018, Google was handed a record-setting €4.34bn ($4.9bn) fine in Europe for abusing its monopoly on Android. The company has spent the intervening years challenging that decision, but the continent’s highest court has put a stop to that. The Court of Justice of the European Union has affirmed the penalty, meaning Google is out of options.

«

And also meaning that Google has been found guilty of abusing two different monopolies – search and Android.
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Microsoft commits $2.5bn and 6,000 employees to AI implementation unit • CNBC

Jordan Novet:

»

Microsoft is investing $2.5bn into a new group focused on assisting clients with AI implementations, becoming the latest tech company to commit hefty resources to helping businesses understand and adopt emerging artificial intelligence technologies.

With the new venture, called Microsoft Frontier Co., the software vendor said Thursday that 6,000 employees will be embedded with clients, in a practice that’s become known as forward deployed engineering. The division will contain existing Microsoft FDEs, technical consultants, support staffers and salespeople with experience in specific industries. Rodrigo Kede Lima, who’s been leading Microsoft’s Asia business, will be its president.

The announcement comes two days after cloud rival Amazon said it was putting $1bn behind an FDE initiative to support fast-paced AI engagements. Leading AI labs Anthropic and OpenAI both established FDE groups in May, partnering with private equity firms, banks and consulting firms.

Alongside its technology peers, Microsoft has sunk tens of billions of dollars into building data centers that run generative AI models. Microsoft has also released a variety of AI services, with mixed results.

«

Perhaps all the people in the Xbox division getting canned in the next few days can apply for jobs there?
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Nigel Farage reported to standards watchdog over ‘crypto lobbying’ • The Guardian

Rowena Mason and Tom Burgis:

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The standards watchdog has been urged to investigate whether Nigel Farage lobbied the Bank of England to drop a cryptocurrency plan that could be costly for the billionaire bankrolling his party, potentially in breach of parliamentary rules.

The Reform UK leader has said his party’s major donor, Christopher Harborne, wanted nothing in exchange for the £15m he donated to the party and the undeclared £5m gift to Farage the Guardian revealed in April.

But Farage used a private meeting at the Bank to urge its governor, Andrew Bailey, to drop plans for a state-run alternative to the digital currency that has made Harborne, his Thailand-based benefactor, one of the richest people in the world.

As reported by the Guardian last month, Farage told October’s Zebu Live event in London he regarded the Bank’s plans for a digital pound with “total and utter horror”. He recounted the meeting at Threadneedle Street with Bailey. “I asked him straight: ‘Are you still progressing your plans for a British central bank digital currency?’ And the answer was: ‘Yes.’”

His opposition to the “Britcoin” proposal was so strong that, after the meeting last September, he told the Zebu audience of crypto enthusiasts he would be “prepared to go to prison” to stop it.

The Labour MP Phil Brickell, chair of the parliamentary group on anti-corruption and responsible tax, has now reported Farage’s actions to the standards commissioner, asking him to look into the Reform leader’s interactions with the Bank of England.

The standards commissioner, Daniel Greenberg, is already investigating whether Farage should have declared the £5m gift from Harborne, which he received in the months before he returned to parliament.

«

Crypto is always bad news for someone, somewhere. Fingers crossed.
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US home battery installations hit record high on rising electricity costs • Ars Technica

Jeremy Hsu:

»

US homeowners have embraced home batteries in record-breaking numbers in early 2026, spurred on by state incentives while seeking to offset rising residential electricity costs. The trend could even unlock a more flexible energy supply for power grid operators and even AI data centers.

New home battery installations reached a record 673 megawatt hours of energy storage in the first quarter of 2026, according to the US Energy Information Administration. That trend was driven by states with high electricity prices that have implemented policies to incentivize home battery installation, Bloomberg News reported.

This residential battery trend stands out as a natural next step for states that have already successfully boosted rooftop solar adoption among homeowners, given how batteries enable homeowners to use stored solar energy at night. California and Hawaii accounted for the majority of new residential battery storage, while Texas and Arizona also saw significantly higher numbers of installations.

California incentivizes homeowners with solar panels to also install batteries by offering better pricing for residential electricity exported to the grid after sunset, Bloomberg reported. Hawaii offers a one-time payment of $400 for every kilowatt hour of battery storage that homeowners install.

However, the record-breaking home battery installations coincided with a slowdown in residential installations of solar panels—the result of the Trump administration and Republican-driven One Big Beautiful Bill having eliminated a 30% federal solar tax credit for homeowners. Nonetheless, US electricity generation from solar power continues to rise and even surpassed coal-fired generation in April.

The battery installation spree also coincides with rising electricity costs for US residential customers.

«

It would be good if Ars Technica’s writers knew the difference between a kilowatt (a measure of instantaneous power) and a kilowatt hour (a measure of energy), as the original of this story omitted the “hour” from its measurements.

Anyway, more microgeneration and microstorage all works in everyone’s favour.
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Bye bye, Beeb? • The Critic Magazine

Christopher Snowdon:

»

The BBC is no longer a public good as an economist understands the term. Public goods are non-excludable: you cannot prevent people from using them. When all you needed was a TV aerial, the BBC could only make you pay to watch its programmes by sending you threatening letters. By switching to a Netflix-style subscription model, the BBC could exclude those who do not pay.

This is the obvious solution and it needs to be done soon because the threatening letters are no longer working. Since 2014, the TV licence fee “evasion rate” has risen from 5% to 12.5% and revenue from the licence fee has fallen by 28% in real terms; hence another round of cuts.

As David Elstein noted in last month’s issue of The Critic, prosecutions for licence fee evasion have fallen from 150,000 a year to around 25,000 and the average fine is barely more than the cost of a licence. It is an extremely low risk crime and the BBC wastes £160m a year trying to tackle it. As the word spreads that paying the licence fee is essentially optional, more and more people will become “evaders”. 

Some of these people genuinely never watch live broadcasts and never use the iPlayer, but it is safe to assume that most of them are simply saving money. How many of them would cough up £180 if it was the only way they could access BBC content is the big question and it will become more pressing if licence fee evasion spirals, as seems likely. 

As Elstein says, the BBC’s fierce opposition to moving to a subscription model “borders on the irrational”. The corporation fears that if people were given a choice between paying for the BBC and not watching the BBC, millions will decide to stop paying for the BBC. If so, that is not our problem. The BBC is not the army. It is not the police. It provides entertainment, and no one should be compelled to pay for entertainment they do not consume. 

…This is where the opportunity lies. There are two billion televisions in the world and only 50 million of them are in the UK. It might take a bit of trial-and-error to discover the revenue-maximising price for a global BBC subscription, but the corporation should have enough faith in itself to believe it can take a large enough sliver of the overseas market to make up for any losses in the domestic market.

«

Netflix has around 325m subscribers. It might take the BBC a while to get to that level, but it would be a behemoth if it could.

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Daily Mail sued over ‘systematic’ lifting of social media images • Press Gazette

Charlotte Tobitt:

»

The Daily Mail is being sued over alleged “systematic” lifting of “thousands” of images from social media without permission or payment.

A photographer named Matthew Moore who said one of his own images had been taken without permission has launched a class action lawsuit in New York on behalf of himself and anyone else in the US who has been affected in the past three years.

The legal complaint calls this behaviour “standard practice” at the Daily Mail and is seeking a declaration that it violates US copyright law.

The legal complaint alleges that lawyers found 107 articles that contained at least one photo that had been taken from social media with only a credit to the platform (for example © Instagram) over the course of just nine days in June.

It claims that assuming a payment of between $2,500 and $25,000 per violation of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, this rate of alleged infringement would open the Daily Mail up to “more than ten million dollars per year”.

The claim argues that the Daily Mail ensures its use “stays hidden” to the copyright owners by adding a “false credit” to the social media platform the image was taken from.

This is despite the fact the platforms do not own the copyright according to their own terms and conditions, it says.

But it means that rightsholders searching for their name or using credit alerts may never see the usage.

«

I certainly know of one person who threatened to sue the Daily Mail of its use of their pictures without permission, which led to an apology and a payment to charity. It’s hard to see how the Mail can successfully defend this one, and there’s then the question of what it does in future if that happens.
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Substack reveals newsletters with most paying subscribers in UK • Press Gazette

Charlotte Tobitt:

»

Substack has revealed the 50 newsletters on its platform with the most UK paying subscribers for the first time.

Michael Howell’s Capital Wars is the top Substack newsletter in the UK based on number of paying subscribers. Capital Wars is currently the fifth-ranked finance newsletter across Substack overall and is written by Howell, a former research director at investment bank Salomon Brothers.

Finance is the biggest topic vertical in the top 50, accounting for 13 publications. Other topics represented multiple times include food and drink, fashion and beauty, news/politics and history.

In second place is Exponential View, an AI newsletter by tech entrepreneur Azeem Azhar which passed 100,000 free and paid subscribers two years ago after nine years of publishing (plus a further 200,000 who received it via Linkedin).

Third is Comment is Freed, which has more than 90,000 free and paid subscribers, by Institute for Government senior fellow Sam Freedman and his father Lawrence Freedman (emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London).

Substack already published a “bestseller” list in the US, and has now started a separate list in the UK. It counts only paying subscribers, meaning major newsletters without paywalls may be overtaken by smaller brands with higher conversion rates.

Former Guardian media editor Jim Waterson’s local newsletter London Centric, which he started in September 2024 using a voluntary redundancy payment from the national newsbrand, has the eighth most paying subscribers in the UK on Substack.

Waterson said in May that London Centric had about 5,000 paying subscribers and was bringing in enough revenue to support two additional staff members.

«

Excellent news about London Centric, which might get a flywheel effect going as it hires more staff. And Comment Is Freed, which charges the lowest possible amount (£35 per year), is surely generating a nice bit of income for the Freedman household(s). For all the hate aimed at Substack by some people, it has enabled new models of successful journalism that really couldn’t work before.
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Grok’s traffic heavily driven by NSFW content, report says • Forbes

Mary Whitfill Roeloffs:

»

Elon Musk’s xAI is reportedly leaning into explicit content generation as a core driver of its Grok chatbot traffic and adult content now accounts for the majority of the platform’s activity, according to a Wednesday report from The Information.

The report claims xAI is actively doubling down on its explicit video and image-generation tools and that adult-content dominance extends into Grok’s coding model, which The Information reports frequently receives requests for pornographic material.

Well over half of Grok’s overall traffic is driven by pornographic images and videos, adult role-play chats or other such activity, according to the report, which Vital Knowledge analyst Adam Crisafulli called “a desperate attempt for relevancy.”

The move comes as xAI has “fallen further behind” competitor chatbots from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Meta, per Crisafulli, and Grok recorded the largest drop in web traffic of any single AI model this year, Similarweb data shows.

22%. That’s the drop in Grok web traffic between January and May, according to Similarweb, more than any other major chatbot. Similarweb’s data doesn’t include interactions with Grok through X, Musk’s social media site.

«

Unsurprising that Musk thinks there’s better money to be had hiring the servers powering Grok out to literally anyone else who wants them.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

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:

»

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.

«

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.

«

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

»

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.”

«

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.”

«

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:

»

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.

«

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.

«

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.

«

• 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:

»

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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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Two papers by Max Planck, a pioneer of quantum mechanics, have been removed from their online journal. There is uncertainty about why. CC-licensed photo by Julia Tulke on Flickr.

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A selection of 9 links for you. Made you look. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

“Easily the biggest leak in Apple’s history”: iPhone 18 Pro final design may have just been revealed in a stolen drop test video • Tom’s Guide

Jeff Parsons:

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Apple is obsessed with preserving as much secrecy as it can before officially revealing the rumoured iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max and iPhone Ultra/Fold at the Apple Event in September. But the company has just been dealt a huge blow by a data breach at one of its suppliers.

More than 200,000 files are believed to have been posted to the dark web following the ‘cybersecurity incident’ Tata reported last week.

Photos, videos and component lists of the upcoming devices have been circulating on social media after one of Apple’s India-based suppliers, Tata Electronics, suffered a data breach last week. More than 200,000 files are believed to have been posted to the dark web following the ‘cybersecurity incident’ Tata reported last week.

These files include documentation on other products made by Tata, but according to Reuters, drawings of the iPhone 18 Pro circuit board, A20 chip, and supplier lists for components are also among them.

They also include drop test photos, which is part of customary testing for durability. While it’s not been confirmed whether or not any videos are among the leak, one such video is being circulated on social media. Tom’s Guide hasn’t been able to verify if this video is accurate or merely AI-generated. If genuine, it would give us some huge clues about what to expect in September.

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The phone looks like.. an iPhone. Not the least surprise about that. But Apple will be seething about two points: that the leak has come from Tata, one of its new partners outside China; and that the component list has been leaked. In April 2021 a ransomware attack against Apple’s laptop maker, Quanta, led to the leak of forthcoming designs.

and in January Apple supplier Luxshare was hit, leading to the leak of lots of internal data.
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The Dogs of San Francisco: 51,379 dogs

Ryan McEntush and Luke Eigel:

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Every licensed dog, month by month. After a long slide from 2017, the registry rebounded to a record 11,200 in 2025. Licenses still spike each spring, peaking in May 2025.

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Didn’t know that dogs had to be licensed in San Francisco, but it turns out that means you can generate a database showing all sorts of fun details, particularly about breeds. Large dogs turn out to be surprisingly popular, though maybe the weather is cold enough there to be tolerable for them. A fun project, harking back to the halcyon days of Web 2.0.
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An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time • Vesuvius Challenge

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For almost 2,000 years, the carbonized library of Herculaneum has kept a cruel bargain: its scrolls survived the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, but only by becoming too fragile to open. To read one was to destroy it. Hundreds of rolls have therefore remained sealed, their contents preserved yet unreachable.

Today that changes. We have completely virtually unwrapped and read PHerc. 1667 — the scroll the Vesuvius Challenge community knows as Scroll 4 — without ever touching its pages. It is the first Herculaneum papyrus to be digitally unrolled and read in full, end to end, and made available for sustained scholarly study.

PHerc. 1667 began as a blackened, rolled mass of carbonized papyrus. To read it, we never unrolled it physically. Instead, we scanned it with high-resolution X-rays, reconstructed the wound sheet inside the volume, flattened it into a readable surface, and used machine learning to bring out the faint traces of ancient ink.

…PHerc. 1667 is what survives of a larger roll: earlier attempts to open it by hand — in the 19th century, and again in 1969 and the 1980s — destroyed its outer layers and left only the compact inner core, about 8 cm of an original height of 19–24 cm. From that surviving portion we have now recovered and read the text in full — the lower parts of some 22 columns, transcribed and reviewed by papyrologists. It is the first time the preserved text of a rolled Herculaneum scroll has been read continuously, end to end, rather than in isolated words or patches.

The recovered text is a philosophical treatise on ethics, and the evidence points to a Stoic work: it turns on human nature, impulse, and the moral progress of human beings, and its final preserved column names Aristocreon — nephew and disciple of the great Stoic Chrysippus — which, together with the language and themes of the text, places it in a Stoic context and dates it to the 2nd century BC.

Because the papyrus is damaged, the readings are fragmentary, with gaps where the surface is lost. Even so, several passages can be read clearly for the first time in two thousand years.

…The scans were acquired with high-resolution phase-contrast X-ray microtomography on the BM18 beamline at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble — an instrument able to resolve the wafer-thin, densely packed layers of a Herculaneum roll. The work was carried out in collaboration with the National Library of Naples “Vittorio Emanuele III”, which safeguards the Herculaneum papyri. From those volumes, the team reconstructed the scroll’s geometry, traced and flattened its surface into a readable sheet, and trained machine-learning models to detect ink that is almost indistinguishable from the carbonized papyrus beneath it. Each reading was then examined and transcribed by papyrologists.

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About those “hackquisitions”… • Spyglass

MG Siegler:

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The news that Noam Shazeer is (once again) leaving Google seems like a big deal. The news that he’s joining OpenAI, which turned the transformer paper he helped write into a product that he couldn’t launch (in his first stint) at Google seems like an even bigger deal. Bigger still may be the fact that he had rejoined to help the Gemini product take on ChatGPT, which was seemingly working, at least to some degree. But actually, the biggest deal has to be the actual deal that brought him back to Google. Because it wasn’t even two years ago when Google paid $2.7B to bring Shazeer back.

And like that – poof – he’s gone.

To be fair, there were others on the Character.ai team that Google seemingly wanted too. The non-exclusive licensing rights for Character? Probably less so. If anything, that aspect of the deal has ranged from a headache to a nightmare.1 But clearly it was a deal structure in such a way to get Shazeer back with an offer he couldn’t refuse. And he didn’t. Until he did. Again.

That deal structure, of course, was one of the early “hackquisitions” – a deal to bring on a company’s key talent without acquiring the company itself. Because that clearly would have been messy from a regulatory perspective for any of Big Tech. If nothing else, such deals would be bogged down for months while they’re scrutinized. A “hackquisition”, by contrast, could be done almost instantly.

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Siegler goes into quite some details about all the hackquisitions that are going on among all the AI companies. It’s a lot, and there seems to be an absolute revolving door between all the different companies. But also: it’s hard to see whether AI progress is really reliant on any particular one of these researchers. Is it like a football team, where individuals matter but it’s the team that makes it, or like tennis players, where the individual is what counts?
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When cybercriminals hire burglars: inside an alleged Russian effort to infiltrate multibillion-dollar US law firms • CNN Politics

Sean Lyngaas:

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When an executive at a US law firm’s phone rang in April, the voice on the other end was urgent: A computer virus was spreading through the firm.

The caller said they were from IT support and needed physical access to the lawyer’s computer because remote fixes to stop the attack weren’t working. The lawyer told his purported colleague to swing by his desk at the law firm’s office in New Jersey.

The next day, the firm’s receptionist called: The lawyer had a visitor from IT at the front desk.

“That’s when an alarm bell went off: Why would an IT person need to check in with reception?” said Leeann Nicolo, who handles incident response for cybersecurity insurance firm Coalition, which the law firm hired to investigate the incident.

The visitor ran out of the building when the lawyer approached the front desk, according to Nicolo.

It’s one of several incidents at law firms across the country in the last year in which, the FBI and private investigators suspect, the Russian-speaking Silent Ransom Group has hired people in the US to show up in-person and plug thumb drives into law firms’ computers. The physical access could help bypass anti-virus protections that the hackers run up against from afar.

The group’s millions of dollars in returns contrasts with its modest investments: In a private Telegram channel, the group is offering $500 to people to visit law firms and plug in USB sticks, one cybersecurity professional familiar with the incidents told CNN.

The hired hands are “cannon fodder” for the Russian-speaking cybercriminals — expendable assets in a much larger cybercrime war, the source said.

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The scheme is: get data about the law firms’ clients, leak it if the companies won’t pay a ransom after they’re hit by ransomware.
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Why have papers by one of history’s most famous physicists been retracted? • Science

Sam Kean:

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In early May, Yves Gingras, a historian of physics at the University of Quebec (UQ) at Montreal, was browsing Retraction Watch, a website that catalogs fraud, data manipulation, and other scientific sins. He noticed a link that read “Retractions by Nobel Prize winners.” Were there really Nobel laureates whose papers had been withdrawn from the scientific literature?

After clicking, Gingras froze. “That’s impossible,” he recalls thinking. The fourth name on the list, with two retracted papers, was Max Planck—a legendary pioneer of quantum mechanics and the 1918 Nobel laureate in physics. Gingras had never heard a whiff of scandal about Planck, who was almost as widely revered for his character as his physics. In 1933, for example, he bravely confronted Adolf Hitler over Nazi Germany’s discriminatory laws against Jews.

Gingras called up Mahdi Khelfaoui, a fellow historian of science at UQ Trois-Rivières. “There’s something fishy,” Gingras said. The papers, both quietly retracted in 2011, originally appeared in the early 1940s in Naturwissenschaften, a German journal now owned by publishing giant Springer Nature. After some sleuthing, Khelfaoui determined one of the Planck pieces, a philosophical essay from 1942 titled “Sinn und Grenzen der exakten Wissenschaft” (“Meaning and Limits of Exact Science”), about how to achieve certainty in scientific knowledge, had also appeared in two other journals and been reprinted twice in books.

Repackaging the same work multiple times is considered “self-plagiarism” and frowned upon today—the practice produces copyright conflicts and inflates scholars’ publication records. The Naturwissenschaften site gives “copyright violation” as the reason for the retraction.

Yet publishing identical material in multiple journals was widespread before the internet. “Science was more fragmented” then, Khelfaoui says. “You wanted different audiences …  to have access to your work.” The practice was especially common for luminaries like Planck. Albert Einstein did the same (but escaped retractions).

Springer Nature’s “anachronistic” application of modern standards to a 1942 paper “distort[s] the historical record,” Gingras and Khelfaoui argue in a preprint posted last month on arXiv.

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Seems that a bot thought it was copying somewhere else, and removed it. But:

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Springer Nature was nevertheless still selling the empty PDF for $39.95 until this story was published.

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Never change, academic publishers.
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Spurious copyright claim sees second Press Gazette story removed from Google search • Press Gazette

Dominic Ponsford:

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A Press Gazette article exposing the dubious ‘parasite SEO’ tactics of online marketing company Clickout Media has been removed from Google search results after a spurious anonymous legal challenge.

A mysterious entity called DRF Corp wrote to Google stating Press Gazette had “willfully violated copyright law by copying our entire content word for word, including all images, which are solely owned by our company” even though the content allegedly copied was on an unrelated subject.

It is the second time a fake copyright claim has been used to get Press Gazette reporting about Clickout Media removed from search engine results this year.

According to the Lumen database, the complaint was filed under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

It alleged that the original article was a month-old (now removed) Reddit post headlined: “Casinos Not Gamstop in 2026: The Brutally Honest Truth Before You Deposit.”

The Press Gazette article removed by Google from search results, which was published last week, details how Clickout Media has bought three reputable UK sports news websites and introduced AI-generated reporters whose stories are littered with errors and fabrications. It is headlined: “AI reporters churn out error-strewn stories for football websites.”

This article no longer appears in Google search results. Any search that would have previously surfaced the story now includes the following disclaimer from Google: “In response to a complaint that we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act we have removed results from this page.”

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Odd how the Reddit post has been removed, which makes it harder to verify whether it is indeed exactly the same as the Press Gazette story. (It isn’t.) This adds more detail to the story yesterday about Clickout Media. There’s more to come about this company and its partners. Press Gazette might just be annoyed enough to go and find it.
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Pollen tried to remove my article about CEO Callum Negus-Fancey and CTO Bradley Wright, and Google is assisting with it • The Pragmatic Engineer

Gergely Orosz:

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In 2022, I wrote about the damning fall of events tech company Pollen. The short of it:

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Pollen seemed to have pulled off the improbable feat of building a business in the notoriously low margin industry of events, surviving Covid-19, and building a solid software engineering organization. In April this year, the company announced it had raised another $150M in fresh funding.

But just three weeks later, Pollen laid off about 200 people, a third of staff. Leadership assured employees all was well. However, from that point on, things got worse. Leadership later pulled the plug on Slack, employees were not paid wages, pension contributions went missing, and vendors were not paid. Some vendors took matters into their own hands; on 9 August 2022, JIRA was suspended when Atlassian tired of the company’s failure to pay.

On 10 August 2022, Pollen went bankrupt, collapsing into administration.

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The article looked bad on Pollen’s founder, Callum Negus-Fancey. He was ultimately responsible for lying to staff, not paying salaries, the missing pension contributions, and the unpaid health insurance for US employees. The story was so bad that the BBC created a documentary titled Crashed: $800M Festival Fail. 

And then there was the $3.2m double charge for customers, manually initiated by CTO Bradley Wright, detailed extensively in the documentary Crashed: $800m Festival Fail. That double charge would have been trivial to reverse, but the reversal never happened, customers never got their money back, and the postmortem of the incident was never released to staff.

Four years later, Pollen and Callum Negus-Fancey are attempting to erase this shameful story from the public record. The article is my original writing, and thus I am the copyright holder of it. So imagine my surprise when I was notified that Google removed the article from its search results thanks to a copyright infringement claim it received.

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Guess what? Google removed his article from its search results, based on a copyright claim made by an unknown owner (from an uninhabited country) against an unspecified source. Orosz eventually found the complaint, which asserts that it’s a copy of a New York Post article. It isn’t (that article has a URL ending “band-leader-hits-winning-chord”). Google might want to look at how it’s being abused.
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Bracing for layoffs, unionized Xbox developers hold press conference to make their point • IGN

Cade Onder:

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Unionized Xbox employees are pushing back against the company’s looming layoffs and have outlined various demands.

Earlier today, the CWA (Communications Workers of America) held a press conference in which various unionized Xbox employees spoke out against Microsoft. The conference was held ahead of reported layoffs at Xbox, which insiders have stated will be a “bloodbath.”

It’s also a painful reminder of last year’s layoffs at Microsoft, where 9,000 people lost their jobs across the entire company (not just Xbox) and resulted in multiple projects being cancelled, including the long-awaited reboot of Perfect Dark. The studio behind that game, The Initative, was also shuttered without having ever released a game.

The upcoming layoffs reportedly puts more studios, such as Double Fine and Ninja Theory, at risk of closure. South of Midnight developer Complusion Games is also reportedly at risk of shutting down, despite winning a Peabody Award earlier this year. New Xbox boss Asha Sharma celebrated the win on her socials, months before the studio’s reported demise: “A well-deserved recognition for storytelling that truly matters!”

…It remains to be seen what will come of this, but Activision QA tester Andrew Snell and [Diablo senior environment artist Mahreen] Fatima both made it clear that Microsoft’s actions don’t just impact workers, but also the players: “Workers and players are on the same side of this and we’re done paying for executives’ failures,” said Snell.

“We, the developers, demand that you respect our labor and our games,” added Fatima. “Together we’ve built a huge community and touched the lives of millions of gamers everywhere. Don’t disrespect the developers. Don’t disrespect the gamers.”

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This really does look like it will be bloody. The quarter ended on Tuesday, so now Microsoft can announce any cuts it feels like making in Xbox. They’re expected to be hefty.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified