If you have Warner Brothers DVDs pressed between 2006 and 2008, they may be unreadable due to layer rot. CC-licensed photo by Karl Baron 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. Backed up. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Can the US switch off Europe’s weapons? • Financial Times

Charles Clover, Sylvia Pfeifer, Lucy Fisher and Richard Milne:

»

A longtime US ally has kept a deadly insurgency at bay, helped by squadrons of American-supplied military aircraft.

However when US foreign policy abruptly changes, the aircraft remain — but contractors, spare parts and badly needed software updates suddenly disappear. Within weeks, more than half the aircraft are grounded. Four months later, the capital falls to the rebels. 

This was the reality for Afghanistan in 2021. After a US withdrawal disabled most of Kabul’s Black Hawk helicopters, the cascade effect was swift. “When the contractors pulled out, it was like we pulled all the sticks out of the Jenga pile and expected it to stay up,” one US commander told US government researchers that year. 

Today, a similar spectre haunts US allies in Europe. With the US cutting off military support to Ukraine in an abrupt pivot towards Russia, many European governments are feeling buyers’ remorse for decades of US arms purchases that have left them dependent on Washington for the continued functioning of their weaponry.

“If they see how Trump is dealing with [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy, they should be worried. He is throwing him under the bus,” said Mikael Grev, a former Gripen fighter pilot and now chief executive of Avioniq, a Swedish defence AI company. “The Nordic and Baltic states need to think: will he do the same to us?”

Such is the concern that debate has turned to whether the US maintains secret so-called kill switches that would immobilise aircraft and weapons systems. While never proven, Richard Aboulafia, managing director at consultancy AeroDynamic Advisory, said: “If you postulate the existence of something that can be done with a little bit of software code, it exists.”

In practice, it may not even matter because of how already reliant advanced combat aircraft and other sophisticated weapons — such as anti-missile systems, advanced drones and early warning aircraft — are on US spare parts and software updates.

“It is not as simple as a kill switch,” said Justin Bronk, senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi). “Most European militaries depend heavily on the US for communications support, for electronic warfare support, and for ammunition resupply in any serious conflict.”

«

A graphic shows that the US has 2,951 fighter and ground attack aircraft, and the rest of NATO has 2,064 – of which 1,108 are of US origin. But things are going to change, no doubt about that. If I were tipping shares (I’m not), the European defence industry looks a good long-term bet.
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Hundreds of your Warner Bros DVDs probably don’t work anymore (updated with response from WB) • Joblo

Chris Bumbray:

»

I’m a huge fan of old movies. Now, when I say old I don’t mean movies from ten, twenty, or even thirty or forty years ago. I love movies from the Golden Age of Hollywood, specifically the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s. I’ve always loved this period, and given how hard it is to find many of these movies on streaming, I’ve made an effort to buy as many of these movies on physical media as possible. As such, I have thousands of old movies on DVD, and among my most treasured titles are a few dozen DVD box sets Warner Bros put out in the mid-2000s, as they control the best library of classic film.

A few months ago, I dug into an old Humphrey Bogart box set to watch a favorite of mine, Passage to Marseille. After about an hour, the disc simply stopped working. The same thing happened with another movie from the set, Across the Pacific. I actually thought my old Blu-ray player was to blame, and given that I was in need of an upgrade anyway, I bought a new UHD player and just forgot about it.

Flash forward to about a week ago, when I decided to throw on an old Errol Flynn movie called Desperate Journey. The same thing happened. This was more concerning to me, as, unlike the other movies I mentioned, this has never gotten an HD release and was unavailable digitally. I did a little research online, and to my horror, I landed on several home theater forum threads (and a couple of good videos) confirming this was no fluke.

It turns out that virtually every Warner Bros DVD disc manufactured between 2006 and 2008 has succumbed to the dreaded laser rot, where discs simply stop working due to a rotting of the layers. Once it happens, it can’t be undone. This was a frequent problem with laserdiscs back in the 80s and 90s, but it wasn’t a huge problem with DVDs. The issue comes down to the way the discs were authored. Many of the titles affected, which range from classics like The Wild Bunch and The Shawshank Redemption to TV collections like The Dukes of Hazzard, have been reissued on Blu-ray or digital HD. Some of the titles, such as many of the titles in the Looney Tunes Collections and many of the Golden Age of Hollywood movies, have not, making them, in a lot of cases, lost media.

«

Truly shocking. WB’s response is that it’s “aware” of this and is “actively working” with consumers to replace defective discs; “However, as some of the affected titles are no longer in print or the rights have expired, consumers have been offered an exchange for a title of like value.”

Which is rubbish! WB should be sourcing the discs, since it was the one responsible for selling bad ones.
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Global coffee trade grinding to a halt, hit hard by brutal price hikes • Reuters

Marcelo Teixeira:

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Global coffee traders and roasters say they have slashed their purchases to minimal levels, as the industry reels from a steep surge in prices that suppliers have yet to convince retail stores to accept.

At the U.S. National Coffee Association annual convention in Houston this week, attendees said they have been in shock at a 70% increase since November for Arabica coffee futures on the ICE exchange , the benchmark for coffee deals around the world.

Renan Chueiri, director general at ELCAFE C.A. in Ecuador, said this year is the first time the instant coffee maker hasn’t sold all of its expected annual production by March.

“We would usually be sold out by now, but so far we sold less than 30% of production,” he said. “The big price increase eats clients’ cash flow, they don’t have all the money to buy what they need.”

The coffee price hikes have stemmed from lower production in important coffee growing regions, particularly in top grower Brazil, reducing the availability of beans.

“Nobody wants to be exposed, nobody is buying for future delivery, it is all hand to mouth,” said one coffee broker, asking not to be identified due to the sensitivity of the issue. By “hand to mouth”, he was referring to the practice of buying only what is necessary for the moment and eschewing stockpiling.

Many recent deals in Brazil, he said, have been conducted in a very conservative manner. “You close a deal, and then you have seven days to go to the farm or warehouse and get your coffee. You check the quality, and if it is ok, you make the payment on the site and drive away with the coffee.”

A recent Reuters poll predicted that Arabica coffee prices could fall 30% by the end of the year, as high prices curb demand and early signs point to a bumper Brazilian crop next year.

But until prices drop significantly, much of the coffee industry could be in for a world of pain. A chief executive of a major roaster in the United States – the world’s largest market for coffee consumption, said some of his clients are not sure they can continue to be in business.

«

I have for some time thought that the coffee business was in a mad bubble, given all the podcast adverts for weekly deliveries, and the coffee shops sprouting all over the place. Price changes come to us all, and this is likely to be rough.
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DOGE has deployed its GSAi custom chatbot for 1,500 federal workers • WIRED

Makena Kelly:

»

Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency has deployed a proprietary chatbot called GSAi to 1,500 federal workers at the General Services Administration, WIRED has confirmed. The move to automate tasks previously done by humans comes as DOGE continues its purge of the federal workforce.

GSAi is meant to support “general” tasks, similar to commercial tools like ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude. It is tailored in a way that makes it safe for government use, a GSA worker tells WIRED. The DOGE team hopes to eventually use it to analyze contract and procurement data, WIRED previously reported.

“What is the larger strategy here? Is it giving everyone AI and then that legitimizes more layoffs?” asks a prominent AI expert who asked not to be named as they do not want to speak publicly on projects related to DOGE or the government. “That wouldn’t surprise me.”

In February, DOGE tested the chatbot in a pilot with 150 users within GSA. It hopes to eventually deploy the product across the entire agency, according to two sources familiar with the matter. The chatbot has been in development for several months, but new DOGE-affiliated agency leadership has greatly accelerated its deployment timeline, sources say.

Federal employees can now interact with GSAi on an interface similar to ChatGPT. The default model is Claude Haiku 3.5, but users can also choose to use Claude Sonnet 3.5 v2 and Meta LLaMa 3.2, depending on the task.

“How can I use the AI-powered chat?” reads an internal memo about the product. “The options are endless, and it will continue to improve as new information is added. You can: draft emails, create talking points, summarize text, write code.”

«

OK, but looked at dispassionately: isn’t this making them work more efficiently (if it works)? That seems like a good thing. Though of course firing tons of people first and then seeing if it works isn’t the normal procedure. The UK government on Sunday hinted at something similar for 10% of civil service workers.
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Measles outbreak hits 208 cases as federal response goes off the rails • Ars Technica

Beth Mole:

»

The measles outbreak in West Texas and New Mexico has reached 208 cases.

Texas officials reported 198 confirmed cases across nine counties as of Friday, with 23 people requiring hospitalization since the outbreak exploded at the end of January. Most of the cases continue to be in children and teens, with 153 of the 198 cases being between the ages of 0 and 17. Eleven cases have no confirmed age listed. All but five cases are in people who are unvaccinated or have no vaccination record.

Texas officials have so far reported one death in the outbreak in an unvaccinated school-aged child with no underlying health conditions. Media reports have identified the child as being a 6-year-old.

On Thursday, health officials in New Mexico reported a second death in a person with measles. The case was in an unvaccinated adult who didn’t seek medical care before dying. The person tested positive for measles only after death and the cause of the person’s death is still under investigation, the state’s health department reported.

Since the outbreak erupted in Texas, New Mexico has reported 10 measles cases, which includes the deceased adult. All of the cases—four children and six adults—are in Lea County, which sits directly across the border from Gaines County, Texas, the undervaccinated epicenter of the outbreak.

… [Health secretary] Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is a long-time anti-vaccine advocate… initially downplayed the outbreak, calling it “not unusual,” before penning an op-ed for Fox News, in which he failed to outright recommend vaccination and instead emphasized parental choice and endorsed “good nutrition” and supplements.

…In a yet more worrying sign, Reuters reported Friday afternoon that the CDC is planning to conduct a large study on whether the MMR vaccine is linked to autism. This taxpayer-funded effort would occur despite the fact that decades of research and numerous high-quality studies have already been conducted—and they have consistently disproven or found no connection between the vaccine and autism.

«

I wonder how soon Trump can fire Kennedy, and on what pretext, so that the US doesn’t revert to the treatments – and diseases – of the 19th century.
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A million third-party Android devices have a secret backdoor for scammers • WIRED

Lily Hay Newman:

»

Cheap TV streaming boxes seem like one of the most straightforward gadgets out there, but they can come with hidden costs. In 2023, researchers revealed that tens of thousands of Android TV boxes being used in homes, schools, and businesses were equipped with secret backdoors that allowed them to be used in a host of cybercrime and online fraud.

Now, the same researchers have found that the China-based ecosystem behind the compromised devices and the illicit activities they’re used for—collectively dubbed Badbox 2.0—is fueling a next-generation campaign that’s broader in scope and even more sneaky.

At least 1 million Android-based TV streaming boxes, tablets, projectors, and after-sale car infotainment systems are infected with malware that conscripts them into a scammer-controlled botnet, according to new research shared exclusively with WIRED by the cybersecurity firm Human Security. The compromised devices are used for a range of advertising fraud and in so-called residential proxy services, which allow their operators to use victim internet connections for routing and masking web traffic. And all of this activity happens behind the scenes without the owners of compromised devices having any idea of how their streaming boxes are being used.

“This is all completely unbeknownst to the poor users that have bought this device just to watch Netflix or whatever,” Gavin Reid, Human’s chief information security officer, tells WIRED. “Ad fraud including click fraud is all happening behind the scenes, but the main way they are monetizing the million devices is reselling this proxy service. Victims don’t know that they’re a proxy, they never agreed to be a proxy service, but they’re being used for that. Any bad thing you want to do, scraping, whatever it is, these proxy services are an enabler for that.”

The researchers found that the majority of infected devices are in South America, particularly Brazil.

«

You can imagine that cheap stuff is going to be easily backdoored, either intentionally (for payment) or not (through bad security). Google detects devices that try to connect to its Play Services and are compromised, but it’s an uphill battle to get people to take any action. They just want to watch some TV, after all, not debug their streaming box. (Not to be left out: a million Windows devices targeted in hacking spree.)
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Apple’s smart home hub now ‘postponed’ due to delayed Siri features • MacRumors

Joe Rossignol:

»

Apple has pushed back the launch of its rumored smart home hub due to delayed Siri features, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.

Gurman no longer expects the home hub to launch this month, but he has not provided a revised timeframe for the device’s release.

“At one point, the company had hoped to announce this product in March,” he said, in his Power On newsletter today. “But because the device, to an extent, relies on the delayed Siri capabilities, it has been postponed as well.”

In the meantime, he said Apple has started allowing select employees to test a pre-release version of the device at home.

This comes a few days after Apple said it needs more time to finish the more personalized version of Siri, which it previewed at WWDC 2024 last June. The promised Siri upgrades will be powered by Apple Intelligence, so you will need an iPhone 15 Pro or newer.

“We’ve also been working on a more personalized Siri, giving it more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps,” said Apple, in a statement shared with Daring Fireball’s John Gruber. “It’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year.”

Gurman said Apple was initially aiming to launch the more personalized Siri as part of iOS 18.4, which is already in beta and lacks any of the promised features. He then said that the features were delayed until iOS 18.5 in May, but Apple’s statement suggests the features will take even longer to arrive.

«

A home hub that relies so heavily on an LLM-based Siri that Apple hasn’t been able to get working really is a hostage to fortune, isn’t it. And so it has transpired. Perhaps it’s a failure of my imagination, but I don’t know what they want a home hub to do that isn’t already handled by the Homepod (big or mini).
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How Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip failed me without actually breaking • The Verge

Sean Hollister:

»

When the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 7 arrives, likely this July, it could be a pretty decent upgrade over the Z Flip 5 I own. It’ll reportedly have a slightly bigger battery than the Flip 6, which had a slightly bigger one than the Flip 5, plus a much bigger outer screen.

Unfortunately, I can’t wait a few more months. After a year and a half with a Flip, I’ve reached my breaking point.

To be clear, my phone never cracked. My folding Flip never even sprouted a green line of doom along its crease. The factory screen protector did begin to peel, but $30 and a trip to uBreakiFix made that problem go away.

No, the end came for my Flip when it stopped lasting the day and started waking me up at night. The battery is constantly dying faster than it should, and ever since the last big software update, the sleep and do-not-disturb modes no longer block notification sounds. I can’t figure out either one, and the Flip’s unique benefits no longer feel good enough for me to deal with them anymore.

On battery: I’ve seen this phone reach the 80% mark by 9 in the morning, and threaten to die by 9PM. I practically don’t even use the phone when I’m at work, and yet now I feel like it always needs to be plugged in.

…When people ask me what I actually prefer about the Z Flip, I’ve wound up saying it’s really about how it fits in my pocket, and how awesome it feels to fold. It’s a square when closed, so it stays put in my pocket and doesn’t jut out.

But it’s not actually a small phone, and it’s not a particularly good one-handed phone because there’s no one-handed way to open it. I mostly stopped trying after the tenth time I fumbled it to the ground.

And I do find myself opening it almost every time I use it, because it’s almost never worth bothering with the Flip’s cover screen. While it’s actually larger than the screens on early Android handsets, Samsung simply won’t let you use the outer screen like a proper Android phone.

«

Flip phones: not all that, and not even some of that.
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The real reason Zelenskyy doesn’t wear a suit • POLITICO

Derek Guy writes about menswear (on Twitter/X he’s known for his deadly takedowns of bumptious people):

»

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s contentious Oval Office meeting with President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance didn’t just highlight a debate over geopolitics. It also kicked off an argument over clothes.

“Why don’t you wear a suit?” asked Brian Glenn, a correspondent for the conservative Real America’s Voice network, prompting a smirk from Vance. “You’re at the highest level in this country’s office, and you refuse to wear a suit.”

But the criticism of Zelenskyy’s lack of traditional tie-and-jacket attire misses an obvious question: Why does he dress like that? As it turns out, the black tactical gear he wore to the Oval Office — much like his now-iconic olive-green fleeces and combat boots — is part of a growing visual shift in Ukraine, marked by the war’s impact on the clothing industry and the military’s now central place in Ukrainian culture.

I spoke to Illia Ponomarenko — a Ukrainian journalist who has covered the war, written for the Kyiv Post and The Kyiv Independent and authored I Will Show You How It Was: The Story of Wartime Kyiv — about the real meaning behind Zelenskyy’s style. “The clothes are more than clothes,” he said. “They are part of a culture of people who are involved in this war.”

DG: There’s a lot of discussion in the U.S. about whether Zelenskyy should wear a suit on diplomatic trips. But the discourse is almost always filtered through American eyes. From a Ukrainian perspective, why do you think he dresses the way he does?

IP: Zelenskyy’s clothes are sending a soft, anti-elitist message. When he meets with prominent figures and power brokers, his clothes are basically asking, what are you about? Are you about the business of saving lives, or are you about fancy protocols? Even when he meets with kings, he dresses in a way that represents the average Ukrainian involved in this war effort. So it’s a message to say, “I’ve come to the corners of power as a representative of my humble people.”

«

It’s a brief interview, but a good insight.
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Sony Music says over 75,000 items removed in battle against AI deepfakes • Financial Times

Daniel Thomas:

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Sony Music has revealed the scale of its battle with artificial intelligence fakes of its artists by saying it has taken down more than 75,000 examples of AI-generated material featuring its biggest stars, including Harry Styles.

The company, one of the three biggest labels in the music industry, gave the figure in a submission to a UK government consultation on copyright rules that Sony fears will worsen the damage to the music industry from AI.

Music executives say the detected fakes are probably only a fraction of the AI music fakes available online as teams working on the problem need to scour streaming services manually for them and demand their removal.

The ability of new, freely available AI software to generate vast quantities of convincing fake material has emerged as a significant concern for companies in the creative industries. Many fear the free availability of the material will undermine their ability to make money from legitimate recordings.

Sony said in its submission to the consultation, seen by the Financial Times, that AI-generated recordings in music streaming services resulted in “direct commercial harm to legitimate recording artists, including UK artists”.

Executives are concerned that any weakening of UK copyright law will only make this situation worse, especially for smaller artists who lack a large label to protect their interests.

A person familiar with Sony’s efforts said that, for most labels, the artists copied were their most popular — Harry Styles, Queen and Beyoncé, in Sony’s case.

«

So they’re sort of AI tribute acts?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

We may finally – finally! – have heard the last of the blockchain hype. CC-licensed photo by Mike Seyfang 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.

It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.

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

Revealed: the scammers who conned savers out of $35m using fake celebrity ads • The Guardian

Simon Goodley, Zoe Wood, Pamela Duncan and Michael Goodier:

»

An organised network operating from the former Soviet state of Georgia has scammed thousands of savers from the UK, Europe and Canada out of $35m (£27m) after they fell for fake celebrity adverts on Facebook and Google that the [then Conservative] government promised to outlaw three years ago.

Deepfake videos and fictional news reports featuring the money expert Martin Lewis, the radio DJ Zoe Ball and the adventurer Ben Fogle were used to promote fraudulent cryptocurrency and other investment schemes. The scammers are understood to have still been contacting victims in recent weeks.

UK citizens were the hardest hit, accounting for a third – about £9m – of the money taken.

The fraud was exposed by a huge leak of scam call centre data to the Swedish public broadcaster SVT, which then shared the files with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), the Guardian and other international reporting partners.

The UK government has introduced a new set of laws aimed at protecting children and adults online. However, while the online safety act has been passed into law and scam posts could soon prompt fines, the sections relating to fraudulent advertising by organisations are not expected to become active until next year.

…The leak, which contains over 1m recordings – including long exchanges with victims scammed out of significant amounts of money – allows rare insight into exactly how scammers created havoc in the lives of their victims. And it raises fresh questions about how successful governments, banks and technology companies have been in combating these frauds.

Operating from three office blocks in Tbilisi and referring to themselves as the skameri, Georgian for scammers, a group of about 85 well-paid call centre agents has persuaded pensioners, employees and small business owners to transfers millions out of their savings accounts.

Since May 2022, the data suggests this industrial scale boiler room fraud duped around 6,000 people across the globe out of $35m (£27m). A separate dataset contained in the leak indicates that close to half – 45% – of attempted calls placed by the scammers were made to UK numbers.

«

There’s lots of detail, including the former job of the person who received the most calls. You may be surprised. But it’s long since time that the tech companies stopped this. It doesn’t need a law. It needs them to care.
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AI is the media’s chance to reinvent itself • Prospect

David Caswell and Mary Fitzgerald:

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The practice of public-interest journalism involves, among other things, establishing the veracity of information before publishing it, and correcting the record if it turns out to be incorrect. Through this process, day after day, journalism accumulates an imperfect but permanent record, archived as articles, audio and video, of what has happened. This record has been verified; it can be referenced, contested, corrected, explained and shared by many people. Its origin is known and accountable. AI-mediated news systems like X -Stories provide none of those things.

This is not to say that AI systems cannot be deployed to serve the public. In Colombia, the news outlet Cuestión Pública has prototyped a fine-tuned language model based on its high-quality investigative journalism and structured data, which delivers fact-checked breaking news in a fraction of the time it takes a human to do so. Instead of just replicating traditional news formats, this newsroom is attracting younger audiences using games: riffing on Hollywood and Netflix blockbusters (“Game of Votes” and “I Know What You Did Last Legislative Term”) to expose corruption in politics. In southern Africa, the news outlet Scrolla has deployed an AI tool that helps community-based reporters to report news in articulate and accessible formats.

There are countless prototypes and experiments like these under way around the world. But much of today’s media lacks the imagination and risk tolerance needed to reimagine for the AI era journalism’s ability to self-correct and seek accuracy at scale—and that are not owned and driven by erratic billionaires such as Musk.

«

One only has to look at how effective the media industry has been at embracing and controlling every previous technological introduction to know how this one is going to play out. In brief: it will be late to it, underfunded, and will badly underestimate how to use it best.
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Uncle Sam mulls policing social media of all would-be citizens • The Register

Iain Thomson:

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The US government’s Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) is considering monitoring not just the social media posts of non-citizens coming into the country, but also all those already in America going through an immigration or citizenship process.

Back in 2019, the Department of Homeland Security, which runs USCIS, decided anyone looking to enter the US on a work visa or similar had to hand over their social media handles to the authorities so that they could be looked over for wrongdoing and subversion.

In fact, this goes back to 2014, at least, to one degree or another, and has been standard procedure for years for foreigners, particularly those coming in on a visa.

Our non-American vultures who obtain media visas to work a stint, long or short, in the United States for El Reg have had to disclose all manner of personal info, such as social media profiles, family and employment details, and whether or not we’ve ever been card-carrying communists or trafficked child soldiers. No, is the answer, by the way, to both. (One of us had a career in the military and thus had an interesting experience disclosing their expertise in explosives and weapons.)

On January 20 this year, President Trump signed an executive order calling for much tougher vetting of foreign aliens, and in response, USCIS has this week proposed rules saying all of those already in the country who are going through some process with the agency – such as applying for permanent residency or citizenship – will have their social media scanned for subversion.

That means if you came to America before foreigners’ internet presence was screened as it now is, and you’re now seeking some kind of immigration benefit, at this rate you’ll be subject to the same scanning as those entering the Land of the Free today.

«

Not at all strange, no sir.
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RIP (finally) to the blockchain hype • CIO

Grant Gross:

»

The blockchain hype starting in the late 2010s has nearly died, replaced by intense interest in AI and hurt by sketchy cryptocurrency and NFT schemes, some experts say.

Gartner’s last hype cycle for blockchain, released in July 2024, had most blockchain-related technologies moving past the peak of inflated expectations and headed into the trough of disillusionment. Related technologies headed into the trough include NFTs, Web3, decentralized exchanges, and blockchain for IoT.

The excitement has faded so much that the IT analyst firm may not release another hype cycle chart for blockchain, says Adrian Leow, vice president in Gartner’s applications and software engineering leaders group. 
There has been limited success with blockchain technologies with specific use cases, such as the Vatican using NFTs to put its archives online. Most of the value from blockchain won’t happen for another five years or so, Leow says.

Blockchain technologies “just really haven’t hit the heights that was promised,” Leow says. “This is not an overnight sensation.”

There’s still interest in some related technologies, including cryptocurrency and blockchain wallets, but Leow doesn’t see widespread adoption in the future unless blockchain is paired with other emerging technologies such as AI and quantum computing. “The technology is still going to evolve, but not on its own,” he says.

For example, blockchain may be able to give organizations a level of trust and security when they string multiple AI agents together to create a multi-step business or IT process, he says.

«

Nooo! Blockchain won’t be used like that. Just as it hasn’t been used for anything outside of cryptocurrency. This insistent belief that surely because a technology exists it must be a solution to something else is very tedious. It tends to come from hopeless proponents, and journalists trying to cover themselves in case something somehow stages a resurrection.
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Advanced attack drones for Ukraine in new deal struck by UK government and Anduril UK • GOV.UK

»

The deal follows a meeting of world leaders in London last week, when the Prime Minister and allies agreed it was essential that military support continues for Ukraine to put the country in the strongest possible position for peace as it continues to defend itself from Russian aggression.

The new contracts, totalling nearly £30m and backed by the International Fund for Ukraine, will result in Anduril UK supplying cutting-edge Altius 600m and Altius 700m drones – known as loitering munitions – that are designed to monitor an area before striking targets that enter it.

The Defence Secretary visited Anduril yesterday, where he spoke with a number of American and British staff. Founded in California, Anduril continues to invest significantly in the UK with a large footprint across the country and plans to rapidly scale, in line with the Government’s commitment to keeping the nation safe while providing highly skilled jobs.

Securing a lasting peace in Ukraine and strengthening bonds between NATO allies set to top the agenda when the Defence Secretary meets with his US counterpart today.

«

Drone warfare is a lot cheaper and effectively asymmetrical than the old infantry approach. It’s not aircraft, but it’s also a lot harder to knock out than aircraft.
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You knew it was coming: Google begins testing AI-only search results • Ars Technica

Ryan Whitwam:

»

Google has become so integral to online navigation that its name became a verb, meaning “to find things on the Internet.” Soon, Google might just tell you what’s on the Internet instead of showing you. The company has announced an expansion of its AI search features, powered by Gemini 2.0. Everyone will soon see more AI Overviews at the top of the results page, but Google is also testing a more substantial change in the form of AI Mode. This version of Google won’t show you the 10 blue links at all—Gemini completely takes over the results in AI Mode.

This marks the debut of Gemini 2.0 in Google search. Google announced the first Gemini 2.0 models in December 2024, beginning with the streamlined Gemini 2.0 Flash. The heavier versions of Gemini 2.0 are still in testing, but Google says it has tuned AI Overviews with this model to offer help with harder questions in the areas of math, coding, and multimodal queries.

With this update, you will begin seeing AI Overviews on more results pages, and minors with Google accounts will see AI results for the first time. In fact, even logged out users will see AI Overviews soon. This is a big change, but it’s only the start of Google’s plans for AI search.

Gemini 2.0 also powers the new AI Mode for search. It’s launching as an opt-in feature via Google’s Search Labs, offering a totally new alternative to search as we know it. This custom version of the Gemini large language model (LLM) skips the standard web links that have been part of every Google search thus far. The model uses “advanced reasoning, thinking, and multimodal capabilities” to build a response to your search, which can include web summaries, Knowledge Graph content, and shopping data. It’s essentially a bigger, more complex AI Overview.

«

Thanks, I hate it already. I simply don’t trust results found in this way, for the same reason I don’t immediately trust the first result I see for any search; I like to see what other results are offered and weigh them against each other. Too many people are too trusting of the first link; too many are already too trusting of AI results.
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An oral norovirus vaccine tablet was safe and elicited mucosal immunity in older adults in a phase 1b clinical trial • Science Translational Medicine

“Courney Malo”:

»

Although most humans infected with norovirus recover after an unpleasant few days, susceptible populations, including older adults, can develop severe disease. A vaccine, especially one that is easy to administer, would thus be an important advance for protecting older adult populations. Here, Flitter et al. report that an orally delivered vaccine against the norovirus GI.1 variant is safe and elicits robust immune responses in adults between 55 and 80 years old.

This included elicitation of antibody responses in the saliva and nasal cavity, potentially offering a first line of defense against mucosal pathogens such as norovirus. These promising clinical trial results support further development of oral norovirus vaccines, including ongoing studies with bivalent vaccines.

«

OK? I feel like this is an AI-generated summary (which might be unkind) but it’s pretty straightforward. Another pill to pop!
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Trump looms over Chinese smartphone players’ successful global push • CNBC

Arjun Kharpal:

»

Chinese players have been a feature of MWC[Mobile World Congress, in Barcelona] for several years as they’ve expanded their footprint globally. Now eight of the top 10 smartphone players are headquartered in China, according to Canalys data. Xiaomi for example is the world’s third-largest.

Xiaomi has grown its presence in Europe while others, like Transsion, have focused on emerging markets. With that success also comes the potential for further scrutiny, Wood said.

“The danger for these manufacturers is if they put their head too far above the parapet, they’ll start to get scrutiny from the U.S. administration,” [CCS Insight analyst Ben] Wood said. “So I think they have to tread a fine line in Barcelona and make sure that they don’t make too much noise because the last thing they want is to be the poster child for Chinese technology and become the latest focal point for Trump and his advisors.”

So far, Trump has focused on raising tariffs on Chinese imports. But there has been little action on the technology restriction front. Under the previous President Joe Biden, Washington brought in several rounds of restrictions that looked to cut off China’s access to advanced technology in areas such as semiconductors.

Other analysts agree there is a risk of increased scrutiny but point to a couple of key reasons why other Chinese manufacturers may not be restricted the way Huawei was.

Francisco Jeronimo, vice president for data and analytics at International Data Corporation (IDC), said that the Chinese brands are focusing their efforts on Europe rather than the U.S., which could help deflect scrutiny from Washington.

“They [Chinese players] definitely don’t have a chance selling in the U.S., but if they continue targeting Europe as they are, I don’t think that’s a risk and I don’t think it will come to a point where the U.S. administration will tell whatever countries in Europe they need to stop selling Xiaomi or Honor or any other brand,” Jeronimo told CNBC.

«

They’ve all learnt from Huawei and ZTE, which got badly hurt in the first Trump administrations by sanctions.
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A few words about FiveThirtyEight • Nate Silver

Nate Silver was the founder (later ejected) of FiveThirtyEight, which was shut down and wiped from the net on Monday by its latest and last owners, Disney:

»

the basic issue is that Disney was never particularly interested in running FiveThirtyEight as a business, even though I think it could have been a good business. Although they were generous in maintaining the site for so long and almost never interfered in our editorial process, the sort of muscle memory a media property builds early in its tenure tends to stick. We had an incredibly talented editorial staff, but we never had enough “product” people or strategy people to help the business grow and sustain itself.

It’s always an uphill battle under those conditions, particularly when it comes to recruiting and retaining staff, who were constantly being poached by outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post.

It also doesn’t quite feel like the end, exactly. “Data journalism” may have been a dumb name for what we were doing — that one’s on me — and Fivey Fox aside, the FiveThirtyEight brand was never warm and cuddly. But it always found a huge audience, and coverage of polls and political data is now much smarter. Compare the extremely analytical polling deep dives that Nate Cohn is doing at the New York Times, for instance, to the vibes-based coverage of the Boys on the Bus era. That trend may get even more entrenched as former 538ers form a diaspora that filters out to the rest of the media.

…Collecting and maintaining a database of public polls is a lot of work, requiring diligence, meticulousness, and dealing with constant complaints about edge cases from readers and pollsters. But it’s also a public service. Polling has its challenges, but I believe it’s vital in a democracy.

«

Data journalism, especially about polling, matters. It’s a fairly safe – though not totally safe – bet that 538 (named for the total number of electoral votes available in a US presidential election) will rise again in some form.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Budget airline Ryanair has got cold feet over ending its physical boarding passes – used by 40 million passengers annually. CC-licensed photo by Tnarik Innael 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. All aboard. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

U.S. pauses intelligence sharing with Ukraine used to target Russian forces • The Washington Post

Warren P. Strobel, Siobhán O’Grady, Ellen Nakashima, Missy Ryan and Kostiantyn Khudov:

»

The United States has paused major portions of its intelligence-sharing with Ukraine, squeezing the flow of vital information that Kyiv has used to repel invading Russian forces and strike back at select targets inside Russia, according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials.

The rupture in intelligence-sharing includes a halt in targeting data that U.S. spy agencies supply to Kyiv so it can launch American-provided weapons and Ukrainian-made long-range drones at Russian targets, Ukrainian officials said. Some Ukrainian missile operators say they are no longer receiving information needed to hit targets inside Russia.

The pause comes amid a decision early this week by President Donald Trump to freeze future deliveries of weapons to Ukraine, to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into peace negotiations with Russia.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe confirmed the latest move Wednesday, telling Fox Business that the United States has paused both intelligence-sharing and weapons systems in the aftermath of a contentious Oval Office meeting last week between Trump and Zelensky. Ratcliffe said the pauses would “go away” once it was clear Zelensky was committed to peace.

«

So the systems to hit targets inside Russia will come back online once Zelensky commits to peace? This is not just senseless, it’s evil. This will mean Ukrainian troops will die on the frontline.
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Ryanair delays move to paperless boarding passes • Travel Weekly

Samantha Mayling:

»

Budget carrier Ryanair has delayed its move to 100% paperless boarding passes to the start of its winter schedule on November 3.

Media reports had suggested that the change could come in May, ahead of the busy summer season.

But the implementation will now begin at the start of the winter season in November, and means Ryanair passengers will no longer download and print a physical paper boarding pass. Instead they will use the digital boarding pass generated in their ‘myRyanair’ app during check-in.

Currently almost 80% of Ryanair’s 200 million annual passengers already use this digital boarding pass.

As a result of this initiative, Ryanair expects to eliminate almost all airport check-in fees from November, as all passengers will have checked-in online or in-app to generate their digital boarding pass.

The airline said it will also reduce passengers’ carbon footprint by eliminating unnecessary paper, saving more than 300 tonnes in paper waste each year. The app also has features such as live flight information and updates from Ryanair’s operations centre during disruptions.

Dara Brady, Ryanair chief marketing officer, said: “This move to 100% paperless boarding passes from November 2025 will allow us to deliver an enhanced travel experience for customers, streamlined through the myRyanair app during our less busy winter schedule.”

«

So that’s 40 million passengers (perhaps fewer, if some people travel twice on paper passes) who aren’t using digital passes at the moment. One can imagine they’re of a demographic – older and/or less computer-savvy – who don’t take eagerly to the digital life, but almost certainly are summer travellers. Is Ryanair hoping they’ll all have died by May 2026 when that summer travel season starts?
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Google urges DOJ to reverse course on breaking up company • Bloomberg via The Japan Times

Josh Sisco and Davey Alba:

»

Google is urging officials at the U.S. Justice Department to back away from a push to break up the search engine company, citing national security concerns, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Representatives for the Alphabet unit asked the government in a meeting last week to take a less aggressive stance as the U.S. looks to end what a judge ruled to be an illegal online search monopoly, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing the private deliberations.

The administration of former U.S. President Joe Biden in November had called for Google to sell its Chrome web browser and make other changes to its business, including an end to billions of dollars in exclusivity payments to companies including Apple.

Although Google has previously pushed back on the Biden-era plan, the recent discussions may preview aspects of the company’s approach to the case as it continues under the administration current U.S. President Donald Trump. A federal judge is set to rule on how Google must change its practices following hearings scheduled for next month. Both sides are due to file their final proposals to the judge on Friday.

«

Unsurprising. When George W Bush took over from Bill Clinton in 2001, Microsoft sought to not be broken up too. And it succeeded. At this point, it would almost be surprising if Google didn’t succeed in getting this rolled back. (Not that the Chrome sale ever made any sense.)
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Scientists aiming to bring back woolly mammoth create woolly mice • The Guardian

Nicola Davis:

»

A plan to revive the mammoth is on track, scientists have said after creating a new species: the woolly mouse.

Scientists at the US biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences plan to “de-extinct” the prehistoric pachyderms by genetically modifying Asian elephants to give them woolly mammoth traits. They hope the first calf will be born by the end of 2028.

Ben Lamm, co-founder and chief executive of Colossal, said the team had been studying ancient mammoth genomes and comparing them with those of Asian elephants to understand how they differ and had already begun genome-editing cells of the latter.

Now the team say they have fresh support for their approach after creating healthy, genetically modified mice that have traits geared towards cold tolerance, including woolly hair. “It does not accelerate anything but it’s a massive validating point,” Lamm said.

In the research, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, the team used a number of genome editing techniques to either genetically modify fertilised mouse eggs or modify embryonic mouse stem cells and inject them into mouse embryos, before implanting them into surrogates.

The team focused on disrupting nine genes associated with hair colour, texture, length or pattern or hair follicles. Most of these genes were selected because they were already known to influence the coats of mice, with the induced disruptions expected to produce physical traits similar to those seen in mammoths, such as golden hair.

However, two of the genes targeted in the mice were also found in mammoths, where they are thought to have contributed to a woolly coat, with the changes introduced by the researchers designed to make the mouse genes more mammoth-like.

«

Lots of scientists, such as Adam Rutherford (who should know), are highly critical of this, because it won’t bring back mammoths. It might give you elephants which have thick woolly coats, but they won’t be mammoths, and are likely to die prematurely for all sorts of reasons. It’s a monstrously pointless idea.
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Even the crypto bros don’t love Trump’s proposed crypto reserve • CNN Business

Allison Morrow:

»

The crypto industry is getting everything it wanted under President Donald Trump. The regulators that crypto firms have blamed for all of their problems have been gutted or made over with friendlier faces who are eager to drop lingering legal challenges. The White House is even hosting an industry roundtable this week. That’s the kind of attention the industry could only have dreamed about under the Biden administration.

But a surprising backlash emerged from some prominent tech and crypto leaders after the president promised Sunday to establish a “Crypto Strategic Reserve,” which would direct the government to stockpile bitcoin, ethereum and three other tokens.

Some commentators don’t like the idea of potentially using taxpayer funds to backstop the price of crypto, a speculative digital asset with limited (some would say nonexistent) underlying value. Others questioned the motive behind including three relatively obscure tokens — Solana, XRP and Cardano — some of which have been backed by Trump’s own crypto czar (more on that in a moment). And investors across the board appeared unhappy with the lack of detail in Trump’s brief social media announcement, as crypto assets, which trade 24/7, fell Monday following a brief spike on Sunday.

…The US has a strategic petroleum reserve because oil is limited and extremely useful to keep the US economy humming. But, as Hilary Allen, a law professor at American University and a prominent crypto skeptic told me, crypto has nothing backing it.

A digital token’s price is entirely dictated by supply and demand, she said. Having Uncle Sam buy a bunch of bitcoin artificially jacks up the price. On top of that, a reserve sets up a situation where the United States would at some point have to offload some of its holdings.

“The second you start to sell, the price is going to start tanking,” Allen said. “It just shows how pointless the whole thing is if you have any goal other than to essentially provide exit liquidity for existing holders.”

«

It is indeed a fabulously stupid idea, which doesn’t mean that the Trump administration won’t put it into effect because it will make someone on the inside rich beyond their dreams.
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Rising coffee prices keeping you up? Blame tariffs and climate change • The Washington Post

Ben Brasch:

»

Government data in January showed that the retail price of ground coffee hit a record high of $7 a pound, up from $4 in January 2020.

Behind these surging prices is a complicated mix of drivers. Disastrous growing seasons in the world’s two biggest coffee producers, Brazil and Vietnam, have meant fewer beans on the market. But demand is growing, too: Coffee consumption in China, where a tea culture has reigned for millennia, has surged 150% in 10 years, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, with its coffee drinkers moving from lower-quality soluble coffee to higher-quality green coffee. Geopolitical turmoil and new deforestation regulations also are contributing to the squeeze.

And now, the escalating trade wars in the opening weeks of the Trump administration are poised to make it even worse. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump warned that his threats of 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico — paused last month — are “going forward” next week. A levy on Mexico, whose top coffee export market is the United States, would probably ratchet prices even higher.

All this has caused ripples throughout the production chain: 60% of the world’s coffee comes from more than 12 million farmers, many in poverty, growing on plots smaller than 12 acres, according to an initiative from Cornell University and World Coffee Research. And with fewer beans on the market, farmers are either hoarding them or charging a higher price to make up for losses, noted a recent report from CEPEA, the University of São Paulo Center for Advanced Studies on Applied Economics, which tracks and analyzes domestic coffee trade.

«

Personal liberties and free markets being the byword for the neo-Washington Post on its opinion pages, it’s just as well that this story pointing out that tariffs interfere with free markets appeared in the news section.
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Elon Musk also has a problem with Wikipedia • The New Yorker

Margaret Talbot:

»

Tamzin Hadasa Kelly, a 28-year-old Wikipedia administrator who has been contributing to the site since 2012, told me, “The vast, vast majority of content on the site is produced completely volunteer. We don’t have ranks, we don’t have editorial structure, we don’t have assigned topics.” Wikipedia does have an arbitration committee, a sort of supreme court that adjudicates rule-violating conduct on the site, but to a great extent, Kelly says, “it’s just us.” If she has to block people from editing because their work is consistently subpar—maybe they don’t plagiarize but they tend to paraphrase too closely or chronically fail to cite sources—at least, she says, “I’m not worrying that I’m taking away their livelihood.”

…Since the content is not monetized, and the site accepts no advertising, the articles rarely devolve into mere clickbait. What the Internet scholar Yochai Benkler calls Wikipedia’s “nonmarket utility” has helped insure its integrity. At a time when other social-media sites have abandoned whatever safeguards they had in place against mis- and disinformation—Meta has eliminated fact checking, X has been flooded with free-floating dreck of murky provenance and purpose, ChatGPT obligingly spits out hallucination-filled answers like a student who hasn’t done the reading—Wikipedia is a bastion of transparency, punctiliousness, and accessible knowledge.

So maybe it should come as no surprise that Elon Musk has lately taken time from his busy schedule of dismantling the federal government, along with many of its sources of reliable information, to attack Wikipedia. On January 21st, after the site updated its page on Musk to include a reference to the much-debated stiff-armed salute he made at a Trump inaugural event, he posted on X that “since legacy media propaganda is considered a ‘valid’ source by Wikipedia, it naturally simply becomes an extension of legacy media propaganda!” He urged people not to donate to the site: “Defund Wikipedia until balance is restored!”

…The Heritage Foundation, the think tank behind the Project 2025 policy blueprint, has plans to unmask Wikipedia editors who maintain their privacy using pseudonyms (these usernames are displayed in the article history but don’t necessarily make it easy to identify the people behind them) and whose contributions on Israel it deems antisemitic. (That story was reported by the Forward in January, and was based on leaked Heritage documents. Mike Howell, of Heritage, told me that this “investigation” of Wikipedia, which, he said, “is where information is laundered,” will be “shared with the appropriate policymakers to help inform a strategic response.”)

«

Wikipedia doesn’t actually make a judgement about Musk, because people like Kelly are too careful about it. But the point of view that now prevails in the US is that nothing useful may remain. (Kelly, in passing, must have been 15 when she started contributing to Wikipedia.)
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Justice Department charges Chinese hackers-for-hire linked to Treasury breach • TechCrunch

Carly Page:

»

The Department of Justice has announced criminal charges against 12 Chinese government-linked hackers who are accused of hacking over 100 American organizations, including the U.S. Treasury, over the course of a decade.

The charged individuals all played a “key role” in China’s hacker-for-hire ecosystem, a senior DOJ official said on a background call with reporters, including TechCrunch, on Wednesday. The official added that those charged, which includes contract hackers and Chinese law enforcement officials, targeted organizations in the U.S. and worldwide for the purposes of “suppressing free speech and religious freedoms.”

The DOJ also confirmed that two of the indicted individuals are linked to the China government-backed hacking group APT27, or Silk Typhoon. 

The two individuals, named as Yin Kecheng and Zhou Shuai, are accused of carrying out “multi-year, for-profit computer intrusion campaigns” dating back to 2013.

«

Seems a little bad to admit that you’ve been being hacked for more than a decade.
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The return of Digg, a star of Web 2.0 • The New York Times

Mike Isaac:

»

In the summer of 2005, Alexis Ohanian, a tech entrepreneur, sent an email to his colleague Steve Huffman with an ominous subject line: “Meet the enemy.”

The body of the email contained just one line — a link to Digg, a community-focused social message board where people shared and discussed news articles and links to other sites they found interesting. Mr. Ohanian and Mr. Huffman, who had founded a similar effort called Reddit, set their competitive sights on Digg and its founder, Kevin Rose.

In the 20 years since, these entrepreneurs have gone onto other projects and, in true Silicon Valley fashion, dipped into other parts of tech. Along the way, Digg, which went from popular to not, all but died.

On Wednesday, Mr. Rose announced that he had bought back Digg for an undisclosed sum from Money Group, a digital media company, and would rebuild it to take on Reddit. And he is doing it with an unlikely ally: Mr. Ohanian.
“This is the perfect time to revisit this idea with fresh eyes,” Mr. Rose, 48, now a venture capitalist at True Ventures, said in an interview. He said social media had become so ubiquitous that “it doesn’t need to be winner take all,” adding that “we don’t need to take down Reddit to win.”

Mr. Rose and Mr. Ohanian, 41, are relaunching Digg when social media is in tumult.

«

I think this is Digg’s third time around the block. The first one was killed by social media, the second was killed by.. social media. I wonder what will knock it out this time.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

New research has found that uptake of AI chatbots for writing professional work has been most popular in less-educated parts of the US. CC-licensed photo by Quick Spice 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. Not a user. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

We need to keep a closer eye on saboteurs in our midst • POLITICO

Elisabeth Braw:

»

The campaign German authorities uncovered in early February was certainly devious.

First, it was one car, then another, then a few more; eventually the tally came to hundreds. They were sabotaged by four men, supposedly in support of the country’s Green Party. As it turns out, though, these men weren’t green activists at all — the real instigator of the serial sabotage was Russia.

This is far from the only case of geopolitically linked harm we’ve seen in recent months. And it’s time European countries, as well as companies, started keeping a much closer eye on potential saboteurs in our midst.

In total, the perpetrators in Germany sabotaged 270 cars parked on city streets, spraying insulation foam into the cars’ exhaust pipes, rendering them immobile. To complete their anti-car campaign, the perpetrators stuck posters on the cars, with the command: “Be more green!” alongside the image of Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck.

It looked like the work of overzealous climate activists trying to drum up support for Habeck’s Greens ahead of Germany’s national elections on Feb. 23. But alert police officers outside Berlin solved the mysterious case when they spotted a group of men driving suspiciously. And the men — a German, a Romanian, a Serb and a citizen of Bosnia-Herzegovina — turned out to be guns for hire. One of them even told the police they’d been contracted by a Russian who paid them €100 ($106) per sabotaged car, plus an advance of several thousand euros.

Although German investigators haven’t been able to prove the sabotage was instigated by the Kremlin — and may never find such proof — it’s important to remember that it would be in Russia’s interest to discredit the staunchly pro-Ukraine Greens.

But the car campaign is far from the only case of geopolitically motivated harm we’ve seen recently: incendiary parcels intended for airliners have turned up at DHL’s logistics hub in Leipzig. Unknown perpetrators have tried to break into water plants in Finland and Sweden. There have been suspicious fires at shopping centers and warehouses in various European countries. Unidentified drones have been keeping watch of defence manufacturing plants. Undersea cables have been malfunctioning at galloping rate in the Baltic Sea, Taiwanese waters and elsewhere. There was even a Russia-linked plot to assassinate Armin Papperger, the CEO of the German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall.

Individuals trying to harm our countries are, in fact, stalking our streets every day.

«

These aren’t accidents, and they aren’t random – witness the assassination attempt. This is how the world is going to change over the next four years: this sort of low-level stochastic terrorism is going to become more widespread. Last Friday made it visible that everything has changed. We just hadn’t seen it before. (Thanks Greg B for the link.)
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Researchers surprised to find less-educated areas adopting AI writing tools faster – Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

»

According to new Stanford University-led research examining over 300 million text samples across multiple sectors, AI language models now assist in writing up to a quarter of professional communications. It’s having a large impact, especially in less-educated parts of the United States.

“Our study shows the emergence of a new reality in which firms, consumers and even international organizations substantially rely on generative AI for communications,” wrote the researchers.

The researchers tracked large language model (LLM) adoption across industries from January 2022 to September 2024 using a dataset that included 687,241 consumer complaints submitted to the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), 537,413 corporate press releases, 304.3m job postings, and 15,919 United Nations press releases.

By using a statistical detection system that tracked word usage patterns, the researchers found that roughly 18% of financial consumer complaints (including 30% of all complaints from Arkansas), 24% of corporate press releases, up to 15% of job postings, and 14% of UN press releases showed signs of AI assistance during that period of time.

The study also found that while urban areas showed higher adoption overall (18.2% versus 10.9% in rural areas), regions with lower educational attainment used AI writing tools more frequently (19.9% compared to 17.4% in higher-education areas). The researchers note that this contradicts typical technology adoption patterns where more educated populations adopt new tools fastest.

«

But it’s not surprising. When people in comparatively ordinary jobs spout jargon about their work (never more often than when they’re firing people), I assume that they’re hiding a lack of comprehension. Using a chatbot to generate formal-sounding output is rational, in similar situations.
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Goodbye clicks, hello AI: zero-click search redefines marketing • Bain & Company

Natasha Sommerfeld and Doug Harrington:

»

For years, marketers have worked to master search algorithms and position their companies well in search results and generate sales. Some invested in rich content and thoughtful optimizations, while others chased quick fixes like keyword stuffing.

Now, the rise of AI search engines and generative summaries has upended traditional search behavior, delivering answers directly on results pages and removing the need for users to click through to another site. Bain’s recent survey finds that about 80% of consumers now rely on “zero-click” results in at least 40% of their searches, reducing organic web traffic by an estimated 15- 25%. The speed of this upheaval leaves marketers with an urgent question: How do we engage consumers when clicks and site visits are disappearing?

…On traditional search engines, the zero-click trend is accelerating across demographics, with our research showing that about 60% of searches now end without the user progressing to another destination site. Even among those who say they are skeptical of generative AI, about half say that most of their queries are answered on the search page without a click.

In parallel, platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity are surging in popularity. ChatGPT saw a 44% traffic boost in November 2024, and Perplexity reached 15 million monthly users in late 2024.

Customers indicate that LLMs are encroaching on traditional search engine use cases: roughly 40% to 70% of LLM users use the platforms to conduct research and summarize information (68%), understand the latest news and weather (48%), and ask for shopping recommendations (42%).

«

Google certainly jumped just in time – though it has been preparing for this for years. Successfully managing the transition to mobile (its first big risk) and now to AI has been an impressive double act.
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YouTube podcast views: one billion people watch on video platform • Hollywood Reporter

Alex Weprin:

»

YouTube is sending a message to the podcast industry: It is the biggest player in town.

The streaming video platform on Wednesday disclosed that it now has one billion monthly active users watching podcast content, an astonishing number that makes it the biggest podcast platform in the world.

That should not be totally surprising given YouTube’s status as the largest streaming video platform, but the new numbers underscore how the Google-owned company has maneuvered itself into becoming a podcast power player, with many hosts reworking their shows to be video-first.

Even other podcast companies are leveraging YouTube to grow their business, like SiriusXM, home to Call Her Daddy, Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend and SmartLess. The company is betting that by offering subscription podcast offering son other platforms (like YouTube) it can grow both its audience and its bottom line.

YouTube has also leveraged its recommendation algorithm to drive new listeners and subscribers, a key priority for podcasters looking to grow their business.

“Podcasts with video are more than just a trend, they meet audiences where they are: on YouTube,” the company wrote in a blog post Wednesday. “We’ve specifically developed our podcast product experience to make it easier for fans to find podcasts they love, discover new ones, and watch (or listen!) wherever they want. We’ve also added more and more podcasters into our revenue sharing program, the YouTube Partner Program.”

And the company says that users watched more than 400 million hours of podcast content on living room TV devices, suggesting that users are watching long-form podcasts in lieu of traditional TV news, talk show or interview programming.

«

This is very much the Captain Phillips meme: podcasts are the media now.
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BBC and ITV slash big-budget TV spend as US streamers pour money into UK • The Guardian

Mark Sweney:

»

UK broadcasters slashed their spending on big-budget TV shows to the lowest level in almost a decade last year, even as their US rivals Netflix, Disney and Amazon ploughed hundreds of millions more into British-made premium content.

In a sign of the increasing competitive pressures of the streaming era, the amount spent on high-end TV shows costing more than £1m an hour to make by domestic operators such as the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and Sky, plunged by a quarter last year to £598m.

Stripping out the anomaly of 2020, when Covid shut down all film and TV production, this is the lowest level of investment since 2019, according to latest annual figures released by the British Film Institute, the industry body, on Thursday.

While UK broadcasters remained under pressure – last year Channel 4 made its deepest job cuts in more than 15 years while Sky axed 1,000 roles in response to the shift away from satellite TV – investment from primarily US based media firms surged by a quarter.

Spend on British-made shows by the likes of Netflix, Amazon and Disney increased almost £600m year on year to £2.82bn in 2024. “Inward investment” on shows such as Netflix’s The Immortal Man, a Peaky Blinders continuation, and Rowan Atkinson series Man vs Baby accounted for 82% of the total £3.44bn spent on premium TV production in the UK last year.

Industry figures such as Jane Featherstone, the co-founder of Sister, which co-produced Black Doves and Chernobyl, have warned that UK broadcasters are being “priced out” of the high-end TV production market.

«

It’s a hollowing out, and there’s no obvious reason for it to stop. I’m writing this while the TV is on a British FTA (free to air) channel funded by advertising, and one of the ads is for a Netflix series which is brand new, while the program I’m watching is very, very old. (So old it’s nearly dead, Jim. Yes, yes, I know he never said it.)

But why should this spiral ever end?
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Apple launches legal challenge to UK “back door” order • Financial Times

Tim Bradshaw and Lucy Fisher:

»

Apple is stepping up its fight with the British government over a demand to create a “back door” in its most secure cloud storage systems, by filing a legal complaint that it hopes will overturn the order.

The iPhone maker has made its appeal to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, an independent judicial body that examines complaints against the UK security services, according to people familiar with the matter.

The Silicon Valley company’s legal challenge is believed to be the first time that provisions in the 2016 Investigatory Powers Act allowing UK authorities to break encryption have been tested before the court. The Investigatory Powers Tribunal will consider whether the UK’s notice to Apple was lawful and, if not, could order it to be quashed.

The case could be heard as soon as this month, although it is unclear whether there will be any public disclosure of the hearing. The government is likely to argue the case should be restricted on national security grounds.

Apple received a “technical capability notice” under the act in January. The order, which the company is prevented from discussing publicly, targeted an optional extra layer of encryption that protects its iCloud system, Advanced Data Protection.

Apple has been working to fend off the UK’s threat of a technical capability notice (TCN) since soon after it introduced iCloud ADP in December 2022.

The iPhone maker launched its legal complaint appealing against the order last month at about the same time as it withdrew its most secure online back-up service from the UK, rather than comply with the TCN.

«

Interesting pairing of bylines: Bradshaw has covered technology (very well) for more than a decade, while Fisher is the FT’s Whitehall editor, ie its top political journalist. That covers the tracks of precisely which bit of the story came from where. The point about the TCN being threatened since ADP was introduced is, frankly, unsurprising. I think the government might let this one go, as ADP has been nixed for the UK.
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The best stuff we’ve seen at Mobile World Congress 2025 so far • The Verge

Andrew Liszewski:

»

Mobile World Congress 2025 is well under way in Barcelona, Spain, and while there’s still two days left, the mobile-focused show has already delivered lots of new laptops, smartphones, concepts, and innovative accessories.

Some of the biggest announcements were made over the weekend, so we want to make sure you didn’t miss anything. Here are the best gadgets that have debuted at MWC 2025 so far…

«

Lenovo is in there twice, first with a laptop that has a colossal screen which folds backwards to make it a (very heavy) tablet; and then with a solar-powered version, which will be a big hit with basement dwellers, no doubt. Plus some phones. The Xiaomi’s Modular Optical System adds a really good camera lens that attaches to a phone with a magnet: it’s a neat idea.

Whether any of these will get to a shop.. well.
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Why bird flu spreading to cows, cats and rats is so worrisome • The Washington Post

Leana Wen:

»

If cats could contract H5N1 from humans, could the reverse be true, too? This has been documented in the past, said Kristen K. Coleman, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Health. She cited a 2004 bird flu outbreak in a Thailand tiger breeding facility in which human workers contracted the virus. A spillover from cats to humans “could spark a human pandemic,” she said.

Finally, the rats. In late January, the Agriculture Department added the black rat to the list of mammals known to have bird flu. Coleman says this species heightens her unease as it is smaller and cats “frequently and readily prey on” it. If cats eat infected rats, they could get H5N1 and spread it to one another and to other species. The black rat’s mobility between farm and urban areas could also speed up the virus’s already high rate of species spillover.

Meghan Frost Davis, a veterinarian and Johns Hopkins professor, has been warning for months that rodents contracting H5N1 would be a major red flag in the evolution of bird flu. “What we really need to understand is to what degree rodents are involved,” she said, so that containment can be more targeted and more precise. She also urges better surveillance and data reporting of companion animal infections and more education of veterinary workers so that they are looking for bird flu across species and aware of their own risk.

Every expert I spoke to this for this column — and indeed for every piece I’ve written on bird flu — emphasized the urgent need for rapid, accessible testing.

«

Watching very closely brief. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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Plane GPS systems are under sustained attack – is the solution a new atomic clock? • BBC News

Pallab Ghosh:

»

As a Ryanair flight from London approached Vilnius, Lithuania, on 17 January, its descent was suddenly aborted. Just minutes from touching down, the aircraft’s essential Global Positioning System (GPS) suffered an unexplained interference, triggering an emergency diversion.

The Boeing 737 MAX 8-200 had already descended to around 850ft (259m) when the disruption occurred. Instead of landing, the plane was forced to climb back into the sky and divert nearly 400km (250 miles) south to Warsaw, Poland. Lithuanian air authorities later confirmed the aircraft had been affected by “GPS signal interference”.

«

So (long feature short) British scientists are developing alternative atomic clocks for an alternative ground-based GPS:

»

GPS and other satellite navigation systems reset their own clocks by touching base with these more accurate clocks on the ground. For the alternative to GPS, the scientists will need a new type of atomic clock that can eventually be miniaturised and robust enough to work in everyday situations, rather than the carefully controlled conditions inside a lab.

The National Physical Laboratory (NPL) researchers are perfecting a so-called optical clock to achieve this, which is 100 times more accurate than the most accurate caesium clocks used today. It looks as if it might be part of Dr Who’s Tardis and is stimulated with laser light rather than microwaves.

When optical clocks take over from caesium ones as the timepieces that determine Universal Coordinated Time (UTC), the way the passage of time is defined will also have to change, according to [NPL head scientist for time and frequency Dr Helen] Margolis.

“The international community has drawn up a road map for the redefinition of the second,” she tells BBC News.

The NPL’s immediate hope is to have a national network by 2030, connecting four atomic clocks across the UK that businesses can plug into for secure accurate timekeeping and for developing new innovative applications that harness ultra-fast time.

Eventually, critical systems in the UK in finance, telecommunications, energy, utilities and national security could switch over – though that would take longer. “To convert everything is at least a decade away, and probably significantly longer,” says [the NPL’s] Prof [Douglas] Paul.

«

GPS is here! A decade away at least. Russia is already being aggressive about jamming, so might need it sooner. (Thanks Greg B for the link.)

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The announcement of tariffs on imports to the US hit Nvidia shares hard, taking them back to September’s level. CC-licensed photo by Laineema 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. Pricey. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

UK probes TikTok, Reddit over child data privacy concerns • The Register

Lindsay Clark:

»

The UK’s data protection watchdog has launched investigations into three social media platforms following concerns about the protection of privacy among teenage users.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said it has begun reviews into how TikTok, Reddit and image sharing platform Imgur protect the privacy of youger users.

It said TikTok uses personal information belonging to people between the age of 13 and 17 to make recommendations and serve new content, which could lead to young people being served inappropriate or harmful material.

John Edwards, Information Commissioner, said: “My message is simple. If social media and video sharing platforms want to benefit from operating in the UK, they must comply with data protection law.

“The responsibility to keep children safe online lies firmly at the door of the companies offering these services and my office is steadfast in its commitment to hold them to account,” he said.

The ICO is also looking into data use at Imgur and Reddit to find out how they use children’s personal information and look at age assurance measures.

At this stage, the ICO said it was investigating whether there had been any infringements of data protection legislation. If there is sufficient evidence of any legal breach, the ICO said it would get representations from the companies concerned before reaching a final conclusion.

The move reflects growing concerns around access to social media platforms by children and young people. An ICO survey found 42% of British parents felt they had little or no control over the information social media and video sharing platforms collected about their children.

«

The report on what they found at TikTok will be interesting: the ICO is insistent that it has the power to access TikTok’s data (and, one presumes, algorithm) that works on what’s shown to children. The only other example I know of is the US, where TikTok set up special centres where nominated people could examine the algorithm.
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AI firms follow DeepSeek’s lead, create cheaper models with “distillation” • Financial Times via Ars Technica

Cristina Criddle and Melissa Heikkilä:

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Leading artificial intelligence firms including OpenAI, Microsoft, and Meta are turning to a process called “distillation” in the global race to create AI models that are cheaper for consumers and businesses to adopt.

The technique caught widespread attention after China’s DeepSeek used it to build powerful and efficient AI models based on open source systems released by competitors Meta and Alibaba. The breakthrough rocked confidence in Silicon Valley’s AI leadership, leading Wall Street investors to wipe billions of dollars of value from US Big Tech stocks.

Through distillation, companies take a large language model—dubbed a “teacher” model—which generates the next likely word in a sentence. The teacher model generates data which then trains a smaller “student” model, helping to quickly transfer knowledge and predictions of the bigger model to the smaller one.

While distillation has been widely used for years, recent advances have led industry experts to believe the process will increasingly be a boon for start-ups seeking cost-effective ways to build applications based on the technology.

“Distillation is quite magical,” said Olivier Godement, head of product for OpenAI’s platform. “It’s the process of essentially taking a very large smart frontier model and using that model to teach a smaller model . . . very capable in specific tasks that is super cheap and super fast to execute.”

Large language models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4, Google’s Gemini and Meta’s Llama require massive amounts of data and computing power to develop and maintain. While the companies have not revealed precise figures for how much it costs to train large models, it is likely to be hundreds of millions of dollars.

Thanks to distillation, developers and businesses can access these models’ capabilities at a fraction of the price, allowing app developers to run AI models quickly on devices such as laptops and smartphones.

Developers can use OpenAI’s platform for distillation, learning from the large language models that underpin products like ChatGPT. OpenAI’s largest backer, Microsoft, used GPT-4 to distill its small language family of models Phi as part of a commercial partnership after investing nearly $14bn into the company.

«

On everyone’s phone in a year, at a guess?
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Google cofounder tells AI staff to stop ‘building nanny products’ • The Verge

Alex Heath:

»

For the last couple years, it has been evident that Google cofounder Sergey Brin is back in the building. This week, he sent a clear message to hundreds of employees in Google’s DeepMind AI division, known as GDM: the pressure to win the AGI race is on.

“It has been 2 years of the Gemini program and GDM,” begins his note, which The New York Times first reported on yesterday and I’m publishing below [on the full page] in full. “We have come a long way in that time with many efforts we should feel very proud of. At the same time competition has accelerated immensely and the final race to AGI is afoot. I think we have all the ingredients to win this race but we are going to have to turbocharge our efforts.”

Brin goes on to recommend that Google’s AI teams work longer hours (“60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity”), come into the office “at least every week day,” prioritize “simple solutions” to problems, and generally move faster (“can’t wait 20 minutes to run a bit of python”). What stuck out the most to me was his last point: that Google’s AI products “are overrun with filters and punts of various kinds.” According to Brin, Google needs to “trust our users” and “can’t keep building nanny products.”

While his note was intended for a small audience of AI researchers at DeepMind and not all of Google, it’s still remarkable in a couple of ways. For one, it came from Brin, who technically has no formal role these days besides being a board member, and not Demis Hassabis, who runs Google DeepMind.

As some employees have poined out to me, there’s also irony in Brin recommending that employees work 12-hour days when he and cofounder Larry Page arguably left Google rudderless when they retired in 2019 — just before this AI boom cycle began in earnest. Finally, it’s telling that Brin, who attended President Donald Trump’s inauguration with CEO Sundar Pichai, is now using his power to seemingly push for removing Gemini’s guardrails.

«

Brin, the former wünderkind, is now 51 years old. Hassabis is 48. (Mark Zuckerberg is still only 40.) There was certainly a time when Brin would have thought staff who worked 60-hour weeks were slackers.
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Apple’s M4 MacBook Air coming this week with six new features • 9to5Mac

Ryan Christoffel:

»

Apple has been having fun mixing it up with recent product launches. After teasing the iPhone 16e launch on X, now Tim Cook has shared news of another product launch in the same way. The launch is happening this week, and is widely assumed to be the M4 MacBook Air. Here’s everything the new model is expected to offer.

«

I like the confidence with which this is stated. In short: 13in and 15in screens, M4 chip (obvs), 16GB minimum, battery life. And new iPads to follow. Would like to see a refreshed Mac Studio: that’s long overdue.
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Nvidia shares fall 9% on tariff fears • CNBC

Kif Leswing:

»

Nvidia shares fell nearly 9% on Monday after President Donald Trump confirmed that tariffs from Canada and Mexico will go into effect on Tuesday.

The chipmaker’s shares retreated on a bad day for the market. The Dow, of which Nvidia is a component, tumbled 800 points, or 1.8%, and the Nasdaq Composite slid more than 3%.

Nvidia shares are now trading at the same price they were in September, before the U.S. presidential election. The company, having shed its $3 trillion market cap, is worth $2.79 trillion after Monday’s slide knocked another $265bn off Nvidia’s valuation.

Nvidia is down over 13% since Wednesday, when the company reported earnings that topped analysts’ estimates across the board. The company’s revenue jumped 78% from a year earlier to $39.33bn.

During Nvidia’s earnings report, analysts asked about the company’s response to U.S. tariffs.

“Tariffs at this point, it’s an unknown until we understand further what the U.S. government’s plan is,” Nvidia Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress told investors.

«

As a reminder, a company’s market capitalisation is the stock market’s evaluation of the net present value of its total future earnings. When the market cap falls, the stock market is saying it thinks those profits will be smaller. (Of course for every seller there has to be a buyer. But the buyers pay a lower price than the sellers originally wanted.)
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Struggling with errors, DOGE deletes billions more from list of savings • The New York Times

David A. Fahrenthold, Emily Badger and Jeremy Singer-Vine:

»

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has deleted hundreds more claims from its mistake-plagued “wall of receipts,” erasing $4bn in additional savings that the group said it had made for U.S. taxpayers.

Late Sunday night, the group erased or altered more than 1,000 contracts it had claimed to cancel, representing more than 40% of all the contracts listed on its site last week. The deleted items included five of the seven largest savings that it had claimed credit for just last week. At the same time, the group added about 1,000 additional canceled contracts, worth smaller total savings.

It was the second time in a week that DOGE had deleted some of its greatest claims of success. Early last week, it erased all five of the largest savings it had claimed when the wall of receipts, which is what the group is calling its list of cancelled contracts, was originally posted on Feb. 19.

Since that first posting, the total amount of savings that the initiative has claimed from cutting contracts has steadily declined, from $16bn at first to less than $9bn now.

The “wall” shows only some of the cuts Mr. Musk has imposed on government, making it difficult to assess the claim that his initiative has saved taxpayers more than $100bn. But the site is the only place where the group has given a detailed public accounting of its work, providing a rare look at its basic competence and familiarity with government data.

Contracting and budget experts say that look has been worrisome.

From its start, the list has been full of errors: claims that confused billions with millions, triple-counted the same cancellation, or claimed credit for contracts that had ended years or even decades before. Contracting experts said these mistakes raised questions about DOGE’s basic understanding of the federal government, at a time when Mr. Musk’s group is attempting to rapidly overhaul it.

“Overall, there’s a certain randomness to it,” said Jessica Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.

«

“A certain randomness” is one way of putting it. “Total mess” would be another. Musk’s successful projects – Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink – have a clear, describable goal: cars, rockets, satellites. His unsuccessful ones – X, notably – are trying to make existing things change. DOGE is the latter.
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DOGE actions may cause Social Security benefit ‘interruption’, say ex-agency head • CNBC

Lorie Konish:

»

Social Security has never missed a benefit payment since the program first began sending individuals monthly benefits more than eight decades ago.

But the recent actions at the U.S. Social Security Administration by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency are putting monthly benefit checks for more than 72.5 million Americans at risk, former commissioner and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley told CNBC.com.

“Ultimately, you’re going to see the system collapse and an interruption of benefits,” O’Malley said. “I believe you will see that within the next 30 to 90 days.”

Ahead of any interruption in benefits, “people should start saving now,” O’Malley said.

The Social Security Administration uses multiple systems and technologies that Musk has criticized for leading to errors. As commissioner, O’Malley told Congress the agency needed more funding for information technology modernization.  

O’Malley said DOGE leaders are now making changes at the agency, and significant staff cuts have already led to system outages. Those intermittent IT outages may happen more frequently and for more extended periods of time until there is a “system collapse and an interruption of benefits,” he said.

Neither the Social Security Administration nor the White House responded to requests for comment by press time.

«

Well, that gives us something to look forward to. From a distance, at least.
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Antiscientific vandalism • Quillette

Evan Morris is a professor of radiology and biomedical imaging at Yale University:

»

To understand how biomedical scientists feel as they watch Donald Trump and Elon Musk aim their bazookas at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), recall how you felt when the Taliban aimed their bazookas at the 1,500-year-old Bamiyan Buddhas of Afghanistan. “Senseless” may be one word that springs to mind. “Permanent” might be another.

But the destruction of NIH is in many ways worse than the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas. The Buddhas were an astounding feat of architecture and sculpture and devotion. But there were just two of them. NIH contains 27 institutes and centres, each of which specialises in the research and cure of a whole class of diseases. The work of these institutes occurs, in part, at NIH proper, but the bulk of the work occurs at universities (the so-called “extramural” program) funded through grants.

This collective research builds on continuing advances in every field of medicine as well as chemistry, physics, mathematics, computer science, biology, and more. The American biomedical science enterprise, which has eradicated polio, created artificial organs, and mapped the genome to identify the root causes of disease, is the greatest collective accomplishment of human beings in the history of the world. Once derailed, it will take a very long time to recover.

Musk has pointed his bazookas at two longstanding practices, the disruption of which is causing a great deal of havoc and despair among university-based scientists: the indirect costs and the grant-review committees (also known as “Study Sections”).

Indirect costs are negotiated between the individual universities and the federal government. These rates account for the federal monies that accompany each grant but do not go to the scientist. Rather, they go to the universities to create and maintain the environments that host and facilitate the research. Colloquially, but inadequately, they are said to be for “keeping the lights on.”

Morris explains how this is going to lead to harm that will take years and years to repair – if it ever is. One could almost make an argument for tearing down the NIH if you had a plan for how to replace it with something better. Of course, no such plan exists.
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A crypto mogul who invested millions into Trump coins is getting a reprieve on civil fraud charges • CNN Business

Allison Morrow:

»

A businessman who pumped $75m into the Trump family-backed crypto token finds himself in a fortunate position this week as federal securities regulators are hitting pause on their civil fraud case against him.

On Wednesday, lawyers for the Securities and Exchange Commission and Justin Sun, a 34-year-old Chinese crypto entrepreneur, asked a federal judge to put the agency’s case on hold, citing the interests of both sides and “the public’s interest.”

The pause is a 180 for the SEC, America’s top financial regulator, which two years ago charged Sun and his companies — Tron, BitTorrent and Rainberry — with selling unregistered securities and fraudulently manipulating the price of digital token Tronix. Sun and his companies sought to have the case dismissed.

Sun is a polarizing figure within the world of crypto, in which he has become one of the most prominent investors in the World Liberty Financial crypto project, backed by the Trump family. Sun’s $75m purchase of World Liberty tokens, which he’s touted in social media posts, could set the Trump family up to eventually collect tens of millions of dollars, as the family is entitled to 75% of the tokens’ revenues, according to the company. Sun is also an official adviser to World Liberty, which lists President Donald Trump as its “chief crypto advocate” and his son Barron as its “DeFi visionary.”

«

Filed under: new American kleptocracy. Subcategory: crypto.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

How far should you persist with a series such as, say, Breaking Bad if you’re not enjoying it at first? Statistics can tell us. CC-licensed photo by Irmin Wehmeier 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. Seasonal. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Citigroup erroneously credited client account with $81tn in “near miss” • Financial Times

Stephen Gandel and Joshua Franklin:

»

Citigroup credited a client’s account with $81tn when it meant to send only $280, an error that could hinder the bank’s attempt to persuade regulators that it has fixed long-standing operational issues.

The erroneous internal transfer, which occurred last April and has not been previously reported, was missed by both a payments employee and a second official assigned to check the transaction before it was approved to be processed at the start of business the following day.

A third employee detected a problem with the bank’s account balances, catching the payment 90 minutes after it was posted. The payment was reversed several hours later, according to an internal account of the event seen by the Financial Times and two people familiar with the event.

No funds left Citi, which disclosed the “near miss” to the Federal Reserve and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, according to another person with knowledge of the matter.

…Citi’s $81tn near miss in April was due to an input error and a backup system with a cumbersome user interface, according to people familiar with the incident. In mid-March, four transactions totalling $280 destined for a customer’s escrow account in Brazil had been blocked by a screen that catches payments that are potential sanction violations.

The payment was quickly cleared, but nonetheless remained stuck in the bank’s system and unable to be completed normally.

Citi’s technology team instructed the payments processing employee to manually input the transactions into a rarely used back-up screen. One quirk of the program was that the amount field came pre-populated with 15 zeros, which the person inputting a transaction needed to delete, something that did not happen.

«

The interest on that sort of amount would be colossal – even in 90 minutes. (I make it about $9bn – not million – at 2% across an hour.) Nice to know the amount didn’t leave Citigroup – I’d be amazed if it could rally those funds under any circumstances. But notice how this colossal error arose from a bad user interface: the programmer assumed the user would “know” to remove the zeroes, while the user assumed the programmer wouldn’t let those zeroes remain once input began. Now read on and imagine crucial government systems made with that sort of misunderstanding.
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We are dedicated to the American public and we’re not done yet • 18F Group

»

1 March 2025: A letter to the American People:

For over 11 years, 18F has been proudly serving you to make government technology work better. We are non-partisan civil servants. 18F has worked on hundreds of projects, all designed to make government technology not just efficient but effective, and to save money for American taxpayers.

However, all employees at 18F – a group that the Trump Administration GSA Technology Transformation Services Director called “the gold standard” of civic tech – were terminated today at midnight ET.

18F was doing exactly the type of work that DOGE claims to want – yet we were eliminated.

When former Tesla engineer Thomas Shedd took the position of TTS director and met with TTS including 18F on February 3, 2025, he acknowledged that the group is the “gold standard” of civic technologists and that “you guys have been doing this far longer than I’ve been even aware that your group exists.” He repeatedly emphasized the importance of the work, and the value of the talent that the teams bring to government.

Despite that skill and knowledge, at midnight ET on March 1, the entirety of 18F received notice that our positions had been eliminated.

The letter said that 18F “has been identified as part of this phase of GSA’s Reduction in Force (RIF) as non-critical”.

“This decision was made with explicit direction from the top levels of leadership within both the Administration and GSA,” Shedd said in an email shortly after we were given notice.

This was a surprise to all 18F staff and our agency partners. Just yesterday we were working on important projects, including improving access to weather data with NOAA, making it easier and faster to get a passport with the Department of State, supporting free tax filing with the IRS, and other critical projects with organizations at the federal and state levels.

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Formed in 2014 under the Obama administration, with slightly fewer than 100 staff. One of its biggest wins was a site that let Americans file their taxes for free, rather than having to do it via a vampire company. Now you’ve got to build that competency up again.
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Elon Musk, and how techno-fascism has come to America • The New Yorker

Kyle Chayka:

»

Accelerationism has been popularized in the past decade by the British philosopher Nick Land, who is part of the so-called neo-reactionary or Dark Enlightenment movement populated by figures including Curtis Yarvin, a former programmer and blogger whose proposals for an American monarchy have enjoyed renewed relevance during Trump 2.0.

The accelerationist attitude is, as Andrea Molle, a professor of political science at Chapman University who studies accelerationism, put it to me, “This collapse is going to come anyway—let’s rip the Band-Aid.” Accelerationism emerged from Karl Marx’s idea that, if the contradictions of capitalism become exaggerated enough, they will inspire proletarian revolution and a more egalitarian society will emerge. But Molle identifies what he calls Muskian “techno-accelerationism” as having a different end: destroying the existing order to create a technologized, hierarchical one with engineers at the top.

Musk “has to completely break any kind of preëxisting government architecture to impose his own,” Molle said. He added that a government thoroughly overhauled by Musk might run a bit like the wireless system that operates Teslas, enabling the company to theoretically update how your car works at any moment: “You’re allowed some agency, but they are still in control, and they can still intervene if the course is not going in the direction that it is supposed to go to maximize efficiency.”

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Only fools think Elon is incompetent • Noahpinion

Noah Smith:

»

Seth Abramson [a social media critic of Musk] could not build SpaceX, or Tesla, or any of the things Musk has built, no matter how much money someone handed him. Neither could I, dear reader, and neither could you. Neither, I think, could Terence Tao, or any of the other highest-IQ supergenius mathematicians on the planet. Any of us could spend a lifetime and burn a trillion dollars and probably not end up with anything remotely resembling Musk’s high-tech industrial behemoths.

Why would we fail? Even with zero institutional constraints in our way, we would fail to identify the best managers and the best engineers. Even when we did find them, we’d often fail to convince them to come work for us — and even if they did, we might not be able to inspire them to work incredibly hard, week in and week out. We’d also often fail to elevate and promote the best workers and give them more authority and responsibilities, or ruthlessly fire the low performers. We’d fail to raise tens of billions of dollars at favorable rates to fund our companies. We’d fail to negotiate government contracts and create buzz for consumer products. And so on.

And there are probably lots of other, less obvious things that Musk does that we would fail to do:

»

A key driver of [Musk’s] success is a relentless focus on solving problems fast, often by working directly with the engineers or coders who’ve gotten stuck, Marc Andreessen says…The legendary venture capitalist shared his insights from working closely with Musk on X, xAI, and SpaceX…Unlike many CEOs, Musk is devoted to understanding every aspect of his businesses, the Andreessen Horowitz cofounder and general partner said. He’s “in the trenches and talking directly to the people who do the work,” and acting as the “lead problem solver in the organization.”

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I’ve been watching Elon succeed at building seemingly impossible companies and driving them to new heights of success for over a decade. And at every turn, there were hecklers on social media calling him an idiot, a fraud, and a huckster, and claiming that his companies were about to collapse and die. Although Elon didn’t deliver on every promise he ever made, again and again he has made his hecklers eat their words.

«

It’s important not to underestimate successful people whose motives and intentions you don’t respect; instead, you should try to understand exactly why they’re successful. (A link shared by John Naughton.)
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Crypto prices jump as Trump names tokens included in strategic reserve • Financial Times

Philip Stafford and Eric Platt:

»

On Sunday, Trump said that bitcoin and ethereum would be “the heart of the reserve”, adding that it would also include Solana, XRP and Cardano.

“I will make sure the US is the Crypto Capital of the World,” he wrote on his Truth Social account. “We are MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

His comments gave prices across the industry a lift after weeks of selling pressure, as cryptocurrencies have been hit by a market shake-out of riskier assets.

Bitcoin rose 10% to $93,883.80 while Ethereum gained 13% to $2,477.46, according to CoinDesk. Solana, the token that represents the blockchain that hosts most memecoins — including Trump’s own coin — climbed 19% to $169.71.

Ada, which represents the Cardano blockchain, soared 50% to just over $1 per token. XRP, the coin affiliated to payments group Ripple, rose 31% to reach $2.83.

Traders have cited their frustration that the Trump administration has not moved faster to enact some of the reforms he promised on the campaign trail.

His administration has been quicker to halt enforcement actions against the industry, which the top securities regulator under former president Joe Biden had described as the “Wild West . . . rife with fraud, scams and abuse”.

Coinbase, a crypto exchange, said last month that the SEC had agreed to drop its landmark case against the company, which it had accused of failing to register as a national securities exchange, broker or clearing agency.

Executives at other groups, including crypto exchanges Gemini and OpenSea, have also indicated that securities regulators have dropped investigations into their businesses.

«

There’s now no difference between the US and Russia, except that the Americans don’t realise what sort of country they’re living in – one which is being stripmined by a kleptocracy. All the people who needed to be on the inside of this announcement were tipped off. And a small group of others will benefit. Those who missed out will need to pay handsomely to get in to a game that’s already rigged.
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Second US company recalls pet food as bird flu spreads to cats through tainted meat • The Guardian

Melody Schreiber:

»

a second company selling raw pet food issued a voluntary recall after cats from two different households in Oregon contracted H5N1 from the tainted meat earlier this month.

Two more cats in different households in Washington state have tested positive for bird flu after eating the same brand of raw pet food nearly two weeks after the recall, officials announced on Wednesday. One cat was euthanized, while the other remains under veterinary care.

Two lots of the raw food, made by Wild Coast Raw, fall under the voluntary recall. It is not clear whether the new cases in Washington are linked to recalled lots or others.

Since 2022 in the US, nearly 100 domestic cats have tested positive for bird flu, which can be fatal, and it may be possible for cats to transmit the virus to humans.

On 6 February, Christine “Kiki” Knopp noticed one of her 11 cats was running a slight fever. Within days, two of her cats had to be euthanized, and a third was in an intensive care unit.

All of the cats that had eaten raw pet food would later test positive for bird flu. Only a male cat kept apart from the others and fed canned food stayed negative.

«

Well, that seems like one of those strong pieces of evidence. The idea this illness can be spread by food is concerning. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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Scientists match Earth’s ice age cycles with orbital shifts • The Current

University of California at Santa Barbara:

»

Beginning around 2.5 million years ago, Earth entered an era marked by successive ice ages and interglacial periods, emerging from the last glaciation around 11,700 years ago. A new analysis suggests the onset of the next ice age could be expected in 10,000 years’ time.

An international team, including researchers from UC Santa Barbara, made their prediction based on a new interpretation of the small changes in Earth’s orbit of the sun, which lead to massive shifts in the planet’s climate over periods of thousands of years. The study tracks the natural cycles of the planet’s climate over a period of a million years. Their findings, published in Science, offer new insights into Earth’s dynamic climate system and represent a step-change in understanding the planet’s glacial cycles.

The team examined a million-year record of climate change, which documents changes in the size of land-based ice sheets across the Northern hemisphere together with the temperature of the deep ocean. They were able to match these changes with small cyclical variations in the shape of Earth’s orbit of the sun, its wobble and the angle on which its axis is tilted.

«

You have probably already thought of an objection. They’re right there with you:

»

“But such a transition to a glacial state in 10,000 years’ time is very unlikely to happen because human emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere have already diverted the climate from its natural course, with longer-term impacts into the future,” added co-author Gregor Knorr from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research.

«

Ice Age v carbon dioxide atmospheric load: who wins? Only one way to find out.
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How many episodes should you watch before quitting a TV show? A statistical analysis • Stat Significant

Daniel Parris:

»

Some TV shows take a while to “get good.” Modern classics like Breaking Bad, The Wire, Community, and Bojack Horseman are notorious for “starting slow” and are often recommended with a disclaimer like “Give it a few episodes; I promise it gets good!”

At the same time, some shows never get good. Recently, I started a spy series called The Agency, which could best be characterized as premium mediocre (at least so far). There are big-name actors (Michael Fassbender, Jeffrey Wright, Richard Gere), expensive sets, and glossy camerawork—but after a few installments, I’m trapped in a liminal space between engaged and listless. At the end of each episode, I’m left with the same thought: “Maybe the next one will get good.”

Committing to a mediocre program or continuing with a floundering series elicits a state of (mildly) torturous ambiguity. Should you cut your losses, or is this show some late-blooming classic like Breaking Bad? What is the optimal number of episodes one should watch before cleansing a subpar series from their life? Surely, a universal number must exist! Like 42, but for television.

So today, we’ll explore how long it takes a new show to reach its full potential and how many lackluster episodes you should grant an established series before cutting ties.

«

Lots of fun wonkery on this (never watched Bojack Horseman, personally). It doesn’t mention The Sopranos, though.
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Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim cuts ties with Elon Musk’s Starlink after controversial tweet • Thinktank via MSN

»

Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim has officially severed ties with Elon Musk’s Starlink, opting to invest in his own telecommunications infrastructure rather than relying on Musk’s satellite technology.

Slim’s company, América Móvil, announced a massive $22bn investment over the next three years to enhance its network, signaling a major strategic shift in Latin America’s telecommunications industry. The decision is expected to deliver a financial blow to Starlink, which had anticipated a profitable partnership in the region.

Tensions between the two business moguls reportedly escalated after Musk shared a controversial tweet implying Slim had connections to organized crime. Within minutes of the post, Slim canceled all collaborations with Starlink in Latin America, causing Musk to lose an estimated $7bn.

«

Most expensive tweet ever? Perhaps. I don’t think the tweet caused the contract cancellation – rather, that the cancellation of the contract led to the tweet. Confirmation is difficult to find – this doesn’t seem to have been picked up widely, which makes me wonder whether it’s accurate at all. But just in case..
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

About 20 people have been fired from Meta for leaking “confidential information”, such as Mark Zuckerberg’s complaints about too much leaking. CC-licensed photo by Michael Vroegop 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.

No post today at the Social Warming Substack. Maybe next week?

A selection of 10 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.

AI supertest for prostate cancer screening is “game-changing” • The Times

Eleanor Hayward:

»

Scientists have developed a prostate cancer “supertest” they claim is the most accurate tool yet for detecting the disease.

There is no routine screening programme for prostate cancer in the UK because some tests, including the prostate specific antigen (PSA) blood test, are considered too unreliable.

The new test, developed by EDX Medical Group, based at Cambridge Science Park, uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyse blood and urine samples, looking for more than 100 biological markers. These markers, including specific genes and proteins, have been clinically validated as having a connection to prostate cancer in previous trials.

The test is the first to combine them into one tool. It aims to provide a comprehensive assessment of a man’s overall risk of prostate cancer, discover whether the disease is present and assess what stage it has reached.

It has been welcomed by Sir Chris Hoy, the former Olympic cycling champion who disclosed in November that he has terminal prostate cancer. He said there was a vital need for “better and more accurate screening tests”.

The company hopes to launch the test privately in the UK over the next year and said it could be used by doctors and “revolutionise” prostate cancer screening for men aged 45 to 70.

…Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in England, with 55,000 men diagnosed each year. If caught early, nearly 100% survive, but if caught late, only 50% live. More than 12,000 men a year die from it in the UK.

«

Maybe this is the use case for AI? They might be good at diagnoses that humans can’t perceive because we can’t pull enough signal from the noise, rather as GPS navigation systems are picking up a signal so weak it’s one-hundredth of the background thermal noise.
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Antiaging pill for dogs from start-up Loyal wins FDA recognition • The Washington Post

Lisa Bonos:

»

Dog owners do many things to keep their companions happy and healthy. They could soon add an antiaging pill to their pooch’s regimen of walks, vet visits and belly rubs.

Loyal, a biotech startup based in San Francisco, said Wednesday that a drug it developed to increase canine lifespan has passed a significant milestone on the way to regulatory approval.

The Food and Drug Administration certified the daily pill as having a “reasonable expectation of effectiveness” at extending senior dogs’ lifespans.

The regulator’s Center for Veterinary Medicine still has to certify that the drug is safe and that Loyal can manufacture it at scale before vets can prescribe the pill to dogs 10 years or older that weigh 14 pounds or more.

Loyal’s CEO, Celine Halioua, estimates that the process should be complete by the end of 2025 and called the FDA’s initial recognition “a key step” to extending dogs’ lives.

…Loyal previously received a “reasonable expectation of effectiveness” certification from the FDA for a longevity drug for large and giant breeds like Great Danes and Newfoundlands. But that treatment has to be administered via injection and will take longer to manufacture and get to market.

Other companies are working to develop weight-loss drugs akin to Ozempic for dogs and cats. Loyal’s pill is a result of research into how to mimic the life-extending benefit of caloric restriction without the appetite suppression — and without the need for an owner to restrict their dog’s food.

The drug aims to improve a dog’s metabolic fitness, or the body’s ability to convert nutrients into energy and regulate hormones, which declines in humans and canines with age.

«

Older dogs for an ageing population. Fitting, somehow.
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Apple’s new C1 brings two killer features, and it’s just the start • 9to5Mac

Ryan Christoffel:

»

Another big advantage with the C1 [besides longer battery life due to lower power demand] is that it can be integrated with iOS in a way Qualcomm’s modem never could. This enables it to understand what you’re doing on the device at any given time, and prioritize data use that matters most.

Here’s Apple’s explanation to Reuters:

»

One of the ways Apple hopes the C1 will set its iPhones apart is by tightly integrating it with its processor chips. For example, if an iPhone encounters congested data networks, the phone’s processor can signal to the modem which traffic is the most time sensitive and put it ahead of other data transfers, making the phone feel more responsive to the user’s needs, said Arun Mathias, vice president for wireless software at Apple.

«

…When you’re facing network congestion, Qualcomm’s modem has no idea which data requests are most important. Often that creates a frustrating user experience. But Apple’s C1 will be able to offer more responsive and intelligent data use to meet your exact needs.

«

Quite what that means is a bit vague – is the idea that when you’re using Safari, the C1 will recognise packets destined for the browser? But Apple managed to tune the M series of chips for the most common instruction groups, so maybe the C1 – and its descendants – will have similar benefits.
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New AI text diffusion models break speed barriers by pulling words from noise • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

»

On Thursday, Inception Labs released Mercury Coder, a new AI language model that uses diffusion techniques to generate text faster than conventional models. Unlike traditional models that create text word by word—such as the kind that powers ChatGPT—diffusion-based models like Mercury produce entire responses simultaneously, refining them from an initially masked state into coherent text.

Traditional large language models build text from left to right, one token at a time. They use a technique called “autoregression.” Each word must wait for all previous words before appearing. Inspired by techniques from image-generation models like Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, and Midjourney, text diffusion language models like LLaDA (developed by researchers from Renmin University and Ant Group) and Mercury use a masking-based approach. These models begin with fully obscured content and gradually “denoise” the output, revealing all parts of the response at once.

While image diffusion models add continuous noise to pixel values, text diffusion models can’t apply continuous noise to discrete tokens (chunks of text data). Instead, they replace tokens with special mask tokens as the text equivalent of noise. In LLaDA, the masking probability controls the noise level, with high masking representing high noise and low masking representing low noise. The diffusion process moves from high noise to low noise. Though LLaDA describes this using masking terminology and Mercury uses noise terminology, both apply a similar concept to text generation rooted in diffusion.

Much like the creation of an image synthesis model, researchers build text diffusion models by training a neural network on partially obscured data, having the model predict the most likely completion and then comparing the results with the actual answer. If the model gets it correct, connections in the neural net that led to the correct answer get reinforced. After enough examples, the model can generate outputs with high enough accuracy or plausibility to be useful.

«

Speed is definitely a key element of usefulness for these models: faster is perceived by the user as better. LLMs are proliferating right now as quickly as PCs did in the mid-1980s, when there were dozens of computer brands all jockeying for sales and, eventually, profit – but also all fading away as the market winners emerged. Is this going to be the same? Or can they all coexist?
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Scientists scorn EPA push to say climate change isn’t a danger, say just look around at the world • AP News

Seth Borenstein:

»

As President Donald Trump’s administration looks to reverse a cornerstone finding that climate change endangers human health and welfare, scientists say they just need to look around because it’s obvious how bad global warming is and how it’s getting worse.

New research and ever more frequent extreme weather further prove the harm climate change is doing to people and the planet, 11 different scientists, experts in health and climate, told The Associated Press soon after word of the administration’s plans leaked out Wednesday. They cited peer-reviewed studies and challenged the Trump administration to justify its own effort with science.

“There is no possible world in which greenhouse gases are not a threat to public health,” said Brown University climate scientist Kim Cobb. “It’s simple physics coming up against simple physiology and biology, and the limits of our existing infrastructure to protect us against worsening climate-fueled extremes.”

Environmental Protection Agency chief Lee Zeldin has privately pushed the White House for a rewrite of the agency’s finding that planet-warming greenhouse gases put the public in danger. The original 52-page decision in 2009 is used to justify and apply regulations and decisions on heat-trapping emissions of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane, from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas.

“Carbon dioxide is the very essence of a dangerous air pollutant. The health evidence was overwhelming back in 2009 when EPA reached its endangerment finding, and that evidence has only grown since then,” said University of Washington public health professor Dr. Howard Frumkin, who as a Republican appointee headed the National Center for Environmental Health at the time. “CO2 pollution is driving catastrophic heat waves and storms, infectious disease spread, mental distress, and numerous other causes of human suffering and preventable death.”

That 2009 science-based assessment cited climate change harming air quality, food production, forests, water quality and supplies, sea level rise, energy issues, basic infrastructure, homes and wildlife.

«

Once again, taking America’s science back to the 1950s.
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Meta is firing about 20 employees for leaking • The Verge

Alex Heath:

»

Meta has fired “roughly 20” employees who leaked “confidential information outside the company,” according to a spokesperson.

“We tell employees when they join the company, and we offer periodic reminders, that it is against our policies to leak internal information, no matter the intent,” Meta spokesperson Dave Arnold tells The Verge exclusively. “We recently conducted an investigation that resulted in roughly 20 employees being terminated for sharing confidential information outside the company, and we expect there will be more. We take this seriously, and will continue to take action when we identify leaks.”

Meta has ramped up its efforts to find leakers due to a recent influx of stories detailing unannounced product plans and internal meetings, including a recent all-hands led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg. After we and other outlets reported on what Zuckerberg said during that meeting, employees were warned not to leak. In comments that were subsequently leaked, CTO Andrew Bosworth then told them that the company was “making progress on catching people.”

…“There’s a funny thing that’s happening with these leaks,” Bosworth said during an internal meeting in early Febuary. “When things leak, I think a lot of times people think, ‘Ah, okay, this is leaked, therefore it’ll put pressure on us to change things.’ The opposite is more likely.”

«

Facebook – Meta, now – is such a political and cultural chameleon.
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Congo reports over 50 deaths from mystery illness • The Washington Post

Vivian Ho:

»

An unknown illness has killed 53 people in a northwestern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo, with a significant portion of deaths taking place within 48 hours of the onset of symptoms, according to the World Health Organization, which describes the outbreak as posing “a significant public health threat.”

At least 431 cases have been reported since January of individuals suffering from fever, vomiting, diarrhea, muscle aches, headaches and fatigue, according to the WHO’s Africa office. The illness — believed to have broken out in two separate villages in Équateur province — has a fatality rate of 12.3%, the WHO said.

Investigators traced the outbreak’s origin to the village of Boloko, where three children under the age of five died after reportedly eating a bat carcass, health officials said.

In addition to the other symptoms reported with this disease, the three children suffered symptoms similar to those of a hemorrhagic fever — bleeding from the nose and vomiting blood — before they died between Jan. 10 and Jan. 13.

«

A disease caught from bats? But there are no Chinese laboratories nearby, this can’t have happened. Anyway, good to know that the US has stopped wasting money by cutting USAID budgets which monitored new zoonoses.
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Trump team weighs pulling funds for Moderna bird flu vaccine • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Madison Muller, Riley Griffin and Ike Swetlitz:

»

US health officials are reevaluating a $590 million contract for bird flu shots that the Biden administration awarded to Moderna Inc., people familiar with the matter said.

The review is part of a government push to examine spending on messenger RNA-based vaccines, the technology that powered Moderna’s Covid vaccine. The bird flu shot contract was awarded to Moderna in the Biden administration’s final days, sending the company’s stock up 13% in the two days following the Jan. 17 announcement.

Shares of Moderna fell as much as 4% when US markets opened on Thursday. The company didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The US is in the midst of a record-breaking bird flu outbreak that’s affected dozens of cattle herds along with poultry flocks nationwide, sending egg prices soaring. While human cases have been relatively rare, the virus has caused deaths in the past, and experts are concerned that it could become more transmissible and dangerous.

“While it is crucial that the US Department and Health and Human Services support pandemic preparedness, four years of the Biden administration’s failed oversight have made it necessary to review agreements for vaccine production,” a spokesperson for HHS said in a written statement.

«

Science? Never heard of it. This is driven by RFK Jr. The US is reverting to the 1950s in every respect, including its scientific understanding. Unfortunately, it’s the American citizenry that’s likely to pay the price of having an idiot in charge of their wider health. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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What would happen if a tiny black hole passed through your body? • Universe Today

Brian Koberlein:

»

Some theoretical models argue that primordial black holes could be the source of dark matter. If that’s the case, observational limits constrain their masses to the 1013 – 1019 kg range, which is similar to the mass range for asteroids. Therefore, the study focuses on this range and looks at two effects: tidal forces and shock waves.

Tidal forces occur because the closer you get to a mass, the stronger its gravity. This means a black hole exerts a force differential on you as it gets near. So the question is whether this force differential is strong enough to tear flesh. Asteroid-mass black holes are less than a micrometer across, so even the tidal forces would cover a tiny area. If one passed through your midsection or one of your limbs, there might be some local damage, but nothing fatal. It would be similar to a needle passing through you.

But if the black hole passed through your head, that would be a different story. Tidal forces could tear apart brain cells, which would be much more serious. Since brain cells are delicate, even a force differential of 10 – 100 nanonewtons might kill you. But that would take a black hole at the highest end of our mass range.

Shockwaves would be much more dangerous. In this case, as a black hole entered your body, it would create a density wave that would ripple through you. These shockwaves would physically damage cells and transfer heat energy that would do further damage. To create a shockwave of energy similar to that of a 22-caliber bullet, the black hole would only need a mass of 1.4 x 1014 kg, which is well within the range of possible primordial black holes.

So yes, a primordial black hole could kill you.

«

As Koberlein and the authors of an ArXiv paper on this topic concede, the idea was first considered by SF author Larry Niven in 1974.
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2003: IT Doesn’t Matter • Harvard Business Review

Nick Carr, writing in 2003:

»

Some managers may worry that being stingy with IT dollars will damage their competitive positions. But studies of corporate IT spending consistently show that greater expenditures rarely translate into superior financial results. In fact, the opposite is usually true. In 2002, the consulting firm Alinean compared the IT expenditures and the financial results of 7,500 large U.S. companies and discovered that the top performers tended to be among the most tightfisted.

The 25 companies that delivered the highest economic returns, for example, spent on average just 0.8% of their revenues on IT, while the typical company spent 3.7%. A recent study by Forrester Research showed, similarly, that the most lavish spenders on IT rarely post the best results. Even Oracle’s Larry Ellison, one of the great technology salesmen, admitted in a recent interview that “most companies spend too much [on IT] and get very little in return.” As the opportunities for IT-based advantage continue to narrow, the penalties for overspending will only grow.

«

This is a sort of corollary to the question yesterday about AI trying to find its killer app: what is it really useful for? Subscribers to Ben Thompson’s Stratechery would have read a long interview – more of a discussion – between Thompson and Benedict Evans in which they try to figure out what AI is best used for, and what the AI products of the future will look like. The answer seems to be “we don’t know yet, but it isn’t an empty box asking you to input text”.

In that sense, Carr’s essay could be updated and called AI Doesn’t Matter. And for completeness, Wendy Grossman points out that Thomas K Landauer wrote a 1995 book called “The Trouble with Computers: Usefulness, Usability and Productivity”, about the perceived “productivity paradox” of these new systems.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Reaching the UK’s energy transition targets will mean learning to love pylons – because burying cables is insanely expensive. CC-licensed photo by Grey World 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. Highly strung. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Satya Nadella says AI is yet to find its killer app • The Register

Tobias Mann:

»

Nadella thinks a better benchmark for AI’s success [than AGI-adjacent benchmarks] should be its ability to boost a country’s gross domestic product. “When we say: ‘Oh, this is like the industrial revolution,’ let’s have that industrial revolution type of growth. That means to me, ten percent, seven% for the developed world. Inflation adjusted, growing at five percent, that’s the real marker.”

Few nations achieved that pace of growth in 2024.

Nadella suggested that growth hasn’t eventuated because it’s going to take time before folks understand how to use AI effectively, assuming they find a use for it – just as it took some years for the personal computer to find its feet.

“Just imagine how a multinational corporation like us did forecasts pre-PC, and email, and spreadsheets. Faxes went around, somebody then got those faxes and then did an inter-office memo that then went around, and people entered numbers, and then ultimately a forecast came out maybe just in time for the next quarter,” Nadella explained.

“Then somebody said: ‘Hey, I’m just going to take an Excel spreadsheet, put it in an email, send it around, people will go edit it, and I’ll have a forecast.’ The entire forecasting business process changed because the work artifact and the workflow changed. That is what needs to happen with AI being introduced into knowledge work,” the CEO said.

«

The question of where GDP growth really came from, and how big a role each computing introduction – PCs, spreadsheets, email, web browsing, broadband, mobile phones, mobile broadband, smartphones – added to GDP is one for the ages.
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Ship and Chinese crew detained after Penghu undersea cable severed • Focus Taiwan

»

A Togolese-registered vessel and its Chinese crew have been detained after a submarine communications cable linking Taiwan and Penghu was severed Tuesday.

Taiwan’s Coast Guard Administration (CGA) said it dispatched the PP-10079 patrol and rescue vessel at 2:30 a.m. Tuesday to monitor the “Hong Tai” freighter, which was anchored 6 nautical miles northwest of Jiangjun Fishing Port in Tainan.

The CGA said it immediately issued broadcasts ordering the vessel to leave.

At around 3 a.m., the CGA received a report from the partially state-owned Chunghwa Telecom informing it that the “Taiwan-Penghu No. 3” submarine fiber optic cable had been severed.

The CGA said that it then began attempting to detain the ship on grounds of possible sabotage.

However, due to the difference in height between the two vessels preventing CGA personnel from boarding the Hong Tai, the CGA said it had to send the Cijin offshore patrol vessel and the PP-10059 patrol vessel to the scene to assist with boarding and detention.

The Hong Tai, which the CGA said was funded by “Chinese capital,” was later brought to Anping Harbor where it and its eight crew, all Chinese nationals, were detained, pending investigation by Tainan district prosecutors.

When PP-10079 radioed the freighter, its crew said the ship’s name was “Hong Tai 168,” which contradicted the name shown by its Automatic Identification System “Hong Tai 58,” the CGA said.

The CGA added that the ship’s name would be verified by an upcoming investigation.

According to the CGA, the freighter had been loitering near the broken cable at a distance of about 925 meters from the cable since 7 p.m. on Feb. 22.

«

Drones and submarine cables. It’s the new warfare.
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Amazon’s subscription-based Alexa+ looks highly capable—and questionable • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

»

Amazon representatives showed Alexa+ learning what a family member likes to eat and later recalling that information to recommend appropriate recipes. In another demo, Alexa+ appeared to set a price monitor for ticket availability on Ticketmaster. Alexa+ told the user it would notify them of price drops via their Echo or Alexa.

I also saw Alexa+ identify, per the issued prompt, “that song Bradley Cooper sings. It’s, like, in a duet” and stream it off of Amazon Music via Echo devices placed around the room. The user was able to toggle audio playing from Echo devices on the left or right side of the room. He then had Alexa+ quickly play the scene from the movie A Star Is Born (that the song is from) on a Fire TV.

Notably, Alexa+ understood directions delivered in casual speak (for example: “can you just jump to the scene in the movie?”). During the demos, the Echo Show in use showed a transcription of the user and voice assistant’s conversation on-screen. At times, I saw the transcription fix mistakes. For example, when a speaker said “I’m in New York,” Alexa first heard “I’m imminent,” but by the time the speaker was done talking, the transcribed prompt was corrected.

I even saw Alexa+ use some logic. In one demo, a user requested tickets for Seattle Storm games in Seattle in March. Since there were none, Alexa+ asked if the user wanted to look for games in April. This showed Alexa+ anticipating a user’s potential response, while increasing the chances that Amazon would be compensated for helping to drive a future ticket sale.

Unlike with today’s Alexa, Alexa+ is supposed to be able to interpret shared documents. An Amazon rep appeared to show Alexa+ reading a homeowner’s association contract to determine if the user is allowed to install solar panels on their home. Although, as some have learned recently, there are inherent risks with relying on AI to provide totally accurate information about contracts, legal information, or, really anything.

«

(I think the “questionable” means you can ask it questions.) Free for Prime users, $20 for others. Looks like a big leap forward if you’re prepared to commit to Amazon running your home.
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It’s easier than ever to scrub your personal info from Google Search • Ars Technica

Ryan Whitwam:

»

As Google’s 2024 antitrust loss proved, the company has worked very, very hard to ensure its search engine is the primary roadmap for the Internet. Google scours the Internet for data about everything—even you. And if you don’t want your personal info to wind up in Google search results, you can use the just-redesigned “Results About You” tool. The tool, which began its rollout in 2022, is easier to use now, and some of the most useful features are now better integrated with search results.

The first step in using Results About You—which has not changed—is a bit alarming when you’ve set out to obscure your personal information. Just head to the new hub for Results About You and enter your personal information. Google probably already knows your phone number, email, and even physical address, but this tells the tool what specific information to pluck out of search results. If that data is out there, Google has it whether or not you remove it from search results.

Before this update, most of the Results About You features were limited to this console, but the most important features are now integrated with the search results. They’re not exactly prominently displayed, though. When scrolling through a Google search (after the AI overview, ads, knowledge graph, and more ads), you can use the three-dot menu next to a result to get data about it. This menu now includes options to remove the result right at the top.

If you request a removal due to the presence of personal information, Google will ask for more details, but that only takes a few seconds.…If you’re requesting a personal data removal, it has to be your data.

«

It’s the Right To Be Forgotten under another name, isn’t it. The data still exists out there, but you can’t find it through Google.
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AI linked to growing cancer risk • Futurism

Joe Wilkins:

»

As the artificial intelligence boom spirals to epic proportions, big tech companies are throwing heaps of cash into massive data centres throughout the world.

Packed full of hardware to process AI queries, these data centers put out forest-melting levels of heat as they suck the life out of local energy grids and water tables to meet demand. They’re incredibly noisy as well — pumping incessant mechanical sounds into quiet neighbourhoods and driving away wildlife.

And unfortunately, the public cost of AI doesn’t end there. New research by academics at UC Riverside and Caltech is warning that AI data centres are also taking a massive toll on human health, in the form of diseases like cancer and asthma.

The study, which hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed, looked at the production output of AI hardware over the past five years, found that air pollution resulting from AI development could cause as many as 1,300 premature cancer and asthma deaths per year by 2030.

That’s on top of a cost approaching nearly $20bn a year from the collective burden of health treatment, missing wages, and lower school attendance as a result of diseases caused by AI runoff. In 2023 alone, the total cost of AI-connected illness was $1.5bn, the paper found, in an eye-watering 20% increase from 2022.

The issue of air pollution is easy to overlook, because in most cases, the data centers are powered by local coal-burning plants, which tend to be disproportionately located near low-income and working-class communities. It also seems wherever they go, AI data centres drive up the local cost of electricity, saddling their host communities with a burden not shared by the rest of the country, let alone by Silicon Valley or big tech’s Wall Street investors.

«

The estimate relies heavily on some handwaving guesses about the use of diesel backup generators at data centres (there’s no data presented on how much they’re used), the above-mentioned use of coal-burning plants (limited), and the manufacture of the chips. (Thanks Greg B for the link.)
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What would reaching net zero mean for life in 2040s Britain? • The Guardian

Fiona Harvey:

»

The government’s climate advisers have published their latest official advice on meeting the UK’s legally binding target of reaching net zero emissions by 2050. The advice, which covers the period from 2038 to 2042, contains dozens of recommendations covering all aspects of society. But how will Britons’ lifestyles change under these plans?

…Moving about: Perhaps as soon as next year, or by 2028, the CCC estimates that electric cars will reach the same price levels as petrol and diesel models. This is likely to spur greater take-up, and by 2040 no new fossil fuel vehicles will be available. But people should also be encouraged to walk and cycle, and public transport must play a crucial role, the CCC said. “Better infrastructure enables more people to choose public transport, cycling, or walking instead of driving, bringing the UK closer in line with countries such as Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands,” the report found.

Homes: Most people in the UK heat their homes with gas, but by 2040 most will need electric heat pumps if the UK’s carbon targets are to be met. This does not mean ripping out gas boilers – replacing old gas appliances with electric ones can be done when the existing ones wear out. This is likely to require some form of government intervention and support, as heat pumps are still expensive. Hydrogen, posited by some as a way to carry on using the UK’s existing gas supply networks to replace gas in home heating systems, is definitely out – it will never be cheap enough or feasible, according to multiple studies, and the CCC said its use would be largely confined to industrial settings.

«

There’s plenty more – eating (different), flying (less), countryside and nature (more trees!), energy (lots more), working (in the green economy).
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The cost of burying our grid • Yes and Grow

Ben Hopkinson:

»

The most in-depth study on transmission grid costs was done by the construction firm, Parsons Brinckerhoff. They found that overhead lines are the cheapest transmission technology with lifetime costs varying between £2.2m and £4.2m per kilometre (in 2012 prices). Burying the cables underground costs between £10.2m and £24.1m per kilometre, five to six times more. Importantly, underground cables were found to always be more expensive when compared to equivalent overhead lines. These are extra costs that billpayers would have to shoulder, when Britain already has some of the most expensive electricity in the world.

Not only are overhead lines six times cheaper than underground cables, they are also better for the local environment. Overhead cables are cooled by the air around them, while underground cables need to be spaced apart to avoid overheating. To match one overhead pylon line, as many as 12 separate cables in four separate trenches may be needed, resulting in a work area up to 65m wide. That means existing hedgerows and trees will need to be cut down to make way for the worksite. Plus all this digging threatens sensitive habitats and could damage archaeological heritage.

Once the construction is complete, access will still be needed for the life of the link, which means restrictions over buildings, trees, and hedgerows over the cables. Even with these restrictions it is much harder to quickly repair underground cables. If a fault occurs on one, it is on average out of service for 25 times longer than an equivalent overhead line.

«

And yet there are people who bewail pylons (notably among MPs). I’ve lived near a pylon. You basically don’t see it.
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Intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard will fight ‘egregious’ Apple back-door order • The Washington Post

Joseph Menn:

»

New U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has called a U.K. order that Apple break the encrypted storage it offers customers worldwide an “egregious” violation of American rights and said it could violate a law easing cooperation between the countries in investigations.

Gabbard wrote late Tuesday to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Arizona), saying that she had directed a legal review of the secret order and that she had not known of it before it was reported by The Washington Post and confirmed by other publications. The legislators had urged her to act just after her confirmation as the top U.S. intelligence leader.

“I share your grave concern about the serious implications of the United Kingdom, or any foreign country, requiring Apple or any company to create a “backdoor” that would allow access to Americans’ personal encrypted data,” she wrote in response. “This would be a clear and egregious violation of Americans’ privacy and civil liberties, and open up a serious vulnerability for cyber exploitation by adversarial actors.”

«

Very much looking forward to seeing Gabbard fight an order that has been in use in the US – access to people’s iCloud data with a proper court order – for years. In fact the US has been particularly eager to access data held on American companies’ data centres, regardless of the location or nationality of the data’s owner.
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The Casio Ring Watch is extremely silly, and that’s why I love it • The Verge

Victoria Song:

»

There is no pretense here. This is a tiny Casio watch that sits on your finger. Casio made it to celebrate its 50th anniversary and to cash in on your retro design nostalgia for the halcyon age of our collective youth. It harkens back to the vintage watch rings of the ’80s and ’90s, which you can find on Etsy for $10. This particular one just happens to be fully functional.

Unboxing it, my first thought as a reasonable person is that no one should buy this. For starters, it’s currently unavailable on Casio’s site and is going for upward of $300 on eBay. (Such is the fate of limited-edition gadgety baubles.) In an age when eggs cost $5 a carton — $7, if you live in my neck of the woods — your money can be spent on more practical things, especially since you probably already own a dozen gadgets that can also tell you the time.

Not to mention, this ring watch only comes in a single 10.5 size. If your fingers are smaller, you’ll need one of two included spacers to make it fit. If your fingers are bigger, sorry. No fun for you. Besides, how practical could something like this be? Never mind that it has a stopwatch, an alarm, and dual timezone features. You’d probably never use any of them, because what are these, buttons for ants?

These were my mature, responsible adult thoughts before slipping on the ring. Unfortunately, the second it was on my finger, I morphed into the hhhehehe lizard.

It just looks cool. The Casio Ring Watch is the sort of dweeby chic that reminds me of childhood: before puberty and the consuming need to fit in, when wearing Disney princess tiaras and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles watches was legitimately cool.

«

I guess not all tech needs to be useful. Sometimes just existing is enough. Probably one for women more than men, though.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The rise in streaming has been matched by a fall in understanding of what people are watching, and for how long. CC-licensed photo by Stock Catalog 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. Bears watching. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Chegg sues Google, explores sale after AI search summaries hit revenues • FT via Ars Technica

Maxine Kelly:

»

Chegg is suing Google parent Alphabet over claims the search engine’s artificial intelligence summary tool has hit its revenues, leading the US-listed educational technology group to weigh up a sale of the business.

California-based Chegg, which provides study tools for students, filed the complaint on Monday claiming that Google AI Overviews, which presents users with summary answers to their queries, serves to keep users on Google’s own site.

Chief executive Nathan Schultz said the search giant’s AI search changes had “unjustly retained traffic that has historically come to Chegg, impacting our acquisitions, revenue and employees.”

He added this was “materially impacting” revenues, leading the company to instigate a strategic revenue in which it would explore “a range of alternatives to maximize shareholder value, including being acquired, undertaking a go-private transaction, or remaining as a public standalone company.”

Google said: “With AI Overviews, people find search more helpful and use it more, creating new opportunities for content to be discovered. Every day, Google sends billions of clicks to sites across the web, and AI Overviews send traffic to a greater diversity of sites. We will defend against these meritless claims.”

Chegg’s move comes as developments in AI shake global industries, from health care to education and the automotive sector. The fast development of generative AI since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022 has upended demand for edtech companies’ paid-for online learning tools, leading their valuations to plummet.

The company’s shares were down 22% in premarket trading on Tuesday. Chegg’s stock is down more than 80% over the past year.

Edtech businesses are grappling with how to harness the benefits of generative AI, often integrating some of the tools into their own products, while also being wary of AI companies establishing rival platforms, such as OpenAI’s recently launched ChatGPT Edu and Google’s LearnLM.

…Chegg reported on Monday that total net revenues for the three-month period to the end of December dropped nearly a quarter to $143.5m compared with the previous year, while the number of service subscribers fell 21% to 3.6 million.

«

Probably the first of many.
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Universities must embrace AI or face extinction • Chris Kanan

Chris Kanan is a professor of computer science at the University of Rochester in the US, where he leads an AI initiative:

»

Before World War II, American higher education was not about job training—it was about intellectual and personal development:

• Intellectual Rigor – Students engaged deeply in philosophy, rhetoric, and interdisciplinary scholarship.

• Moral and Civic Leadership – Universities shaped ethical, community-minded leaders.

• Broad Knowledge – Curricula encouraged cross-disciplinary exploration over narrow specialization.

After WW2, this emphasis diminished. The GI Bill expanded access, and universities became focused on preparing students for jobs rather than personal or intellectual growth. While this shift was beneficial for economic mobility, today’s AI-driven world demands a return to foundational skills that AI cannot fully replicate: critical thinking, reasoning, and adaptive problem-solving.

Meanwhile, higher education faces a double crisis: a projected 13% enrollment decline by 2041—likely an underestimate if AI disrupts white-collar job markets even faster than expected.

AI has advanced dramatically in just a few years. Today’s best AI systems can achieve “B” or better in nearly all college courses. A Frontiers in Psychology study found that ChatGPT can even surpass humans in perceived emotional intelligence—a domain once thought uniquely human. Meanwhile, many AI experts, myself included, predict that artificial general intelligence (AGI) could arrive within the next decade. Once AGI emerges, it will displace many of the jobs people attend college to obtain.

This trajectory is an existential threat to universities reliant on the promise of career advancement. If employers can access AI that is faster, never fatigued, has mastered every discipline, and even competent in emotional intelligence, the economic rationale for college weakens.

«

UK universities face similar challenges, but with the added problem that their budgets are under gigantic pressure.
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Facebook boosts viral content as it drops fact-checking • ProPublica

Craig Silverman:

»

Meta has made debunking viral hoaxes created for money a top priority for nearly a decade, with one executive calling this content the “worst of the worst.” Meta has a policy against paying for content its fact-checkers label as false, but that rule will become irrelevant when the company stops working with them. Already, 404 Media found that overseas spammers are earning payouts using deceptive AI-generated content, including images of emaciated people meant to stoke emotion and engagement. Such content is rarely fact-checked because it doesn’t make any verifiable claims.

With the removal of fact-checks in the U.S., “what is the protection now against viral hoaxes for profit?” said Jeff Allen, the chief research officer of the nonprofit Integrity Institute and a former Meta data scientist.

“The systems are designed to amplify the most salacious and inciting content,” he added.

In an exchange on Facebook Messenger, the manager of NO Filter Seeking Truth, which shared the false ICE post, told ProPublica that the page has been penalized so many times for sharing false information that Meta won’t allow it to earn money under the current rules. The page is run by a woman based in the southern U.S., who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she said she has received threats due to her posts. She said the news about the fact-checking system ending was “great information.”

«

A completely predictable outcome, given that it has already happened on what used to be Twitter.
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Solar, battery storage to lead new U.S. generating capacity additions in 2025 • U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)

»

We expect 63 gigawatts (GW) of new utility-scale electric-generating capacity to be added to the U.S. power grid in 2025 in our latest Preliminary Monthly Electric Generator Inventory report. This amount represents an almost 30% increase from 2024 when 48.6 GW of capacity was installed, the largest capacity installation in a single year since 2002. Together, solar and battery storage account for 81% of the expected total capacity additions, with solar making up over 50% of the increase.

…Battery storage: In 2025, capacity growth from battery storage could set a record as we expect 18.2 GW of utility-scale battery storage to be added to the grid. U.S. battery storage already achieved record growth in 2024 when power providers added 10.3 GW of new battery storage capacity. This growth highlights the importance of battery storage when used with renewable energy, helping to balance supply and demand and improve grid stability. Energy storage systems are not primary electricity sources, meaning the technology does not create electricity from a fuel or natural resource. Instead, they store electricity that has already been created from an electricity generator or the electric power grid, which makes energy storage systems secondary sources of electricity.

«

Install a lot of renewables, and the way to get past their intermittency is to add batteries. (And build nuclear power stations.)
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Amazon shuts down Chime, its Zoom alternative • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

»

Amazon Chime, the tech giant’s underwhelming alternative to Zoom and Google Meet, is shutting down for good. The company on Wednesday confirmed it will end support for Chime, including its Business Calling features, on February 20, 2026.

As part of this transition, Amazon stopped accepting new Chime accounts as of February 19, 2025.

From now until Chime’s end of life, existing customers will still be able to schedule and host meetings, add and manage users, and take advantage of features in the Amazon Chime administration console, a company blog post explains. The Amazon Chime SDK, however, will not be impacted.

Customers are advised to delete their data before the shutdown and make the move to another web meetings service. Amazon recommends other solutions like AWS Wickr, Zoom, or Salesforce’s Slack.

«

But launched in 2017, rather than (say) late 2020 as you might otherwise guess. Basically used only inside Amazon, and it looks like even they tired of it.
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Two people in US hospitalized with bird flu, CDC reports • The Guardian

Melody Schreiber:

»

Two people, in Wyoming and Ohio, have been hospitalized with H5N1 bird flu, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said in a routine flu update on Friday.

The person from Wyoming is still in hospital, while the Ohio patient has been released, according to the report. Both patients experienced “respiratory and non-respiratory symptoms”, the report said, without detailing those symptoms.

“This shows that H5N1 can be very severe and we should not assume that it will always be mild,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan.

The news comes amid one of the worst seasonal flu outbreaks in 15 years – raising the potential for the emergence of a more dangerous virus that combines bird flu and seasonal flu in a process called reassortment.

“I am very worried about H5N1 in patients that are being treated in hospitals where there are also many seasonal flu patients because this creates opportunities for reassortment, which could potentially produce a pandemic-capable H5N1,” Rasmussen said.

These are the first human H5 cases detected in Wyoming and Ohio.

«

Watching brief (still). (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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Who’s watching what on TV? Who’s to say? • The New York Times

John Koblin:

»

People now watch so many programs at so many different times in so many different ways — with an antenna, on cable, in an app or from a website, as well as live, recorded or on demand — that it is increasingly challenging for the industry to agree on the best way to measure viewership. In some cases, media executives and advertisers are even uncertain whether a competitor’s show is a hit or something well short of that.

The scramble to sort out a suitable solution began nearly a decade ago, as Netflix rose to prominence. It has only intensified since. “It is more chaotic than it’s ever been,” said George Ivie, the chief executive of the Media Rating Council, a leading industry measurement watchdog.

For decades, there was no dispute — Nielsen’s measurement was the only game in town.

But things started to go sideways after the emergence of streaming services like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime Video. Nielsen had no ability — at least at first — to measure how many people clicked play on those apps. The streamers, of course, knew exactly how many people were watching on their own service but they either selectively disclosed some data or did not bother releasing it at all.

Over the past two years, as nearly all the major streaming services have introduced advertising, they have released more data. But the data they release makes apples-to-apples comparisons difficult.

Netflix discloses what it calls “hours viewed” and “views” for its shows. Prime Video and Max prefer to describe how many million “viewers” watched a hit of their choosing.

The disclosures can be helpful to compare one show with another on the same streaming service. Yet those figures, too, can lead to disagreements.

«

“Nobody knows anything”, as Samuel Goldman famously said about Hollywood’s inability to figure out what would make a film work or not; now the not-knowing is spread far and wide, with no reliable way to know what might happen. Are there streaming sleeper hits, as the film The Shawshank Redemption (not big in cinema, became a hit on DVD) was? We don’t know. Nobody knows.
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Large majority of Taiwanese oppose transfer of cutting-edge TSMC tech to US • Taiwan News

»

Nearly 85% of Taiwanese respondents oppose transferring TSMC’s 2nm technology to the US, according to a poll released Monday, as former US President Donald Trump continues to push for relocating semiconductor manufacturing through tariff threats.

Deputy Legislative Speaker Johnny Chiang (江啟臣) shared the poll results at a press conference, urging the government to prepare for potential trade negotiations under a second Trump administration, per CNA. The poll, conducted by the Foundation for the People (啟思民本基金會), found that 85.6% of respondents expect Trump to impose tariffs on Taiwan, while 62.4% believe the US holds the upper hand in trade talks.

Taiwan recorded a record-high trade surplus of US$73.9bn (NT$2.41 trillion) with the US last year. Chiang speculated that Washington may pressure Taiwan to reduce the surplus by increasing purchases of American weapons, fossil fuels, or agricultural products.

Regarding Taiwan’s semiconductor industry, 83.8% of respondents agreed that companies like TSMC are Taiwan’s “sacred mountain.” Additionally, 62.5% viewed the semiconductor sector as Taiwan’s “silicon shield,” believing that its strategic importance would prompt Western intervention if tensions with China escalated.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that Taiwan “stole” the US semiconductor industry, a statement 88.4% of respondents disagreed with. Furthermore, 84.8% opposed transferring TSMC’s advanced 2nm process technology to the US.

«

One has to think that the remaining 15.2% don’t know what TSMC is, but the simple principle that Taiwan is important to the US only as long as it has cutting-edge chip technology is obvious to everyone, far and wide.

The fact that Trump wants the technology transferred to the US tells you something else. That around one-third think Taiwan might actually have some leverage in trade talks does too: what if Taiwan’s chip shipments to the US were, oh dear, unavoidably delayed?
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Sonos speakers and soundbars are 25% off for existing customers • The Verge

Sheena Vasani:

»

Since its app fiasco last year, Sonos has been busy slowly rebuilding its reputation with customers. This latest sale, which is exclusive to existing customers, seems to be a part of that strategy — and we’re not complaining, because the deals are solid. Through March 2nd, Sonos is taking 25% off one select Sonos product up to $2,500, though you’ll have to sign in (or create an account) to see the discounted prices. To qualify, you must have registered a Sonos product by February 19th, 2025.

The Sonos sale includes a wide range of audio gear, many of which are down to new all-time low prices. For example, the Sonos Ace is cheaper than ever at $336.75 ($112.25 off). Along with delivering good sound and noise cancellation, the Ace supports TV Audio Swap so you can pair it with Sonos soundbars for private listening. That includes the latest Sonos Beam and Sonos Ray, both of which are also on sale for some of their best prices at $374.25 ($124.75 off) and $209.25 ($69.75 off), respectively.

«

Not happening (yet?) in the UK. Sacrificing profits for revenue to shift product ahead of the end of the quarter on March 31. Meanwhile, no hint of when a release of the app that actually works (and can be used to set up those new speakers) will be forthcoming. The company’s current market capitalisation is about $1.6bn – about one year’s revenue. (It also announced a $150m stock repurchase program on Monday. Was there really no better use for that money?)

It’s a company still in trouble, and no obvious sign of a buyer.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The nerds at DOGE wrestling with COBOL are not going to win – the programming language is deeply embedded in government. CC-licensed photo by Kevin Savetz 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 10 links for you. Business-oriented. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

If COBOL is so problematic, why does the US government still use it? • ZDNet

Steven Vaughan-Nichols:

»

In the coming weeks and months, we might see DOGE reporting finding “fraud” in government agencies where the real crime is out-of-date, badly-maintained software, and not any criminal intent.

COBOL, you see, may be old, but it’s far from dead. According to the Government Accounting Office (GAO), numerous vital government systems still rely on legacy software and hardware. Some of these systems are more than 50 years old.

These archaic systems include ones for the Department of Education for tracking students; the Department of Health and Human Services’ clinical and patient administration; and Medicare & Medicaid Services still uses COBOL-based systems for critical operations.

Last but not least, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) still uses COBOL for some of its critical systems. Altogether, the IRS still relies on approximately 160 COBOL applications. At the IRS’s heart is every taxpayer’s Individual Master File (IMF). This is written not just in COBOL but in IBM Assembler as well. This is, in no way, shape, or form, easy code to work with. Complicating matters further, the IRS uses multiple versions of COBOL, including IBM COBOL for OS/390 & VM, IBM Enterprise COBOL for zOS, and Micro Focus Visual COBOL for Eclipse.

You might think that IMF, which dates back to the early 1960s, is the oldest computer system. You’d be wrong. The Department of Defense’s computerized contract-management system, Mechanization of Contract Administration Services (MOCAS), is still with us after almost 67 years of service. That’s even older than the official release of COBOL itself. MOCAS was written in beta COBOL.

In theory, the IMF was to be replaced by 2028. That was before DOGE cut 6,000 IRS employees out of the government agency’s approximately 82,990 employees.

This problem isn’t limited to just the Federal government. Forty-five of the 50 states and the District of Columbia still run COBOL systems. Many of you may remember when Covid first hit, and you couldn’t get unemployment checks. More than likely, your money was delayed because of over-burdened COBOL-based unemployment programs.

None of this is COBOL’s fault. It may be old, but COBOL is still useful. Indeed, when you get cash from an ATM, 95% of the time you’re interacting with a COBOL program. Behind them, 43% of banking systems are written in COBOL, and 90% of banks still use some COBOL. It’s not just banks. Insurance companies also rely on COBOL. This old programming language will not be leaving us this decade, maybe not this century.

«

Cockroaches and COBOL, the two great survivors.
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Trump manufacturing win: Apple to spend $500bn in U.S., hire 20,000 • Axios

Mike Allen and Ben Berkowitz:

»

Apple CEO Tim Cook said in the announcement: “We are bullish on the future of American innovation, and we’re proud to build on our longstanding U.S. investments with this $500 billion commitment to our country’s future.”

“From doubling our Advanced Manufacturing Fund [from $5 billion to $10 billion], to building advanced technology in Texas, we’re thrilled to expand our support for American manufacturing,” Cook added. “And we’ll keep working with people and companies across this country to help write an extraordinary new chapter in the history of American innovation.”

Trump met with Cook on Thursday in the Oval Office. Then Trump got so excited that he revealed the plans prematurely, saying on-camera while meeting with governors that Cook is “investing hundreds of billions of dollars. I hope he’s announced it — I hope I didn’t announce it, but what the hell? All I do is tell the truth — that’s what he told me. Now he has to do it, right?”

“He is investing hundreds of billions of dollars and others, too,” Trump continued. “We will have a lot of chipmakers coming in, a lot of automakers coming in. They stopped two plants in Mexico that were … starting construction. They just stopped them — they’re going to build them here instead, because they don’t want to pay the tariffs. Tariffs are amazing.”

«

Axios gets a prize for most credulous reporting, and Trump for most credulous president. Apple announced much the same thing in 2021 (that’s ongoing – maybe this is part of it?). The Mexico stuff is perhaps two ancient ones which made keyboards. It’s the Potemkin investment, but Trump is happy.
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Perplexity wants to reinvent the web browser with AI—but there’s fierce competition • Ars Technica

Samuel Axon:

»

Natural-language search engine Perplexity will launch a web browser, joining a competitive and crowded space that has for years been dominated by Google.

The browser will be called Comet, but we know nothing at all about its features or intended positioning within the browser market at this stage. Comet was announced in an X post with a flashy animation but no details.

Perplexity followed up the X post with a link and an invitation to sign up for beta access to the browser. Those who follow the link will find a barebones website (again with no details) and a simple form for entering an email address.

When we entered an address, we received a brief email saying that Perplexity will add new users to the beta every week and that people can get in faster by sharing Comet on social media and tagging Perplexity’s account.

Perplexity was founded in 2022 by a group of engineers with backgrounds in machine learning. Its primary product is a large language model-based search engine wherein users can type queries to get information from the web and various databases. Perplexity gathers the information, summarizes it, presents it, and takes follow-up questions to dig deeper.

It has recently been expanding its offerings—for example, it recently launched a deep research tool competing with similar ones provided by OpenAI and Google, as well as Sonar, an API for generative AI-powered search.

It will face fierce competition in the browser market, though. Google’s Chrome accounts for the majority of web browser use around the world, and despite its position at the forefront of AI search, Perplexity isn’t the first to introduce a browser with heavy use of generative AI features. For example, The Browser Company showed off its Dia browser in December.

Dia will allow users to type natural language commands into the search bar, like finding a document or webpage or creating a calendar event. It’s possible that Comet will do similar things, but again, we don’t know.

«

Control people’s browsing, and you control their internet and their life – the scammers who would hack your browser to redirect your searches to their chosen search engine have known this for years. You really have to trust the maker of a browser, and it has to do something special. Chrome was special at first: really, really fast. Perplexity is going to have to do something remarkable to justify handing over your digital life to it.
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Latest calculations conclude Asteroid 2024 YR4 now poses no significant threat to Earth in 2032 and beyond • Planetary Defense

»

NASA has significantly lowered the risk of near-Earth asteroid 2024 YR4 as an impact threat to Earth for the foreseeable future. When first discovered, asteroid 2024 YR4 had a very small, but notable chance of impacting our planet in 2032.

As observations of the asteroid continued to be submitted to the Minor Planet Center, experts at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s (JPL’s) Center for Near-Earth Object Studies were able to calculate more precise models of the asteroid’s trajectory and now have found there is no significant potential for this asteroid to impact our planet for the next century. The latest observations have further reduced the uncertainty of its future trajectory, and the range of possible locations the asteroid could be on Dec. 22, 2032, has moved farther away from the Earth.

«

Those 15 minutes of fame were really famous, though. Hang on though what’s this on the Nasa page?

»

There still remains a very small chance for asteroid 2024 YR4 to impact the Moon on Dec. 22, 2032. That probability is currently 1.7%.

«

I think that wouldn’t be good for the Moon, and hence for us because we rely a lot on tides (and also the Moon not being knocked out of orbit either onto us or away)? Great to know there’s still something to worry about for the next seven years.
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Global sales of combustion engine cars have peaked • Our World in Data

Hannah Ritchie:

»

To decarbonize road transport, the world must move away from petrol and diesel cars and towards electric vehicles and other forms of low-carbon transport.

This transition has already started. In fact, global sales of combustion engine cars are well past the peak and are now falling.

As you can see in the chart [in the story], global sales peaked in 2018. This is calculated based on data from the International Energy Agency. Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates this peak occurred one year earlier, in 2017.

«

There’s plenty more about the worldwide trends. Of course, sales peaking still leaves a ton of old internal combustion cars on the road, being replaced only very slowly, being sold on and on to second and third buyers.
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Ukrainian drones to dodge Russian jamming with GPS alternative • The Next Web

Thomas Macaulay:

»

A Ukrainian drone tech firm has unveiled an alternative to GPS navigation.

Sine.Engineering built the system to counter Russia’s electronic warfare, which has wreaked havoc on GPS signals. 

To dodge the interference, Sine invented a satellite-free replacement. The approach is inspired by time-of-flight (ToF) methods, which began tracking aircraft long before the advent of GPS. Unlike GPS, ToF systems don’t rely on satellites. Instead, they measure the time it takes a signal to travel between a transmitter and a target.

In Sine’s framework, the calculations come from a communication module for drones. 

Smaller than a playing card, the module shares signals with a ground station and two beacons. It then measures how long the signals take to travel. As the beacons and ground station have known, static coordinates, the software can precisely determine a drone’s coordinates. And because the module runs on multiple bandwidths, the aircraft can elude jamming that targets specific frequencies.

Crucially, the system is also relatively cheap. By providing affordable accuracy, Sine plans to accelerate Ukraine’s transition to autonomous drones.

The country’s armed forces have backed the plans. Already, they have deployed Sine’s module in military operations.

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Cheap to make, resistant to jamming: all they need is the explosives. Though of course Russia can deploy the same system. Logical next step: the new target becomes the ground stations.
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Artificial Intelligence: the asymptote pt. III • Radio Free Mobile

Richard Windsor has been a technology analyst for a few decades now; this is from his daily newsletter:

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At some point, investors are going to start asking where the returns are on the investments that they have made [in the big AI companies] and with a race to the bottom in terms of pricing, the returns are likely to be lower than expected.

This will be exacerbated to some degree by DeepSeek’s methodologies which may make it much cheaper to create these sorts of services meaning that even more players can enter the market.

Without the creation of a super-intelligent machine that can replace 90% of human economic tasks, the valuations of all of these companies look much too high to me.

RFM Research [Windsor’s boutique research outfit] has long concluded that there is no super-intelligent machine on the horizon with the only alternative being a correction when reality finally reappears.

This correction is unlikely to be anything like as bad as the Internet Bubble as even without a super-intelligent machine, generative AI has many use cases where there is plenty of money to be made.

When this happens, the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral and so on are likely to run out of money and be acquired by much bigger players with deep pockets.

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It’s that last line which piqued my interest, because it makes a lot of sense: when everyone’s got an AI in the palm of their hand, what’s the distinguishing feature of one or the other?
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Britain’s net zero economy is booming, CBI says • The Guardian

Damian Carrington:

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The net zero economy grew by 10% in 2024 and generated £83bn in gross value added (GVA), a measure of how much value companies add through the goods and services they produce.

The analysis, by the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), found that 22,000 net zero businesses, from renewable energy to green finance, employ almost a million people in full-time jobs. The average annual wage in the businesses – £43,000 – was also £5,600 higher than the national average.

The analysis showed economic growth and climate action go together, said the report’s authors, and improve lives and livelihoods. The chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was criticised in January for suggesting economic growth was more important than net zero, but said more recently: “There is no tradeoff between economic growth and net zero. Quite the opposite. Net zero is the industrial opportunity of the 21st century.”

The figures contradict claims by Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party that “net zero is crippling our economy”. It has promised to “scrap net stupid zero”. The Conservative party, which put the 2050 net zero emissions target into law in 2019, now says it “leaves us economically worse off” and its new leader, Kemi Badenoch, has called it a “mistake”.

The CBI’s chief economist, Louise Hellem, said: “It is clear, you can’t have growth without green – 2025 is the year when the rubber really hits the road, where inaction is indisputably costlier than action.”

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The U.S.’s chipmaking sector is ringing the alarm about Washington’s chip war with China • Fortune Asia

Lionel Lim:

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For years, the U.S. chip sector complained that Washington’s chip controls would hurt their business and spur the creation of a Chinese competitor—yet these warnings rang hollow as revenue kept hitting records thanks to the AI boom.

But recent earnings reports from equipment manufacturers like Applied Materials and Lam Research show the U.S.’s broadside against China’s chip sector may be starting to bite. 

Applied Materials, the largest U.S. chip equipment manufacturer, issued a lukewarm revenue forecast last week, citing the risk of new export controls from Washington. Revenue from China, the company’s largest market, dropped 25% in the most recent quarter to reach $2.2bn, out of a total $7.2bn.

China’s contribution to Applied Materials’ revenue has dropped from 45% a year ago to 31% today.

And the company thinks it’ll drop even further. “For Q2, we expect that China as a percentage of total revenue will be about five percentage points lower than in Q1,” CFO Brice Hill told analysts last week. 

Equipment manufacturers, for now, are still reporting an increase in overall revenue, as the tech industry piles into the AI boom. But analysts warn these companies will sorely miss what China has: a lot of semiconductor manufacturing, and a consumer market eager to snap up the products that use those chips. 

“China is not just a semiconductor manufacturing hub,” says Moonsup Shin, head of hardware, semiconductor, and data centers for Asia-Pacific at Bain & Company. “Around or more than 50% of the semiconductors manufactured by Chinese manufacturers are consumed in China.”

And worse, there’s no ready-made alternative waiting. Regions like Southeast Asia are investing in local manufacturing to position themselves as neutral territory in a chip war. Yet in practice, these up-and-comers lack both China’s manufacturing and consumer demand.

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Sanctions by the US on chip exports to China are biting.. but they’re biting the American companies.
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What we know about the $49.5M Infini exploit so far • CoinJournal

Charles Thuo:

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Infini, a Hong Kong-based stablecoin neobank blending crypto and traditional finance, has become the latest hack victim, resulting in the loss of $49.5 million in USD Coin (USDC).

The hack, which was reported earlier today, was first flagged by blockchain security firm CertiK at 3:18 AM UTC. The result of the exploit has sent shockwaves through the decentralized finance (DeFi) community, underscoring persistent vulnerabilities in the crypto space, especially following the $1.4bn Bybit hack on February 21, 2025.

The Infini attack targeted an Infini-related smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain, specifically the address 0x9A79f4105A4e1A050Ba0b42F25351D394fA7E1DC.

According to security analysts from CertiK, Cyvers, Blocksec, and PeckShield, a hacker gained unauthorized access by exploiting retained administrative privileges within the contract. The attacker, operating from the address 0xc49b5e5b9da66b9126c1a62e9761e6b2147de3e1, had initially developed the smart contract for Infini but retained control, unbeknownst to the project.

This insider access allowed the hacker to manipulate the contract’s settings, draining $49.5m in USDC from what is believed to be the Morpho MEV Capital Usual USDC Vault.

Following the theft, the hacker swiftly converted the stolen USDC into Dai (DAI) and then purchased 17,696 Ethereum (ETH), valued at around $49m at the time.

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What with that ByBit hack – said to be the biggest crypto heist ever (but look, it’s early in the week) – crypto is behaving like it’s 2014 again. Maybe 2015. Or 2016? Actually, it’s just being like a day of the week ending in “y”.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified