The age of physical price tags is ending, which creates a problem when you don’t know whether an algorithm is deciding to charge you more than someone else. CC-licensed photo by Theen Moy on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Invaluable. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Deadly Nepal flood may have been caused by ‘ice avalanche,’ scientists say • The New York Times
Leo Sands:
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The deadly flooding in Nepal on Wednesday was likely set off at least in part by an enormous chunk of ice snapping off a glacier and cascading thousands of feet to the valley below, according to an initial assessment by a group of geologists and glaciologists. The phenomenon is known as an ice avalanche.
“It looks like a glacier in the area basically snapped off in a clean break, allowing it to fall just over a vertical kilometer to the valley bottom,” said Daniel Shugar, a geologist at the University of Calgary in Canada who studied satellite imagery to analyze what happened.
“The bottom looks like a bomb exploded — it’s just deposits from the broken-up glacier,” he said.
But he said that it was too early to rule out other possible factors behind the flash flooding. Hundreds of people are missing in Nepal and the Chinese territory of Tibet after floodwaters cascaded through river valleys on Wednesday morning. Warming temperatures caused by climate change may have accelerated the glacier’s collapse, scientists said, but they added that it was too early to determine a precise cause.
Across the fast-warming Himalayas, melting glaciers are presenting dangerous new opportunities for avalanches and earthquakes to cause destruction by unleashing torrents of water.
On Wednesday, a chunk of ice with a width of about 2,000 feet snapped cleanly off the glacier, Dr. Shugar said, sending a mixture of ice and water to the valley floor. By his assessment, the chunk of ice fell from an altitude of around 17,000 feet, dropping almost 4,000 feet.
“This is a big chunk of ice that is stored at high elevation in the mountain, with a huge amount of potential energy,” said Simon Cook, a glaciologist at the University of Dundee in Scotland who also worked on the satellite analysis. When it breaks off, he added, the sheer force of the drop pounds the ice into a dangerous, fast-moving mix.
…Dr. Cook said the ice avalanche recalled a similar event in India in 2021, when a Himalayan glacier broke and caused major flooding in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand, killing more than 100 people.
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Meta settles states’ child-safety claims for $18bn; Florida rejects deal as “peanuts” • Ars Technica
Jon Brodkin:
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Meta agreed to impose daily limits on children’s social media use and pay nearly $18bn in settlements with nearly every US state today, cutting short a trial in which Meta said several of the states were demanding over $1.4 trillion. The settlement requires court approval.
Meta is facing claims that it designed its products to foster compulsive use by children and failed to warn users of addiction and mental health risks. Meta, which already uses ID checks and face analysis to verify user ages, said it agreed to impose on people under 18 a “default two-hour daily time limit that teens can only turn off with a parent’s permission,” a default block between midnight and 6 am, and a school mode in which notifications are muted by default from 8am to 3pm.
The two-hour daily “limit is cumulative across Facebook and Instagram, and time spent scrolling on both apps counts toward the total, including if we detect that someone has multiple accounts,” Meta said. Teens will “receive prompts after every 15 minutes of continuous screen time on Facebook or Instagram,” and “prompts when their total daily usage hits 60 minutes and 90 minutes.”
The primary settlement provides up to $16.7bn for 47 states and the District of Columbia, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, and Puerto Rico. The settlement has a clause that would reduce Meta’s payment by $5bn if other top social media firms don’t agree to similar terms.
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Meta was very insistent that this trial was a nothing. Whose idea was it to settle? The settlement amount is a long, long way short of the amount that the states were looking at, and Florida declined to accept it.
And of course all the limitations only apply in the US (and territories). But: Meta’s long list of trial settlements goes on.
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OpenAI’s rogue AI model incident was worse than we thought • The Verge
Hayden Field:
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According to the METR-Redwood report, one AI agent that called itself PHASEONE10841 established what amounted to a secret message board unbeknownst to researchers. Within a few hours, more than 50 agents had found it and sent more than a thousand messages under the radar. With PHASEONE10841 often delegating assignments, the “collective” figured out how to hack their way onto the internet; then into Hugging Face’s internal systems, gaining access to private data and the organization’s enterprise messaging platform. OpenAI also confirmed in its report that Hugging Face wasn’t the only organization that was breached during the attack, although the company did not specifically name all the other targets.
The METR-Redwood report laid out the full scale of the incident. Roughly 1200 AI agents that were meant to be isolated, it says, exchanged over 70,000 messages and files on the “unsanctioned message board,” performing “extensive research on how they could spoof, edit, or delete their own transcripts” to avoid detection. Of these, 700 participated in the attack on Hugging Face. The agents “clearly and frequently reasoned about how to evade automated security checks from both Hugging Face and OpenAI.”
On July 20, OpenAI discovered the hack, 12 days after the AI agents first circumvented their safeguards. OpenAI quickly reached out to Hugging Face and started “initial containment measures,” according to OpenAI’s own report, and was able to shut down most of the unauthorized activity from its agents within three days, although some continued for longer than that. On July 25, the company stopped all training related to the internal-only research model and related ones.
The two OpenAI models responsible for the damage were an unnamed, “highly capable, research-only model” that was “not intended for public use,” per OpenAI — METR refers to it as “HPIM.” The other was a currently public OpenAI model, GPT-5.6 Sol. Because the unnamed model wasn’t released yet, it was “not being evaluated with the same type of safeguards that OpenAI uses in production,” the company’s report says.
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OpenAI also wrote a report. But it’s clear that these systems aren’t as trammelled as their owners thought. And we’ve had a long time since then during which more occasions like this could have occurred but we don’t know about it.
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Surveillance prices, hidden fees, shifting costs: this madness must stop • The New York Times
Stephanie Nguyen, former chief technologist at the US Federal Trade Commission:
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The discounts, promotions and offers you receive from businesses, from Starbucks to Kroger to Target to Home Depot, are all too often targeted calculations about what to charge you, built from data including your location, browsing history and social media activities. This information can be used to build hidden profiles of customers’ intelligence, abilities and preferences, which can signal how much you are willing to pay for any given item or service. When you are presented with a deal, you may not have realized that algorithms have already invisibly sized you up with the goal of squeezing your wallet.
This is a part of the commercial surveillance business model. Over the past decade, companies built up infrastructure to harness vast amounts of consumer data, using it to target individuals with unfair price hikes. Now the concept of a price is itself degraded. Left in its place are numbers engineered for individual consumers, based not on market conditions but on the weaponization of your personal data. Policymakers should mandate that companies offer a real price — one that must be simple, public, accessible and consistent in a given market, with rules on discounts and loyalty programs to promote fairness and protect consumers and competition. No more targeted price adjustments based on surveillance. No more hidden costs or fees. No more prices that change on the fly.
Some argue that targeting and personalization are simply how modern discounts work, a natural evolution of coupons. But there is a meaningful difference between a public offer and a surveillance-driven one. The Sunday circular goes to everyone in the neighborhood: The terms are visible, the discount is available to anyone who clips it, and consumers know what they’re signing up for. Surveillance pricing works in reverse. Companies collect data, infer your willingness to pay and set a price, without you ever knowing your neighbor was charged less for the same thing. One rewards a consumer’s action; the other exploits a consumer’s profile.
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It’s an obvious thing that the worldhas become unequal; that we get penalised by algorithms, and, worse, that we can’t always be sure when that happens. Whether the US or other countries have the gumption to do it is a different matter.
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Launch date for London robotaxis slips amid TfL uncertainty • Financial Times
Tim Bradshaw and Kana Inagaki:
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London’s robotaxi rollout is running behind the ambitious schedule set out by the UK government, with the three main operators now unlikely to launch a fully driverless commercial service this year.
Alphabet’s Waymo, Uber-backed Wayve and China’s Baidu still face regulatory or technical barriers, or both, before they can take paid passengers without a “safety driver” behind the wheel.
Any delay in London will come as a relief to cab drivers worried about potential job losses, but it could dismay the 100,000 people who have signed up to try Uber and Wayve’s service.
Ministers, investors and tech executives had also hoped that the launch of robotaxis could help to position the UK as an innovation hub. The vehicles are now available to hire in more than 20 cities across the US, China and the Middle East.
This month Zagreb became the first European city to offer autonomous rides to the general public, but the service, available through Uber, still has a human driver behind the wheel for “onboard monitoring”. Waymo announced on Tuesday that it planned to launch in Munich next year.
…progress has slowed significantly in recent months, while the new Prime Minister Andy Burnham has hinted at a less enthusiastic stance towards technology companies.
Transport for London, the city authority which must give its consent to any rollout, is yet to even publish the guidance that companies must follow to win its approval.
“At the start of the year, there was clear pressure from the top of government to have a car without a driver moving around the middle of London,” said Jack Stilgoe, tech professor at University College London.
“It’s not clear whether Andy Burnham shares that enthusiasm. TfL are still asking what problems this would actually solve. And it’s not clear where the final decision will be made.”
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Grokipedia stopped reviewing edits in April. It didn’t tell anyone • Lawfare
Renée DiResta and Ronald Robertson:
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Artificial intelligence (AI)-generated reference systems are on their way to becoming a significant part of the infrastructure of public knowledge. Grokipedia, the encyclopedia xAI launched in October 2025 as a machine-written alternative to Wikipedia, is the clearest current example: Its entries are drafted and maintained by a large language model that decides not only what to write but also when to edit itself.
That is why it matters that Grokipedia appears not to have updated any articles since April 24. The encyclopedia stopped editing itself and processing suggested edits from humans. As far as we can tell, no entry has changed in more than three months.
…Some Grokipedia users have noticed the pause. In the weeks after late April, users on Reddit (r/grokipedia, r/antiai) and X commented that suggested edits were piling up “in review,” that the site’s aggregate edits feed had disappeared from the home page, and that the project appeared frozen or abandoned.
A small, highly committed group has invested substantial effort in improving the site. While more than half of all contributors suggested only a single edit, a tiny cohort of 13 power users accounts for 42.6% of all human edit requests (nearly 40,000 edits). The most prolific contributor submitted over 8,000 corrections across 4,000 pages.
One self-described frequent contributor reported in mid-June that the review system had been stuck for more than 50 days. That places the onset in late April, consistent with our data. He also wrote on X that someone he identified as an xAI team member had acknowledged the complaint but could not provide a status update.
…Grokipedia’s contents also do not remain confined to Grokipedia. An Ahrefs analysis published in March 2026 found the site surfacing in roughly 356,000 citations across AI systems—most often in ChatGPT and Google’s AI Mode, and at lower volumes in Gemini, Copilot, and AI Overviews. That remains a small fraction of Wikipedia’s roughly 25 million such citations, but it is not trivial.
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Once again: a Musk project gets abandoned once he loses interest. He’s as bad as Google.
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Bomb fishing is reducing coral reefs to ‘rubble’ • Inside Climate News
Johnny Sturgeon:
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Nicknamed the “Amazon of the Seas,” the Coral Triangle is the world’s most biologically diverse marine ecosystem. Sink below the surface and you’ll encounter the sound of a vibrant symphony of snapping shrimp, crunching crustaceans and feeding fish.
But then the rhythmic music of life will dissolve into eerie silence, punctured only by the plosive boom of detonating bombs.
Off the coast of Indonesia’s Spermonde Archipelago, underwater microphones captured over 3,500 explosions in just 3,600 hours of recording, according to researchers from the Zoological Society of London.
The source? Blast fishing—a globally banned technique that uses plastic bottles packed with explosives to stun and kill everything in a 90-foot radius. The highly destructive practice has been documented in at least 34 countries, from Lebanon and Libya to Brazil and Ecuador.
While fishers predominantly use the method to catch fish for sale at local markets—identifiable by their ruptured internal organs and burst swim bladders—it’s also a grave threat to colorful coral reef habitats.
“Bomb fishing is quite likely the leading cause of reef loss in this area,” said Ben Williams, the paper’s lead author, noting that a single bomb can wreak 200 square feet of destruction. “These picturesque reefs get converted into a landscape that looks like the moon. It’s just rubble and dead coral with very little sign of life.”
In 2023, researchers from Britain and Indonesia snorkelled down and anchored $150 audio recorders to short stakes in the sea floor. Using AI software—which the team has now made open-source—they scoured 16 months of audio in just a few hours to identify possible detonations.
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Don’t Wordle
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Don’t Wordle is a free daily puzzle with similar appearance and gameplay as Wordle. In Wordle, the goal is to guess the 5 letter hidden word. In Don’t Wordle, the goal is to not guess the hidden word. Just like Wordle, after each guess, each letter is labeled as either green (correct letter, correct spot), yellow (correct letter, incorrect spot), or gray (letter not in the word). However, the strategy and feel of the game is completely different to Wordle, and many users find it frustrating. The full rules are explained here.
Wordle is calibrated so that it’s hard to win on the first guess, but the clues usually nudge you toward the answer before you run out of guesses. It’s surprisingly tough to lose Wordle if you’re making an honest attempt to try to win. By the same virtue, it is surprisingly difficult to win at Don’t Wordle, because the game forces you to respect the information you have learned in previous guesses (i.e. you must re-use green letters in the same spot, and re-use yellow letters in a new spot) while still avoiding the hidden word.
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Launched in May 2022; the words in the target list will run out in September 2028. The author doesn’t give their name. But it’s a fun thing to try.
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Government invests £71m to help reopen Devon tungsten mine • BBC News
Zhara Simpson:
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The National Wealth Fund said the funding supported its continued growth and renewal of mining in south-west England, building on its most recent investment in Cornish Metals to help it reopen South Crofty tin mine in January 2025.
[UK Chancellor, John] Healey said: “We are living in a more dangerous world, which is why backing British industry is more important than ever before. That is what this deal does.”
National Wealth Fund chief executive Oliver Holbourn said Hemerdon had the “largest deposits of tungsten in the world right on our doorstep”. He said the increasing demand for tungsten was being driven by its use in defence, aerospace, next generation energy and electronics.
Chief executive of Tungsten West Jeff Court said the mine was a “world class, low cost and long life tungsten and tin resource”.
Court said: “It is extremely important to us that we prioritise UK requirements for this critical metal to support domestic demand. Hemerdon will be a long-term creator of economic benefits for the South West, including the generation of a significant number of direct and indirect jobs.”
He said the government support was ensuring critical minerals produced at the mine would underpin the UK’s national interests for the long term. The company said the existing infrastructure and previously-operating mine resulted in competitive costs and a shorter route to production.
It said the target was to “ramp up to full scale production” in 2027.
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Tungsten turns out to be a critical element for lots of battery and electronics industries.
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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 