A new class action lawsuit in the US alleges that Expedia’s control of online hotel bookings artificially inflates prices. CC-licensed photo by on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Checking 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.
How Expedia rigs travel markets and raises your hotel prices • The Big Newsletter
Lee Hepner:
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Most discussions about travel costs by the media frame the cause as high demand, oil prices, or too much consumer spending. Americans just want to see each other, and alas, that’s costly. But I’m going to explain why they are wrong, and what we’re dealing with is an obvious conspiracy. It’s called Expedia, and it is responsible for 80% of every dollar spent booking hotels on the internet. And for a frame of reference, on its last investor call, the company noted that price per hotel booking increased by 5% over the last year, which is twice the rate of inflation.
Now, Expedia is not the only conspiracy at work here. There are others, such as hotel consolidation, junk fees, and hidden pricing algorithms. But what Expedia is doing is worth highlighting, because it plays a sort of ringmaster role in setting prices in the hotel space, not just for people who use Expedia, but even for those who don’t. The story is explained in a new lawsuit alleging a price fixing conspiracy engineered by the firm.
Here’s how it works.
Expedia has power because of its huge share of online bookings. If you are a hotel, you must list on the site, or you can’t get customers. The lawsuit alleges that Expedia Group, which also owns Hotels.com, Travelocity, and Orbitz, leverages its status as a critical channel for booking to charge hotels commissions anywhere from 15% to 30%. Indeed, the company’s executives bragged to investors in August about this pricing power, chalking up increased profit margins to “our supplier-funded promotions,” which are the kickbacks that hotels offer the middleman.
But there’s an important second layer to the problem. Those commissions get baked into hotel prices not just on Expedia but on direct bookings with hotels and other online travel agencies, like Booking.com, which also owns Priceline, Kayak, and Agoda. It even gets baked into higher prices for most hotels on their own websites.
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A subtle downside of aggregation online. Of course it’s only a lawsuit at present, rather than a decision, so we will find out (perhaps quite quickly) what the adjudicated truth is. (Yes, this is the second day in a row where a Big Newsletter article has been at the top, but it’s just chance.)
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Climate change is accelerating faster than we can respond, scientists warn • TIME
Simmone Shah:
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The climate is warming up faster than we can respond. According to a new report published Oct. 14 in the journal BioScience, “Earth’s climate system is moving deeper into uncharted territory.”
The State of the Climate, an annual report that tracks the Earth’s “vital signs,” monitors several climate related indicators—ranging from greenhouse gas concentrations and temperature changes to tree cover loss due to wildfire. The researchers found that, of the 16 planetary vital signs, seven are currently at record extremes. This includes sea levels and greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. Meanwhile several others, such as areas burned during wildfires and ocean heat levels, show evidence of acceleration or abrupt shifts.
The researchers warn that the rate of global warming appears to have accelerated, from about 0.05°C per decade between 1880 and 1970 to roughly 0.36°C per decade between 2010 and 2024—and the 2°C threshold meant to limit planetary damage could be reached before 2050 they warn. These accelerating and intensifying changes could raise the risk of reinforcing feedback loops and crossing tipping points—critical thresholds that, when crossed, can lead to accelerating and often irreversible environmental changes. In 2025, the Earth passed its first climate tipping point, as rising ocean temperatures, acidification, overfishing, and pollution are combining to cause coral bleaching and mortality.
“Earth’s life-support systems are being pushed beyond stable limits,” the report states, “with changes unfolding faster than our ability to respond.”
This year, a number of extreme weather events made the impacts of an acceleratingly warming planet impossible to ignore. July 2026 was the hottest month on record for the contiguous United States, with ocean temperatures also reaching a record high that month. Back-to-back heat waves in Europe lead to an estimated 35,000 excess deaths, preliminary reports show. A number of regions—including Utah in the U.S., Ontario, Canada, along with France, Spain, Britain, and Belgium have either experienced their worst wildfire years in history or are on track to do so. While we don’t yet know enough to link these individual weather events to climate change, research shows that it is supercharging extreme weather events.
Concentrations of greenhouse gases—including carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide—all reached record levels in 2026, the researchers say. In May 2026, atmospheric carbon dioxide exceeded 428 parts per million, roughly 50% above pre-industrial levels and generally higher than any time in the last 2 million years.
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Apate sends AI agents undercover to get scammed so they can gather fraud intelligence • TechCrunch
Ram Iyer:
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Most companies use AI agents to ship products faster or to speed up workflows. Apate.ai sends them undercover to get scammed.
Founded in 2024 on the basis of research done in Macquarie University in Sydney, the Australian startup deploys thousands of AI agents that masquerade as innocent victims. The agents can answer scam calls, respond to shady messages and emails, follow phishing links, and join social media groups to bait fraudsters. They pretend to be people of all stripes, sporting different ages, genders, and accents, and speak various languages as they try to keep scammers engaged long enough to learn something useful.
The company says its fleet of agents has so far wasted 17 years of scammers’ time across 2.5 million conversations. More importantly for Apate’s customer base of banks, telecom companies, government agencies, and utilities, the undercover agents try to get scammers to reveal things about themselves that are usually learned only after a victim has been scammed: bank accounts, crypto wallets, phone numbers, malicious websites, the brands they’re impersonating, and other details about the scams they’re running.
Apate, one of the finalists at this year’s Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt, then feeds that information to its customers, who use it to inform their anti-fraud measures and initiatives.
…It’s a curious evolution of scam-baiting, but it’s not so surprising given how much AI has empowered scammers and hackers. The FBI received more than 22,000 complaints of AI-related crimes in 2025, which resulted in about $893m in losses. More than $632m of that came from investment scams, in which the FBI says fraudsters use AI to run conversations, and deepfake the voices and appearances of celebrities, executives, and trusted figures.
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Naturally the impulse for this came from someone who got a spam call, and wondered about automating the stringing along of the spammer.
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Passkeys are not a trap • Scott Helme
Scott Helme:
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A post called “Passkeys are a trap. Do not use them” has been doing the rounds over the last few days, making it pretty high on Hacker News, and I’ve had it sent to me many times with an ‘is this true?’ kind of vibe. It’s written for “non-technical citizens of the web”, and the headline advice is to stop using passkeys and go back to TOTP codes and passwords.
The post makes what appears to be one central claim: Passkeys support something called attestation, which lets a website ask for cryptographic proof of what made the passkey.
The author calls this a “hidden dial” and argues that sites will slowly turn it up, until you’re only allowed to log in with approved software on an approved operating system, with no modifications, no LineageOS and no sharing your Netflix password. Throw in uBlock Origin, the FIDO Alliance membership list and the UK’s image-scanning proposals, and the conclusion is that passkeys are “not designed to prioritize your interests”. 😱
It’s a compelling story. It just doesn’t match how any of this actually works.
The passkeys most people use are synced passkeys, stored in iCloud Keychain, Google Password Manager, 1Password, Bitwarden or whatever other software of your choosing. These passkeys don’t give websites an attestation statement at all, and though a site can ask, what comes back is none. I know this because I wrote an opensource passkeys library and made it available to everyone.
If a consumer website decided tomorrow that it would only accept attested passkeys, it would lock out almost all of its own users, instantly. What website is going to do that? Besides, the guidance for consumer sites has been to not even request attestation for years now.
The post describes attestation as proving “that an approved passkey manager, operating system, and firmware are in use” which is simply not true.
When it is present, WebAuthn attestation tells the site the make and model of the authenticator, identified by its AAGUID, with a certificate chain from the vendor to back it up. It says nothing about your OS, your browser, your extensions, whether your phone is rooted or jailbroken, your firmware version, or even what colour it is.
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I had looked at the linked article and thought it seemed off. Helme points out that it’s a classic case of “escalate to certainty from unlikely possibility” – a tactic beloved of conspiracy theorists.
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The AI math isn’t mathing as infrastructure spending forecast to outstrip expected revenue • The Register
Dan Robinson:
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AI services are unlikely to deliver enough revenue to cover the expected capital expenditure going into IT infrastructure between now and 2030, and it looks like neocloud operators will largely bow out or be bought out.
This is the conclusion from Gartner, which has added up the anticipated investments in AI datacenters over the next several years, estimated the revenue that can be expected from AI-driven applications over the same period, and found the numbers come up short.
Gartner’s data comes from a report, “Prepare for AI Market Consolidation: Capital Write-Downs Could Exceed $4 Trillion by 2032“, which concludes that AI will not generate enough sales to profitably cover all of the planned AI capital spending before 2032 at the earliest. But forecasts typically focus on the end of the decade, so it ran the numbers for 2030 as well.
“In 2026, AI providers are expected to spend nearly $1 trillion on AI infrastructure, and are forecast to invest an additional $6 trillion between 2027 and 2030,” said Gartner senior director analyst Will Sommer.
“However, our research indicates that enterprise and consumer AI revenue will be insufficient to support profitable returns on all planned AI capital expenditures during this period.”Assuming a 12% return on invested capital (ROIC), which many companies are said to regard as the bar for acceptability, Gartner estimates AI datacenter operators would need to generate a total of $8.5 trillion in revenue to cover capital spending and financing costs while achieving that return.
Unfortunately, it forecasts that the total enterprise and consumer AI revenue that can be attributed to AI datacenters during this period will add up to no more than $3.6 trillion.
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The only question feels like whether the realisation will be slow or sudden. If it’s the latter, that would be really bad.
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Severe drought declared in parts of southern England • Sky News
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Severe drought has been declared in parts of Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Somerset, East Sussex and West Sussex, the government has said.
The south of England had its driest April to September in over a century, according to the government’s environmental department, Defra. Water firms will be told to monitor reservoir and river levels daily, as well as carry out tougher water quality checks due to lower dilution of sewage.
The announcement has been prompted by concerns over two reservoirs in particular. Ardingly in West Sussex, which serves about 95,000 properties, is only at 19% capacity, while Wimbleball in Somerset, which serves around 300,000 properties, is at 16% capacity. Normal capacity for this time of year should be about 75%.
South East Water and South West Water have been given permission to cut the amount of water the reservoirs send to nearby rivers by millions of litres per day. Defra said there were also concerns about levels in the Drift, Stithians, Tottiford and Venford reservoirs, which serve just over 100,000 households in Devon and Cornwall.
Yorkshire also entered drought status last week, joining all of central, southern and eastern England.
However, the south’s upgrade to “severe drought” is the most urgent designation possible.
It is declared when evidence shows drought is causing – or will soon cause – serious harm, and that emergency action is needed.
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The emergency action will principally consist of making sure businesses aren’t taking more water than they should. But that won’t make it rain, and won’t create the new reservoirs that have been needed for decades.
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BBC News channel launches on YouTube for viewers in UK and US • BBC News
Katie Razzall and Paul Glynn:
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The BBC News channel has been made available to stream live on YouTube for viewers in the UK and USA.
The trial, which began on Thursday, external, has been described by BBC bosses as “a significant step” in expanding access to “trusted, impartial journalism in more places people use every day”.
The move is an expansion of what the BBC has already done in other countries, with the news channel also available to YouTube viewers in Australia, Kenya, Nigeria, and Poland.
Broadening access to the service forms part of the BBC’s wider strategy to reach digitally-native new and younger audiences.
The channel offers rolling coverage of international and domestic news, as well as breaking news and the latest developments in the worlds of politics, business, technology, culture and sport.
The BBC’s YouTube strategy is widely seen a response to the increasing fragmentation of audiences.
The guarantees that viewers sit down and turn on their favourite channel – whatever is on it – are long gone. Now, their TV sets take them into a world of infinite choice and the BBC (along with the UK’s other public service broadcasters) knows it needs to go to where audiences are – as well as trying to entice them to its own platforms.
Thursday’s development is part of the specific drive by the BBC to take its trusted news to audiences who aren’t tuning in to the news channel directly or via the iPlayer.
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Fingers crossed it can find an audience amid the algorithm.
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Secret documents reveal donors behind $330m for Trump’s ballroom • The Washington Post
Jonathan O’Connell, Sarah Blaskey and Aaron Schaffer:
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A list obtained by The Washington Post reveals all the major donors to President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom project, including previously undisclosed contributors who have benefited from regulatory decisions, government contracts and, in one case, a pardon for a family member.
Tech giants Nvidia and Apple each committed $25m, the top contribution amount, the list shows. The Adelson family, one of the GOP’s largest donor dynasties, committed that sum as well, as did billionaire Charles Ergen, co-founder and chairman of telecommunications company Dish Network.
Absent from the list is Trump himself, who has said that he is helping to pay for the project. “It’s being paid for a hundred% by me and some friends of mine,” he said last year, days after demolition began on the old East Wing.
The White House publicly identified 37 people, companies and foundations as donors last October, without revealing the amount of their individual gifts.
The list obtained by The Post, an internal spreadsheet used to track contributions for the fundraising effort, contains the source, date and amount of all 67 donations above $10,000 recorded as of late last month. It shows a total of $333m from private donors, aligning with the administration’s public statements.
…the vast majority of the funds raised came from companies and wealthy individuals with interests before the federal government.
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A byword for corruption. Utterly incredible. And shaming for Apple to be among them.
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Greg Joswiak says Apple isn’t focused on making AI for ‘lunatic fringe’ • MacRumors
Joe Rossignol:
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In an interview with TIME‘s Andrew R. Chow, Apple’s marketing chief Greg Joswiak said Apple Intelligence is meant for “everyday people” as opposed to the “lunatic fringe.”
The full sentence: “In the midst of a populist AI backlash, they contend that they are building a modest but personalized and privacy-preserving form of AI that will actually help ordinary people as opposed to merely dazzling Silicon Valley’s ‘lunatic fringe,’ as Greg Joswiak, senior vice president of worldwide marketing, puts it.”
Joswiak apparently believes Apple Intelligence is not for “die-hard AI believers chasing superintelligence,” as Chow described it.
“We love them, and they can use it too, but that’s not our target,” said Joswiak. “It’s how to make it better for everyday people.”
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Except that’s the only time Joswiak is quoted using that phrase. He doesn’t use it anywhere else in any quoted sentence, which makes me suspicious. Joswiak is, like any well-practised Apple executive (and boy is he practised), very careful with his words. I wonder if we’re going to see a transcript of this, because I just don’t see him calling enthusiastic buyers of Mac minis the “lunatic fringe”.
(The full article is pretty dull, with no surprises if you’ve read anything about Apple in the past five years.)
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He crafted a crypto law for Trump—as his company got millions from a crypto giant • WSJ
Sam Kessler:
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Lawmakers and executives crowded into the East Room of the White House in July 2025 to watch President Trump sign the Genius Act, a landmark crypto bill that set rules for selling stablecoins pegged to the US dollar.
From a podium, Trump rattled off thank-yous to the law’s architects. “Where’s Bo Hines?” he asked. The president’s 29-year-old crypto adviser rose from the front row to applause.
What most people in the room didn’t know: While Hines was leading the White House’s push to pass the Genius Act, Tether—the company with the most at stake in the legislation—was steering millions of dollars to a business he co-owned, according to messages, internal documents and payment records reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Hines exchanged Signal messages showing that while he was in the White House, he took part in a group chat with his company partners, where he discussed legislative developments and relayed Genius Act talking points as his partners were communicating with Tether’s chief executive.
Once the bill was signed, Tether hired him—to run its US operations.
Hines had started Nxum, a small consulting firm, with his father and another partner around 2022. Each owned one-third. He stepped back from day-to-day management of the company when he joined the administration in early 2025 but kept his ownership stake, his government ethics disclosures show.
Weeks after Hines began working on stablecoin legislation inside the White House, Nxum, which had only dabbled in crypto until that point, started pursuing business with Tether, the world’s largest stablecoin issuer.
…Since the deal was signed, Nxum has earned $6.3 million from the arrangement, according to the documents, messages and blockchain records, plus a person involved in the deal.
The payments began while Hines was working to finalize the Genius Act—legislation that would dictate Tether’s ability to operate in the US.
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The levels of corruption are just off the scale. Amazing that this law got through the sclerotic American legislature, and then nobody noticed Hines having incredible conflicts of interest? These are not serious people.
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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. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
I bought a Mac mini a few days ago – to power my iMac repurposed as a screen-only. The assistant in the Apple shop was amazed – she’d never sold one before. That must make me a (proud) member of the lunatic fringe.