After Google mapped a fruit fly’s brain in computer form, people set it to work playing… Doom, of course. CC-licensed photo by Nitin Chandra on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Flying high. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
China’s top spy chief warns AI is a threat to party rule • The New York Times
Lily Kuo:
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China’s top spy chief has warned that artificial intelligence could pose a direct threat to the Chinese Communist Party’s hold on power, in what is the highest-level and most detailed articulation yet of how Beijing sees the technology’s security risks.
The unusually blunt assessment by Chen Yixin, the head of China’s Ministry of State Security, is in contrast to the warnings dominating the A.I. debate in the United States, which have focused on the possibility that A.I. could slip out of human control or pose a threat to humanity itself.
In an article published on Sunday in the state-run magazine China Cyberspace, Mr. Chen called for more party control over A.I. and stricter government oversight. This, he said, was necessary to protect political stability at home; to defend against increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks and misinformation campaigns from “hostile forces”; and to compete militarily with countries like the United States.
Mr. Chen referred specifically to U.S. tech companies and their A.I. models — like Claude Mythos and GPT-5.5-Cyber — as examples of new threats to cybersecurity. He also described the danger that foreign intelligence agencies might use A.I. for “large-scale espionage” and attacks on China’s critical infrastructure.
The warning from the powerful security agency makes clear that China sees foreign A.I. models as an active threat to China, according to Henry Gao, a law professor at Singapore Management University. That effectively draws a red line before talks between American and Chinese officials on A.I. safety risks, expected ahead of a meeting between President Trump and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, on Sept. 24 in Washington.
“Beijing is going into these talks viewing A.I. safety not as a shared humanitarian mission, but through an adversarial lens,” Mr. Gao said. It is making clear to Chinese tech firms and foreign rivals that “data sovereignty and political security will never be traded away for international safety accords,” he added.
Mr. Chen’s remarks are not the first time the security agency has spoken about the dangers of A.I., but they are the most comprehensive and signal Beijing’s growing concern about the industry. The security chief outlined several ways that A.I. could pose a threat to China…
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Among them: the creation of deepfake video and audio to create a propaganda war against China’s (current) leaders. In that sense much the same as the west, only turbo-powered. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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The latest weird thing to play Doom is the mapped-out brain of a fruit fly • CNET
Joe Hindy:
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Doom is such a simple, beautifully designed game that it can run on all sorts of weird things, from pregnancy tests to potatoes. Weird things can play it, too. In an effort to eternally one-up itself, the community has now gotten a map of a fruit fly’s brain to play the 1993 first-person shooter.
It started with Google, which partnered with HHMI Janelia Research and other collaborators to map the brain and central nervous system of a male fruit fly. This mapping, which is weirdly beautiful, contains 11,700 types of neurons and 166,000 neurons overall, breaking the record for the most complex neuron mapping ever done.
The research is pretty cool: It involved taking very thin slices of a fly’s brain and body, imaging them and using AI to combine the millions of 2D images into 3D neural shapes. Google says that “knowing the structure of the brain allows neuroscientists to understand the mechanisms behind brain function.”
It turns out that knowing the structure of the male fruit fly brain can also help modders and developers teach it how to play Doom. A few days after Google dropped its fly brain research, software engineer Alex Wormuth created a simulated fly brain using Google’s map and then set it loose to learn how to play the pioneering FPS.
The process is quite complicated. Each frame of the game generates 3,335 brightness inputs and 811 R8 color inputs. These inputs are fed into the simulated fruit fly brain, which contains 25.6 million connections. These inputs hit specific neurons based on what the frame shows, and that information is used to determine which controls the fly uses. This process repeats each frame the game runs.
It even works with pain. Wormuth says that nonfatal damage targets the PPL101 dopamine receptors, which control hunger and aggression in real fruit flies.
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At this rate we’re going to meet aliens and our first question to them will be “can you play Doom?”
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Speed up electricity grid upgrade or else face higher bills, warns UK watchdog • The Guardian
Alex Daniel:
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Consumers will pay higher energy bills unless the UK government speeds up work on a vast programme of upgrades to the electricity grid to enable the switch to renewables, the public spending watchdog has warned.
The National Audit Office (NAO) said that without faster action the extra costs associated with managing the ageing power network, which are ultimately passed on to the public, could reach £7.8bn a year by 2030.
A £70bn programme is under way to modernise Great Britain’s network of pylons, overhead lines and substations so that more power can be carried from wind and solar farms and other clean energy sources to homes.
Labour has said its plan to decarbonise the grid by 2030 will keep consumer bills lower than they would otherwise be, but the NAO said that if the planned upgrades did not happen fast enough then bills could rise instead.
Of the 80 projects it said were needed to meet the target, just 16 are finished and most are in their early stages.
Gareth Davies, head of the NAO, said the planned upgrades would “test systems not designed for activity at this pace or scale”. He added “Value for money now depends on delivery. Failure to implement these necessary grid upgrades will hamper economic growth as well as increase consumer bills.”
When the grid cannot carry enough electricity from where it is generated to where it is needed, the system operator pays windfarms to switch off and gas plants to switch on elsewhere to meet the demand. These so-called constraint costs are added to bills, and reached £1.9bn in 2025-26. Without faster upgrades, the NAO said, they could climb as high as £7.8bn by 2030.
Meanwhile, the £70bn investment will require transmission owners – the private companies that build and manage the network – to more than quadruple their annual spending on upgrades, from £2.5bn in 2025-26 to more than £11bn by 2027-28.
Ofgem, the industry regulator, believes households would be about £30 a year better off if the upgrades happen at the required pace because of the reduced curtailment costs. But the NAO said meeting that schedule would be “very challenging”.
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Electric cars gain a 33% cost advantage over gasoline cars in Europe • Review-Energy
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Battery electric vehicles (BEVs) are strengthening their economic advantage over conventional vehicles in Europe as battery costs continue to fall and fuel prices remain high, according to the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT).
The organisation’s EV Transition Check 2026 finds that BEVs were on average 33% cheaper to drive than gasoline-powered cars in the European Union in 2025. The gap widened further in early 2026, when the oil crisis pushed the energy costs of combustion-engine cars up by between 12% and 36%, while the energy costs of battery electric cars remained largely unchanged.
The report assesses the progress of Europe’s road transport transition towards zero emissions, covering passenger cars as well as trucks and buses. It examines vehicle affordability, running costs, charging infrastructure, emissions, manufacturing and the wider competitiveness of the European automotive sector.
The economic advantage of electric cars is no longer limited to their lower running costs. According to the ICCT, BEVs had already reached upfront price parity with comparable internal combustion engine vehicles in Germany in the three largest car segments in 2025.
The analysis is based on price data covering around 100,000 vehicles in Germany, Europe’s largest automotive market. The number of BEV models available in the country also quadrupled between 2020 and 2025, reaching around 160 models.
Battery costs are a major factor behind the change. Global battery costs fell by 35% between 2020 and 2025. Over the same period, inflation-adjusted BEV prices in Germany, accounting for vehicle characteristics such as range, declined by 18%, while prices for internal combustion engine cars increased by 2%.
The ICCT says the difference between the decline in battery costs and the evolution of vehicle prices indicates that there could still be room for further reductions in BEV prices.
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Batteries getting cheaper (thanks, China); fossil fuels getting dearer (thanks, Trump and Netanyahu).
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Commercial rooftops could provide major boost to UK solar capacity • EIBI
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A new report, commissioned by Real Estate:UK, has found that the UK’s untapped commercial rooftops could accommodate more than 60GW of additional solar capacity – equivalent to almost 20 Hinkley Point C nuclear power stations in terms of generating capacity.
These figures are based on data in From Opportunity to Infrastructure: Scaling Rooftop Solar in Commercial Real Estate, a report produced by Cushman & Wakefield which assesses the potential for solar generation across commercial real estate.
Real Estate:UK says that, if utilised correctly, commercial rooftops could massively increase UK renewable energy production, fast-track the UK’s path to net zero, improve national energy security, reduce the need for solar deployment on agricultural land, and drastically reduce energy costs for occupiers amid ongoing energy price uncertainty.
The report has found that less than 10% of suitable commercial building roofspace has been utilised for solar generation to date, providing just 3-5GW of solar capacity. While solar technology is widely championed in principle, its deployment remains significantly below its technical potential, particularly across the industrial and logistics real estate sector.
Unlocking the remaining 90% could provide a vast new source of home-grown renewable generation, with the potential for more than 60 gigawatts (GW) of untapped solar capacity to be harnessed across UK commercial real estate. It would also significantly reduce energy costs for occupiers and create additional revenue streams for landlords whilst rapidly decarbonising the UK’s built environment, which currently emits 25% of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions.
This latent capacity (60 GW) is the equivalent of powering approximately 20 million National Grid-enabled UK homes per year, or more than 10 times the AI data-centre capacity the Government expects the UK to need by 2030.
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Even if it’s only one-tenth of that, it’s a substantial amount of generation which benefits everyone. Add in batteries, and you’re changing things dramatically.
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Photosynthesis: use your iPhone’s best lenses at the same time
Sam Shepherd:
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Photosynthesis is a groundbreaking camera app for iPhone that takes photos from two lenses at once, then stitches the results into one extraordinary photo, all with just one tap of the shutter.
iPhone Pro (3 rear lenses) users can choose between 1x + Zoom, or 1x + 0.5x, while regular (2 lens) iPhone users can take 1x + 0.5x photos.
Photosynthesis enables you to use 100% of your camera, combining the scope of the wider lens with the detail of the closer one. The app uses no generative AI whatsoever, using only the pixels captured by each lens to form a seamless composite result.
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I had to think about this for a bit, but the demonstration photos show – via a slider – what this is about: essentially, capturing all the detail that all the lenses see and putting it into a single photo. Promising. (There’s a cheap one-time lifetime upgrade on offer if you buy before October 1.)
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A college girl was exploited on camera. A network of anonymous men got to work • WIRED
Ej Dickson with a worrying investigation into the “burnerverse”:
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Over the next 24 hours, Kowalski sat paralyzed on her couch as anonymous people on the internet endlessly harassed her; they posted her old photos, her dad’s LinkedIn, and even his golf handicap. They called and texted her parents all through the night, saying things like, “I gave your daughter drugs and fucked her”; one anonymous man told Kowalski’s father he’d had sex with her and had since tested positive for HIV while playing the call live on Spaces, X’s live chat feature. Another posted on X placing bets on whether, by the end of the coming week, she’d start an OnlyFans or kill herself.
Kowalski called her best friend, Lexie Blake, who was then a sophomore at the University of Mississippi. She “wasn’t even really saying words,” Blake recounts. “She was just sobbing, hysterical.” When Kowalski’s father showed up at her apartment, she was too humiliated to face him. She tried to jump out of her fifth-floor window.
By Monday afternoon, #Maddiekowalski was trending on X nationwide, with more than 1,200 posts using the hashtag. Content about her—much of it showing her incapacitated, naked, and engaging in sex acts—had been viewed more than 8.5 million times.
Kowalski had heard about this happening to other college girls before; one of them, a University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) student named Mary Kate Cornett, had been doxed in the same way nine months prior. These campaigns were the work of the burnerverse (or “beev,” or “BV”), a loosely connected network of anonymous “burner” accounts on X, mostly operated by students and alumni, with the primary purpose of discussing college sports.
But Kowalski was learning in real time that, outside of talking shit about athletes and posting photos of crushed red Solo cups, this faceless corner of the internet has another mission: destroying the lives of young women.
…The women targeted by the burnerverse were private citizens before their names, rumors, explicit images, or videos went viral. WIRED has identified 10 women who have been doxed by the burnerverse, most of whom were between the ages of 18 and 21. The virality follows a specific pattern: salacious gossip about a college girl’s sex life, or nude photos and videos of her, make their way to YikYak or Snapchat before being disseminated by burner accounts on public social media platforms. Sometimes, the content has even made national news, with aggregation websites like TheSportsGrail or Barstool Sports employees amplifying the victim’s humiliation.
Communities of burner accounts crop up around most large schools with prominent sports teams. Networks of a Big 10 university, like Michigan State or the University of Maryland, will have a slightly different flavor than that of an LSU or an Ole Miss, which are part of the Southeastern Conference. Kowalski’s video went viral within the SEC burnerverse before spreading nationally.
Like most online communities, the SEC burnerverse has its own vernacular, consisting of allusions to frat boy culture.
…The men’s ages range widely. One burner fan account for an East Coast university team tells WIRED that in his group DM of around 200 people, there are members as young as 15 and as old as their mid-40s.
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EU is set to propose ban on social media and AI chatbots for under-15s • Reuters
Foo Yun Chee:
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The European Union will propose a ban restricting under 15s from social media, video sharing platforms, AI chatbots and online games, in the most sweeping plan yet to protect children from online dangers, a European Commission document seen by Reuters shows.
Concerns have mounted globally about the impact on children’s health and safety of major outlets, including Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, TikTok, Google’s YouTube and ChatGPT.
The EU proposal is part of an EU Kids Act that European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen will present on Thursday. The former may announce some details in her State of the Union address on upcoming EU policy on Wednesday.
“The Union’s approach should allow minors to benefit from the huge potential of digital services, while protecting them from abuse and exploitation. It needs to limit the access of tech companies to our children, and not the other way around,” the document said.
The Commission’s proposal, which will also cover video gaming platforms, allows for gradual access to the various services according to age, while the obligations imposed on the companies will depend on the type of service and the age of the children.
The Commission declined to comment.
According to the document, companies will have to pay a supervisory fee to fund regulators’ enforcement and supervision.
Children from 15 onwards can set up their own accounts under the proposal, while children between 13 and 14 can ask parents to open introductory accounts for social media and video-sharing platforms under parental control and with limited contacts and strict time limits.
Accounts for children between 3 and 12 will be fully controlled by parents and will only be for child-friendly services with strict safety standards, the document said. Under-3s would have no access to the services.
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The Tobacco Moment is upon us, it seems. Though only for children presently. (Smoking products couldn’t be sold to those under 16 from 1908; suggestions of its harmful effects were prevalent around the same time, but rigorous proof not until 1950.)
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This software engineer is taking Google to the U.S. Supreme Court to clarify patent law • GeekWire
Grace Kaste:
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Jeff Kohler was working as a software engineer in 2005 when he started spending his nights and weekends on a side project: a web conferencing system that could record and replay live sessions. He filed for a patent without the help of a patent attorney, stuffing two CDs full of C++ source code into the application to show his work.
The patent was issued in 2010, and years later, after Kohler had joined Microsoft, the Redmond company licensed his technology for its Teams video-conferencing platform.
When YouTube later added the ability for viewers to pause, rewind, and change the playback speed of live video, Kohler saw in the feature what he considered to be his own invention. Kohler, who lives in Bellevue, Wash., sued Google for patent infringement in U.S. District Court in Seattle in April 2023.
But rather than defending the feature’s originality, Google argued that Kohler’s patent was too abstract to be eligible for patent protection. The district court agreed and dismissed the case, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed that decision.
Both decisions cited Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International, a 2014 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that raised the bar for software patent eligibility by holding that an inventor cannot patent an “abstract idea” implemented with generic technology.
Since then, Alice has been used to invalidate thousands of software patents, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly declined to revisit the standard. Now, Kohler is asking the Supreme Court to take up his case, not to overturn Alice, but to clarify how courts should apply it.
“The patent legal system has become hostile to inventors,” Kohler said. “Because of Alice, my case got stopped before it even started.”
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This does have the potential to be rendered totally moot once AIs are writing most code, given that that can’t be copyrighted. (But could it be patented, since the human has thought of the idea – the inventive step – behind the prompt?)
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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 