A Google Cloud outage knocked out ATM services for some people in the UK. (People still use cash?) CC-licensed photo by Henry Cha on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Enriching. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Publish (fake) stats, get cited by AI: the tactic that put my data all over the web • Peec AI
Metehan Yesilyurt:
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About seven months ago, I launched a website with 50,000 statistics. Every one of them was fake.
Google has forgotten the site exists and deindexed the pages, but ChatGPT hasn’t. Since the website went live seven months ago, it has sent more than 10,000 AI sessions its way. And now more than 330 referring domains, including Shopify, Bluehost, and DHL, link to the site. Its made-up numbers have also ended up in an academic paper and in a bank’s investment research.
At Peec AI and in the industry, we talk about GEO and SEO every day, and we keep looking for new tactics. I’ve been working on this stats page one for a long time, sharing pieces of it publicly along the way. Of course, it’s experimental, but the results have been hard to ignore.
…I bought a brand-new domain, stateglobe.com, and generated 50,000 statistics pages in a single day with GPT-4.1. The site purports to provide stats on SEO, content marketing, social media, e-commerce, and web technology from 200 countries. Except every number was totally invented. I never checked a single one. I pushed them to the site with a basic AI web design template. This cost me around $30. Later, I added 15,000 listicles on top of the statistics. That was about $20 more, so all in all, this is an experiment that came in at the very low price of about $50.
The reaction when I first shared it was wild. When my friend Kevin featured it in Growth Memo, it reached a much bigger audience. I think people responded so enthusiastically to this work because it showed great results while also speaking to the fears people have about what ends up in AI search results.
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Google, as he says, completely buried the site within days, but the bots are slurping it up. Which is concerning, because these statistics are essentially poisoning the knowledge base. (Worse than the things humans write? Well, OK, probably not.) One thing the page reminds me of is the endless optimistic “market research” reports one gets from consultancy agencies.
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A death, a plagiarism scandal and a quest for revenge: the bizarre tale of Otto Z • The Guardian
Alessio Perrone:
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Otto sank into his chair. As a doctor, he had seen death many times, but his own mother’s passing sent him into shock. He felt frozen, watching the windows glisten in the fading light. He was 66, and his brother and father had died years before. He had no friends. He had given all of his time, energy and attention to his mother’s care, and now that his task was suddenly over, he had no one to turn to. He mourned in solitude, with an impromptu ritual. He lit candles and set metal plates at the four corners of her bed. He sat beside her and thought about her soul.
Once the rite was complete, Otto picked up the phone and called a funeral home. He knew the procedure: as a doctor, he could issue his own mother’s death certificate. After he hung up, Otto waited. It was the last calm moment he would experience for many months.
After he called the funeral home, Otto told me, he waited beside his mother all night and into the next afternoon before he heard a knock at the door. He was surprised to see that, rather than doctors, the two men in the hallway were police officers. They wore bulletproof vests and carried guns. He invited them inside, where they scanned the rooms. He directed them to his mother’s bedroom and followed close behind, but the officers stopped him and asked him to take a seat.
While the officers inspected his mother’s body, Otto sat in his office. Forty-five minutes passed, and then he heard someone else enter the flat without knocking. A tall, stylish woman approached and introduced herself as a coroner from the Munich Institute of Forensic Medicine, before walking off to the bedroom.
Otto knew that a coroner – as opposed to a doctor or nurse – is only sent to the scenes of suspicious deaths. He followed her to the bedroom, where she had begun inspecting his mother’s body. Otto wasn’t easily rattled, but he told me that the way the coroner handled Doria threw him off. He found her elegant attire unprofessional, given the circumstances, and her bedside manner lacking. He said that he tried, however, to remain polite and helpful. As she went about her work, he offered his recollections from his mother’s final hours and an account of her long illness, which he had documented minutely over the years. Otto informed the coroner that he was a doctor, but it seemed to him that she was uninterested. She turned to the police officers and, without explanation, told them that this was a matter for law enforcement, before leaving the flat. Otto told me he wondered why nobody was listening to him, the grieving son, the doctor?
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You will never, ever guess where this goes. It’s a fascinating story filled with twists that any writer would be delighted to have invented.
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Google says cloud outage affecting UK banks and websites resolved • BBC News
Liv McMahon and James Kelly:
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Google Cloud says it has resolved disruption at its UK cloud site which caused an outage affecting UK banks, businesses and the courts.
The company, one of a few large cloud computing firms whose infrastructure and services underpin many online platforms, reported an “issue with multiple services” at its London data centre complex “europe-west2” early on Tuesday.
Revolut, Lloyds Bank and HSBC were among popular UK services that confirmed disruption on Tuesday morning, after thousands of reports of problems were raised by users online.The tech giant apologised to those affected and thanked customers for their patience.
“We have resolved a disruption to Google Cloud services at a third-party facility in our europe-west2 cloud region due to a power event,” a Google Cloud spokesperson said in a statement on Tuesday evening. “Services have been restored.”
They added that the company would publish an analysis of the incident on its service health dashboard, external, where it provides customers with updates about the status of its cloud services globally.
Cloud computing giants like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud make their services available to clients in local or regional sites around the world, which they call “regions”, containing their data centres.
In updates to its service dashboard on Tuesday morning, Google Cloud had said a number of its cloud services were “experiencing elevated errors and intermittent network failures in europe-west2 region” – its UK cloud facility in London.
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Revolut in particular essentially vanished into a hole: signups, sign-in, payments, transfers, top-ups, ATM withdrawals, stock trades and cryptocurrency transactions were all taken out. (OK the last one means it wasn’t a complete disaster.)
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CoreWeave’s debt is becoming the whole AI industry’s problem • The Verge
Elizabeth Lopatto:
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CoreWeave had a bad week last week. Its bonds slipped into distressed territory by a common definition — when investors demand 1,000 basis points [10 percentage points] more in yield than they’d get from government bonds. Last Tuesday Chamath “SPAC King” Palihapitiya noticed the distressed debt, and also asked whether the AI buildout was a private credit bubble. Its shares are down more than 20% since Tuesday’s close, which is kind of a lot! There even seemed to be some collateral damage in the market on other AI companies, too.
Now, I have also asked if the AI industry is a bubble, but when the SPAC King echoes concerns held by a lady whose ongoing question about AI is “How are we planning on affording this, champs?”, that’s a very different signal. When I say “yikes,” it’s one thing. When Elon Musk says it, that’s something else.
To make things worse for CoreWeave, Brannin McBee, one of the company’s cofounders, told the Financial Times — also last week, on the same day as Palihapitiya’s post — that the company wants to have its debt be investment-grade, rather than junk, so that it can borrow from insurers, as their capital is, in his words, “unlimited.” This is not entirely unreasonable — earlier this year, CoreWeave secured its first investment-grade chip loan. But when you talk about wanting to tap into the enormous sums of money that insurers have, that’s the kind of thing that makes investors afraid that CoreWeave — already a massive debtor — is going to borrow even more.
…CoreWeave has a lot of very expensive debt, and if that debt gets more expensive, that makes it even harder for CoreWeave to turn a profit.
CoreWeave is the poster child for AI debt, and as of its second quarter earnings, owed more than $35bn. That’s partly because it pioneered GPUs as collateral for loans, and partly because CoreWeave doesn’t have a real business beyond selling compute, a business on which it does not make money — the company lost more than a billion dollars in the first half of the year.
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It seems possible that companies like CoreWeave could get into serious financial trouble even while demand for GPUs is still going through the roof. Paying a 10% vig on your bonds gets expensive and difficult fast: see any Sopranos episode.
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Who is planting backdoors in Ledger crypto wallets? • Zero Day
Kim Zetter:
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After crypto wallet maker Ledger announced Friday that a backdoor embedded in a handful of Ledger wallets sold in SouthEast Asia allowed thieves to hijack around $102m in crypto from their owners, news has emerged of other Ledger wallets sold in Germany also having implants.
The hardware implants were originally found on an unknown number of Ledger Nano X wallets sold by an authorized Ledger reseller called CryptoBilis based in Malaysia. Ledger said the implants were found on a limited number of devices, all sold by the same seller. But a Ledger device owner in Europe has since said that he found an implant on a Nano X that he purchased at a large European electronics chain store in August and a second one he purchased this weekend at another store in the same chain. He believes these indicate that Ledger’s supply-chain has been compromised.
Since then, users and researchers have also reported finding implants in Ledger Flex and Ledger Stax devices – two of Ledger’s more recent line of devices used for securely storing keys used to access a device owner’s crypto accounts.
…In an update to X this weekend, Ledger suggested the implant problem may stem from authorized resellers obtaining Ledger wallets from illegitimate sources or reselling wallets that were bought and returned to them — after being compromised.
“We are reminding our authorized resellers and distributors to source products only through authorized channels and never to restock returned products,” Ledger wrote. “This is an ongoing threat that doesn’t just impact Ledger, but the whole ecosystem, and we are calling others in the space to work with us on making improvements for users…. Raising the bar on physical supply-chain integrity benefits the entire ecosystem.”
But [a German user called] Johannes, who purchased a second Ledger wallet from another MediaMarkt store on Monday and found an implant in it as well thinks this suggests that Ledger’s supply chain has been compromised.
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Anthropic Mythos: Bank of America hired 1,000 contractors to patch flaws • CNBC
Hugh Son:
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Bank of America has hired an army of external contractors to help it patch software vulnerabilities exposed by advanced artificial intelligence models including Anthropic’s Mythos, the bank’s CEO, Brian Moynihan, told CNBC.
In an interview after the bank’s third-quarter earnings release, Moynihan said that earlier this year the company rushed to bolster a wide spectrum of its internal and vendor code using thousands of employees and outside personnel.
“That risk is real risk, and that’s why when the frontier-type models came out. … A lot of us sat down and said, ’How do we figure out how to get through this quickly?” Moynihan told CNBC’s Leslie Picker.
“We put on a thousand contractors to help us do the patching work in the second quarter, and those people remain here today, helping us, on top of the three thousand people we have in that area,” he said.
The bank spent a “couple hundred million plus” on the software remediation and regulatory issues related to anti-money laundering compliance in the third quarter, Moynihan told analysts earlier.
The comments are some of the first by a major US corporation to specify the manpower and dollars spent to protect software systems from Mythos, which was released to a small group of banks, technology firms and government agencies in April.
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Upped the people working on the software by a third, and it’s all remediation? That banking software must make Swiss cheese look like armour plate.
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Cloud rats and software roaches • Idle Words
Maciej Cieglowski:
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To my mind, though, fretting about feral LLMs is like living in New York and worrying that wild mustangs will take over Central Park. Mustangs are certainly an issue in some places—I own a cabin in New Mexico where the wild horses have learned to come bully me for apples as soon as they see my car pull in. But in a city full of rotting trash and warm sewers, there are more immediate pests to worry about. Cockroaches are a plague on city dwellers not because they are intelligent, but because they are adaptable enough to thrive in an environment we thought we were building for ourselves. And rats show that a little intelligence in an adversarial setting goes a long way. To the extent that any software breaks containment and starts to actively thrive in the cloud, it will be far easier for small roach-like pieces of self-replicating code to do it than for a full LLM to escape, weights and all.
What might such software pests look like in the wild?
For a roach or rat to survive in the human world, it needs access to the three necessities of life: dark corners, drainpipes, and trash heaps. I think we can agree that the Internet is full of all three.
A dark corner in this metaphor is any place where it is easy to hide and hard to search—think vast thickets of memory, petabytes of storage, bloated binaries, and the innumerable caches and buffers (from the hardware level on up) that make up the modern Internet.
Drainpipes are any links that enable travel between constituent parts of the built environment, both to find new resources and to escape when the going gets heavy. In a world of networked devices, this is a low bar to clear. Any connection big enough for a piece of software to hop across can serve this function; even low-bandwidth bluetooth links are probably enough to transmit software pests.
Finally, there are trash heaps, mountains of consumable resources left sitting out unprotected. This pretty much defines the networked world, where at any given moment most memory, CPU and bandwidth sits idle, especially on the highly capable devices we all carry in our pocket.
Fom the point of view of small, self-perpetuating software pests, this is a rich and completely undefended landscape. What has been missing up to now is the element of natural selection. But the networked environment may have become diverse enough to support it.
…Remember that death is the best form of reinforcement learning. A scenario where mutable rogue software exists, and 99.9% of it is successfully caught, is one where we’re guaranteed to get highly capable, persistent software pests in short order.
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Cieglowski is always worth reading at length.
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Feds suspect ransom negotiator ran ShinyHunters extortion site • Krebs on Security
Brian Krebs:
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U.S. federal investigators pursuing the ShinyHunters hacking group that recently stole highly sensitive data from the FBI have identified executives at two different ransomware negotiation firms who maintained unusually close relations with the extortion group, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. Sources close to the investigation say one of the executives in the United States even helped ShinyHunters operate a website that pressured victims into paying a ransom.
Hackers aligned with ShinyHunters have claimed credit for dozens of major data breaches since 2019, when the group was primarily operated by cybercriminals living in France. As those original members were arrested or jailed one by one, control over the ShinyHunters brand eventually passed to “Rey,” identified last year as a teenage hacker from Amman, Jordan. According to the FBI, ShinyHunters has extorted more than $70m from victims so far this year.
In late September, ShinyHunters hacked the FBI recruitment website fbijobs.gov and taunted the agency by threatening to publish the stolen files, which reportedly included medical and psychological records, Social Security numbers and home addresses, and information about each employee’s unit and specialization.
…On October 9, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that the FBI arrested a 54-year-old Canadian cybersecurity executive named Edward Dubrovsky in connection with the ShinyHunters investigation. Dubrovsky, who recently published a book on handling cyber extortion that recommended always engaging with the hackers, was charged with threatening to disclose stolen or hacked data and interfering with interstate commerce through extortion, according to court records. Politico reports prosecutors have asked that Dubrovsky remain in custody pending trial, and that records related to his case remain under seal.
A source close to the investigation told KrebsOnSecurity that [ShinyHunters suspect Pepijn] Van der Stap’s Signal messages showed he had frequent conversations with Mr. Dubrovsky and with at least one executive at a large U.S.-based consulting firm, and that these executives often knew the details about new ShinyHunters victims before the victims themselves had even learned of the breach.
…KrebsOnSecurity has learned from two sources close to the ShinyHunters probe that FBI investigators believe at least one executive at a U.S.-based consulting firm played an active role in operating the now-defunct ShinyHunters victim extortion website “shinywire[.]com.”
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Definitely some perverse incentives going on there: ransomware negotiators are always going to advise that you keep, well, negotiating. But running the extortion site is taking the dialogue too far.
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Europe EV sales rose 70% in September, around 30% of market share • Reuters
Mathias de Rozario:
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Battery-electric vehicle (BEV) registrations in Europe rose 70.3% in September, as high oil prices, subsidies and the availability of more affordable models continued to lead the growth.
Around a third of cars sold across 17 key European markets in September were BEVs, data from E-Mobility Europe, New Automotive and Fier Automotive showed on Monday, amid a deal made by France and Germany to soften proposed EU car emissions rules.
• BEV registrations reached 300,202 vehicles in September, giving fully electric cars a 32.6% market share
1.98 million BEVs have been registered across Europe so far this year, up 38.1% from the same period in 2025• France hit a 41.7% BEV market share with 65,243 registrations, while Germany’s share reached 34.6% with 88,724 registrations.
• The Nordic market remained Europe’s most electrified, led by Norway at 98.8% and followed by Denmark (88.8%), Finland (62.7%) and Sweden (49.0%).
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No prizes for guessing why.
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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
