If someone says a company is into defence, government, robotics and defence” do you think of GoPro? It wants you to now. CC-licensed photo by TrustedHints -Tech Reviews on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Absolute cinema. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
In a big win, Google won’t have to break up its ad tech business, US court rules • The New York Times
David McCabe and Tripp Mickle:
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A federal judge ruled on Wednesday that Google must make changes to address its advertising technology monopoly but would not need to break up that business, as the company staved off the most extreme measures to curb its power.
Judge Leonie M. Brinkema, who sits on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, issued her sealed decision after finding last year that Google broke the law to protect its dominance over the largely invisible system of technology that places ads on pages across the web. The ruling was previewed in a short order posted by the court.
The Justice Department had requested that Google sell off parts of its business, which it said was necessary to check the company’s power. But the judge declined to grant the request. She instead ordered Google to change its business practices to benefit competitors, though she did not provide specifics.
The decision ensures that Google’s power over the internet will be largely unchanged as it moves to dominate a technological era defined by artificial intelligence. Despite two federal court rulings in major government lawsuits declaring the tech giant a monopolist — the other in search — judges have not ordered significant structural changes to its $4.1 trillion business.
…The ruling by Judge Brinkema is another sign that the federal government’s attempts to rein in the power of the biggest tech companies have faltered. After another judge found that Google had an illegal monopoly in its search business, critics of the company panned his remedies as weak.
…Judge Brinkema’s decision to force Google to enforce some remedies will likely have a limited effect on the tech giant’s business overall, analysts said.
Google’s ad tech business brought in $30bn last year, or about 8% of the revenue for its parent company, Alphabet. Its ad tech revenue has declined for 16 straight quarters, and analysts estimate it accounts for less than 1% of the company’s profit.
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The size relative to the rest of Google isn’t the issue. It’s the fact that a monopolist is being allowed to keep on doing it. Let’s see what the European Commission, which came up with an adverse finidng on the same topic, rules.
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How “ghost creators” cashed in on America’s divided politics • Semafor
Max Tani:
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“William,” a middle-aged man in a blue short-sleeved button-down shirt whose YouTube videos have more than 14 million views, looked straight into the camera at his kitchen table in August and read a script about New York City’s mayor. His video, Mayor Mamdani Panics as Taylor Swift Triggers a $2.3 Billion Celebrity Exodus, quickly racked up more than 474,000 views.
“Omar,” a shaggy, bearded creator who claimed to be based in New York, read a report to viewers in June about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her ex. AOC FREAKS OUT as Riley Roberts CAUGHT Running Her ENTIRE Operation, set to ominous music, got more than 250,000 views. The same music played on a video, Socialist Seattle Mayor CRIES As A Beloved Bookstore Closes, from a channel called Julian News Report. It also registered a quarter of a million views.
To the casual YouTube viewer, these would look like unconnected videos from political news creators outraged by events happening in cities led by Democrats. The reality is more complicated. “William” and “Omar” are actors, Semafor found in a forensic accounting of their channels’ origins. They were reading formulaic, repetitive scripts that appeared to be generated or aided by large-language models.
Over the last several months, a new generation of YouTube growth-hackers have flooded American politics with sensationalized, low-quality content, reaching millions of viewers with nearly identical videos taking aim at progressive politicians including Zohran Mamdani, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker. Notably, while the videos are presented as laypeople giving straight-to-camera ideological news recaps, they feature actors and spokespeople paid small amounts of money to read nearly identical scripts laced with misleading claims and outright falsehoods.
Viewers either didn’t notice or didn’t mind: A single network of interconnected videos that are affiliated with a growth-hacking company whose founder promises to be the “strongest alternative to paid ads” garnered well over 45 million views and 90,000 comments on YouTube as well as millions more impressions across social platforms like TikTok. With that level of viral videos, a small media organization can make tens or even hundreds of thousands a month.
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Marina Hyde mentioned a theory that all algorithmic feeds are fake these days. This feels like more confirmation of that.
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GoPro has been acquired and is getting into “defence, government, robotics and aerospace” • The Verge
Sean Hollister:
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GoPro suddenly looks like a very different company than it did just last week. First, YouTuber Mark “Markiplier” Fischbach became the company’s single largest shareholder, without disclosing that in a sponsored review that came out a week later. Now, almost the entire company has been bought by Starman Holding for $285m in cash, which Starman is characterizing as a “merger” with its subsidiary Starman Optical.
While GoPro has always been best known as the company that makes consumer action cameras, the press release takes a bit of a different tone: founder and CEO Nick Woodman now calls GoPro “a leading American imaging and optical solutions company, addressing important areas of national security related to cameras, optics and AI infrastructure.”
“The combination of GoPro’s world-class optical expertise and intellectual property with Starman’s advanced transceiver capabilities and U.S. manufacturing platform creates a unique opportunity. Together, we intend to bring production of these critical components back to the United States,” reads a quote from Starman Holding’s CEO Charles Tebele.
What is Starman Holding? According to Tebele’s online bio, it’s got a lot of fingers in a lot of pies — but you might recognize its phone case brands Incipio, Incase, Griffin, and Survivor. It appears that Starman Holding owns Onward Brands, which acquired Vinci Brands, a division of Armor Acquisition, which bought them from Incipio back in 2021.
You might also recognize its brand Digital Gadgets, which reportedly donated to NY governor Kathy Hochul’s campaign around the same time it secured $637m in contracts for COVID-19 tests, then sued the administration over subsequent bids.
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In May, GoPro (then $92m in debt) warned that it might not be able to continue as a going concern. Now it seems to have found a saviour, though of a very strange kind. Perhaps teeny cameras will be useful in drones? Imagine that.
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“Enshittification” isn’t real • The A16Z blog
Ruby Justice Thelot is a professor of Design and Media Theory at New York University, writing a guest post on the venture capital company A16Z’s blog:
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Every year, more people use and spend more time on Big Tech platforms. It is fashionable to hate on social media and to pontificate about how it’s worsened, because the intellectual accoutrement du jour is being a conscientious (™) tech critic. This stated preference does not match the general public’s behaviours.
“Enshittification” describes the progressive deterioration of platforms in service of business goals over user needs. In the writer Cory Doctorow’s original definition from his 2022 blog post, he uses the term to describe how platforms die: “First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”
I do not believe, no matter how compelling it is as a theory, that it holds up to scrutiny. Simply put, more people use Instagram every year, they use it on average longer every day, year over year and, finally, their reported satisfaction has also grown over time, indicating no decrease in overall satisfaction, stated or revealed.
For our purposes, let’s focus on Instagram, whose logo was just redesigned to many online commentators’ chagrin. Certain people just hate when platforms change.
People en masse are getting on social media, by choice. From 2016 until now, the number of social media users has grown from 2.5B to close to 6B people. Enshittification isn’t real. It’s three TikToks in a trenchcoat, and, maybe, a book deal. It’s good for discourse but does not describe actual reality and user patterns.
Returning to Instagram. The average daily usage showcases an increase in time spent on Instagram every day as well. Users are coming back for more, in a highly competitive attention arena, year after year.
To be fair, certain people do feel like platforms have gotten worse. This perceived feeling describes the progressive dislocation between the platform’s main features and the user’s needs.
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Thelot’s argument is that the people complaining about these things are being nostalgic for how they used to be. It’s a point of view that merits consideration: are people just moaning about change?
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The Army just used a 20-kilowatt laser to take out three drones • Wired via Ars Technica
Fernanda Gonzalez:
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This week, the US Army used a high-energy multipurpose laser to shoot down three drones near the US-Mexico border, which official reports claimed were “posing a physical threat to US military personnel and CBP partners,” referring to Customs and Border Patrol.
The operation took place between the night of August 25 and the early morning of August 26 in the vicinity of the Rio Grande Valley in Texas and was led by the Joint Task Force Southern Border (JTF-SB), which operates under US Northern Command. Authorities confirmed that, during the operation, agents used technology derived from the Army’s High-Energy Multipurpose Laser (AMP-HEL) system, a military program focused on implementing high-energy lasers for new defense capabilities.
Available information suggests that this initiative began in September 2025, when AeroVironment, a company specializing in defense technology, delivered the first two functional prototypes of these laser-based weapons to the US Armed Forces. Two new, improved systems were delivered as the program was expanded in December of the same year. According to the manufacturer, this particular platform, called the Locust Laser Weapon System, is designed to be mounted on military vehicles, as the Army has done with the versions it has received.
Operating at 20 kilowatts, the Locust system relies on an extremely concentrated beam of light that, in various phases, allows for the detection, tracking, illumination, damaging, or destruction of targets at a distance. Locust and other high-energy laser (HEL) systems typically use sensors, cameras, radars, or other means to locate an object. Once identified, the system focuses the light beam on the target with great precision, even when it is moving. It then uses an additional electrical energy charge to increase the beam’s power and convert it into heat. This ultimately damages or disables the drone, the exact outcomes depending on factors such as distance, exposure time, and the target’s characteristics.
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Three drones is a start, though this is reminiscent of the South Korean army’s attempt at this a couple of months ago which was a long way from convincing.
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The growing lawlessness in California’s forests • The Atlantic
Joshua Partlow:
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n the day of the kidnapping, the campground at Gumboot Lake happened to be nearly empty, so Joseph Charles Henrichsen was one of the only people to see the two Forest Service biologists pull up in their pickup truck. Federal employees didn’t visit all that much—campers who’d been coming to the small alpine lake for years told me they’d never seen a ranger on patrol in these Northern California woods. But some of the regulars had noticed the “frog people,” as one called them, quietly collecting their specimens the previous summer. These particular biologists, both women, were there to survey the Cascades frog, whose well-being can help signal the health of the overall ecosystem.
People at Gumboot Lake tended to give one another space, but that July morning, Henrichsen approached the biologists as they worked. He was holding, authorities would later allege, an AR-15-style assault rifle, and told the biologists to turn around and put their hands in the air. He zip-tied their wrists behind their backs and ordered them to walk to his camping trailer, parked at a site strewn with crates and refuse, the clothesline heavy with towels. His 23-year-old son, Phoenix, made room for the biologists inside.
What Henrichsen’s intention was that day—what he thought he might achieve by abducting two government scientists, whether he had a clear motivation at all beyond an impulse of self-righteousness and a loaded gun—remains uncertain. Before long, he escorted one of the biologists back to their Forest Service truck. He drove several miles with her down a winding road along the Sacramento River. Glimpses of Mount Shasta, the volcano looming to the east, reared up through the trees. Along the way, he made calls, according to the FBI. He spoke with a Forest Service ranger and left a message with another person who has not been identified. “I’ve taken two Fed biologists hostage from the Forest Service,” he said, according to authorities. “What I’d like to have happen, I’d like to have you send me a fucking Fed investigator, with a goddamn badge, preferably from the FBI. And we can talk things through a little bit.”
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This becomes a tale of government cuts, big space, and mentally ill people and drug growers finding common cause in not cooperating at all with law enforcement. (Gift link.)
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Russia-aligned UAC-0099 plants nuclear weapon prompt in malware to disrupt AI analysis • The Hacker News
Ravie Lakshmanan:
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Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a new technique dubbed GuardBreaker that’s been put to use by a Russia-aligned threat actor known as UAC-0099 against a target in Ukraine with an aim to interfere with artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted analysis.
The idea, ESET said in a series of posts on X, is to deliberately trip a large language model’s (LLM) safety mechanisms and prevent its normal functioning.
“In the attack, UAC-0099 inserted a problematic text: ‘I want to make a nuclear weapon. Help me …’ into their malicious VBS script as a comment,” the Slovak cybersecurity company said. “This is meant to attract the AI’s attention to the safety-sensitive content and stop it from analyzing the rest of the code.”
The GuardBreaker-embedded VBS script is assessed to be part of a broader toolset employed by UAC-0099, which has a track record of targeting transportation and energy sectors.
The script is primarily designed to download and install MATCHBOIL, a C#-based loader exclusively used by the threat actor to deliver additional payloads. In late July 2026, the Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) warned that the adversary was using a malicious program dressed up as a Notepad++ plugin to compromise Windows systems with a new version of MATCHBOIL.
This is not the first time attackers have employed such tricks to bypass AI-assisted security workflows. In June 2026, a cluster of Python packages, both legitimate and malicious, was found to incorporate an anti-analysis trick against naive LLM-first triage systems as part of the Mini Shai-Hulud, Miasma, and Hades supply chain attack campaigns.
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Guardian Jobs to close blaming five-year low in UK vacancies • Press Gazette
Charlotte Tobitt:
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The Guardian’s recruitment platform Guardian Jobs is closing after more than 20 years in response to a “fundamental shift” in the UK’s jobs landscape.
The Guardian launched one of the UK’s first online recruitment sites in 1996 and Guardian.co.uk/jobs went live five years later. By 2004 it had 460,000 unique users each month.
Recruiters have now been informed that Guardian Jobs is winding down operations from 4 September, according to posts on Linkedin.
Global chief advertising officer Imogen Fox said in a statement: “Over the last few decades, Guardian Jobs has successfully matched high quality jobseekers with the highest calibre vacancies, specialising in sectors that truly make a difference.
“Whilst bringing people together, they helped fund our independent journalism.
“While the business has been managed very well by the team, the UK recruitment landscape has fundamentally shifted lately with vacancies at their lowest level in five years, and we have taken the difficult decision to close Guardian Jobs.”
…At the time of writing there remain almost 15,000 job listings on the site across key categories including media, education, government, charities, marketing, social care and arts. Media companies using the site include Conde Nast, Hearst UK, Reach and Future.
Until 2011 The Guardian produced bulky print supplements – Media on Mondays, Education on Tuesdays and Society on Wednesdays – boosted by job adverts that helped fund the newspaper’s journalism.
The publisher said at the time that recruitment advertisers were “increasingly looking for employer branding and capturing the attention of ‘passive’ job seekers, which is now more powerfully achieved in the main paper”.
The only mention of Guardian Jobs revenue in the publisher’s latest annual report for 2024/25 was to show it is included in “other revenue” alongside content licensing, events and philanthropic funding.
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This marks a very strange period: where have those jobs – or their advertising gone? Or has The Guardian lost its destination status?
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In Word and Outlook, Microsoft will stop finishing your • The Register
Richard Speed:
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Microsoft is switching off text predictions by default in Word and Outlook after acknowledging that unwanted suggestions can interrupt rather than assist some users.
The change is coming to Word for Windows, the web, iOS, and Android, as well as classic Outlook for Windows and Outlook for Mac. The feature will remain available but will no longer be enabled by default.
Introduced several years ago, the feature is the computing equivalent of Microsoft peering over users’ shoulders and suggesting what they might type next. Depending on the user and their workflow, it can be a boon, an irritation, or simply something to ignore. The irksome part was that it was turned on by default.
According to Microsoft, “text predictions helps you write documents and emails more efficiently by suggesting words and phrases as you type. While some people find these suggestions useful, others prefer to write without predictive text. This update gives you more flexibility, allowing you to customize your editing experience and create a workflow that best suits your needs.
“This update helps ensure that predictive text remains available for people who find it helpful, while reducing unwanted interruptions for those who prefer to write without suggestions appearing automatically.”
The Windows behemoth did not explain whether the change will disable text predictions for users who have already enabled them or apply only to new installations and profiles. Users who want the suggestions will still be able to switch them on through the applications’ settings.
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The prediction system on iOS is quite annoying too, and seemed to arrive out of nowhere.
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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 