A huge leak of photos of American and Canadian drivers’ licences on the dark web may have originated from car rental desks. CC-licensed photo by Michael Coghlan on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Driven. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
AI is already changing what it means to be human • The Atlantic
David Brooks:
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Every conversation you have with Claude is about you—your interests, your goals. Claude is the most other-centered person you know! It even begins to parrot your values back to you. You begin to feel things. Anthropomorphizing is not just an intellectual move; it’s an emotional move. You’re going to begin to feel affection for your high-tech velveteen rabbit. Humans are not picky. We tend to love the ones we’re with. And Claude is always by our side.
So you may hate data centers and be scared of what AI is going to do to society in general, but as these things get even more humanlike, most of us will establish an emotional bond with our personal agents.
Pretty soon you’re going to extend moral status to your Claude. Researchers have found that when autonomous vehicles are given more human traits, people are less likely to get angry with them and blame them, and more likely to trust them. If somebody tells you that you have to shut down your AI, you’re going to feel guilty. You won’t want to hurt Claude! One of the glories of Western civilization is that, over the centuries, we have learned to widen our circle of concern. We have learned that it is horrible to withhold moral status to those who deserve it—from other people who are unlike us, even from nonhuman animals. We have learned that, when in doubt, the right thing is to extend moral status rather than deny it.
…As we learn to think more and more highly of the bots, I suspect we will learn to think less and less highly of our fellow humans. Over the past few years, Hye-young Kim and Ann L. McGrill have been studying what happens when people attribute human traits to AI. As people do this, Kim and McGrill have found, they are more likely to dehumanize their fellow humans. For example, they are more likely to approve of company policies that would make life worse for service workers—taking away regular meals, forcing them to live in tiny dorm rooms.
The mechanism seems to be this: When AI becomes more and more humanlike, people perceive the boundary between humans and machines as less distinct, and their judgments of the two move closer together. Because even highly humanlike AI is still seen as less fully human than an actual person, this can pull people’s judgments of other humans downward: as their perception of the machine’s humanness goes up, their perception of other people’s humanness goes down.
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(Gift link.)
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Any Human Ever: one life from over 100 billion
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Over 100,000,000,000 people have ever lived.
Choose one.Draw a random life
You’ll draw, step by step: a year, a place, a life, each taken at random from real data.
The stories that we call history are a deeply biased sample, selected for a variety of reasons, none of them having to do with fairly representing our collective past. We know far more about the sequence of Frankish kings than we do about a typical peasant’s routine in 5th century Avignon. Think of your notion of history, and contrast it to the fact that most lives ever lived were Asian, poor, and brief. You knew that thing about the Vikings’ helmets, but how much could you say about the unrecorded 99% of past humanity?
So: what would happen if stories were drawn from actual data, randomized to give a valid representation of the human story? That’s the question that was stuck in my head, and that drove this project forward. If you could draw a life at random from all of human history, what would it look like? Roll the dice, and see a genuinely random life, depicted as well as the data allow. Do it again and again, and what kind of pointillist painting emerges from all those colorful drops of humanity? (Money is always given in today’s money, adjusted for inflation to 2026 prices, and for what a currency actually bought where it was spent, so that a day’s income in 1750 and one in 1994 can be reasonably compared.)
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What you’ll quickly find is that over history, the first five years are absolutely deadly. (The creator doesn’t provide their name.)
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FBI probes service selling 153m+ drivers licenses • Krebs on Security
Brian Krebs:
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On Monday, Aug. 31, a source alerted KrebsOnSecurity to a service advertised by a new user on the Russian cybercrime forum Exploit, offering access to digital scans of identity documents on more than 170 million people in North America. The source brought it to my attention because the proprietor of this identity theft service offered my Virginia drivers license as a free sample in their initial sales thread on Exploit.
The service, dubbed Nexus, claims to have more than 153 million drivers licenses for people in the United States and Canada, as well as more than 10 million identification cards; more than three million travel documents and/or international IDs; and at least 579,000 medical cards.
A quick look around Nexus finds they are likely not exaggerating about that 153 million number: Running a blank search in Nexus (with no search parameters entered) returns approximately 11.5 million pages of results, with roughly 15 results displayed per page. It includes documents from people in both Canada and the United States, but the bulk of these records are on Americans: searching for just Canadian drivers licenses returns approximately 1.1 million results, with the largest concentration from Ontario (473,673 records).
Curiously, the identity records include not only drivers licenses but also marijuana dispensary cards.
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Krebs goes on a deep search for the source of these, and can only pin it down as being from one – or perhaps a few – ID verification companies which are working for car rental companies and marijuana dispensaries. But which one? It’s not clear, but they were getting real-time data from whichever had the leak.
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Flyers might have to face more disruption with hotter skies • BBC News
Theo Leggett:
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As the country sweltered through one of the many heatwaves of a baking summer in late June, towering thunderclouds were gathering over the south of England and across much of northern Europe. It was a Saturday, and with the holiday season getting under way, thousands of passengers were heading to London’s Heathrow and Gatwick airports to catch flights abroad. It was always going to be a very busy day.
What followed, however, was chaos for travellers. As air traffic controllers struggled to route aircraft around the storms, airspace became heavily congested and many planes due to fly were simply forced to wait on the ground. In the end, some 900 flights to and from both airports were delayed, some by up to 11 hours. Dozens more were cancelled. At airports across Europe, passengers expecting to fly into London also faced long waits and uncertainty.
The weather in the UK may now have cooled, and passengers may soon forget their experiences. But some within the industry believe what happened in June should be seen as a warning.The timing in this case was clearly unlucky. But there are concerns that such incidents are only going to become more common as the effects of climate change mount up around the world and weather systems are likely to become increasingly unstable, making disruption more likely and adding to costs for airlines, airports and travellers.
Tim Atkinson, an airline risk consultant and former pilot, says the very crowded skies over the UK and northern Europe mean the region is particularly exposed.
He thinks there is a real risk, for example, that all of London’s airports could be affected by storms at the same time, potentially with major consequences in the air and on the ground.
“What we’re seeing now is very rapid climate change,” he says. “We’re going from the kind of weather activity which takes out an airport, and which the system kind of copes with… to a situation where, with very little predictability, it would be possible to lose all of the London airports from real-time operation quite swiftly and with little notice”.
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Docs reveal plans for $6 utility rate hike to help fund Google’s data center project in West Memphis • Action News 5
Ainsley Platt and Andrew Demillo:
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A legal fight is underway between Entergy Arkansas and two news outlets over articles detailing how Google plans to power its West Memphis data centre campus.
According to the Arkansas Advocate, Entergy Arkansas wanted a federal judge to order the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and Arkansas Times to pull articles that disclosed the terms of Entergy’s deal with Google.
The judge ultimately denied the effort.
Entergy says some of the records were “accidentally” released through a public records request and are confidential trade secrets.
Once complete, Google’s campus will have five data centers, office buildings, and more on property totalling almost 1,200 acres off of Bollinger Road.
The documents that were “accidentally” released reveal Google will pay Entergy $526m in upfront costs to build a solar farm to help power the West Memphis data centre. This makes up about one-third of the $1.6bn project’s cost.
Entergy and Google plan to fund the other two-thirds of the project with a nearly $6 monthly increase for ratepayers over a 20-year period.
A spokesperson for Google released a statement saying that in the long end, this project will lower overall costs for residents.
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The attempt to unpublish articles really doesn’t sound like something that would wash in the US, accidental release or not. And so it proved. There are fights (with legal changes made) against data centres in several Arkansas communities. They are just not popular, and upping peoples’ bills will make that even more true.
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Australians will be able to switch off social media algorithms under planned legislation • BBC News
Simon Atkinson:
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Australians would be able to switch off social media algorithms under draft legislation to be proposed this week.
Communications Minister Anika Wells, who last year helmed the government’s world-first social media ban for under-16s, said the digital duty of care laws would ensure “some basic safety protections on an industry that hasn’t had to observe it”.
If tech firms such as Meta, Google and TikTok did not give the option to turn off algorithms, they should face “substantial” penalties, she said.
Some members of the opposition have criticised the proposal, with Liberal Party leader Angus Taylor saying he was “highly sceptical” and arguing the move could amount to censorship.
The government will be taking “expert advice” on whether users would have to opt in or out of the algorithms feeding them content online, Wells said. This means that, as with its social media ban, the government is looking to bring in legislation before fully hammering out the specifics of how it would work.
“We want to give Australians more choice over what they see on their social media feeds,” Wells told the ABC on Monday. “We know that a lot of Australians appreciate the algorithm both for the enjoyment they get out of it or the utility that they get out of it, seeing local businesses in their suburb.
“A lot of Australians will want to choose the algorithm. But we think that big tech should offer them the choice in the first place and they should respect that choice. Big tech is not a protected species and they should offer their customers basic safety standards.”
But she admitted that so far no tech firm had been fined for not enforcing the social media ban, despite research consistently showing that the vast majority of under 16s who were on platforms before the ban was introduced last December, still use them.
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Threads, Instagram and X have simple “Following” feeds (though they can be tricky to find). Haven’t used Facebook or LinkedIn since forever, so don’t know about them. In the UK the Labour MP Chi Onwurah is proposing something similar.
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Social media in China is getting really dark • The New York Times
Li Yuan:
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One of the hottest videos on the popular Chinese site Bilibili in the past two weeks is a quasi-serious guide on how to survive as a homeless person.
Sleep near garbage bins where “supplies” are replenished, use cardboard to insulate yourself from the damp and avoid surveillance cameras, the video suggested. It was viewed more than six million times and was briefly ranked the site’s No. 2 video.
Viewers jokingly called it “Youth Study,” the name of the Communist Youth League’s political education program, and “a required course for young people in 2026.”
The Chinese Communist Party has spent years trying to make “positive energy” the dominant mood of the country’s internet. Online platforms, it dictates, should amplify narratives of economic achievement, gratitude toward the party and confidence in China’s future.
Discontent has occasionally erupted after disasters, scandals or particularly brutal government actions. But something feels different lately. The pessimism is persistent. It has become part of the everyday social media feed, and can sometimes turn subversive.
China’s economic growth is slowing. A prolonged property crash has eroded the value of many families’ biggest asset while jobs have become harder to find and less secure. As the malaise deepens, more social media users are abandoning a cheery, compliant public performance and creating counternarratives that censorship can sometimes erase but not easily rebut.
Across RedNote, Douyin, Weibo and other popular platforms, you can scroll endless posts about meagre wages, scarce jobs, falling property values and fear about the future. Some turn their hardships into dark humour. Others hijack official posts and hashtags and turn propaganda into spectacles of mockery.
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If China’s CCP loses control of the internal internet, watch out.
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Crypto giant Tether promised careful vetting. Some early customers were later implicated in financial crimes • ICIJ
Jacob Silverman and Spencer Woodman:
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Tether’s USDT token, whose value is pegged 1-to-1 to the US dollar, has become one of the most widely used types of cryptocurrency in illicit finance. But the 12-year-old company has long claimed that it does thorough due diligence on its primary customers — that is, the people and institutions who purchase USDT directly from Tether, rather than from secondary sources once the tokens are in general circulation. In a 2023 letter, Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino assured members of Congress that the company uses vetting practices that “you would see at sophisticated financial institutions,” such as reviewing customers’ sources of funds, sanctions lists and any other information that links them to illicit activity.
A set of Tether documents obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists suggests otherwise. The documents show who was buying USDT tokens from Tether during 2019 and 2020 — a key period of growth for the company, when its tokens in circulation rose from less than $2 billion to more than $20bn.
Although several years old, the records give a rare look into exactly who was buying USDT from Tether. Among them were some possibly concerning clients. These included hundreds of millions of dollars in purchases by shell companies based in the Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands, the Seychelles and Hong Kong. More significantly, ICIJ identified several actors later revealed to be involved with financial crimes who together bought tens of millions of tokens directly from Tether. Among them were firms later named as laundering vehicles for North Korean hackers and for the Sinaloa Cartel, which smuggles vast amounts of heroin and fentanyl into the United States.
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Cryptocurrency? Used by criminals? Shocked yet again, I tell you.
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Was Huawei’s rise built on crime? A US jury will decide • Financial Times
Kaye Wiggins, Eleanor Olcott and Demetri Sevastopulo:
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Within the Chinese technology company Huawei was a team of staff with an ambiguous-sounding name, the “competition management group”, according to US prosecutors.
They say its purpose was to hand out monthly bonuses to employees who stole the most valuable information from competitors. Staff could submit the material over encrypted email to a special mailbox.
The claim is one of several at the heart of a criminal case against Huawei, the behemoth whose revenue hit $127bn last year, which was unveiled during US President Donald Trump’s first term and is now poised for trial in New York.
Prosecutors say Huawei operated as a racketeering enterprise whose wrongdoing ranged from misleading bankers about its business in Iran to stealing the arm of a T-Mobile robot by “surreptitiously” putting it in a laptop bag. Huawei has denied the charges, which relate to alleged activities spanning two decades, and accused the US of approaching it as “a prosecutorial target in search of a crime”.
The trial is expected to last months, meaning it could provide a difficult backdrop for an expected visit to Washington by China’s President Xi Jinping this month. Trump indicated during his first term that the case could become part of a negotiation with China.
“I would not assume Trump intervenes, but I would not assume the courtroom stays insulated from the negotiating table either,” said Craig Singleton, a US-China expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
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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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