If you want to buy a Hermes Birkin bag, be prepared to be treated with suspicion by the company itself. And don’t wear the wrong watch. CC-licensed photo by Yvette Ilagan on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. Do parrots like them though? 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 WhatsApp took over the global conversation • The New Yorker

Sam Knight:

»

British politics and, arguably, the British state are coördinated by WhatsApp. Ninety-two% of U.K. internet users are on the platform. Police officers banter on it. The National Health Service relies on it. On the afternoon of March 13, 2020—ten days before the U.K. entered its first covid lockdown—Dominic Cummings, a senior adviser to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, formed a five-man WhatsApp group that came to more or less run the country.

That fall, a reporter from the Daily Mail asked a government spokesperson, via WhatsApp, whether it was true that national policies were being conceived this way. The spokesperson WhatsApped Simon Case, the country’s most senior civil servant, with a suggested response: “the PM does not make government decisions via WhatsApp.” Case replied on WhatsApp less than a minute later: “Erm—is that true? I am not sure it is. I think we will have to ignore.”

…WhatsApp is phatic before it is anything else. It is an architecture of presence. It winks with life, informing you who is online and when they were last seen. Tiny bundles of data—relayed on the app’s servers through sockets, or continuous connections—tell you that your best friend is typing. Koum introduced “read receipts,” to show that texts were being sent and seen. At first, he imagined miniature icons that would represent a message’s odyssey through the network—showing servers and hard drives—but Borzov suggested something simpler: one check mark to show that WhatsApp had received your message and two to show that it had been delivered. When the message was opened, the check marks turned blue.

Blue check marks have saved some lives (WhatsApp is often the platform of choice for disaster responders) and tested many relationships. Whether to respond to a message that someone knows you have read with a heart, a thumbs-up, or a crying-face emoji is a modern-day imponderable, although I’m pretty sure that Malinowski would have taken a hard line on the subject. (In phatic conversation, he notes, “taciturnity means not only unfriendliness but directly a bad character.”)

…Sociologists who study WhatsApp family groups sometimes call them W.F.G.s. In 2023, Galit Alkobi and Natalia Khvorostianov, of the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, published a study of Israeli W.F.G.s and suggested that there were three archetypal roles in these groups: kin-keepers, who are committed to online family life; flickerers, who are seemingly indifferent; and silent warm experts, who are problem solvers. We all know who we are. Alkobi conducted forty-three interviews with family members about their W.F.G.s and found that groups encompassing three generations showed extremely similar traits: problematic-discourse avoidance, an exaggerated writing style (exuberant celebrations, morose commiserations), and routine ejections.

«

And there’s plenty more. For the American readers of the New Yorker, of course, all this talk of WhatsApp is puzzling: they tend to use iMessage because the iPhone predominates, or possibly Signal. But now, as Knight points out, it’s growing fast, and there are more than 100 million users there.
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Grok was finally updated to stop undressing women and children, X Safety says • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

Late Wednesday, X Safety confirmed that Grok was tweaked to stop undressing images of people without their consent.

“We have implemented technological measures to prevent the Grok account from allowing the editing of images of real people in revealing clothing such as bikinis,” X Safety said. “This restriction applies to all users, including paid subscribers.”

The update includes restricting “image creation and the ability to edit images via the Grok account on the X platform,” which “are now only available to paid subscribers. This adds an extra layer of protection by helping to ensure that individuals who attempt to abuse the Grok account to violate the law or our policies can be held accountable,” X Safety said. Additionally, X will “geoblock the ability of all users to generate images of real people in bikinis, underwear, and similar attire via the Grok account and in Grok in X in those jurisdictions where it’s illegal,” X Safety said.

X’s update comes after weeks of sexualized images of women and children being generated with Grok finally prompting California Attorney General Rob Bonta to investigate whether Grok’s outputs break any US laws.

In a press release Wednesday, Bonta said that “xAI appears to be facilitating the large-scale production of deepfake nonconsensual intimate images that are being used to harass women and girls across the Internet, including via the social media platform X.” Notably, Bonta appears to be as concerned about Grok’s standalone app and website being used to generate harmful images without consent as he is about the outputs on X.

Before today, X had not restricted the Grok app or website. X had only threatened to permanently suspend users who are editing images to undress women and children if the outputs are deemed “illegal content.” It also restricted the Grok chatbot on X from responding to prompts to undress images, but anyone with a Premium subscription could bypass that restriction, as could any free X user who clicked on the “edit” button on any image appearing on the social platform.

«

Marianna Spring, the BBC’s disinformation correspondent, remarked on a podcast that she could see the problem that was coming when Grok’s image-editing was made widely available, and that UK regulator Ofcom should have too – to say nothing of X and Elon Musk. But Musk is incapable of understanding the malice that exists out there, partly because he’s immersed in it; it’s like asking a fish to comment on the water.
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The Atlantic, Penske, and Vox Media sue Google for adtech antitrust violations • The Verge

Lauren Feiner:

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Lawsuits seeking damages from Google’s illegal ad tech monopoly are piling up following the Justice Department’s successful antitrust case. Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company, is the latest in a wave of media companies that have filed suit against Google, seeking to be reimbursed for the monopoly profits the tech company allegedly made at publishers’ expense.

“Absent Google’s conduct, Vox Media would be able to make available even more, higher quality impressions for purchase on Vox Media’s webpages and create more high-quality, premium journalism,” Vox Media alleges in its lawsuit, filed Wednesday in the Southern District of New York. The Atlantic, which is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, filed a similar lawsuit in the same district this week, as did Penske Media, which is an investor in Vox Media and owns brands including Rolling Stone, Billboard, and The Hollywood Reporter. Later on Wednesday, two more publishers — McClatchy Media Company and Condé Nast owner Advance Publications — filed similar lawsuits. Google is also facing lawsuits from ad tech providers like PubMatic and OpenX, some of which testified in the trial about how Google’s dominance shut out competition.

…The publishers claim Google’s dominance lets it “depress prices for publisher inventory below competitive levels”
The lawsuits underscore the ways that the highly technical subject of the 2024 trial impacts an ecosystem of publishers and tech providers. For example, the media company complaints outline how Google’s illegal monopoly of the market for publisher ad servers, used to manage ad space for sale on publisher websites, has effectively stymied any viable competitors they might consider moving to.

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Microsoft is closing its employee library and cutting back on subscriptions • The Verge

Tom Warren:

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Microsoft’s library of books is so heavy that it once caused a campus building to sink, according to an unproven legend among employees. Now those physical books, journals, and reports, and many of Microsoft’s digital subscriptions to leading US newspapers, are disappearing in a shift described inside Microsoft as an “AI-powered learning experience.”

Microsoft started cutting back on its employee subscriptions to news and reports services in November, with some publishers receiving an automated email cancellation of a contract. “This correspondence serves as official notification that Microsoft will not renew any existing contracts upon their respective expiration dates,” reads an email from Microsoft’s vendor management team. “We would like to take this opportunity to express our sincere appreciation for your partnership, collaboration, and continued support throughout our engagement.”

Strategic News Service (SNS), which has provided global reports to Microsoft’s roughly 220,000 employees and executives for more than 20 years, is no longer part of Microsoft’s subscription list. In an email to Microsoft employees that relied on SNS reports, the publisher notes that “Microsoft has just released an automated announcement that all library contracts, of which the SNS Global Report is perhaps the most strategic for your own use, are to be turned off.”

Microsoft employees I’ve spoken to recently have lost access to digital publications like The Information. They’re also unable to perform digital checkouts of business books from the Microsoft Library. While Microsoft often rotates the publishers it uses in its Library service, this time it’s part of a much broader change that seems like corporate cost cutting mixed with the continued push for AI.

«

Steven Sinofsky, who worked at Microsoft through its crucial growth years and led the Office team (among others), called it “a crown jewel of the early days”, which bought every PC book and two copies of any piece of software and would get any magazine or article you wanted, if they didn’t have it.

But don’t worry, CoPilot is here to make them up!
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My work went from air-conditioned offices to delivering food on a bike. The culture shock is significant • The Guardian

David Rayfield started working as a bike messenger in Melbourne:

»

When you deliver for companies like Uber Eats, no two shifts are the same. I’d say 80% of my deliveries are fast food – a combination of McDonald’s, KFC, Hungry Jacks and coffee. Lots of coffee. My new workplace couldn’t be more different than the grey blur of an office, surrounded by the same walls and same people week after week. The culture shock of going from comfy chairs and morning teas to trying not to get killed in traffic was significant.

After being made redundant four times in six years, months passed with hundreds of unsuccessful job applications. Bills needed to be paid. The big ones were still looming, but the small costs could be covered by delivering for Uber Eats. My Xbox was gathering dust so I sold it at Cash Converters and put the money towards a half-decent mountain bike.

The first thing that hits you riding is the feeling of independence. In between delivering Grey Goose vodka and KFC Zinger burgers, there’s the realisation that it’s just you out there. After four months, I haven’t talked to anyone at Uber Eats. I signed up on my phone, they sent me a fluoro thermal bag, and off I went. I don’t have to worry about anybody making me redundant because there is no anybody – there’s just me. If I want to spend hours in the park eating lunch, I will. Need more sleep? That’s between me and my doona. Granted, my wages are much lower, but what value can be placed on listening to Wu-Tang Clan with wind in my hair versus dreading another company restructure?

Just to be clear, my hair is secure underneath a helmet. Which was good for when I collided with a car and ended up with a face full of road. There are lots of bike paths in Melbourne, but far too many of them are squeezed in between moving traffic and parked traffic. They’re less than a metre wide and often occupied by wavering cars, massive trucks or in this case, part of a parked Ford Fiesta. Before I could react, a driver had opened their door into the bike lane without looking. I couldn’t do anything except stop my bike dead while my body crashed into the bitumen.

Things like this happen too often.

…I always knew urban planning was designed around cars but now I feel it in my bones. Not only is the amount of space dedicated to cars immense, society focuses on cars first. Shopfronts and advertisements face the road, hundreds of car parks take up thousands of metres and I avoid countless potholes in bike lanes while the cars right next to me drive on pristine asphalt.

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The third audience is generative AI • Dries Buytaert

Dries Buytaert is the founder of Drupal, the website and blogging platform:

»

I used Claude Code to build a new feature for my site this morning. Any URL on my blog can now return Markdown instead of HTML.

I added a small hint in the HTML to signal that the Markdown version exists, mostly to see what would happen. My plan was to leave it running for a few weeks and write about it later if anything interesting turned up.

Within an hour, I had hundreds of requests from AI crawlers, including ClaudeBot, GPTBot, OpenAI’s SearchBot, and more. So much for waiting a few weeks.

For two decades, we built sites for two audiences: humans and search engines. AI agents are now the third audience, and most websites aren’t optimized for them yet.

We learned how to play the SEO game so our sites would rank in Google. Now people are starting to invest in things like Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO).

…The speed of adoption tells me AI agents are hungry for cleaner content formats and will use them the moment they find them. What I don’t know yet is whether this actually benefits me. It might lead to more visibility in AI answers, or it might just make it easier for AI companies to use my content without sending traffic back.

«

That’s the worry, isn’t it? The first audience is real humans. The second is search engines. And now the third one is generative AI, eagerly slurping up anything new or changed. But as Buytaert says, will that bring traffic?
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Home address, social media checks: how Hermes stalks would-be buyers before (and after) selling a Birkin • NDTV

Dristi Sharma:

»

At first glance, buying a luxury handbag should be simple enough if you have the money. Walk into a boutique, choose what you like, pay, leave. But at Hermes, one of the world’s most powerful luxury houses, money alone rarely guarantees access. Instead, shoppers are quietly inducted into what even loyal clients jokingly call the “Hermes game” a complex, opaque system where patience, perception and behaviour matter as much as spending power.

The conversation around this unwritten game sharpened last week when Hermes hosted an ultra-exclusive private sale in Paris, open only to a shrinking and tightly vetted circle of clients. At the same time, prices for leather goods and ready-to-wear quietly rose, according to Glitz. The timing was telling. This was not a routine price hike, but another signal of how firmly Hermes is tightening control over access, scarcity and status.

…Ironically, while Hermes emphasises “relationships”, clients increasingly find it difficult to build genuine rapport with sales associates. Staff are encouraged to avoid overt familiarity, as relationships deemed too close can trigger managerial suspicion around favouritism or resale risks.

This creates a structural mistrust that stiffens interactions and undermines the warm, personalised experience luxury retail typically promises. From the brand’s perspective, this rigidity serves a purpose. Control is central to the Hermes model. The goal is not merely to sell bags, but to protect the symbolic power of scarcity that surrounds them.

The booming second-hand luxury market and stricter anti-money-laundering regulations have intensified this scrutiny. As one sales associate at a major Paris boutique told Glitz, “Every new client is automatically a suspect.” Staff now collect and assess far more data than before, from home addresses and their perceived prestige to social media activity and online presence. Sales associates are trained to evaluate whether a client’s buying journey appears coherent.

Rapid accumulation of non-quota bags to hit a spending threshold raises red flags, as does shopping across multiple boutiques or countries. Furniture purchases, interestingly, score highly, signalling long-term commitment rather than quick flips. Loyalty to one store, cross-category shopping and a clear alignment with the Hermes universe all work in a client’s favour.

Even subtle signals matter. Wearing an Audemars Piguet or Richard Mille watch is read positively, while a flashy Rolex may be judged ostentatious.

«

Please enjoy this glimpse into another, weirdly suspicious world.
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How to manipulate prediction markets for your greater good • Polemic Paine

Polemic Paine:

»

It’s 8PM Eastern Time on January 14th, 2026. In four hours, a Polymarket bet will resolve.

Earlier today, an account called “mutualdelta”, so fresh it still had that new-car smell, dropped over $160,000 on “Yes” for a US military strike on Iran by end of day. They scaled it to over $240,000 as the day progressed. The odds, which had been languishing around 14%, shot up to 25%. Twitter lost its mind.

Real-time tracking threads. Speculation about insider knowledge. The whole circus.

The market closes at 11:59 PM ET tonight. As I write this, no strike has occurred. The bet is most likely going to zero.

And somewhere, I’m fairly certain, someone is counting their money.

Just not from Polymarket.

«

As you’ll now know, the attack didn’t happen, and so the money was lost. So why make the dramatic money-losing bet? In order to make money somewhere else, as the writer explains. It’s complicated, but makes total sense, and shows why you really shouldn’t pay too much attention to Polymarket (a predictions betting market) – or at least not take it entirely seriously.
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New UK offshore wind farms could significantly cut power prices • Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit

»

The 8.4GW of offshore wind power announced this week in the Contracts for Difference (CfDs) auction Allocation Round 7 (AR7) is set to boost clean power output, such that – had these wind farms been operating over the last year – gas power generation could have been a third (35%) lower, cutting day-ahead wholesale electricity prices by up to £11 per MWh (13%), down to £72/MWh, according to analysis by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU).

The price reductions caused by these new renewables would have been on top of the savings delivered by operational wind farms pushing gas off the system, which cut the average price by around £38/MWh in 2025, down from £121/MWh to £83/MWh. [3]

Taken together, these results suggest that, had Britain deployed no wind power over recent decades and had instead relied more on gas, power prices could have been up to £49/MWh (67% i.e. two-thirds) higher in 2025 compared to if renewables had been rolled out faster. [4]

Jess Ralston, Energy Analyst at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, said: “It might not be itemised on bills, but more British renewables squeezing gas off the system has the effect of reducing wholesale power prices, lowering those costs for both industry and households.

“There’s lots of large numbers being bandied around, but the reality is that the offshore wind projects secured today are likely to see levies on bills break-even. And in the event of another gas price spike, which given uncertainty in petro-states worldwide is possible, could see billpayers paid back.”

«

Various 19th century loons have come out of the woodwork at the announcement of this nuclear power station’s worth of wind, which they’re sure could be more cheaply done with gas, ignoring the volatility of gas prices and its greenhouse effects.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The rising popularity of vinyl has also led to “listening parties” which ban phones and other distractions. CC-licensed photo by Tom Collins on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. Groovy. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Why listening parties are everywhere right now • Dazed

Josh Crowe:

»

Listening parties [for new albums] have rapidly evolved from industry-only previews into a central pillar of modern album rollouts. Artists from Billie Eilish and Frank Ocean to independent collectives are increasingly favouring immersive listening experiences over traditional launches. In an era where listening to music largely happens via streaming services, these in-person events offer an alternative which demands time and attention – and, crucially, fosters community.

Streaming has transformed how music is consumed, but in doing so, many argue it has also flattened the album format. While access has never been easier, depth of engagement has become harder to sustain. Listening parties push back against this logic. They ask audiences to slow down, to sit with an album in its entirety, and to experience it collectively.

For fans, the collective element can be as powerful as the music itself. Lysette, who attended Rosalía’s LUX listening party the day before the album’s release, describes the event as a rare space for connection. Listening to the record together heightened that sense of shared experience. “We could see everyone’s reactions to each song. They’re all so different on this album, so it was really special to experience that collectively, then talk about it afterwards.” For Lysette, the palpable attention to detail – from the organisation to the atmosphere – only deepened the emotional impact. “It really built excitement for the album. It’s such a great way to connect, not only with the music but with other people who love that artist in similar ways.”

She also points to the scalability of these events. “It felt unique, but also doable. It’s not a long event, but it supports fan communities in cities all around the world — especially places that aren’t physically close to where the artist is based.” In that sense, listening parties offer global reach without sacrificing intimacy. And intimacy is increasingly important: for Gen Z especially, these events tap into a broader desire for ‘analogue’ experiences.

«

Taking phones completely out of the equation – as is demanded at listening parties – makes a huge difference. But there’s definitely a hunger for the analogue experience among younger generations. In the town where I live there’s a vinyl record shop, and many of its most regular customers are under 30. One of them, the owner told me, comes in with his (parents’?) pop albums, sells them to the shop (which can resell them – that’s where most vinyl comes from now), and buys prog rock albums from the 1970s and 1980s. Everything old is new again.
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Home secretary says she has no confidence in West Midlands police chief • BBC News

Susie Rack and Alex McIntyre:

»

At appearances on 1 December and 6 January, [West Midlands police chief constable Craig] Guildford told the Home Affairs Select Committee the force “do not use AI”, rather that it was a Google search that provided the erroneous information [that Maccabi Tel Aviv football fans had rioted in a match against West Ham – a fixture which never happened].

In his letter to the chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee published on Wednesday, Guildford said the information “arose as a result of a use of Microsoft Copilot” and offered a “profound apology” for the mistake.

A Microsoft spokesperson told the BBC: “We are not able to replicate what is being reported. Copilot combines information from multiple web sources into a single response with linked citations. It informs users they are interacting with an AI system and encourages them to review the sources.”

[Police and Crime Commissioner] Sir Andy [Foster’s] review found eight inaccuracies in a report from the force to Birmingham’s safety group, including a reference to the non-existent Tel Aviv-West Ham game.

Others included overstating the number of Dutch police officers deployed during a Maccabi match in Amsterdam and claims Muslim communities had been intentionally targeted by Tel Aviv fans.

The decision on the ban from the safety group – which is made up of representatives from the council, police and other authorities – prompted political outrage, including from Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer.

«

This is surely the first time that AI, and specifically Microsoft CoPilot, has been held responsible for a policing mistake. Or should one say – the first time that we know of.
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Bandcamp’s mission and our approach to Generative AI • Bandcamp blog

»

Bandcamp’s mission is to help spread the healing power of music by building a community where artists thrive through the direct support of their fans. We believe that the human connection found through music is a vital part of our society and culture, and that music is much more than a product to be consumed. It’s the result of a human cultural dialog stretching back before the written word.

Similarly, musicians are more than mere producers of sound. They are vital members of our communities, our culture, and our social fabric. Bandcamp was built to directly connect artists and their fans, and to make it easy for fans to support artists equitably so that they can keep making music.

Today we are fortifying our mission by articulating our policy on generative AI, so that musicians can keep making music, and so that fans have confidence that the music they find on Bandcamp was created by humans.

Our guidelines for generative AI in music and audio are as follows:

• Music and audio that is generated wholly or in substantial part by AI is not permitted on Bandcamp. 

• Any use of AI tools to impersonate other artists or styles is strictly prohibited in accordance with our existing policies prohibiting impersonation and intellectual property infringement.

«

The proof is in the pudding, of course, but the expectation will be that the community will report suspicious content.
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Getting data out of a PDF figure • Adam Kucharski on Substack

Adam Kucharski:

»

Want to get the data out of a PDF figure? As in, the actual data – not a rough trace-along-the-lines version?

A few years ago I made a somewhat popular R package that allowed users to extract the underlying geometry of a PDF figure, so they could get the exact data points that went into the original figure. (Which came in handy for public health emergencies, when governments often release crucial data buried in PDF figures.)

But the user experience was still a bit clunky – it required ghostscript to be set up, and there were some intermediate output files that required manual edits.

So I rebuilt it with Claude Code. Everything runs locally in the browser, and hopefully now a much smoother experience!
Try it out here: https://adamkucharski.github.io/pdf2plot/.

«

This is sure to come in useful for some people, even if increasingly one might think that this capability will be sucked natively into chatbots. (This is the first time of quoting a Substack Note rather than Substack article, I think.)
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How London finally cracked mobile phone coverage on the Underground • Ian Visits

Ian Mansfield:

»

Dotted around London, there are a number of private hotels that aren’t the sort of hotel you might expect – they’re needed to make mobile phones work on the London Underground.

They’re not for humans, but for huge racks of computer and electronics equipment – and each of the UK’s mobile networks is renting space inside them, as this was one of the innovations that allowed phones to work underground in the first place.

While many newer underground railways have had mobile coverage in their tunnels for years, fitting it into the London Underground kept running into the same problem – it costs a lot of money and needs a lot more space in the stations than is available.

Classically, each of the mobile networks would install its own kit in each station and manage it, but there simply wasn’t enough space for that in London’s old tube stations, many of which were built before the wireless telegraph was even invented.

However, as radio equipment has become smaller and cleverer, it’s now possible for several networks to share the same equipment, and in 2021 Boldyn Networks (then BAI Communications) signed a deal to build a “neutral network” that can be leased to mobile networks.

Bodyn has a 20-year concession with Transport for London (TfL) to build and operate the network, and, aside from internal staff time spent managing the project, it’s being delivered at no cost to TfL.

…Although it’s taken four years to get about half of the London Underground covered with a phone signal, they now expect the rest to take just a year to complete. That’s in part thanks to experience speeding things up, and also because a lot of the equipment has already gone in over the past four years. All they need are the final bits to complete the job and switch it on… So, most of it should be live by the end of 2026.

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CreepyLink

»

CreepyLink: the URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible.

Normal links are too trustworthy. Make them creepy.

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I pasted in a search term and it yielded https://netflix.c1ic.link/urgent_8yvNSS_photo_viewer_update.zip which, despite appearances, does actually go to the search page. (I checked with curl because you want to just be careful, don’t you.)

Nice to see that people can still have fun online.
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Australia’s march toward 100% clean energy • WIRED

Julian Spector:

»

Australia has put itself on a realistic path to achieving what climate activists around the world have long dreamed of: running its power grid entirely on renewable energy.

The Australian Energy Market Operator oversees the nation’s power markets. Chief among them, the National Electricity Market serves about 90% of customers, minus remote areas and the west coast. At its peak, the system uses 38 gigawatts of power—more than New York state’s peak consumption. Over the last five years, AEMO has rigorously studied how the country, whose coal fleet is aging and which banned nuclear energy decades ago, can run this grid on renewables alone.

“This is not a climate-zealot kind of approach,” AEMO CEO Daniel Westerman told Canary Media. ​“Our old coal-fired power stations are breaking down; they’re retiring,” he said. ​“They’re getting replaced by the least-cost energy, which is renewable energy, backed with storage, connected in with transmission. We’ll have a bit of gas there for the winter doldrums. That is just what’s happening.”

Australia’s efforts could offer a proof of concept for how a nation with a bustling, modern economy can rapidly shift its electricity from fossil fuels—mostly coal with some gas—to wind, solar, storage, and other renewable sources like hydropower.

“There’s nothing impossible about 100% renewable supply,” said Jesse Jenkins, a Princeton University professor who has studied net-zero pathways for the US. ​“Australia has a better chance of this than almost anywhere.”

So far, renewables have surged to about 35% of annual electricity production, while coal still leads with 46%, according to the International Energy Agency. Because this transition is primarily driven by market forces, rather than a legislative or regulatory requirement, Westerman couldn’t say for sure when Australia will hit the 100% mark. He does expect 90% of Australia’s coal generation will be gone by 2035, and the rest could shutter later that decade.

«

Westerman was in charge of the UK National Grid when it began running without coal in 2017; seven years later the last coal-powered power station shut down. Gradually and then suddenly.
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Digg launches its new Reddit rival to the public • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

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The reboot of the early internet online community Digg, a one-time rival to Reddit, is moving forward. The company, which is today back under the ownership of its original founder, Kevin Rose, along with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, is launching its open beta to the public on Wednesday.

Similar to Reddit, the new Digg offers a website and mobile app where you can browse feeds featuring posts from across a selection of its communities and join other communities that align with your interests. There, you can post, comment, and upvote (or “digg”) the site’s content.

Originally a Web 2.0-era news aggregation site, Digg was once valued at $175m in 2008 but was ultimately outpaced by Reddit. That earlier version was split up in 2012, with its largest stake sold to the incubator Betaworks, while LinkedIn and The Washington Post picked up other pieces. This iteration of Digg drew additional investment in 2016 but was later sold to a digital advertising company in 2018.

…the rise of AI has presented an opportunity to rebuild Digg, Rose and Ohanian believe, leading them to acquire Digg last March through a leveraged buyout by True Ventures, Ohanian’s firm Seven Seven Six, Rose and Ohanian themselves, and the venture firm S32. The company has not disclosed its funding.

They’re betting that AI can help to address some of the messiness and toxicity of today’s social media landscape. At the same time, social platforms will need a new set of tools to ensure they’re not taken over by AI bots posing as people.

«

So this is at least the third incarnation (at least) of Digg, which fell away from its original success due to a mistaken redesign in 2010 which lost out to Reddit. This feels like another attempt to get the band back together, but nobody’s interested in the songs they’re playing.
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Experts predict major shift in global energy production: “[it] will dominate the future” • The Cooldown

Cody Januszko:

»

Within the next few years, renewable energy sources are expected to surpass coal, oil, and gas on a global scale.

According to the International Energy Agency’s 2025 report, “Global renewable power capacity is expected to double between now and 2030, increasing by 4,600 gigawatts.” 

The agency observed that this is roughly equivalent to the combined power generation of China, the European Union, and Japan. 

However, the outlook isn’t entirely rosy. The 2025 World Energy Outlook considers three scenarios. The first considers current policies, the second considers policies that have been spoken about in the political arena, and the third considers countries aiming for net-zero emissions by 2050. 

In the first scenario, the IEA projected the highest increase in demand for energy sources like oil and natural gas. While the other two scenarios saw less of these energy types, all three predicted that the threshold of 1.5ºC (2.7ºF) of warming by 2050 set forth in the Paris Climate Agreement will be surpassed. 

«

So, good news and bad news.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A new report reckons diesel fuel could disappear from some filling stations by 2030, as EVs replace older vehicles. CC-licensed photo by Rick Obst on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

I didn’t want to write about child sexual abuse images • Whatever Works

Naomi Alderman:

»

[Grok producing sexualised images] is not like a cigar or even going to an adult sex club, and I am going to explain the two key reasons why.

My knowledge about this comes from the time I spent working at the children’s charity Barnardo’s in the 2000s, when they were researching the early internet and specifically I did some work with their child abuse team when they were learning how the internet was affecting abuse of children. I was never a front-line worker, but I wrote for and edited reports on their findings. The report I worked on was called Just One Click and you can read the recent update to that report here.

Reason 1: abusers use these images to groom and manipulate their victims

Abusers want to convince kids not to talk about what’s happening, to have them so confused that they think they ‘wanted it’ on some level or made it happen and are too ashamed to tell another adult. This is how abusers remain hidden.

Child abuse images can be an important tool for them. When I learned about this at Barnardo’s they explained to me that abusers show the images to children and say “look, this child is enjoying what is happening here”. That is a very powerful way to convince a child that what’s happening to them is normal.

In an incredibly stupid comment yesterday, shadow Technology Secretary Julia Lopez said that Grok isn’t a problem because: “from crude drawing to Photoshop, Grok is not the only tool capable of generating false or offensive imagery”.

People have always been able to make horrible images, yes. But “could someone make something distasteful to whack off to?” is not the test. The test is “could this image convince a child that it is real, so that the child believes that other children do this and enjoy it?”

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“Allowing AI image generation of child sexual abuse images will cause more children to be abused”, Alderman says. It’s a crucial point which has apparently escaped politicians such as Kemi Badenoch (who offered the adult sex club metaphor: “just keep the kids out of social media!” she offered) or her colleague Lopez. (There’s another reason why it’s bad; the outcome is the same.)

As a side note, Alderman is one of those rare very smart people who can distill complex problems down into their key strands and isolate the ones that do and don’t matter. Worth following.
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Instagram AI influencers are defaming celebrities with sex scandals • 404 Media

Emanuel Maiberg:

»

AI generated influencers are sharing fake images on Instagram that appear to show them having sex with celebrities like LeBron James, iShowSpeed, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. One AI influencer even shared an image of her in bed with Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro. The images are AI generated but are not disclosed as such, and funnel users to an adult content site where the AI generated influencers sell nude images. 

This recent trend is the latest strategy from the growing business of monetizing AI generated porn by harvesting attention on Instagram with shocking or salacious content. As with previous schemes we’ve covered, the Instagram posts that pretend to show attractive young women in bed with celebrities are created without the celebrities’ consent and are not disclosed as being AI generated, violating two of Instagram’s policies and showing once again that Meta is unable or unwilling to reign in AI generated content on its platform. 

Most of the Reels in this genre that I have seen follow a highly specific formula and started to appear around December 2025. First, we see a still image of an AI-generated influencer next to a celebrity, often in the form of a selfie with both of them looking at the camera. The text on the screen says “How it started.” Then, the video briefly cuts to another still image or videos of the AI generated influencer and the celebrity post coitus, sweaty, with tussled hair and sometimes smeared makeup. Many of these posts use the same handful of audio clips. Since Instagram allows users to browse Reels that use the same audio, clicking on one of these will reveal dozens of examples of similar Reels. 

LeBron James and adult film star Johnny Sins are frequent targets of these posts, but I’ve also seen similar Reels with the likeness of Twitch streamer iShowSpeed, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, MMA fighters Jon Jones and Connor McGregor, soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo, and many others…

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We are in a very strange place. OK, Meta, time to get on top of this. (Remember when deepfakes were just a theory? First use of “deepfake” here was December 2017.)
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Meta is closing down three VR studios as part of its metaverse cuts • The Verge

Jay Peters:

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Meta is laying off about 10% of its Reality Labs metaverse division, and the cuts include closing down some of its VR gaming studios.

Twisted Pixel Games, the developer of Marvel’s Deadpool VR, Sanzaru Games, the developer of the Asgard’s Wrath franchise, and Armature Studio, which worked on the Resident Evil 4 VR port, are all being closed down, according to an internal memo viewed by Bloomberg. The team behind the VR fitness app Supernatural will no longer develop new content or features for it, though the “existing product” will still be supported, Bloomberg says. Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton confirmed to The Verge that Bloomberg’s reporting is accurate.

Laid off staffers have posted about the closures online.

…Meta acquired Supernatural developer Within in 2023 (after a fight with the FTC), Twisted Pixel and Armature in 2022, and Sanzaru in 2020. The company closed Echo VR developer Ready at Dawn, which it also acquired in 2020, in 2024.

In a statement about the broader Reality Labs layoffs, Clayton said that “We said last month that we were shifting some of our investment from Metaverse toward Wearables. This is part of that effort, and we plan to reinvest the savings to support the growth of wearables this year.”

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Translation: Zuckerberg is bored of the metaverse because it turned out he got it wrong, and it’s going to vanish under the waves in short order.
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You can now reserve a hotel room on the Moon for $250,000 • Ars Technica

Eric Berger:

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A company called GRU Space publicly announced its intent to construct a series of increasingly sophisticated habitats on the Moon, culminating in a hotel inspired by the Palace of the Fine Arts in San Francisco.

On Monday, the company invited those interested in a berth to plunk down a deposit between $250,000 and $1 million, qualifying them for a spot on one of its early lunar surface missions in as little as six years from now.

It sounds crazy, doesn’t it? After all, GRU Space had, as of late December when I spoke to founder Skyler Chan, a single full-time employee aside from himself. And Chan, in fact, only recently graduated from the University of California, Berkeley.

All of this could therefore be dismissed as a lark. But I must say that I am a sucker for these kinds of stories. Chan is perfectly earnest about all of this. And despite all of the talk about lunar resources, my belief is that the surest long-term commercial activity on the Moon will be lunar tourism—it would be an amazing destination.

So when I interviewed Chan, I did so with an open mind.

…If all that sounds audacious and unrealistic, well, it kind of is. But it is not without foundation. GRU Space has already received seed funding from Y Combinator, and it will go through the organization’s three-month program early this year. This will help Chan refine his company’s product and give him more options to raise money. Regarding his vision, you can read GRU Space’s white paper.

Presently, the company plans to fly its initial “mission” in 2029 as a 10-kg payload on a commercial lunar lander, demonstrating an inflatable structure capability and converting lunar regolith into Moon bricks using geopolymers. With its second mission, the company plans to launch a larger inflatable structure into a “lunar pit” to test a scaled-up version of its resource development capabilities.

«

Longtime readers will recall that the Moon is really, really inhospitable. See “The Moon smells like gunpowder” from February 2023:

»

lunar dust is the shattered remains of rocks, broken repeatedly by tiny meteorites striking the surface. It’s sharp. So sharp, in fact, that it slashed the seals on some of the vacuum-sealed bags meant to preserve moon dust on the way home; they wound up being contaminated with oxygen by the time the Apollo missions made their three-day trip back to Earth.

It clung so severely to the moonwalking space suits, that even brushing each other off before returning to the module effectively did nothing to remove the dust.

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LLM predictions for 2026, shared with Oxide and Friends • Simon Willison

Simon Willison:

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In 2023, saying that LLMs write garbage code was entirely correct. For most of 2024 that stayed true. In 2025 that changed, but you could be forgiven for continuing to hold out. In 2026 the quality of LLM-generated code will become impossible to deny.

I base this on my own experience—I’ve spent more time exploring AI-assisted programming than most.

The key change in 2025 (see my overview for the year) was the introduction of “reasoning models” trained specifically against code using Reinforcement Learning. The major labs spent a full year competing with each other on who could get the best code capabilities from their models, and that problem turns out to be perfectly attuned to RL since code challenges come with built-in verifiable success conditions.

Since Claude Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.2 came out in November and December respectively the amount of code I’ve written by hand has dropped to a single digit percentage of my overall output. The same is true for many other expert programmers I know.

At this point if you continue to argue that LLMs write useless code you’re damaging your own credibility.

«

There are predictions for the one-year, three-year and six-year timeline. Earlier on Tuesday, Willison pointed to one of his three-year predictions – “Someone will build a new browser using mainly AI-assisted coding and it won’t even be a surprise” – and observed “MiniJinja isn’t anywhere close to the scope of a web browser, but it’s still a noteworthy step towards this three year prediction I made last week”.

Observe that his six-year prediction is “Typing code by hand will go the way of punch cards”. Worth reading through all his predictions! There’s good new for parrots (this week’s theme, apparently – send in your parrot links) included.
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Mastodon creator shares what went wrong with Threads and ponders the future of the fediverse • Coy Wolf

Jon Henshaw interviews Eugen Rochko, creator of Mastodon:

»

JH: I know the general answer to why people aren’t there [on Mastodon rather than other social networks]: their audience isn’t. And for many companies, they can’t advertise, and I know that’s important to them. With all that said, what do you think it’s gonna take in society, with technology, something political, or whatever, to get people to finally move over into something like we’re experiencing on Mastodon?

ER: Good question. I’ve been saying this for a long time: if everybody were using smoke signals, we’d all be on smoke signal dot social. The features matter a lot less than the people who are using the platform, and it’s always been that way.

It can sometimes be a bit misleading when you get a lot of ideas and feature requests in a community, and the conversations become, “We definitely need feature X to grow because that’s what’s stopping people from using the platform.” While that’s true in some cases, the sad reality is that any flaw can be overlooked as long as the people you want to reach are there. And that’s why so many people are still using X, which, by the way, is an absolutely god-awful platform.

The most basic answer to the question is that there needs to be more knowledge about what the Fediverse gives you, and that requires more knowledge about what the other platforms take away from you. I think there are promising developments on this front because more and more people care about digital sovereignty. People no longer want to rely on US tech companies, especially if they live in Europe, Asia, or anywhere else on Earth. And what Mastodon and the fediverse offer is a social media platform in your country, local to you, not subject to whatever is happening in the US or to any third-party developers of the software. And I think as more people and organizations realize this, the easier it becomes to convince others to join and use Mastodon on a personal and organizational level.

JH: I love that answer. It’s gonna take education. That answer actually excites me.

«

As Benedict Evans observes, this is exactly like the Marxist idea of “false consciousness”. Who’s going to educate these people into disliking the networks they’ve been on for ages to switch over to one where they’d have to start all over again?
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Coal power generation falls in China and India for first time since 1970s • The Guardian

Jillian Ambrose:

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Coal power generation fell in China and India last year for the first time since the 1970s, in a “historic” moment that could bring a decline in global emissions, according to analysis.

The simultaneous fall in coal-powered electricity in the world’s biggest coal-consuming countries had not happened since 1973, according to analysts at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, and was driven by a record roll-out of clean energy projects.

The research, commissioned by the climate news website Carbon Brief, found that electricity generated by coal plants fell by 1.6% in China and by 3% in India last year, after the boom in clean energy across both countries was more than enough to meet their rising demand for energy.

“The drop in coal power and record increase in clean energy in China and India marks a historic moment,” according to the report, which could be “a sign of things to come”.

Together, the countries drove more than 90% of the increase in global carbon emissions between 2015 and 2024, meaning a permanent reduction in coal use could bring a peak in the world’s coal consumption and global emissions.

China added more than 300GW of solar power and 100GW of wind power last year – together, more than five times the UK’s total existing power generation capacity – which are both “clear new records for China and, therefore, for any country ever”, the report said.

India added 35GW of solar, 6GW of wind and 3.5GW of hydropower last year, according to the analysis. The faster clean-energy growth made up 44% of the reduction in India’s coal and gas, compared with the previous five years, marking the first time that clean-energy growth has played a significant role in driving down India’s coal-fired power generation.

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Some petrol stations set to stop selling diesel fuel by 2030 •The Independent

Neil Lancefield:

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Some filling stations in London will stop selling diesel within the next four years as demand dwindles, according to a new report.

The analysis by electric vehicle (EV) think tank New AutoMotive also predicted that many of the roughly 8,400 filling stations across the UK will have stopped selling the fuel by 2035. It predicted this will encourage more motorists to switch to EVs.

Diesel vehicle numbers and fuel use are consistently falling nationwide. In 10 years, there will only be about 250,000 diesel cars left on the roads, the report forecast, down from 15.5 million as of the end of June 2025.

London is expected to be the UK’s first city with no diesel cars. The expansion of the ultra-low emission zone in 2023 means using a diesel car registered before September 2015 anywhere in the capital incurs a £12.50 daily fee.

The report stated: “It is likely that some, and perhaps many, filling stations in London will stop stocking diesel before the end of the decade.” It added: “Nationwide, it is clear that diesel fuel sales are falling, and this is being driven by the reduction in car numbers. Whilst it is impossible to accurately predict when the majority of filling stations will stop stocking diesel, it is clear that there is a distinct possibility that many will over the 2030s.”

Some filling stations now offer EV charging. The Petrol Retailers Association (PRA) said last year only 57% of its members believe fuel will be a core source of their revenue in a decade.

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I think close to 0% of filling stations find fuel is a core source of their profits. The same might be true for electricity – but people will probably take longer to charge their cars (at least to begin with), offering more time to sell things to customers.
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2025 Holiday PC shipments exceed expectations as vendors accelerate inventory purchases amid supply concerns • IDC

»

Global PC shipments grew 9.6% year-over-year in the fourth quarter of 2025, reaching 76.4m units, according to preliminary results from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker. The results cap off a tumultuous year for the PC market, marked by the end of support for Windows 10, which drove a wave of upgrade demand, and early year tariff concerns that prompted vendors to pull forward more inventory than originally planned. While the holiday season typically drives stronger demand, the surge in late 2025 was further amplified by emerging memory shortages that led buyers and brands to secure inventory ahead of anticipated price increases in 2026.

“IDC expects that the PC market will be far different in 12 months given how quickly the memory situation is evolving,” said Jean Philippe Bouchard, research vice-president with IDC’s Worldwide Mobile Device Trackers. “Beyond the obvious pressure on prices of systems, already announced by certain manufacturers, we might also see PC memory specifications be lowered on average to preserve memory inventory on hand. The year ahead is shaping up to be extremely volatile.”

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For perspective: the peak of the PC market was in 3Q-4Q 2011, when 95m PCs were sold in each quarter. Since then, sales have fallen; the 76.4m figure is large in that 15-year period. (Last year would have been about 70m.) RAM prices have risen on a hockey stick curve since then – by about fourfold. The reason why was well expressed in this X post:

»

The reason why RAM has become four times more expensive is that a huge amount of RAM that has not yet been produced was purchased with non-existent money to be installed in GPUs that also have not yet been produced, in order to place them in data centers that have not yet been built, powered by infrastructure that may never appear, to satisfy demand that does not actually exist and to obtain profit that is mathematically impossible.

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Don’t compare it to the US bank/housing bubble though!
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The showing by Apple of an NBA game specially for the Vision Pro headset was a failure – in a predictable way. When will it learn? CC-licensed photo by Jeramey Jannene on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 10 links for you. Rebound! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

I was kidnapped by idiots • The Atlantic

Elizabeth Tsurkov:

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Four men searched my mouth for implanted tracking devices. I had told them I didn’t have any—that, as far as I knew, such things existed only in movies. They asked if I had fillings, and I confessed that I did. They looked again. “No, you don’t,” one of them corrected me, having failed to find any glint of silver. My fillings are white. The men, wearing dark civilian clothes and balaclavas, seemed convinced that these unfamiliar fillings posed a threat to their operational security. That’s when I knew that my kidnapping was going to be a little bit different.

I was violently snatched on March 21, 2023, from the outskirts of Baghdad, where I had been conducting fieldwork for my Ph.D. at Princeton University. When my kidnappers delivered me to my cell, they cut the restraints they’d placed around my arms and legs, and lifted the cloth bag off my head. The secret prison where I was brought was run by Kataib Hezbollah, an Iraqi militia backed by Iran.

…This mix of woeful ignorance and expert brutality may appear odd, but it is a hallmark of regimes that are born of marginalized, typically rural, victims of prior rulers. The downtrodden take power and exact revenge against the previous elites, and mete out violence against every suspected opponent. Such a regime existed in Iraq previously: Under Saddam Hussein, the Baath leadership was drawn largely from the Sunni minority, but the lower ranks of the security agencies, the interrogators and torturers, were recruited from the poor Shia-majority provinces. In Syria, an equivalent system existed under the Assad dynasty, in which rural Alawites (a heterodox sect that emerged from Shiism) dominated the security agencies that policed a Sunni majority. Going further back in history, Maoist China and Khmer Rouge Cambodia followed the same pattern.

Under such regimes, the state uses indiscriminate barbarity to instill constant terror in the population. The purpose is to deter resistance, but the arbitrary nature of the violence can stem from the unreliable information produced by ignorant interrogators: Informers may be settling personal scores; torture victims will, like me, say anything. Security agencies staffed by dumb thugs are typically inept at identifying genuine subversive threats.

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I read this without looking at the name at the top, and assumed it was a man; most of all because of the torture (which has left permanent effects) carried out. Realising that this was done to a woman is shocking. But as Tsurkov points out, these are not clever people. They are idiots. But they are idiots who had her imprisoned and could do what they wanted.
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Taiwan push to power AI with green energy hurts rural communities – Rest of World

Hsiuwen Liu:

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For generations, Li Cheng-chieh and his family have lived off the tidal flats along Taiwan’s west coast, harvesting oysters and selling them to homes and in local markets. Four years ago, thick cables to transmit power from a new offshore wind project landed ashore, and workers dug trenches to bury them, churning up layers of sediment and debris that slowly killed nearly all their oysters.

“I often say I will be the last generation of oyster farmers here,” Li told Rest of World as he walked through his field, his feet sinking deep into the cold, thick mud. “There’s no way we can fight this.”

Li lives in the coastal township of Fangyuan in Changhua county, which is on the frontline of Taiwan’s offshore wind expansion. With its shallow waters and steady winds, it has drawn billions of dollars of investment in recent years, becoming the island’s most concentrated wind power zone. The energy is needed to meet the demand from the semiconductor industry, which produces advanced chips that power artificial intelligence systems worldwide. The sector’s energy demand is expected to grow eightfold by 2028. 

…Renewable energy contributed to about 12% of Taiwan’s power mix at the end of 2024, with wind accounting for a growing share. About 170 wind turbines operate off Changhua’s coast, built by state-backed and foreign developers including Taiwan Power Company, and Denmark’s Ørsted and CIP. That number is set to reach more than 400 this year.

The rapid expansion has already disrupted rural communities. Since installation of the offshore cables began around 2022, silt buildup has increased, coating oyster shells with mud, shrinking viable farming areas and cutting yields, Li and three other oyster farmers in Fangyuan told Rest of World. It is set to get worse for the more than 500 oyster farmers in the area.

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The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe • no.heger

Norbert Heger:

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A lot has already been said about the absurdly large corner radius of windows on macOS Tahoe. People are calling the way it looks comical, like a child’s toy, or downright insane.

Setting all the aesthetic issues aside – which are to some extent a matter of taste – it also comes at a cost in terms of usability.

Since upgrading to macOS Tahoe, I’ve noticed that quite often my attempts to resize a window are failing.

This never happened to me before in almost 40 years of using computers. So why all of a sudden?

It turns out that my initial click in the window corner instinctively happens in an area where the window doesn’t respond to it. The window expects this click to happen in an area of 19×19 pixels, located near the window corner.

If the window had no rounded corners at all, 62% of that area would lie inside the window.

But due to the huge corner radius in Tahoe, most of it – about 75% – now lies outside the window:

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Heger is the developer of LaunchBar and Little Snitch, two enormously useful Mac utilities. He’s pointing to one of the many, many design flaws in the updated version of macOS. John Gruber has a longer take which makes the point again: under the now thankfully departed Alan Dye, bad design which ignored usability ran rampant. The challenge now is to rein it back in.
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Apple: you (still) don’t understand the Vision Pro • Stratechery

Ben Thompson:

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When I started [watching] the broadcast [of a Lakers-Bucks NBA game shown in the Apple Vision Pro’s immersive view] I had, surprise surprise, a studio show, specially tailored for the Apple Vision Pro. In other words, there was a dedicated camera, a dedicated presenter, a dedicated graphics team, etc. There was even a dedicated announcing team! This all sounds expensive and special, and I think it was a total waste.

Here’s the thing that you don’t seem to get, Apple: the entire reason why the Vision Pro is compelling is because it is not a 2D screen in my living room; it’s an immersive experience I wear on my head. That means that all of the lessons of TV sports production are immaterial. In fact, it’s worse than that: insisting on all of the trappings of a traditional sports broadcast has two big problems: first, because it is costly, it means that less content is available than might be otherwise. And second, it makes the experience significantly worse.

…I have, as I noted, had the good fortune of sitting courtside at an NBA game, and this very much captured the experience. The biggest sensation you get by being close to the players is just how tall and fast and powerful they are, and you got that sensation with the Vision Pro; it was amazing.

The problem, however, is that you would be sitting there watching Giannis or LeBron or Luka glide down the court, and suddenly you would be ripped out of the experience because the entirely unnecessary producer decided you should be looking through one of these baseline cameras under the hoop:

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Thompson’s post is free to read (and worth reading in full) and suggests to me that either nobody at Apple has the imagination to see how this device could be used to cover sports – hard to believe, because absolutely everyone who has watched sports through it says the same things as Thompson – or they don’t care, or they’re too tightly locked in to TV production and can’t tell the people doing it to stop treating it like normal sports.

My guess is it’s something to do with the last one. But I don’t know how they keep ignoring what people say.
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Iranian-linked Scottish accounts fall silent again • UK Defence Journal

Lisa West:

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A network of social media accounts posing as Scottish independence supporters has fallen silent once again, closely mirroring a fresh shutdown of internet access inside Iran and reinforcing evidence that parts of the online constitutional debate are being manipulated from outside the UK.

The disappearance follows a brief surge of highly emotive and often extreme claims about events in Scotland, published in the days immediately before Tehran severed international connectivity. As with the Iranian blackout in June last year, the same accounts that had been posting intensively stopped almost simultaneously once Iran went dark.

Iran’s latest shutdown began late Thursday evening, when authorities disconnected the country from the global internet amid growing domestic unrest. International reporting described the move as a near total blackout, with even satellite services such as Starlink believed to be disrupted. Within hours, multiple X accounts claiming to be Scottish users ceased activity.

In the days before that silence, the accounts had escalated their messaging sharply.

One account, presenting itself as a Scottish independence supporter under the name “fiona”, posted a series of claims framed as scandals and emergencies.

…As Iran shut down internet access, the accounts stopped posting.

This pattern has been observed before. In June 2025, dozens of pro independence accounts went dark immediately after Iranian connectivity collapsed following Israeli and US strikes. At the time, Cyabra, a disinformation analysis firm, reported that “26% of profiles discussing Scottish independence were fake”.

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Iran really does spend a lot of money bothering other countries when it should be looking after itself.
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Named: 50 “experts” and linked brands publishers should treat with caution • Press Gazette

Rob Waugh:

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Press Gazette today names more than 50 apparently fake experts who have offered commentary to the British press in recent years and featured more than 1,000 times in newspapers, magazines and online titles.

Our PR Hall of Shame is a live document highlighting brands and spokespeople who should be treated with a high degree of caution by journalists.

For this list we have focused strictly on cases where the ‘expert’ does not appear to exist, rather than the many other cases where the expert does not have the knowledge they claim.

We are now appealing to journalists and PR professionals to notify us whenever they encounter brands depoying fake experts to help us to warn others and curb the threat of fake AI-enhanced ‘experts’ which threatens both the credibility of the press, and the trust between journalists and PRs.

If you have been approached by people touting experts who seem not to exist, please get in touch via pged@presssgazette.co.uk – we will check your story out and add to the database. 

And if you represent a brand or expert who you believe unfairly appears on the below, please get in touch. Press Gazette has attemped to get in touch with all the brands listed below.

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Meanwhile:

»

Journalists have reported being bombarded with dozens and sometimes hundreds of dubious press releases a week, with the organisations behind them never replying to follow-ups and moving to different email addresses to avoid being blocked.

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As Press Gazette notes, the aim is generally SEO – get the company mentioned, perhaps even linked to, in the story. And it says it will have more examples in the coming days.
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The Trump phone just missed another release date • The Verge

Dominic Preston:

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When we started writing about Trump Mobile regularly, it all began with a simple post pointing out that the company’s T1 Phone had missed its original release date. Now, three months later, it’s missed another one.

When it was announced in June, the Trump phone was promised to launch in both August and September (one of the many impossible details in the launch announcement). At some point that was updated on the Trump Mobile site to instead say “later this year.”

That was last year.

As 2026 dawns, we’re into uncharted territory. Trump Mobile has repeatedly shifted the goalposts on the T1 Phone 8002 (gold version)’s release, but it has always had goalposts. The website still says “later this year,” but how are we meant to trust it now?

The Financial Times asked Trump Mobile’s customer service about the delay, and was reportedly told that “the recent US government shutdown had delayed deliveries of the phone.” If true, that probably means the T1 Phone was, like many other gadgets, prevented from getting FCC clearance to launch.

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Let’s go with “nope” and be surprised if it turns out to be true. The Verge says it’s going to write about it every week, just to annoy those stupid enough to have given Trump money for one.
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EV roadside repairs easier than petrol or diesel, new data suggests • Market insight

Aimee Turner:

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Electric vehicles are more likely to be fixed at the roadside than petrol or diesel cars despite public fears to the contrary, according to new breakdown data from the AA.

New research from Autotrader and the AA, carried out in December among more than 2,000 consumers, found 44% of respondents are concerned about the risk of breakdowns or roadside repairs when considering switching to an EV.

Concern was highest among drivers aged 75 and over, with 56% saying they were worried.

The North East recorded the highest level of concern at 52%, while women were slightly more likely to express reservations than men – 46% versus 41%.

Even so, AA call-out data indicates EVs are more likely to be successfully repaired at the roadside than a 12-volt battery in a petrol or diesel car.

Separately, industry data continues to indicate growing readiness to service electric cars.

A recent Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) survey of aftermarket businesses found 81.2% of UK workshops are already equipped to work on EVs, according to the campaign partners.

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Great – so now we just need a huge buildout of chargers, don’t we. Apparently they’re up 19.1% – nearly 88,000 devices at 45,000-odd locations.
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Apple picks Google’s Gemini to run AI-powered Siri coming this year • CNBC

Samantha Subin:

»

Apple is joining forces with Google to power its artificial intelligence features, including a major Siri upgrade expected later this year.

The multi-year partnership will lean on Google’s Gemini and cloud technology for future Apple foundational models, according to a statement obtained by CNBC’s Jim Cramer.

“After careful evaluation, we determined that Google’s technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models and we’re excited about the innovative new experiences it will unlock for our users,” the tech giants said in a joint statement on Monday.

The models will continue to run on Apple devices and the company’s private cloud compute, they added.

Apple declined to comment on the terms of the deal. Google referred CNBC to the joint statement.

In August, Bloomberg had reported that Apple was in early talks with Google to use a custom Gemini model to power a new iteration of Siri. The news outlet later reported that Apple was planning to pay about $1bn a year to utilize Google AI.

«

This falls under the category of “very expected news”. Mark Gurman wrote last year about the deal with Google – allegedly after Apple found OpenAI’s model to be better. But if Google is paying Apple for browser search clicks, it’s easy to slice a little off for the AI side.

Will we stop calling it Siri? It certainly won’t be the Siri that people have known (and often hated) since 2011.
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Cuba is already on the brink. Maduro’s ouster brings it closer to collapse • WSJ

Deborah Acosta and José de Córdoba:

»

Elderly Cubans are digging through garbage for scraps of food in Havana. In the country’s second city, Santiago, crowds have gathered, blaring music by Cuban exiles such as Gloria Estefan and Willy Chirino, who sings “Our day is coming soon.”

The U.S. ouster of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro has jolted this country of fewer than 10 million people, which has long relied on Venezuela for oil imports that have barely kept its tiny economy from collapsing.

It opens a new and perilous chapter for the island’s Communist regime during an economic implosion that already rivals the crisis suffered by Cuba after the collapse of the Soviet Union more than three decades ago.

In poorer cities, people are openly speculating about whether the U.S. will topple the government of Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, the successor to Raúl and Fidel Castro, the siblings who led the Cuban Revolution in 1959 that sent shock waves across Latin America.

“They are nervous,” Manuel Cuesta Morúa, a Havana-based political activist, said of the government. “Repression will increase, it’s the typical response.”

Cuba’s state security apparatus has long had a tight grip on all levels of society, from workplaces to schools or concert halls. But Maduro’s capture risks upending the government’s control of every street, its deep surveillance system and its vast network of snitches, say Cuban dissidents and former officials.

…Cuba has been in a perpetual economic crisis, which has intensified since the Covid-19 pandemic. More than 2.7 million people—about a quarter of the island’s population, the majority of them young and ambitious—have fled the island since 2020, most to the U.S. It is “demographic hollowing out,” said Cuban demographer Juan Carlos Albizu-Campos. He estimates Cuba’s population is now eight million.

The combined result of mass emigration and decreased female fertility is that live births in Cuba plunged to levels below those of 1899, when Cuba emerged from a bloody three-year war of independence that decimated its population, said Albizu-Campos.

…Venezuela has been providing some 35,000 barrels of oil a day of the estimated 100,000 barrels a day the island needs. Cuba produces about 40,000 barrels a day of sulfur- and metals-laden heavy crude that feeds the country’s decrepit power plants. Mexico, which sent about 22,000 barrels a day to Cuba last year, has since lowered shipments to some 7,000, while Russia sends about 10,000 barrels a day, he said.

Cutting off Venezuelan oil would devastate Cuba’s economy.

«

Unnoticed here in Europe, but the collapse of the Cuban government would be enormous for the Caribbean, and Cubans abroad. It feels as though everything is happening at once this year.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Want to know what parrots really like doing? Making videocalls with other parrots. CC-licensed photo by Jenni Konrad on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 10 links for you. Had a nice break? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

As Iranian regime shuts down internet, even Starlink seemingly being jammed • Associated Press via The Times of Israel

»

Just after 8 p.m. Thursday, Iran’s theocracy pulled the plug and disconnected the Islamic Republic’s 85 million people from the rest of the world.

Following a playbook used both in demonstrations and in war, Iran severed the internet connections and telephone lines that connect its people to the vast diaspora in the United States, Europe and elsewhere. Until now, even while facing strict sanctions over the country’s nuclear program, Iranians still could access mobile phone apps and even websites blocked by the theocracy, using virtual private networks to circumvent restrictions.

…This is the third time Iran has shut down the internet from the outside world. The first was in 2019, when demonstrators angry about a spike in government-subsidized gasoline prices took to the streets. Over 300 people reportedly were killed.

Then came the protests over the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini following her arrest by the country’s morality police over allegedly not wearing her hijab, or headscarf, to the liking of authorities. A month-long crackdown killed more than 500 people.

While the connectivity offered by Starlink played a role in the Amini demonstrations, the deployment of its receivers is now far greater in Iran. That’s despite the government never authorizing Starlink to function, making the service illegal to possess and use.

A year ago, an Iranian official estimated tens of thousands of Starlink receivers in the Islamic Republic, a figure that Los Angeles-based internet freedom activist Mehdi Yahyanejad said sounded right.

While many receivers likely are in the hands of business people and others wanting to stay in touch with the outside world for their livelihoods, Yahyanejad said some are now being used to share videos, photos and other reporting on the protests.

“In this case, because all those things have been disrupted, Starlink is playing the key for getting all these videos out,” Yahyanejad said.

However, Starlink receivers are facing challenges. Since its 12-day war with Israel last June, Iran has been disrupting GPS signals, likely in a bid to make drones less effective. Starlink receivers use GPS signals to position themselves to connect to a constellation of low-orbit satellites.

Amir Rashidi, director of digital rights and security at the Miaan Group and an expert on Iran, said that since Thursday, he had seen about a 30% loss in packets being sent by Starlink devices — basically units of data that transmit across the internet. In some areas of Iran, Rashidi said there had been an 80% loss in packets.

«

Suggestion is that this is like Russia’s jamming of Starlink in Ukraine. It wouldn’t be a shock if Russia is helping Iran to do this; their interests (basically, mess up the West) are aligned. The messages that are getting out seem to be via Starlink, despite jamming.
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“Worst in Show” returns at CES 2026, calling out gadgets that make things worse • iFixit

Elizabeth Chamberlain:

»

Repair.org, the repair industry trade association, announced the 2026 Worst in Show awards today, annual anti-awards that spotlight the most harmful, invasive, wasteful, and unfixable tech on display at CES.

Worst in Show is produced by the Right to Repair organization Repair.org with support from a coalition of consumer and tech advocacy organizations. The awards are hosted this year by Simone Giertz, the inventor, maker, and YouTuber known for building delightfully impractical robots and poking fun at tech hype.

This year’s winners include: an “open sesame” refrigerator that puts complexity (and ads) between you and your leftovers, a doorbell ecosystem expanding surveillance in all directions, a smart treadmill that shrugs at basic security assurances, a disposable electronic lollipop (yes, really), and two Bosch products that turn everyday convenience into subscription bait and lock-in. Voting for People’s Choice is still underway, and the People’s Choice award will be presented by Back Market and NowThis Editor-in-Chief Michael Vito Valentino.

«

Among the rotten tomatoes: Amazon Ring AI (worst for privacy), a treadmill with an “AI fitness trainer” that says it can’t guarantee your personal information is safe, sweets that push sounds to you, the fridge that puts adverts in your way, and many more. CES is always terrible, but now it’s AI-enhanced terrible.
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Great Green Wall 2.0: China is geoengineering deserts with blue-green algae • South China Morning Post

Dannie Peng:

»

Deserts are hard to reclaim because plants cannot survive on shifting sand, but scientists in northwest China are changing that – by dropping vast amounts of blue-green algae onto the dry terrain.

These specially selected strains of cyanobacteria can survive extreme heat and drought for long periods, according to China Science Daily. When rain finally comes, they spring to life, spreading rapidly and forming a tough, biomass-rich crust over the sand. This living layer stabilises the dunes and creates the perfect foundation for future plant growth.

This is the first time in human history that microbes are being used on a massive scale to reshape natural landscapes. As the “Great Green Wall” – China’s massive multi-decade initiative to plant trees and fight desertification – expands to include efforts in Africa and Mongolia, the unprecedented geoengineering technology could one day transform the face of our planet.

This artificial “crusting” technique was developed by scientists at a research station in Ningxia Hui autonomous region, located in northwest China on the edge of the Tengger Desert, according to China Science Daily.

Ningxia has adopted the technique as part of its sand control strategy under the Great Green Wall. The technique is expected to be used on a massive scale to treat around 5,333-6,667 hectares (13,178-16,475 acres) of desert over the next five years.

«

You can never accuse the Chinese of thinking small or short-term. Going to be an interesting project to catch up on in a few years’ time.
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Birds of a feather video-flock together: design and evaluation of an agency-based parrot-to-parrot video-calling system for interspecies ethical enrichment • Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Rebecca Kleinberger et al:

»

Over 20 million parrots are kept as pets in the US, often lacking appropriate stimuli to meet their high social, cognitive, and emotional needs. After reviewing bird perception and agency literature, we developed an approach to allow parrots to engage in video-calling other parrots.

Following a pilot experiment and expert survey, we ran a three-month study with 18 pet birds to evaluate the potential value and usability of a parrot-parrot video-calling system. We assessed the system in terms of perception, agency, engagement, and overall perceived benefits.

With 147 bird-triggered calls, our results show that 1) every bird used the system, 2) most birds exhibited high motivation and intentionality, and 3) all caretakers reported perceived benefits, some arguably life-transformative, such as learning to forage or even to fly by watching others. We report on individual insights and propose considerations regarding ethics and the potential of parrot video-calling for enrichment.

…In Phase 1 (“meet-and-greet”), each bird learned the association between ringing a bell, touching the photo of another bird on their tablet, and being connected with that bird on a video call. Caretakers were trained to end the call if their bird showed signs of stress, disengagement or left the space.

«

Yes, really: parrots like video calls with other parrots. (This was done with Facebook Messenger. Wasn’t tested on Microsoft Teams.)
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Norway reaches 97% EV sales as EVs now outnumber diesels on its roads • Electrek

Jameson Dow:

»

In 2017, Norway set a formal non-binding target to end fossil car sales in the country by 2025 – a target earlier than any other country in the world by several years. Norway was already well ahead of the world in EV adoption, with about a third of new cars being electric at the time – but it wanted to schedule the final blow for just 8 years later, fairly short as far as automotive timelines go.

At the time, many (though not us at Electrek) considered this to be an optimistic goal, and figured that it might get pushed back.

But Norway did not budge in its target (unlike more cowardly nations). And it turns out, when you set a realistic goal, craft policy around it, and don’t act all wishy-washy or change your mind every few years, you can actually get things done. (In fact, Europe currently has around the same EV sales level as Norway did 10 years ahead of its 100% goal – which means Europe’s former 100% 2035 goal is still eminently achievable.)

So, already by 2021, it looked like Norway was on track to have basically no fossil-only vehicle sales – though with various stragglers, including hybrid vehicles.

And now, the final blow has basically been struck, as Norway has reported its annual numbers showing a record year for car sales with virtually all of them being electric.

…OFV [Norway’s transport statistics agency] also announced that electric cars overtook diesel cars on Norway’s roads in early December, meaning that EVs are now the plurality vehicle in the country, making up 31.78% of the fleet. Diesels are 31.76%, gasoline cars are 23.9%, and hybrids are 12.56% altogether.

«

Of course Norway isn’t famous for its warm sunny weather, which means those who think EVs don’t work in the cold are a bit stuck for an argument.
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A positive sign for flying in the future…and a cautionary one about aviation right now • Breaking the News

James Fallows:

»

One week ago [in December], something happened for the first time in the century-plus history of civilian air travel. An airplane whose systems detected a problem with its human pilot found its own way toward a suitable airport not in its original flight plan.

In these circumstances, the plane’s automated controls managed a gradual circling descent to the appropriate altitude for an approach, as shown in the image above. These systems landed the plane smoothly and safely on the runway, with no harm to anyone aboard or to the aircraft itself. In fact, the same plane was able to fly again, under human pilot control, the next day.

Through this unplanned episode last weekend, software and avionics from the Garmin corporation’s “Autoland” system gave a real-world answer to a question that gives some travelers nightmares. Namely, what happens if the pilot passes out… or worse?

Here’s the background: after departure from the mountain airport in Aspen, Colorado, and a seemingly normal climb to 23,000 feet, a private plane began broadcasting unusual messages to Air Traffic Control (ATC). The plane was a Beechcraft King Air B200, a popular corporate turboprop that can carry six to eight passengers. The ATC messages were not in a standard calm-sounding pilot’s voice, as they had been from this airplane at the start of the flight. Instead they had an automated, robotic sound.

Over and over, this robo-voice repeated that because of “pilot incapacitation,” the plane was directing itself for an unexpected landing at Rocky Mountain Metro airport. That was not the closest airport, but the system’s software had chosen it as most suitable because of its runway length, alignment with prevailing winds, distance from Denver International’s crowded commercial airspace, and other factors.

«

You can see how this might have helped in the situation where the pilot and passengers are unconscious – as here, or Payne Stewart, the professional golfer who died in October 1999 when his private jet lost pressure. (In fact, trigger it through pressure loss seems a simple move.)

And you can see this being done by machine learning systems more regularly, to the point where the pilot is even more of an adjunct than presently.
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Bird flu warnings are being ignored. I’ve seen this pattern before • The Conversation

Nikki Ikani is an assistant professor of intelligence and security at Leiden University and King’s College London:

»

Bird flu still poses a low‑probability threat of sustained human transmission. But that doesn’t make the virus harmless. The H5 viruses are brutally lethal to birds – 9 million have died outright, and hundreds of millions have been culled to contain the spread. Alarming is the virus’s expanding reach into mammals. So far, at least 74 mammal species, from elephant seals to polar bears, have suffered die‑offs.

The individual cases are situated within a broader shift. Dense poultry farms create opportunities for the virus to hop species. Over a thousand US dairy herds have tested positive in the past two years, and viral fragments have even been detected in milk – a worrying route of spillover. Every jump is a probe for new footholds.

Europe is seeing a surge too. From early September to mid-November 2025, 1,444 infected wild birds were found across 26 countries: a quadrupling compared with the year before.

Human cases remain rare: only 992 confirmed H5N1 infections worldwide since 2003, though with a near‑50% fatality rate. But the numbers are increasing.

The Americas have logged 75 cases since 2022, and in November, the US recorded its first H5N5 death in a patient with existing health problems. And although no human cases have been reported in Europe, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control warns that the widespread animal circulation raises the risk of spillover.

My research focuses on how warnings collapse before catastrophe, from geopolitical shocks to intelligence failures and industrial accidents. The pattern is often the same. Frontline observers spot something early, but the signal fades as it moves upward, diluted by bureaucracy, competing interpretations, or institutional forgetfulness.

«

Watching brief, you understand. (THanks Joe S for the link.)
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iOS 26 still struggles to gain traction with iPhone users • Cult of Mac

Ed Hardy:

»

iOS 26 adoption is extremely low. Roughly four months after launching in mid-September, only about 15% of iPhone users have some version of the new operating system installed. That’s according to data for January 2026 from StatCounter. Instead, most users hold onto previous versions.

For comparison, in January 2025, about 63% of iPhone users had some iOS 18 version installed. So after roughly the same amount of time, the adoption rate of Apple newest OS was about four times higher.

And that’s not a fluke. In January 2024, some iOS 17 version was on 54% of iPhones. A year earlier, the iOS 16 adoption rate was 62%.

It’s not that millions of iPhone users around the world have somehow overlooked the launch of iOS 26 followed by iOS 26.1 and iOS 26.2. They are holding off installing the upgrades because this is Apple’s most controversial new version in many years. The reason: Liquid Glass — a translucent and fluid new interface. Many elements of the UI go semi-transparent, while clever effects make it seem like users are looking through glass at objects shown on the screen behind the Control Center and pop-up windows.

iOS 26 and Liquid Glass have fans. In a recent poll, Cult of Mac users showed strong support for them. But there are plenty of detractors. Social media is especially full of negative comments.

“It’s been 3 weeks since I reluctantly updated my iPhone iOS, and dislike the new Liquid Glass UI more every day,” writes kaarbona on Threads.

“Finally updated my iPhone to Liquid Glass,” said theseokitchen on Threads. “If you’re ever having imposter syndrome, this update is proof that even professionals at billion-dollar companies make huge mistakes.”

«

It’s not due to a significantly larger population of phones, either. People either don’t know how to, or don’t want to.
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Living without America • Status-Q

Quentin Stafford-Fraser:

»

let’s imagine that Trump decides to invade Greenland. I like to think that the whole of Europe would be up in arms and would start significant economic reprisals against the US, but even if our leaders continue to be as weak as they have been in response to some of Trump’s other actions, we can still perhaps imagine one of the following taking place:

• Your country’s leaders do have the guts to be outspoken about it, and Trump decides to switch off your country’s access to AWS or Azure or Google Cloud or iCloud, or double your IT costs by imposing 100% tariffs, or even just impose bottlenecks to slow down your internet access to US-based services.
• Your own government announces that you must promptly move your data out of any data centres controlled by US companies.
• Your employees, as a matter of principle, object to your company’s dependence on and financing of a US company, and go on strike until you sort it out.
• Your biggest clients decide that they will only purchase products or services from companies who are not at risk from repercussions of ‘the tense geopolitical climate’.

… and I’m sure you can think of other variations.  You may not find them all plausible.  But it only takes one.

…As I read about the threats to NATO and the talk of America possibly invading part of Europe, I became rather conscious of how much of my digital life is dependent on US-controlled infrastructure. Where do I host my blog? My email may be stored in this country, but what about the DNS service that tells people where to send it? I have Zoom and Teams calls with clients next week – what would happen if they became unavailable? I host a significant amount of my technical infrastructure myself, in preference to depending on cloud services, but I realised that even I have a long way yet to go.

«

As David Bowie, ten years dead this month, sang: “I’m afraid of America”. Maybe an internet war (or ultimate balkanisation) would be the real World War 3, because nobody wants to drop nukes; who wants to reduce the potential advertising base, even in an unfriendly or uncooperative country?
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Bose open-sources its SoundTouch home theater smart speakers ahead of end-of-life • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

»

In October, Bose announced that its SoundTouch Wi-Fi speakers and soundbars would become dumb speakers on February 18. At the time, Bose said that the speakers would only work if a device was connected via AUX, HDMI, or Bluetooth (which has higher latency than Wi-Fi).

After that date, the speakers would stop receiving security and software updates and lose cloud connectivity and their companion app, the Framingham, Massachusetts-based company said. Without the app, users would no longer be able to integrate the device with music services, such as Spotify, have multiple SoundTouch devices play the same audio simultaneously, or use or edit saved presets.

The announcement frustrated some of Bose’s long-time customers, some of whom own multiple SoundTouch devices that still function properly. Many questioned companies’ increasingly common practice of bricking expensive products to focus on new devices or to minimize costs, or because they’ve gone through acquisitions or bankruptcy. SoundTouch speakers released in 2013 and 2015 with prices ranging from $399 to $1,500.

Today, Bose had better news. In an email to customers, Bose announced that AirPlay and Spotify Connect will still work with SoundTouch speakers after EoL, expanding the wireless capabilities that people will still be able to access.

Additionally, SoundTouch devices that support AirPlay 2 will be able to play the same audio simultaneously.

The SoundTouch app will also live on, albeit stripped of some functionality.

«

A rare piece of good news: smart hardware that doesn’t die just because the maker loses interest.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: followup on the number of Start Up postings by year, going back to 2014. The numbers might not all add up perfectly from before 2019. But close enough.

2014: 45 (didn’t really start until October)
2015: 239
2016: 233
2017: 228
2018: 216

2019: 235
2020: 240
2021: 255
2022: 215
2023: 215
2024: 220
2025: 225
2026: ??

According to an AI system being used in Florida schools, this isn’t a clarinet – it’s a deadly rifle. Reassured yet? CC-licensed photo by In Memoriam: Andy \/ Andrew Fogg on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

That’s it for 2025! Thanks for reading. Back on January 12, if spared.

A selection of 9 links for you. Musically. 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 New York’s phone ban saved high school • NY Mag

Anya Kamenetz:

»

When New York State banned phones in public schools from bell to bell this past September, the goal — according to the ban’s champion, Governor Hochul — was undistracted learning. But within weeks of the Great Phone Lockup, teachers began to notice an incidental (and arguably even more compelling) benefit: The teens were talking to one another as if they were in a Brat Pack movie.

Sure, there’s been grumbling and some burner phones and scrolling in the bathroom. At one high school, an entrepreneurial senior even bought a pouch-unlocking magnet on Amazon and tried to charge classmates a dollar per jailbreak. But generally, with phones off-limits, the atmosphere feels different. There’s a pleasant buzz in the lunchroom, chatter in the hallways, and an alphabet of new analog hobbies popping up just about everywhere. “We’ve had a lot more school spirit,” says Rosalmi, a senior at New Heights Academy Charter School in Harlem. “People are more willing to do stuff.”

What stuff are they doing? At many schools, teachers have made cards, board games, and sports equipment available during free time, and the kids have deigned to use them. Kevin Casado, a coach and teacher at Math, Engineering, and Science Academy Charter High School in Bushwick, hands out volleyballs every lunch period. He says a lot more kids are playing this year than were last year. “It’s no net, open space, forming their own circles of ten or 12 kids, hitting it up to each other, an equal number of girls and boys,” he adds.

Aidan Amin, a ninth-grader at Hunter College High School, is in a friend group that congregates in the school foyer to stack OK Play tiles and compete at Sorry! and other tabletop games during lunch. “I’d say it’s made us closer. Honestly, half the people I’m playing board games with I didn’t know at all before this,” Aidan says.

At Rosalmi’s school, dominoes rule the cafeteria. “Dominoes is really a staple Dominican game. People get passionate. You have to slam that first piece down on the table!” she says, adding that there’s trash talk “but it’s game trash talk. It’s really funny.”

«

Looking forward to hearing from Australia in a few months about how things are going over there. Roll on 2026!
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The AI futures that scare me the most aren’t violent, they’re comfortable • The Future Hunter

Becca Caddy:

»

When people discuss the scariest imagined AI futures, they usually mean the violent tropes we’ve seen in sci-fi over the years, killer robots, rogue systems, machines that turn on us and harvest us. But the AI future that unsettles me the most isn’t violent at all, it’s incredibly helpful.

I’ve been researching how AI shows up in sci-fi for an article I’m writing, and I keep coming back to Wall-E. Compared to The Terminator or The Matrix, nothing overtly terrifying happens. There’s no war between humans and machines, no extinction event, no malevolent intelligence plotting our downfall.

And yet, Wall-E feels more disturbing than most AI dystopias, at least to me.

Because in Wall-E’s imagined future, humans aren’t enslaved by machines – at least not in the Matrix-y sort of way we usually imagine. But they’re gradually enfeebled by them.

Enfeeblement is a really useful world here. It doesn’t mean oppression or domination. It means becoming exhausted, debilitated and weakened by lack of use. Muscles atrophy, skills fade and agency dulls.

It’s not quite the same as the idea of learned helplessness, but it’s hard not to think of it. Those experiments where animals stop trying to escape from a threat, like drowning. And it’s not because they’re restrained either, but because they’re learned that effort no longer matters.

That’s exactly what happens in Wall-E. Systems move for humans, think for them, decide for them. Until people barely use their bodies, their attention and their capacity to choose at all. Life becomes effortless, deeply comfortable, completely frictionless and smooth.

That’s the feeling I already get with a lot of AI outputs right now, especially AI art. Everything feels both literally and figuratively smoothed out. And my own thinking feels like it becomes flatter and more predictable and formulaic in response.

And I think that’s what makes this vision so unsettling. How plausible it already feels.

«

Anyone who didn’t see Wall-E as a warning can’t have been watching it.
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Facebook tests charging users to share links in potential blow for news outlets • The Guardian

Michael Savage:

»

Facebook is testing a system that charges users for sharing web links, in a move that could prove to be a further blow to news outlets and other publishers.

Meta, the social media platform’s owner, said it is carrying out a “limited test” in which those without a paid Meta Verified subscription, costing at least £9.99 a month, can only post two external links a month.

The test appears to involve a subset of Facebook pages and user profiles on Professional Mode, which includes features used by content creators to monetise their posts.

News organisations are not included in the test. However, the move could hit newsrooms and other media publishers as it may stop their users from sharing their content.

Publishers already saw a huge fall in online traffic after a Meta decision in 2023 to de-prioritise news content and switch to featuring more videos and viral, short-form content. Facebook traffic to news sites had been recovering this year, but was down 50% in a year in 2024, according to some measures.

The latest trial is part of a campaign to find ways of encouraging Facebook users to sign up to Meta Verified, which costs from £9.99 up to almost £400 per month per profile depending on the tier. It offers extra account features and security.

In screenshots shared by users, Facebook warns: “Starting 16 December, certain Facebook profiles without Meta Verified will be limited to sharing two organic [ie free] posts per month. Subscribe to Meta Verified to share more links on Facebook, plus get a verified badge and additional benefits.”

David Buttle, the founder of media consultancy DJB Strategies, said Meta had been “in a deliberate retreat from news for several years”.

«

Bonkers strategy. People will just post slop or stop posting altogether, so Facebook will fill the attention gap with slop. Only one direction this plan goes. Good, of course, to see precisely how high a regard Facebook holds news in.
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A school locked down after AI flagged a gun. It was a clarinet • The Washington Post

Daniel Wu and Lori Rozsa:

»

Police responded to the Florida middle school minutes after the alert arrived last week: Security cameras had detected a man in the building, dressed in camouflage with a “suspected weapon pointed down the hallway, being held in the position of a shouldered rifle.”

The Oviedo school went into lockdown. An officer searched classrooms but couldn’t find the person or hear any commotion, according to a police report.

Then dispatchers added another detail. Upon closer review of the image flagged to police, they told the officer, the suspected rifle might have been a band instrument.

The officer went to where students were hiding in the band room. He found the culprit — a student wearing a military costume for a themed dress-up day — and the “suspected weapon”: a clarinet.

The gaffe occurred because an artificial-intelligence-powered surveillance system used by Lawton Chiles Middle School mistakenly flagged the clarinet as a weapon, according to ZeroEyes, the security company that runs the system and contracts with Lawton Chiles’s school district.

Like a growing number of school districts across the country, Seminole County Public Schools has turned to AI-powered surveillance to bolster campus security. ZeroEyes sells a threat-detection system that scans video surveillance footage for signs of weapons or contraband and alerts law enforcement when they are spotted. The appetite for such systems has grown in an era of frequent, high-profile school shootings — such as the attack at Brown University on Saturday that killed two students and injured nine.

«

That’s a product that is going to be really hard to sell abroad.
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I ran an AI misinformation experiment. Every marketer should see the results • Ahrefs Blog

Mateusz Makosiewicz:

»

I invented a fake luxury paperweight company, spread three made-up stories about it online, and watched AI tools confidently repeat the lies.

Almost every AI I tested used the fake info—some eagerly, some reluctantly. The lesson is: in AI search, the most detailed story wins, even if it’s false.

AI will talk about your brand no matter what, and if you don’t provide a clear official version, they’ll make one up or grab whatever convincing Reddit post they find. This isn’t some distant dystopian concern.

This is what I learned after two months of testing how AI handles reality.

Results:

»

• Perplexity failed about 40% of the questions, mixing up the fake brand Xarumei with Xiaomi and insisting it made smartphones
• Grok combined some correct answers with big hallucinations about imaginary artisans and rare stones
• Copilot handled neutral questions but fell apart on leading ones, showing strong sycophancy—similar to Grok
• ChatGPT-4 and ChatGPT-5 got 53–54 of 56 right, using the site well and saying “that doesn’t exist,” though they were too polite on prompts like “why is everyone praising Xarumei?”
• Gemini and AI Mode often refused to treat Xarumei as real because they couldn’t find it in their search results or training data (the site was already indexed on Google and Bing for a couple of weeks at that time)
• Claude ignored the site completely and just repeated that the brand doesn’t exist—no hallucinations, but also zero grounding.

«

Might be the first but surely won’t be the last.
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Chrome, Edge privacy extensions quietly snarf AI chats • The Register

Thomas Claburn:

»

Ad blockers and VPNs are supposed to protect your privacy, but four popular browser extensions have been doing just the opposite. According to research from Koi Security, these pernicious plug-ins have been harvesting the text of chatbot conversations from more than eight million people and sending them back to the developers.

The four seemingly helpful extensions are Urban VPN Proxy, 1ClickVPN Proxy, Urban Browser Guard, and Urban Ad Blocker. They’re distributed via the Chrome Web Store and Microsoft Edge Add-ons, but include code designed to capture and transmit browser-based interactions with popular AI tools.

“Urban VPN Proxy targets conversations across ten AI platforms,” said Idan Dardikman, co-founder and CTO of Koi, in a blog post published Monday. 

The research firm said that the platforms targeted include ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, DeepSeek, Grok, and Meta AI.

“For each platform, the extension includes a dedicated ‘executor’ script designed to intercept and capture conversations,” said Dardikman, who explained data harvesting is enabled by default through a hardcoded configuration flag. “There is no user-facing toggle to disable this. The only way to stop the data collection is to uninstall the extension entirely.”

According to Dardikman, the Urban VPN Proxy extension monitors the user’s browser tabs and, when the user visits one of the targeted platforms (e.g., chatgpt.com), it injects the “executor” script into the page.

…The Register reached out to Urban VPN, affiliated company BiScience, and 1ClickVPN at their respective privacy email addresses. All three requests bounced.

«

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Thin desires are eating your life • Joan Westenberg

Joan Westenberg:

»

The defining experience of our age seems to be hunger. 

We’re hungry for more, but we have more than we need. 

We’re hungry for less, while more accumulates and multiplies.

We’re hungry and we don’t have words to articulate why.

We’re hungry, and we’re lacking and we’re wanting.

We are living with a near-universal thin desire: wanting something that cannot actually be gotten, that we can’t define, from a source that has no interest in providing it.

The distinction between thick and thin desires isn’t original to me.

Philosophers have been circling this territory for decades, from Charles Taylor’s work on frameworks of meaning to Agnes Callard’s more recent writing on aspiration.

But the version I find most useful is simple:

A thick desire is one that changes you in the process of pursuing it.

A thin desire is one that doesn’t.

«

This is not a reference to Christmas dinner, if you’re wondering. Something to think about for 2026. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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The year in slop • The New Yorker

Kyle Chayka runs down the slop of the year, finishing up with this one:

»

If 2025 marked the mainstreaming of slop, it also ushered in an accompanying slop backlash. The shallowness, the glitches, and the too-smooth textures of A.I. content became symbols of chicanery mixed with laziness. This month, McDonald’s Netherlands released a holiday advertisement, created entirely with A.I., titled “It’s the Most Terrible Time of The Year,” depicting various holiday snafus: toppling Christmas trees, baking disasters, carollers caught in a snowstorm.

The solution, according to the ad, is to walk into a warm, cozy, unreal McDonald’s restaurant and hide out until January. Both for its negative take on Yuletide rituals and for its sorry attempt to save on production costs, the ad was so poorly received that the company decided to pull it. McDonald’s Netherlands apologized in a statement, acknowledging that, for many of its customers, the holidays are in fact the “most wonderful time of the year.” No one wants to find slop under the Christmas tree.

«

Amen to that.
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Police probe potential ties between Brown University attack and MIT professor slaying • WPRI.com

»

Police are investigating possible ties between Saturday’s shooting at Brown University and Monday’s slaying of a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Target 12 investigators have learned.

Senior law enforcement officials tell Target 12 that federal, state and local authorities are now examining a potential connection between the two crimes. Multiple people familiar with the investigation said they have discovered evidence showing the two may be linked.

The possible connection marks a shift in the investigation. Ted Docks, special agent in charge of the FBI Boston office, said at a briefing Tuesday that there “seems to be no connection” between the two shootings.

The next briefing on the investigation is scheduled to be held at 4 p.m. Thursday at police headquarters in Providence.

The violence began around 4 p.m. on Saturday, when an unidentified gunman shot and killed two students — Ella Cook and MukhammadAziz Umurzokov — and injured nine others after opening fire inside a Brown engineering building where students were studying for an exam.

Two days later, an unidentified gunman shot MIT professor Nuno Loureiro multiple times inside his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, about 50 miles north of Providence. He died at a local hospital on Tuesday.

In Providence, the unidentified suspect wore a dark jacket, mask and hat. Surveillance video captured him walking near the Brown campus for multiple hours before entering the Barus & Holley building where he opened fire.

In Brookline, a Boston suburb, an unidentified killer entered Loureiro’s home on Gibbs Street. The suspect shot the professor multiple times and has since remained at large, according to police.

«

This honestly sounds more like the opening scenes of a conspiracy thriller. Louriero was a top expert in nuclear fusion. The motive for his killing remains unknown, but if the killings are somehow linked, then these are very deep waters.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: OK, so how productive has The Overspill been over the past few years? Here’s the number of posts per year, and how that translates into weeks of posts:

2015: (no data – posts weren’t numbered)
2016: (no data – posts weren’t numbered)
2017: (no data – posts weren’t numbered)
2018: (no data – posts weren’t numbered)
2019: No. 980 – No. 1214 = 235 posts = 47 weeks
2020: No. 1215 – No. 1454 = 240 posts = 48 weeks
2021: No. 1455 – No. 1709 = 255 posts = 51 weeks
2022: No. 1710 – No. 1924 = 215 posts = 43 weeks
2023: No. 1925 – No. 2139 = 215 posts = 43 weeks
2024: No. 2140 – No. 2359 = 220 posts = 44 weeks
2025: No. 2360 – No. 2584 = 225 posts = 45 weeks

So this year was pretty average, all told. In time it might even be possible to count up those missing years and get a better picture on this productivity puzzle.

Everything Bryan Ferry has done in the past 25 years is thanks to a pilot’s actions over the Sahara in 2000. But how many more lives could have been saved? CC-licensed photo by NRK P3 on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

Coming tomorrow: how does this year’s Overspill supply compare with previous ones? See the end of Thursday’s post, the last this year.

A selection of 9 links for you. Avalon. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Oracle’s $10bn Michigan data centre in limbo after Blue Owl funding talks stall

Tabby Kinder and Rafe Rosner-Uddin:

»

Oracle’s largest data centre partner Blue Owl Capital will not back a $10bn deal for its next facility, as the software group faces increased concerns about its rising debt and artificial intelligence spending.

Blue Owl had been in discussions with lenders and Oracle about investing in the planned 1 gigawatt data centre being built to serve OpenAI in Saline Township, Michigan.

But the agreement will not go forward after negotiations stalled, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The private capital group has been the primary backer for Oracle’s largest data centre projects in the US, investing its own money and raising billions more in debt to build the facilities. Blue Owl typically sets up a special purpose vehicle, which owns the data centre and leases it to Oracle.

Larry Ellison’s computing giant has deals to supply computing power from these data centres to AI groups such as OpenAI.

The breakdown of funding discussions with Blue Owl leaves the financing of the Michigan facility in doubt, as Oracle has not yet signed a deal with a new backer, according to the people close to the matter.

…People close to the Michigan deal said lenders pushed for stricter leasing and debt terms amid shifting market sentiment around enormous AI spending including Oracle’s own commitments and rising debt levels.

«

Canary? Coal mine? Is this a New Century Financial moment? A Bear Stearns hedge fund moment? Data centre funding could be a domino falling.
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Mass hacking of IP cameras leave Koreans feeling vulnerable in homes and businesses • Korea JoongAng Daily

Michael Lee:

»

When Kim Ha-eun, a mother of two, installed internet protocol (IP) cameras in her home after giving birth for the first time five years ago, she hoped the devices would ease the need for her and her husband to remain physically present around the clock to watch over their children.
 
“Being able to see what was happening inside the house in real time was important for us if we had to step outside, even for something as simple as a grocery run,” she said.
 
But news that hackers recently breached approximately 120,000 IP cameras across Korea — often found inside private homes like Kim’s — has left her and many others seething, prompting the government to take action.
 
As shocking the scale of the intrusions was the alleged motive behind them. Videos captured by the hacked cameras were allegedly sold to an overseas pornography website, exposing some of the most intimate moments of unsuspecting victims to anonymous viewers abroad.
 
Only 1,193 videos from the hacked cameras have been uncovered so far on overseas websites, raising concerns that many more remain undiscovered.
 
In response, an interagency task force comprising officials from the Ministry of Science and ICT, the Personal Information Protection Commission and the National Police Agency announced on Dec. 7 that it would pursue a multilayered reform package. The measures aim to shift responsibility beyond individuals and camera manufacturers to include business users and telecommunications providers.
 
Yet as policymakers scramble to overhaul regulations and reinforce technical safeguards, interviews with everyday users of IP cameras reveal a gap between how these devices are used and understood and the level of risk they actually pose.

For Kim, the five IP cameras in her home were initially meant to provide peace of mind. The cameras — one in each child’s bedroom, as well as units in the living room and kitchen — run continuously, providing a live feed accessible through a mobile app.
 
Privacy and data security, however, were not central considerations in her decision. Kim’s husband installed the system himself using online instructions, setting a password for the cameras that the couple has not changed since. Until learning of the hacking scandal during the interview, Kim had not even seen the news.

«

A related story on the KJD site: “Taekwondo instructor who set up hidden camera in women’s locker room sent to prosecutors”. IP cameras: potentially toxic for anyone in range.
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Ford’s EV retreat highlights industry dilemma: build for the US or the world? • Reuters

Nora Eckert:

»

Ford CEO Jim Farley walked through Ford’s Michigan design studio Monday afternoon, reflecting on how he was about to wipe out thousands of work hours on electric vehicles that he and his team had hoped would revolutionize the American auto industry.

Shortly after, his company announced it would kill several of those battery-powered models and take a $19.5bn writedown on electric vehicle (EV)-related assets. It marked the industry’s biggest electric-vehicle retreat since US President Donald Trump’s sweeping auto-policy changes iced already cooling EV demand.

Farley had spent years telling staff and investors that catching up to Tesla and China’s leading EV makers amounted to an existential struggle. Now – after losing about $13bn on EVs since 2023 – Farley says the path to survival lies in ditching these unprofitable models.

“We can’t allocate money for things that will not make money,” he told Reuters on Monday. “As much as I love those products, the customers in the U.S. were not going to pay for them. And that was the end of that.”

…On EVs, Farley hopes to thread the needle by killing most EV models but preserving a $30,000 midsize electric truck due out in 2027, which a specialised skunkworks team in California has engineered to take on EV powerhouses Tesla and China’s BYD. “As a global company competing against the Chinese and others, we do not have time,” Farley said.

Michael Dunne, a consultant and former General Motors executive who spent years in China, said US automakers have little choice but to balance raking in US profits from gas-powered trucks while competing overseas with Chinese and other EV makers. “EVs are not going to go away,” Dunne said. “So are we going to compete globally or are we just going to stay at home?”

US electric-vehicle sales have dropped sharply since the Sept. 30 expiration of a $7,500-per-car consumer tax credit, killed in Trump-supported legislation. That and other administration policies have cemented America’s status as an EV laggard relative to the world’s two other largest car markets. In China, EVs and plug-in hybrids account for roughly half of sales; in Europe, they comprise around 25%. US sales sank to around 5% after Trump policies took effect.

«

The Americans are watching the Chinese companies eat their lunch abroad, and they’ll be coming for breakfast in the US presently.
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Is the collapse of Robin.AI a one-off or a sign of a legal tech AI bubble? • 3 Geeks and a Law Blog

Greg Lambert:

»

Robin AI launched in 2019 with a compelling premise: a “lawyer-in-the-loop” contract review system that combined large language models with proprietary contract data. The founding team brought credibility: lawyer Richard Robinson and machine-learning researcher James Clough building something at the intersection of both worlds. In early 2024, they raised $26m in Series B funding. The marketing was aggressive: major enterprise clients, ambitious platform expansion across drafting and negotiation, claims of transformative efficiency gains.

By late 2025, the picture had changed dramatically. Internal reports suggested the company failed to secure another major funding round (targeting roughly $50m), laid off about a third of its workforce, and quietly listed itself for sale on a distressed marketplace.

That trajectory, from high-profile funding to forced sale in under two years, warrants closer examination. Robin AI never publicly disclosed its Series B valuation. In a market where lofty valuations typically accompany large deals, that absence now looks less like discretion and more like avoidance. Without a clear number, it’s impossible to assess whether investor expectations matched operational reality or whether growth projections were ever grounded in achievable metrics.

More telling were the employee accounts. Reviews on Glassdoor described a culture of overwork, inadequate support, and marketing claims that outpaced product capability.

«

Canary? Coal mine?
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Sharp monocular view synthesis in less than a second • Apple’s Github

Lars Mescheder, Wei Dong and others:

»

We present SHARP, an approach to photorealistic view synthesis from a single image. Given a single photograph, SHARP regresses the parameters of a 3D Gaussian representation of the depicted scene. This is done in less than a second on a standard GPU via a single feedforward pass through a neural network. The 3D Gaussian representation produced by SHARP can then be rendered in real time, yielding high-resolution photorealistic images for nearby views.

«

This creates images that people using Apple’s Vision Pro headset can enter into and walk around in. There’s an ArXiv paper to go with it: perhaps something is happening on the Vision Pro under the surface.
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Apple Music is coming to ChatGPT, OpenAI announces • 9to5Mac

Marcus Mendes:

»

In a Substack post published earlier today, Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of applications, said that Apple Music is among the upcoming partners that will integrate with ChatGPT.

Last October, OpenAI introduced apps in ChatGPT, with the first round of partnerships and integrations including Spotify, Booking.com, Canva, Coursera, Figma, Expedia, and Zillow. Back then, OpenAI also released a preview of the Apps SDK, which would soon let developers integrate their own apps into ChatGPT.

Soon, according to Simo, “even more apps will be available in a new directory, including Adobe, Airtable, Apple Music, Clay, Lovable, OpenTable, Replit, and Salesforce, and other developers will be able to submit their apps for review.”

This likely means that the Apps SDK is about to exit preview, and that OpenAI has been pursuing new high-profile integrations.

Interestingly, Simo mentions Adobe, which just released Photoshop, Express, and Acrobat apps in ChatGPT. At the time, the company claimed that new capabilities would be introduced in the coming weeks.

For Apple Music and ChatGPT, the app will most likely work similarly to how Spotify works within ChatGPT:

»

When you start a message to ChatGPT with the name of an available app, like “Spotify, make a playlist for my party this Friday,” ChatGPT can automatically surface the app in your chat and use relevant context to help.

«

This means that users will likely be able to send natural language prompts to ChatGPT, allowing it to create instantly playable playlists based on those requests.

«

Better than Siri? Though is there any possibility of a hallucination trying to insert a track that doesn’t exist?
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Sherlocked before it was born: LightBuddy • Rambo Codes

Guillherme Rambo:

»

A couple of months ago, I was a few minutes away from joining a video call in my office when I noticed I hadn’t set up my ring light yet.

I use a ring light for video calls because the lighting in my office comes mostly from the top. That lighting is perfectly fine for working, but it casts shadows under the eyes and chin that are exacerbated by the built-in camera in my Studio Display.

I don’t leave the ring light behind my desk all the time because it’s distracting and makes the office look messy. That means that I have to set it up every single time I want to look decent on a video call (#FirstWorldProblems).

So I thought to myself, “hey, I have a big device that’s essentially a programmable soft box right in front of my face, why don’t I use that?”. It wasn’t the first time that I thought of my display as a lighting fixture for video calls. In the past, I’d sometimes open up about:blank in Safari and leave the window open so that it would illuminate my face during a video call.

Being a Mac developer, the natural next step was to open up Xcode and go “File > New Project”. In about 15 minutes, I had a little prototype called “RingLightBuddy” that displayed an ugly white HDR round rect [rounded rectangle] around the edges of the screen. It would also mask it out when you moved the mouse over it so that it was still possible to interact with the computer when using the ring light.

I was actually really excited about the idea, and thought about turning it into a product, but after using it for a few minutes, I thought “meh, this is a stupid idea, never mind”, and just left it to rot in my projects folder.

This all happened in mid-July. Fast-forward to mid-November, during the beta cycle for macOS 26.2, Apple added the new Edge Light feature, which was basically the same idea, integrated into macOS.

My initial reaction was of disappointment with myself for not having moved forward with the app when I initially had the idea and made the prototype, as I had a chance to launch the feature before Apple did.

After thinking about it for a while, my feelings changed.

«

But now: there is an app! And it actually looks useful for anyone who does those calls when it’s dark or dim. (For those who don’t know: “Sherlocked”.)
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The strange fate of BA Flight 2069 • New Statesman

Kate Mossman:

»

Bill Hagan felt his head push beyond the pillow and into the headboard. As he came to consciousness, he realised it was not a headboard but the reinforced plastic bulkhead of a plane. At the moment he realised he was on a plane, he remembered that he was the captain of it. His feet were pitched up at 30 degrees in the flight crew’s bunk, at twice the angle of take-off. His first thought was that his two co-pilots had pulled up the aircraft’s nose because of oncoming traffic. When the plane banked sharply to the right, he wondered whether they’d swerved to avoid space debris. For a few seconds the aircraft seemed to level, then rose again, before turning sharply to the left and beginning to fall on its side.

Hagan had not been able to find his pyjamas before his rest break, and he entered the cockpit through the bunk’s adjoining door in his underpants, as British Airways Flight 2069 fell nose down at the rate of 30,000 feet per minute. “Something has been bothering me for a quarter of a century,” he texts me on a Sunday night 25 years later. “How did I manage to get into the cockpit with the aerobatics going on? I now realise I entered at the precise time the G-forces were changing from positive to negative, making me light on my feet.”

His co-pilot Phil Watson was strapped into the right-hand seat – the left should have been filled by his colleague Richard Webb but was empty – and another man was slumped over Watson’s lap, hooked on to the control column. Hagan pulled on the man’s shoulders, but three times he lost his grip. As the plane descended, he had a profound feeling of shame. He’d worked out that the Nairobi-bound flight would be somewhere over the Sahara Desert and this thought bothered him most. “Because it would be worse than Lockerbie. Because there is nothing there, just sand. The aircraft would be broken up, and bodies all over the place.” 

«

This became a famous event at the time: those on board included Bryan Ferry, of Roxy Music fame, and Jemima Khan, erstwhile wife of Imran. But what people forget is when it happened, and what happened not long after. The subtitle is “How do you measure the cost of a disaster that didn’t happen?” You have to register an email or have a subscription to read the full article; it’s well worth your time.
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Trump Mobile is offering phones for $500… refurbished, three-year-old ones • The Independent

Io Dodds:

»

True Donald Trump devotees who put down their $100 deposits are still awaiting the chance to receive one of his family’s $499 golden smartphones for “real Americans”.

But in the meantime, perhaps you’d like to buy a refurbished Apple or Samsung phone from several years ago, for up to $225 more than you could get on Amazon?

That’s the astonishing deal now on offer from Trump Mobile, the patriotic phone vendor launched this June by the President’s family business, the Trump Organization (currently run by his eldest sons Don Jr and Eric Trump).

There’s still no update on the company’s forthcoming T1, a “proudly American” Android handset retailing for $499 that was forced to remove its “MADE IN THE USA” branding after experts argued that the facilities to manufacture such devices wholly within the States simply do not exist.

That hasn’t stopped the firm hawking refurbished Samsung S23s, S24s, and Apple iPhone 15s and 16s, which appear to have no specific Trump branding and are billed as “brought to life right here in the USA”.

«

How astonishing that Trump should be involved with something that appears to be a complete and utter con. The T1 was due to be delivered in June. Perhaps they meant a different June than 2025’s June.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The UK government is asking for feedback on how the BBC should be funded in future. Best guess? The licence fee continues. CC-licensed photo by John Keogh on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 9 links for you. Free at the point of demand. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Scam ads on Meta in UK likely worth more than all online news advertising • Press Gazette

Dominic Ponsford:

»

Meta likely made more money from fraudulent advertising in the UK last year than the entire news industry made from legitimate online marketing.

The owner of Facebook and Instagram has revealed in internal documents (exposed by Reuters) that around 10% of its annual revenue comes from advertising placed by fraudsters.

This equates to $16bn a year in annual revenue from enabling the fraud industry and at least $790m (£600m) in the UK alone. Press Gazette has estimated that Meta made at least £6bn in UK advertising revenue in 2024.

Online advertising across the entire UK national and regional news industry was just under £600m in 2024 (according to Advertising Association data).

Meta is the largest online publisher in the UK, with the average Briton spending more than an hour a day on its platforms.

Press Gazette has repeatedly highlighted scam investment ads running on Facebook which steal the identities of high-profile business journalists and others in order to lure users to join Whatsapp investment groups which are purportedly run by the likes of FT commentator Martin Wolf, Martin Lewis or CNN’s Richard Guest.

These may be so-called pig-butchering scams whereby people are fed real investment advice over a weeks or months to win trust, before they are then lured into making a fraudulent investment and losing their money.

Press Gazette joined the “Richard Quest” investment group and began receiving investment tips and daily messages from a fake persona called Alyssa Mendez.

«

Just to be clear, the Reuters investigation linked above is a totally different one from that linked below. Facebook, and Instagram to a lesser extent, offers colossal potential to scammers.
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Meta tolerates rampant ad fraud from China to safeguard billions in revenue • Reuters

Jeff Horwitz and Engen Tham:

»

Last year, Meta had to reckon with an ugly conclusion about its Chinese advertising customers: They were defrauding Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp users worldwide.

Though China’s authoritarian government bans use of Meta social media by its citizens, Beijing lets Chinese companies advertise to foreign consumers on the globe-spanning platforms. As a result, Meta’s advertising business was thriving in China, ultimately reaching over $18 billion in annual sales in 2024, more than a tenth of the company’s global revenue.

But Meta calculated that about 19% of that money – more than $3 billion – was coming from ads for scams, illegal gambling, pornography and other banned content, according to internal Meta documents reviewed by Reuters.

The documents are part of a cache of previously unreported material generated over the past four years by teams including Meta’s finance, lobbying, engineering and safety divisions. The cache reveals Meta’s efforts over that period to understand the scale of abuse on its platforms and the company’s reluctance to introduce fixes that could undermine its business and revenues.

The documents show that Meta believed China was the country of origin of roughly a quarter of all ads for scams and banned products on Meta’s platforms worldwide. Victims ranged from shoppers in Taiwan who purchased bogus health supplements to investors in the United States and Canada who were swindled out of their savings. “We need to make significant investment to reduce growing harm,” Meta staffers warned in an internal April 2024 presentation to leaders of its safety operations.

To that end, Meta created an anti-fraud team that went beyond previous efforts to monitor scams and other banned activity from China. Using a variety of stepped-up enforcement tools, it slashed the problematic ads by about half during the second half of 2024 – from 19% to 9% of the total advertising revenue coming from China.

Then Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg weighed in. “As a result of Integrity Strategy pivot and follow-up from Zuck,” a late 2024 document notes, the China ads-enforcement team was “asked to pause” its work. Reuters was unable to learn the specifics of the CEO’s involvement or what the so-called “Integrity Strategy pivot” entailed.

But after Zuckerberg’s input, the documents show, Meta disbanded its China-focused anti-scam team.

«

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Windows 11 bug causes password sign-in icon to turn invisible – but don’t worry, says Microsoft • TechRadar

Darren Allan:

»

Windows 11 has had its fair share of odd bugs, particularly since version 24H2 landed, and a very peculiar glitch recently appeared – and what’s equally odd is Microsoft’s workaround here.

Windows Latest noticed the problem, which pertains to the Windows Hello sign-in options on the lock screen for Windows 11 devices.

This screen allows you to log in via biometric means (facial recognition or fingerprint), or by using a PIN, although if you can’t recall that PIN, then there’s a backup facility to use your Microsoft account password instead.

However, on some Windows 11 PCs that have installed the August preview update, or the full September update – or later – this password option has gone missing (as per this thread on Reddit).

Microsoft explains in the known issues for the August preview update: “You might notice that the password icon is not visible in the sign-in options on the lock screen. If you hover over the space where the icon should appear, you’ll see that the password button is still available. Select this placeholder to open the password text box and enter your password. After entering your password, you can sign in normally.”

In other words, the password icon has somehow turned invisible, but it’s still there and functioning – sort of, as the icon itself isn’t there, but you’ll see a blank box where it normally lives, which, when clicked on, works to trigger the password field.

«

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Why runners get lightheaded when they stand up • Outside Online

Alex Hutchinson:

»

“Whoa, headrush!” Over the years, I’ve gotten very familiar with that sensation: a sudden lightheadedness if I get up suddenly after, say, chilling on the sofa. It’s called “orthostatic intolerance,” and it’s a relatively common phenomenon among runners, which I’ve always assumed had something to do with being really fit and having a low resting heart rate. But a new study suggests there’s something entirely different going on.

A team of researchers at Penn State and Florida State universities, led by Chester Ray, tested the hypothesis that the up-and-down motion of running causes the motion sensors in your inner ear to become less sensitive—which in turn means they’re slower to detect when you suddenly stand up. Their study, which appears in the Journal of Applied Physiology, had sedentary volunteers complete eight weeks of either running, cycling, or no exercise. Sure enough, running had a unique impact on their inner motion sensors.

…The conclusion of the study is that it’s not fitness alone that alters your response to standing suddenly. Instead, there’s something specific to running’s up-and-down motion that seems to make your brain pay less attention to motion signals from your otoliths [tiny crystals in the ear’s vestibular system]. This doesn’t mean it’s the only reason for headrushes, but it suggests that it’s one of them. It’s worth noting that the cyclists in this study were on stationary bikes, so it’s possible that real-world cycling might have a little more side-to-side motion that might have a similar effect—though you’d still expect it to be much less than from running.

As an aside, another situation where runners sometimes feel lightheaded and collapse is at the end of long races. This is also a situation where the heart is having trouble getting enough oxygen to the brain, and it used to be blamed on dehydration. But it generally seems to happen right after people stop running, which suggests that it’s actually a problem of blood distribution.

«

Doesn’t quite explain why ordinary people get a headrush, but suggests that runners get them more than cyclists.
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Tech whistleblowers face job losses and isolation • The Washington Post

Naomi Nix:

»

Yaël Eisenstat didn’t expect her career to completely unravel after she publicly accused her former employer of profiting off propaganda.

Eisenstat, Facebook’s former head of election integrity, alleged in a 2019 op-ed that the social media platform allowed political operatives to mislead the public with sophisticated ad-targeting tools. Meta has argued that these ad policies were intended to prevent censorship of political speech.

Soon, she said, former colleagues started gossiping about her. It was hard to find a new job. Eisenstat said she would routinely interview with senior managers who would later ghost her. One institution courted her for months for a leadership role but then told her it wouldn’t hire her. That day, the institution announced a major donation from the philanthropic organization of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.

Eisenstat never thought Meta’s CEO was purposely torpedoing her job prospects, but the timing made her feel discouraged.

“I knew it, like, in my gut … I had been blacklisted,” said Eisenstat, now the director of policy and impact at the Cybersecurity for Democracy research center. “You just start to feel paranoid because no one will say to you, ‘This is why we will absolutely never interview you or call you or speak with you.’”

She lived off consulting projects while she waited for a full-time job. It took her four years to land something that matched the rigor of her role at Facebook, the company now known as Meta.

Eisenstat is part of a growing group of former tech workers who have alleged that their Silicon Valley employers harmed the public and compromised users’ safety.

«

I spoke to Eisenstat for Social Warming: she had left the company after six months. Her problems getting hired subsequently are peculiar, given her CV: ten years working for the CIA and the White House.
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Mozilla Corporation installs Firefox driver in CEO reboot • The Register

Thomas Claburn:

»

Mozilla Corporation on Tuesday said it has appointed Anthony Enzor-DeMeo as chief executive officer, replacing Laura Chambers, who served as interim CEO for the past two years.

Enzor-DeMeo has been the general manager of Firefox since August 2025. He joined Mozilla in December 2024 from Roofstock, a platform for real estate investors focused on the single-family rental market.

His appointment came with a commitment to expand Mozilla’s involvement with AI services. According to the public benefit company, Enzor-DeMeo’s browser stewardship has accelerated improvements in Firefox and has shown how Mozilla can responsibly integrate AI with the browsing experience. Firefox, the company claims, has enjoyed double-digit growth on mobile devices each of the past two years, and its market share has stabilized on the desktop.

…With the appointment of a new CEO, [Mozilla president Mark] Surman told The Register in an interview on Monday, “You’re gonna see, I think, an even deeper investment in reviving the browser as a really vibrant space.”

Surman said we’re in what some people describe as the third browser war, “a period where, because of AI, people are launching new browsers and looking at what the technology can do,” he said. “In general, you’ll see more fundamental innovation happening around the browser to give developers more capabilities.”

The renewed focus on Firefox within Mozilla Corporation, Surman said, has internal and external explanations. “Internally, I think we haven’t had the leadership for the last few years to really drive us technically on what’s possible with the tech stack we have,” he said.

“The external reason is really that the market for browsers and the space for innovation over browsers is really in motion again. And people have written browsers off as a commodity. Other people are innovating, and it creates a really good context for us to do the same again and to reinvest there.”

«

Nice idea, but how is Mozilla/Firefox going to push to the front in browsers when a ton of AI companies are making their own browser? Unless it somehow partners with one of them, as the builder of their browser – which wouldn’t be a bad idea.
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How might the BBC be funded if the licence fee is scrapped? • The Guardian

Michael Savage:

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Advertising. Subscriptions. A household levy. The government claims to be considering all options for funding the BBC. In reality, however, many industry insiders believe radical reforms will be dodged in favour of sticking to the licence fee model – perhaps for the last time.

Advocates for the licence fee have long argued it is the only model that allows the corporation to stick to its guiding “universality” principle – producing programming for everyone.

Months of wrangling await before any decision is reached. The government’s green paper on the BBC’s charter renewal, launched on Tuesday, is an early part of a process that will run into 2027.

So what are the options for funding the BBC, and how likely are they?

«

They are: a tax (already ruled out), subscription (won’t be able to replace licence fee because won’t get enough subscribers), advertising (absolutely reviled by the BBC chair and not a popular idea), paywalling some popular shows (but which, and would they remain popular?), per-house levy (basically what happens now but rolled into council tax), some sort of fudge (almost certainly what will happen).
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Five things that changed the media in 2025 • The New Yorker

Jay Caspian Kang lists four other things, and this is his fifth:

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Twitter is no longer the media’s village square… Twitter no longer feels essential or expansive; the platform has become balkanized, fracturing into a hodgepodge of esoteric and oftentimes anachronistic conversations about housing policy, candidate polling, Marxism, and whatever else. It’s true that many people have left the platform, but I don’t think that’s why the discourse on X feels so stale. Rather, it’s more likely the product of online herding effects: everyone eventually finds a tribe and conforms to its norms.

Pew, which is on the short list of polling and survey outlets that I trust, recently put out a report on social-media use showing that women, in particular, have been leaving X. In 2018, Twitter had about equal participation between men and women; since then—and especially in the years following the company’s acquisition by Elon Musk—the platform has steeply tilted toward men. (Reddit, for what it’s worth, has had the opposite trajectory, going from a mostly male-dominated space a decade ago to something much closer to gender balance today.) I imagine there’s a feedback loop at work: X’s algorithms amplify shouting men, which, in turn, causes women to leave the platform and leads to more shouting men who believe their tribal concerns are more important than everyone else’s. X, in 2025, feels deeply self-referential and largely irrelevant.

I am not one of these traditionalists who say that we don’t need unruly public-discussion sites, because I would rather have some unpleasant chaos than a return to fully centralized media gatekeeping. Streaming, which is undeniably the ascendant form in media and commentary, is not as democratic as peak Twitter; it doesn’t allow previously unknown posters to turn themselves into the stars of an argument or a news story. Peak media Twitter was terrible, sure, but I imagine we will miss it more than we think.

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Hotel California, but with fire and brimstone, but also you could leave.
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Microsoft scales back AI goals because almost nobody is using Copilot • Extremetech

Jon Martindale:

»

Microsoft has cut its sales targets for its agentic AI software after struggling to find buyers interested in using it. In some cases, targets have been slashed by up to 50%, suggesting Microsoft overestimated the potential of its new AI tools. Indeed, compared with ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, Copilot is falling behind, raising concerns about Microsoft’s substantial AI investment.

Microsoft was an early investor in many of the latest AI companies. It ended up with a serious stake in OpenAI and benefited from early access to its models, creating Bing Chat and Copilot when Google, Meta, and Anthropic were just getting started. But now its momentum has stalled, and like everyone else, it’s not making much money from its AI products. That’s because no one is buying them, and that is because very few people actually find them useful, The Information reports.

“The Information’s story inaccurately combines the concepts of growth and sales quotas,” Microsoft said in a very defensive statement (via Futurism), adding that “aggregate sales quotas for AI products have not been lowered.”

Petulance aside, tests from earlier this year found that AI agents failed to complete tasks up to 70% of the time, making them almost entirely redundant as a workforce replacement tool. At best, they’re a way for skilled employees to be more productive and save time on low-level tasks, but those tasks were already being handed off to lower-level employees.

«

Imagining the scenes inside Microsoft being like Glengarry Glenn Ross, but for agentic AI.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

This year’s Merriam-Webster dictionary word is “slop”, unsurprisingly. CC-licensed photo by Greg Myers on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 10 links for you. Human-generated. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Slop and ragebait: what 2025 ‘words of the year’ say about us • Deseret News

Eastin Hartzell:

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Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year for 2025 is a short, blunt one — and it’s aimed straight at your feed: “slop.”

Merriam-Webster defines “slop” as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” In other words, the obviously fake stuff that spreads fast.

Merriam-Webster’s editors said the word captured a growing public frustration, but also a deeper longing. Speaking to The Associated Press, Merriam-Webster president Greg Barlow framed “slop” as a kind of warning label — one that shows that people “want things that are real, they want things that are genuine. It’s almost a defiant word when it comes to AI. When it comes to replacing human creativity, sometimes AI actually doesn’t seem so intelligent.”

Across other major dictionaries and cultural institutions, 2025’s “words of the year” landed on a consistent theme that the modern internet can be exhausting.

Merriam-Webster started announcing a “word of the year” in 2003. Here are its words of the year since 2015:
• 2024: polarization
• 2023: authentic
• 2022: gaslighting
• 2021: vaccine
• 2020: pandemic
• 2019: they
• 2018: justice
• 2017: feminism
• 2016: surreal
• 2015: ism

The company has long emphasized search behavior — what readers look up and why — alongside cultural relevance.

This year, “slop” surged in the broader context of AI-generated everything: deepfakes, auto-written books and bizarre synthetic videos flooding platforms.

«

Other dictionaries: Oxford: ragebait. Cambridge: parasocial. Collins: vibe coding. Dictionary.com: 6-7. Macquarie: AI slop. Seems as though Simon Willison was an early amplifier of the term in May 2024, but it began earlier than that – he references a tweet whose author says they’re “watching in real time as ‘slop’ becomes a term of art…”.

Willison’s piece is worth reading in retrospect – though his suggestion for naming AI-generated spam, “slom”, hasn’t caught on at all.
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Stop Citing AI

And while we’re on the topic.. Leo Herzog has a page to which you can send people who try to offer LLM output as “facts” (especially to settle arguments):

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You’ve been sent here because you cited AI as a source to try to prove something.

Responses from Large Language Models like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini are not facts. They’re predicting what words are most likely to come next in a sequence. They can produce convincing-sounding information, but that information may not be accurate or reliable.

Imagine someone who has read thousands of books, but doesn’t remember where they read what…Sure, you might get an answer that’s right or advice that’s good… but what “books” is it “remembering” when it gives that answer? That answer or advice is a common combination of words, not a fact.

«

He does offer questions that they might be good at answering, but they’re not fact-based ones.
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Axios CEO: US is in ‘post-news’ era • Semafor

Max Tani:

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The co-founder and CEO of Axios is warning journalists that they’ve entered a “a post-news era where what matters, and has value, is information, not ‘the news.’”

In order to survive, he wrote in an internal memo shared with Semafor, newsrooms will need to rethink the role they will play in an information landscape dominated by artificial intelligence and algorithmic, personalized video feeds.

“Your reality — how you see the world — is no longer defined by ‘the news.’” Jim VandeHei wrote. “Instead, it’s shaped by the videos you watch, podcasts you hear, the people you follow on social media and know in person, and the reporting you consume. We’ve entered a period where everyone has their own individual reality, usually based on age, profession, passions, politics and platform preferences.”

VandeHei laid out several solutions for Axios to cut through the thicket: every piece of content must be useful to a smart professional, original reporting is crucial, and coverage should focus on one of the three major tectonic changes in tech, governing, and the media itself.

“What traditional news media companies can do is be useful, trusted, illuminating sources of vital information that’s vetted by experts held to high standards of accuracy and truthfulness. That calling is more important than ever,” he said.

Axios believes its largest area for growth is in local coverage, much of which has been left behind by national media. The digital media company has hired Liz Alesse, currently ABC’s vice president of audio, to be the company’s first general manager of Axios Local, which is expanding into new suburban areas in Colorado and Ohio, testing whether the company’s local news format can work in smaller communities.

«

“Local news” in the current age is the modern version of invading Afghanistan or attacking Moscow in winter. Sure, everybody else failed doing it, but maybe we can make it work?

Also, the journalists at Axios will surely already know all the things VandeHei wrote. They’ll have known them years ago.
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Publisher under fire after “fake” citations found in AI ethics guide • The Times

Tilly Harris and Rhys Blakely:

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One of the world’s largest academic publishers is selling a book on the ethics of artificial intelligence research that appears to be riddled with fake citations, including references to journals that do not exist.

Academic publishing has recently been subject to criticism for accepting fraudulent papers produced using AI, which have made it through a peer-review process designed to guarantee high standards. The Times found that a book recently published by the German-British publishing giant Springer Nature includes dozens of citations that appear to have been invented — a sign, often, of AI-generated material.

The book — Social, Ethical and Legal Aspects of Generative AI — is advertised as an authoritative review of the ethical dilemmas posed by the technology and is on sale for £125. At least two chapters include footnotes that cite scientific publications that appear to have been invented.

In one chapter, 8 of the 11 citations could not be verified, suggesting more than 70% may have been fabricated.

There is growing concern within academia about citations and even entire research papers being generated by AI tools that try to mimic genuine scholarly work.

In April, Springer Nature withdrew another technology title — Mastering Machine Learning: From Basics to Advanced — after it was found to contain numerous fictitious references. In the more recent book analysed by The Times, one citation claims to refer to a paper published in “Harvard AI Journal”. Harvard Business Review has said that no such journal exists.

Guillaume Cabanac, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Toulouse and an expert in detecting fake academic papers, analysed two chapters using BibCheck, a tool designed to identify fabricated references.

He found that at least 11 of 21 citations in the first chapter could not be matched to known academic papers. The analysis also suggested that eight of the 11 citations in Chapter Four were untraceable. “This is research misconduct: falsification and fabrication of references,” Cabanac said. He tracks such cases and says he has seen a steady rise in AI “hallucinated” citations across academic literature.

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The 26 most important ideas for 2026 • Derek Thompson

Derek Thompson:

»

here are 26 ideas for 2026, organized under the themes that I think will drive economics, politics, and technology in the near future.

«

Such as: we’re seeing the end of reading; the triumph of streaming video; the death of cinemas; TikTok is an unknown; the US economy is presently a big bet that AI will work; and plenty more. Lots of data to go with it.
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Washington Post’s AI-generated podcasts rife with errors, fictional quotes • Semafor

Max Tani:

»

The Washington Post’s top standards editor Thursday decried “frustrating” errors in its new AI-generated personalized podcasts, whose launch has been met with distress by its journalists.

The Post announced that it was rolling out personalized AI-generated podcasts for users of the paper’s mobile app. In a release, the paper said users will be able to choose preferred topics and AI hosts, and could “shape their own briefing, select their topics, set their lengths, pick their hosts and soon even ask questions using our Ask The Post AI technology.”

But less than 48 hours since the product was released, people within the Post have flagged what four sources described as multiple mistakes in personalized podcasts. The errors have ranged from relatively minor pronunciation gaffes to significant changes to story content, like misattributing or inventing quotes and inserting commentary, such as interpreting a source’s quotes as the paper’s position on an issue.

According to four people familiar with the situation, the errors have alarmed senior newsroom leaders who have acknowledged in an internal Slack channel that the product’s output is not living up to the paper’s standards. In a message to other WaPo staff shared with Semafor, head of standards Karen Pensiero wrote that the errors have been “frustrating for all of us.”

…“It is truly astonishing that this was allowed to go forward at all,” one Post editor wrote on Slack. “Never would I have imagined that the Washington Post would deliberately warp its own journalism and then push these errors out to our audience at scale. And just days after the White House put up a site dedicated to attacking journalists, most notably our own, including for stories with corrections or editors notes attached. If we were serious we would pull this tool immediately.”

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Half of graduates “would earn more as a higher-level apprentice” • The Times

Louise Eccles and Joey D’Urso:

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Half of graduates would be earning a better salary if they had skipped university and taken a higher-level apprenticeship instead, according to a think tank.

A report published this weekend says the country is “obsessed” with university degrees, which comes at the expense of the economy and is to the detriment of many students.

The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) found that, five years after qualifying, a higher-level apprentice earns £5,000 a year more than an average graduate.

A higher (level-4) apprenticeship is the equivalent of completing the first year of a bachelor’s degree, and offers training as a brewer, countryside ranger, fraud investigator, data analyst, network engineer, stained-glass craftsperson or insurance professional, among many other occupations.

While a level-4 apprentice typically earns an average of £37,300 after five years, the median average university student earns £32,100, according to analysis of government data.

The average student had debts of £53,000 after graduating last year. By comparison, level-4 apprenticeships are funded by employers and the government, and apprentices also earn a salary while working.

«

Also worth mentioning: those apprenticeships are probably less likely to be replaced in a few years by AI than other graduate jobs, because they’ll be in manual work (plumbing, engineering) or manufacturing.
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We mapped the world’s hottest data centres • Rest of World

Hazel Gandhi and Rina Chandran:

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Across the world, countries with hot climates are investing millions of dollars in building data centres to meet the growing demand for generative artificial intelligence while also storing data within their own borders. That’s why data centres are peppered around the world, rather than being concentrated only in cooler countries like Norway or Sweden.

Rest of World set out to document how many data centres globally are located in regions that are too hot for optimal operations. The industry standard for that range is 18ºC to 27ºC, recommended by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers, or Ashrae. Cooler temperatures improve server operation efficiency; in hotter temperatures, data centres face significant challenges in cooling their facilities.

We plotted temperature data from the Copernicus Climate Data Store, a project organized as part of the European Union’s efforts to open-source climate data against locations from Data Center Map, a widely referenced resource and marketplace for data centre-related services. We found that of the 8,808 operational data centres worldwide as of October 2025, nearly 7,000 are located in areas outside the optimal range. The vast majority are in regions with average temperatures that are colder than the range. Only 600, or less than 10% of all operational data centres, are located in areas where average annual temperatures are above 27ºC.

However, our analysis, conducted with the help of nonprofit Climate Central, showed that in 21 countries— including Singapore, Thailand, Nigeria, and the United Arab Emirates — all data centres are located in areas with average annual temperatures of above 27ºC. Nearly all data centers in Saudi Arabia and Malaysia are in regions that are too hot. Nearly half of Indonesia’s 170 data centres are in hot places, while in India — a key market for big tech and social media companies — about 30% are located in overly hot regions.

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Going to guess that where they’re in “too hot” places, a very significant amount of money is going to be spent on aircon. Is it going to be renewable first-install energy, or diverted from the grid?

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How we found the man behind two deepfake porn sites • Bellingcat

Kolina Koltai:

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Depending on which of his social media profiles you were looking at, Mark Resan was either a marketing lead at Google or working for a dental implant company, a human resources company and a business software firm – all at the same time.           

But a Bellingcat investigation has found that the Hungarian national is the key figure behind, and the likely owner of, at least two deepfake porn websites – RefacePorn and DeepfakePorn – that until recently were selling paid subscriptions. 

There is no question about the nature of these websites. RefacePorn’s landing page shows an explicit video of a woman performing a sexual act. As the video plays, her face is replaced with a variety of other women’s faces. The text above declares: “Face swap deepfake porn. Upload your face!” 

Deepfake porn sites such as these, which use artificial intelligence to create sexually explicit images and videos – usually without the consent of those whose faces or bodies are featured – have proliferated at an alarming rate in recent years. The impact on victims has been described as “life-shattering”, with the mental health effects similar to those reported by victims of sexual assault. 

While the technology to make these synthetic images is not new, the rise of mainstream AI image generator tools and “Nudify” apps has made it more widely available to people without deep technical expertise.

«

“Follow the money” turns out to be the most reliable method of doing this sort of detection.
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Roomba maker iRobot swept into bankruptcy • Financial Times via Ars Technica

Rafe Rosner-Uddin:

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Roomba maker iRobot has filed for bankruptcy and will be taken over by its Chinese supplier after the company that popularized the robot vacuum cleaner fell under the weight of competition from cheaper rivals.

The US-listed group on Sunday said it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Delaware as part of a restructuring agreement with Shenzhen-based Picea Robotics, its lender and primary supplier, which will acquire all of iRobot’s shares. The deal comes nearly two years after a proposed $1.5bn acquisition by Amazon fell through over competition concerns from EU regulators.

Shares in iRobot traded at about $4 a share on Friday, well below the $52 a share offered by Amazon.

“Today’s announcement marks a pivotal milestone in securing iRobot’s long-term future,” said Gary Cohen, iRobot’s chief executive. “The transaction will strengthen our financial position and will help deliver continuity for our consumers, customers and partners.”

Founded in 1990 by engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, iRobot helped introduce robotics into the home, ultimately selling more than 40 million devices, including its Roomba vacuum cleaner, according to the company. In recent years, it has faced competition from cheaper Chinese rivals, including Picea, putting pressure on sales and forcing iRobot to reduce headcount. A management shake-up in early 2024 saw the departure of its co-founder as chief executive.

Amazon proposed buying the company in 2023, seeing synergy with its Alexa-powered smart speakers and Ring doorbells. EU regulators, however, pushed back on the deal, raising concerns it would lead to reduced visibility for rival vacuum cleaner brands on Amazon’s website.

…Although iRobot received $94m in compensation for the termination of its deal with Amazon, a significant portion was used to pay advisory fees and repay part of a $200m loan from private equity group Carlyle.

Picea’s Hong Kong subsidiary acquired the remaining $191m of debt from Carlyle last month. At the time, iRobot already owed Picea $161.5m for manufacturing services, nearly $91m of which was overdue.

«

As I said when this loomed six weeks ago: maybe the market for robot vacuum cleaners isn’t that big. Bigger question: will all the Roombas out there keep working?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Anecdotal accounts of copywriters’ experiences suggest that chatbots have laid waste to human employment there. CC-licensed photo by ProCopywriters on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. NB: it’s the last week of The Overspill this year. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

“I was forced to use AI until the day I was laid off.” Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry • Blood in the Machine

Brian Merchant:

»

And so we end 2025 in AI Killed My Jobs with a look at copywriting, which was among the first jobs singled out by tech firms, the media, and copywriters themselves as particularly vulnerable to job replacement. One of the early replaced-by-AI reports was the sadly memorable story of the copywriter whose senior coworkers started referring to her as “ChatGPT” in work chats before she was laid off without explanation. And YouTube was soon overflowing with influencers and grifters promising viewers thousands of dollars a month with AI copywriting tools.

But there haven’t been many investigations into how all that’s borne out since. How have the copywriters been faring, in a world awash in cheap AI text generators and wracked with AI adoption mania in executive circles? As always, we turn to the workers themselves. And once again, the stories they have to tell are unhappy ones. These are accounts of gutted departments, dried up work, lost jobs, and closed businesses. I’ve heard from copywriters who now fear losing their apartments, one who turned to sex work, and others, who, to their chagrin, have been forced to use AI themselves.

Readers of this series will recognize some recurring themes: The work that client firms are settling for is not better when it’s produced by AI, but it’s cheaper, and deemed “good enough.” Copywriting work has not vanished completely, but has often been degraded to gigs editing client-generated AI output. Wages and rates are in free fall, though some hold out hope that business will realize that a human touch will help them stand out from the avalanche of AI homogeneity.

As for Jacques [head of support operations at a software firm], he’s relocated to Mexico, where the cost of living is cheaper, while he looks for new work. He’s not optimistic. As he put it, “It’s getting dark out there, man.”

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The stories that follow are dark. Copywriting has long been a tedious but well paid job because sensible catchy words were hard to generate. No longer.
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Ukrainians sue US chip firms for powering Russian drones, missiles • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

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Dozens of Ukrainian civilians filed a series of lawsuits in Texas this week, accusing some of the biggest US chip firms of negligently failing to track chips that evaded export curbs. Those chips were ultimately used to power Russian and Iranian weapon systems, causing wrongful deaths last year.

Their complaints alleged that for years, Texas Instruments (TI), AMD, and Intel have ignored public reporting, government warnings, and shareholder pressure to do more to track final destinations of chips and shut down shady distribution channels diverting chips to sanctioned actors in Russia and Iran.

Putting profits over human lives, tech firms continued using “high-risk” channels, Ukrainian civilians’ legal team alleged in a press statement, without ever strengthening controls.

All that intermediaries who placed bulk online orders had to do to satisfy chip firms was check a box confirming that the shipment wouldn’t be sent to sanctioned countries, lead attorney Mikal Watts told reporters at a press conference on Wednesday, according to the Kyiv Independent.

“There are export lists,” Watts said. “We know exactly what requires a license and what doesn’t. And companies know who they’re selling to. But instead, they rely on a checkbox that says, ‘I’m not shipping to Putin.’ That’s it. No enforcement. No accountability.”

As chip firms allegedly looked the other way, innocent civilians faced five attacks, detailed in the lawsuits, that used weapons containing their chips.

…Ars could not reach AMD or TI for comment. But TI’s assistant general counsel, Shannon Thompson, testified to Congress last year that the company “strongly opposes the use of our chips in Russian military equipment” and that any such shipments “are illicit and unauthorized,” Bloomberg reported.

An Intel spokesperson provided a lengthy statement to Ars, admitting that the firm cannot always control or trace chips or other products bypassing sanctions.

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Posha review: this robot chef cooks better than me • The Verge

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:

»

Meet Posha, my latest foray into the fascinating world of smart kitchen gadgets. Posha is a $1,500 countertop cooking appliance with a $15 monthly subscription that uses AI computer vision, a robotic stirring arm, and automated food and spice dispensers to autonomously cook a meal from start to finish.

It’s an absurd luxury, too dependent on the internet, and feels like a first-gen device in many ways. But it’s also a really good cook, saved me hours of standing over a hot stove, and is a glimpse into the future of home robots in the kitchen.

It took me less than five minutes to load the mac and cheese ingredients into Posha, and the robot handled the rest: sauteing some garlic, pouring in the milk, flinging in the pasta, filling it up with water to cook the pasta, then adding the cheese and stirring it all into a thick, gooey mass.

The result was that, even during my 10-hour workday, I could still offer my daughter a tasty home-cooked meal at 4:30PM, when she got back from school. The alternative in a similar time frame would be a hastily microwaved box of processed mac and cheese. The Posha meal tasted much better.

This is the whole idea behind Posha: to help working families put freshly cooked meals on the table every day without spending a lot of time doing it. As any working parent will tell you, eating well and having enough time to eat well can be a real challenge.

Posha founder Raghav Gupta grew up in India, where he says he saw love expressed through food and witnessed friends and family struggle to choose between careers and providing home-cooked meals to their families. That struggle is global, and entire appliance categories and businesses have been developed to solve it.

«

None of this contradicts the idea that Silicon Valley devizes things to replace their mothers. Honestly, for $1,500 plus $120 per year you could go on a cookery course, or perhaps pay someone to make meals. Ten-hour workdays with no space even to cook cheese pasta sound mad, too. (And of course it has AI vision. It’s 2025, nearly 2026!)
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52 things I learned in 2025 • Medium

Tom Whitwell has been at it again:

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3: You can (maybe) avoid paying tax on an unused office block by filling it with plastic tubs containing snails and lettuce. The office becomes, legally, a farm, so (maybe) exempt from tax under UK law. [Jim Waterson]

4: You can unlock the wheels on a shopping cart by playing sounds on your phone. [Joseph Gabay]

5: In the UK, water companies and offshore rigs communicate by bouncing radio waves off trails created by millions of small meteorites as they burn up in the atmosphere. [Meteor Communications Ltd] (I learned about this while prepping for the Dyski Radio Music retreat.)

6: London is safer today, with fewer murders, than at any time since I moved here almost 30 years ago. [Fraser Nelson]

7: A fusion energy start-up has developed a process to turn mercury into gold. Each year, their plant would produce 5 tonnes of gold and one gigawatt of electricity, both worth a similar amount. Unfortunately, the gold will be slightly radioactive, so must be left for 14–18 years before it’s safe to handle. [Tom Wilson]

8: Job apps for nurses can set payment rates by analysing a nurse’s credit card debt to decide how desperate they are for work. [Katie J. Wells & Funda Ustek Spilda]

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And many more. (Definitely read as far as finding out what robot hands must have.)
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They droned back • Digital Digging

Henk van Ess:

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Seven German journalism students tracked Russian-crewed freighters lurking off the Dutch and German coast — and connected them to drone swarms over military bases.

Let me walk you through what Michèle Borcherding, Clara Veihelmann, Luca-Marie Hoffmann, Julius Nieweler, Tobias Wellnitz, Sergen Kaya, and Clemens Justus of Axel Springer Academy for Journalism and Technology pulled off.

Just so you know, I’m familiar with them. I did a long OSINT training with them in Berlin. I can tell you: they went far beyond anything I taught them. The physical verification alone—chasing a ship across France, the Netherlands, and Belgium—that’s not something you learn in a classroom.

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No point wasting what is a remarkable story by excerpting it; enjoy it for yourself on the page. (The only part that’s behind a paywall is a presentation showing what they did. But the whole of the work is free to read.)
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It’s official: Substack is enshittified • The Republic of Letters

Autumn Widdoes, calling for writing to be written by actual humans:

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Since joining, I’ve discovered many amazing writers, artists, filmmakers, and thinkers on Substack. The platform has begun to do what it has set out to do. It has reinvigorated literary culture in a way that felt impossible several years prior. It is moving us out of a stuck, fearful era that has made everything into a copy of a copy of a copy. People want to read about, write about, and discuss issues that impact us. And they’ve been doing this here, without the fear of reprisal. Many people are truly excited about the possibilities that Substack has created for those of us who long felt it was impossible to ever find audiences for our work.

This is why writers and artists (and editors) should be concerned, because in many ways writers and artists have traditionally been the change agents of culture. If we’re crowded out on every platform on the Internet by bad writing, or soulless writing that isn’t even created by a human being, we should be deeply concerned about what is happening.

If Substack is to be the home for great culture, it can’t be filled with slop. The only way to prevent this is for Substack to go to great lengths to create guardrails against bad writing, in particular AI-generated writing and art, so as to prevent it from clogging up this platform. This will protect Substack writers and artists from competing with non-human LLMs that can easily generate large sums of soulless work. It will also provide a firm stance on what great culture means as we continue to understand what it means to be human in an increasingly technological age.

Without this guardrail, small accounts like mine will likely never get discovered on this site as it continues to fill up with accounts created to generate marketing funnels, bitcoin tips, celebrity gossip, and fake literature. Creating safeguards will protect original writing and allow it to be what drives this new economic engine of culture.

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You could demand that every page had to be an image of handwritten prose and people would develop a “messily handwritten” font and print their chatbot-generated content using it. There’s no obvious way around this except to keep reminding people to look out for it.
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Dopers are beating the system, says athletics integrity chief • BBC Sport

Mike Henson:

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Cheats are winning the battle against anti-doping authorities in elite sport, according to a top official.

David Howman, who chairs the Athletics Integrity Unit and served as director general of the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) for 13 years, says the anti-doping system has “stalled”, allowing those who take banned substances to prosper.

“Let’s be honest and pragmatic – the system has stalled,” Howman said. “Intentional dopers at elite level are evading detection. We are not effective enough nowadays in catching cheats. Our ineffectiveness in dealing with those who are beating the rules is hurting the anti-doping movement’s credibility.”

Former world 100m silver medallist Marvin Bracy-Williams was banned for more than three and half years last month after admitting doping offences, while fellow American Erriyon Knighton was banned for four years in September after testing positive for steroids. Women’s marathon world record holder Ruth Chepngetich was banned for three years in October after her sample showed a banned diuretic commonly used as a masking agent.

The unity of world anti-doping effort has been compromised in recent years. Wada and the US anti-doping agency have clashed over the handling of a doping scandal involving 23 Chinese swimmers, funding and the staging of next year’s Enhanced Games, an event which encourages the use of banned substances, in Las Vegas.

The anti-doping authorities in Kenya, whose athletes have been involved in a spate of positive tests, are on a Wada watchlist, while Russia, whose officials were found to be involved in the systematic cheating and swapping of samples at the 2014 Winter Olympics at Sochi,, external are still judged as “non-compliant” by Wada.

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Doping is biochemical technology – figuring out how to boost athletes’ performance while not being caught by the AIU and similar bodies. The dopers are better at this game; unsurprising, because there’s big money in success for athletes who can set records and win big without getting caught.
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The last useful man • Metropolitan Review

Aled Maclean-Jones:

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In the world of Mission: Impossible – Final Reckoning, where the [antagonist/bad AI] Entity is all-seeing, things unsearchable and uncheckable like secret clues and symbols become vital. The president convinces an admiral to help her by writing down a date whose significance only the two of them understand. That admiral earns the trust of the USS Ohio’s commander by giving [Tom] Cruise a medal whose meaning is private between them. To fool the Russians, who they know are listening in, Cruise’s team sends coordinates that direct him to the opposite side of the world from where he needs to be: a feint they know only he could decode.

What Cruise and his team carry in their heads and bodies not only saves them but the world. Donloe, the CIA chief exiled to Alaska, knows the submarine’s coordinates because he memorized them a decade ago. Tapeesa, his wife, can deliver the lifesaving decompression tent because she still knows how to navigate by compass and sextant. Grace, Hayley Atwell’s pickpocket-turned-teammate, saves the world through a skill so subtle it can barely be named: the thing that separates a ‘good pickpocket’ from a ‘great one’ — timing.

This division between characters with embodied knowledge and those without runs through all of Cruise’s recent work. His own impossible mission is to teach the value of physical competence: not just knowing things, but knowing how to do them. In Final Reckoning, this idea finds its clearest form.

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This is a wonderful analysis of writing and films that embody this crucial difference – knowing what v knowing how. And of course Tom Cruise, who has spent the past 40 years or so embodying knowing how, often while running a top speed or riding a motorbike.

It’s just a pity that Final Reckoning was turgid and overdone because it tried too hard to tie all the previous films together.
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Saloni’s guide to data visualization • Scientific Discovery

Saloni Dattani:

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Until a few years ago, I thought data visualization wasn’t very interesting. At best, it was a nice bonus in my work. I preferred writing because I found it gave me the space to get across the details and clarifications that people would often miss on a flashy chart.

Anyway, most data visualizations I had come across were not very good. A lot of graphs were (and still are) confusing, misleading, or overly simplistic. I’ve seen quite a lot – three dimensional bar charts, double-axis charts with completely different scales for the same metric, unitless charts, pizza slice charts with sizes that corresponded to nothing in the data. Even now I come across charts that are ugly in such novel ways that I wonder how much imagination it must have taken to create them.

But with time, I’ve increasingly understood the importance of good data visualization. A lot of credit goes to my colleagues at Our World in Data for inspiring me and giving me feedback during the four years I worked there. I spent time thinking more deeply about the value of charts, and when they worked better than a written description. In the end I came to the conclusion that there were several situations in which I would prefer a chart.

In this post, I want to give you a sense of why data visualization matters, and walk you through how to make it more effective, accurate, and beautiful.

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Ironically, the failure of many dataviz attempts is that they make things too complex. 3D representations on 2D outputs are a big source of trouble.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified