A proposed law in California might make “emitters” liable for damages such as the LA fires: but would it really stand up in court? CC-licensed photo by Scott 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. Nonuninflammable. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

China delays approval of BYD’s Mexico plant amid fears tech could leak to US • Financial Times

Gloria Li, Cheng Leng, Thomas Graham and Kana Inagaki:

»

Beijing is delaying approval for carmaker BYD to build a plant in Mexico amid concerns that the smart car technology developed by China’s biggest electric-vehicle maker could leak across the border to the US.

BYD first announced plans for a car plant in Mexico in 2023, along with intentions to make cars in Brazil, Hungary and Indonesia. It said the Mexican plant would create 10,000 jobs and produce 150,000 vehicles a year.

But domestic automakers require approval from China’s commerce ministry to manufacture overseas and it has yet to give approval, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Authorities feared Mexico would gain unrestricted access to BYD’s advanced technology and knowhow, they said, even possibly allowing US access to it. “The commerce ministry’s biggest concern is Mexico’s proximity to the US,” said one of the people.

Beijing is also giving preference to projects in countries that are part of China’s Belt and Road infrastructure development programme, according to the people.

Shifting geopolitical dynamics have also contributed to Mexico cooling on the plant. Mexico has sought to maintain relations with US President Donald Trump, who has put tariffs on cross-border trade, threatening exports and jobs.

«

Hard to know whether to laugh or cry at the reversal: it was always the worry of American companies that if they shifted their manufacturing to Chinese factories, their precious intellectual property would leak out. (They always did, and it always did.) BYD, of course, is the company which earlier this week announced a superfast electric vehicle charging system that would be nearly as quick as filling a car’s fuel tank.
unique link to this extract

How much does Big Oil owe Californians for the LA fires? • Breakthrough Journal

Alex Trembath, Lauren Teixeira, and Patrick Brown:

»

Last year, both New York and Vermont passed “climate Superfund” laws that impose financial liabilities on large carbon emitters for the damages caused by extreme weather and other climate impacts. California lawmakers introduced similar legislation last year, and are widely expected to do so again in the wake of Southern California’s recent devastating fires—the most expensive natural disasters in American history. With an estimated $250bn in economic damages and about 30 confirmed deaths caused by the fires, there will likely be significant political support for a law like this.

So how much would large carbon emitters owe Californians if the bill becomes law?

The legislative text allows one year for the California Environmental Protection Agency to conduct a “climate cost study” determining the total amount of climate damages owed by each large emitter, defined as institutions that are “responsible for more than 1,000,000,000 metric tons of covered fossil fuel emissions, as defined, in aggregate, globally during the covered period” of 2000-2020.

According to data collected by the UK nonprofit group InfluenceMap, there are 86 eligible entities, but most of them operate outside the United States. For the purposes of this exercise we confined our analysis to the 19 eligible entities headquartered in America.

If the bill becomes law, these large emitters collectively would be, hypothetically, liable for 0.2% of the damages from the LA fires, or just under $495.27m.

«

It’s a fascinating idea, but I do wonder how enforceable it would really be in the courts. The two biggest “entities” are ExxonMobile and Chevron, both oil companies. But, your honour, are they actually emitters? My clients simply supply the product in its unconsumed form. It is not their fault what people then do with it, such as burning it in their vehicle engines.
unique link to this extract

Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones • Eric Migicovsky

The Pebble Is Back guy points out that you still can’t do everything you’d like to with a third-party smartwatch connected to an iPhone:

»

The problem is that 40% of everyone who signed up on rePebble.com still uses an iPhone. So we’re going to make a damn iOS app. I guess we’re gluttons for punishment. Just understand a few things:

• Our watch will always appear to have less developed functionality on iOS than Android. This is Apple’s fault, not ours.

• Some features will appear first on our Android app, and then eventually we’ll add them to the iOS app. This is because the majority of our development team uses Android phones, and generally we’re building things for ourselves, so naturally Android comes first.

I don’t want to see any tweets or blog posts or complaints or whatever later on about this. I’m publishing this now so you can make an informed decision about whether to buy a new watch or not. If you’re worried about this, the easiest solution is to buy an Android phone.

«

John Gruber’s response is, well, roll with it. I’m not sure the European Commission would see it that way.

The Pebble is still going to feel like a retro statement. Not that that won’t sell; vinyl is making a comeback, after all.
unique link to this extract

Superior replication, pathogenicity, and immune evasion of a Texas dairy cattle H5N1 virus compared to a historical avian isolate • Nature Scientific Reports

Cassio Pontes Octavani et al:

»

The current outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) viruses of the H5N1 subtype clade 2.3.4.4b in dairy cattle in the United States has affected nearly 900 dairy farms and resulted in at least 39 human infections, putting health authorities and the scientific community on high alert.

Here we characterize the virus growth properties and host-pathogen interactions of an isolate obtained from a sick dairy cow in Texas in vitro and in vivo and compare it to an older HPAI isolate. Despite so far being associated with mild disease in human patients, the cattle H5N1 virus showed superior growth capability and rapid replication kinetics in a panel of human lung cell lines in vitro. In vivo, cattle H5N1 exhibited more intense pathogenicity in mice, with rapid lung pathology and high virus titers in the brain, accompanied by high mortality after challenge via different inoculation routes.

Additionally, the cattle H5N1 demonstrated efficient antagonism of overexpressed RIG-I- and MDA5-mediated innate antiviral signaling pathways. In summary, this study demonstrates the profound pathogenicity and suggests a potential innate immune escape mechanism of the H5N1 virus isolated from a dairy cow in Texas.

«

Octavani and the other authors are all based at the University of Texas. Basically, what they found is: it’s bad! Only a watching brief, of course. 🤞
unique link to this extract

No one knows what the hell an AI agent is • TechCrunch

Maxwell Zeff and Kyle Wiggers:

»

Silicon Valley is bullish on AI agents. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said agents will “join the workforce” this year. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella predicted that agents will replace certain knowledge work. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said that Salesforce’s goal is to be “the number one provider of digital labour in the world” via the company’s various “agentic” services.

But no one can seem to agree on what an AI agent is, exactly.

In the last few years, the tech industry has boldly proclaimed that AI “agents” — the latest buzzword — are going to change everything. In the same way that AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT gave us new ways to surface information, agents will fundamentally change how we approach work, claim CEOs like Altman and Nadella.

That may be true. But it also depends on how one defines “agents,” which is no easy task. Much like other AI-related jargon (e.g. “multimodal,” “AGI,” and “AI” itself), the terms “agent” and “agentic” are becoming diluted to the point of meaninglessness.

That threatens to leave OpenAI, Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon, Google, and the countless other companies building entire product lineups around agents in an awkward place. An agent from Amazon isn’t the same as an agent from Google or any other vendor, and that’s leading to confusion — and customer frustration.

Ryan Salva, senior director of product at Google and an ex-GitHub Copilot leader, said he’s come to “hate” the word “agents.”

«

I’ve been hearing about software agents since, let me see, the late 1990s when British Telecom did a concept demo (yes, that vague) about how “software agents” would patrol the telephone system discovering bugs and fixing them. I have no idea if this ever happened. Anyway, now they’re back, for about the third time.
unique link to this extract

Global VR market declines 12% YoY in 2024; ‘AR+AI’ smart glasses to take centre stage in 2025 • Counterpoint Research

»

Global virtual reality (VR) headset shipments fell 12% YoY in 2024, the market’s third consecutive year of declines, according to the latest update from Counterpoint’s Global XR (AR/VR) Headset Model Tracker. In Q4 2024, the shipments fell 5% YoY. Hardware limitations, lack of compelling VR content and usage scenarios, and decreased consumer engagement continued to impact the market. However, demand from the enterprise market, though relatively limited in size, remained more resilient, particularly in large-scale immersive Location-Based Entertainment (LBE), education, healthcare and military.

Meta continued to dominate the global VR headset market in 2024 with a share of 77%. In Q4 2024, Meta’s market share rose to 84% primarily due to the launch of the more affordable Quest 3S headset. Sony’s PSVR2 shipment share surged to 9% in Q4 2024, fuelled by aggressive promotions and discounts during the Black Friday and Christmas sales. Apple’s Vision Pro shipments saw a steep 43% QoQ decline in Q4 2024, reflecting a slowdown after the initial market hype. In Q4, Apple expanded the Vision Pro’s availability to new markets, including South Korea, UAE and Taiwan, which helped partially offset the overall decline. The device’s enterprise sales also saw an uptick.

«

Meta dominates the market, with more than two-thirds of sales. Guess why? Because it’s affordable and has lots of content. Apple meanwhile isn’t even in double figures (the Q4 estimate is 2% of what should be the Christmas market). Guess why? Because it’s expensive and has basically no content.

(In passing: all hail Counterpoint, using the British spelling for “centre” in its prediction of the future for smart glasses.)
unique link to this extract

Factcheck: why Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch is wrong about UK’s net-zero goal • Carbon Brief

Simon Evans:

»

In a speech launching a “policy renewal programme” to shape the Conservatives’ approach to key issues, Badenoch disowned the target passed into law by her own party in 2019.

She offered no alternative to the 2050 net-zero target and failed to cite any evidence in support of her assertion that meeting it would be “impossible” without “bankrupting” the country.

…Despite the clear evidence of the need to reach net-zero emissions to stop global warming, Badenoch said in her speech that reaching the target by 2050 was “impossible”. She did not offer any evidence to support this supposedly “unvarnished truth”.

Announcing the adoption of the target in 2019, Conservative then-secretary of state Greg Clark said that it was “necessary and feasible”, pointing to the CCC’s advice as evidence.

Indeed, the 2019 advice set out in detail how it would be “feasible” to cut UK emissions to net-zero by 2050. In its latest advice to the government, the CCC set out a “balanced pathway” to net-zero by 2050 that showed the target was “feasible and deliverable”.

Similarly, in 2024 the National Energy System Operator (NESO) published three “credible” and “affordable” pathways to net-zero by 2050, as part of its annual “future energy scenarios”. It said: “Our net-zero pathways identify three credible, strategic routes to reach net-zero…Decisive action is needed within the next two years to deliver the fundamental change required for a fair, affordable, sustainable and secure net-zero energy system by 2050.”

A peer-reviewed research paper in 2022 identified and compared seven pathways to net-zero by 2050, published by four different organisations.

Directly contradicting Badenoch’s speech, the study concluded that “the breadth of pathways analysed in this paper has shown that there are several possible routes to net-zero”. Moreover, the Conservative government in 2021 published its own strategy for reaching net-zero by 2050, including an entire section titled “why net-zero”.

In a foreword to the 2021 strategy, then-Conservative prime minister Boris Johson wrote that “reaching net-zero is entirely possible”.

«

It is astonishing how the Tories’ latest policies suggest that whoever was in charge between 2010 and 2024 was completely mad and useless. Robert Hutton, sketch writer for The Critic, calls them Hot Dog Tories – after the sketch of the Hot Dog Guy who has crashed his Hot Dog Car into a shop saying “we’re all trying to find the guy who did this” – and it’s completely true.
unique link to this extract

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) shifts its mission • The New York Times

Lisa Friedman and Hiroko Tabuchi:

»

The E.P.A. has “no obligation to promote agriculture or commerce; only the critical obligation to protect and enhance the environment,” the first administrator, William D. Ruckelshaus, said as he explained its mission to the country weeks after the E.P.A. was created by President Richard M. Nixon. He said the agency would be focused on research, standards and enforcement in five areas: air pollution, water pollution, waste disposal, radiation and pesticides.

Perhaps the most significant of the agency’s regulatory changes is an effort to revise a 2009 legal opinion known as the E.P.A. “endangerment finding,” which concluded that rising greenhouse gas emissions are a danger to public health.

The finding gives the agency the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Eliminating it would make it virtually impossible for the E.P.A. to curb climate pollution from automobiles, factories, power plants or oil and gas wells.

Some of the other significant policy changes Zeldin said he planned include:
• Rolling back restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. Currently the E.P.A. requires existing coal-burning power plants and new gas plants built in the United States to cut their greenhouse-gas emissions by 90% by 2039.

• Rewriting tailpipe pollution standards that were designed to ensure that the majority of new passenger cars and light trucks sold in the United States are all-electric or hybrids by 2032.

• Easing limits on mercury emissions from power plants, as well as restrictions on soot and haze from burning coal. A Biden-era rule had aimed to slash by 70% emissions from coal-burning power plants of mercury, which has been linked to developmental damage in children.

• Greatly reducing the “social cost” of carbon, an economic estimate of the damage caused by each additional ton of carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere. That figure plays a significant role in weighing the costs and benefits of regulating industries.

«

This is completely insane. It’s the Environmental “Eh Who Cares” Agency. It might as well not exist; it isn’t going to do anything to protect the environment, nor the people who rely on it (ie everyone). Pollution levels will rise, people will get ill and/or die, and that cohort will include the rich who are old – air doesn’t discriminate.

Also, excuse me, but: “the EPA shifts its mission“? I know the American papers and the NYT particularly are terrible at headlines, but wouldn’t “abandons its mission” be more truthful? Or “says yes to pollution”? Almost anything would be more accurate.
unique link to this extract

Bryan Burrough on Graydon Carter’s memoir and Vanity Fair’s heyday • The Yale Review

Bryan Burrough is a successful author in his own right, but also wrote for Vanity Fair in its heyday – the 1990s:

»

By 1994, Vanity Fair was “hugely profitable,” and Graydon received unyielding support from the magazine’s parent company, Condé Nast, and its owners, the Newhouse family—especially the enigmatic Si Newhouse, who adored magazines and adored Graydon. Not to mention the river of Newhouse cash that flowed Vanity Fair’s way. Oh, the money. Good Lord, the money.

As i look back today, Graydon’s Vanity Fair does feel like some lost world, a gold-encrusted Atlantis ultimately inundated by economic and technological tsunamis, its glories only now being picked over by media anthropologists. I’ve never talked much about what it was like to write there. Because I have always worried about how I’d come off. I mean, the money alone. I’m probably breaking some unwritten law of publishing, but here it is: For twenty-five years, I was contracted to produce three articles a year, long ones, typically ten thousand words. For this, my peak salary was $498,141. That’s not a misprint—$498,141, or more than $166,000 per story. Then, as now, $166,000 was a good advance for an entire book. Yes, I realized it was obscene. I took it with a grin.

Then there was the Hollywood money. Every third or fourth article I wrote ended up optioned for the movies. Most were in the $15,000 to $25,000 range for a renewable eighteen-month option. A handful crossed into six figures. (You haven’t lived until you’ve sat across from Robert De Niro on a film set as he reads your own words back to you—although, sadly, that adaptation of my piece “The Miranda Obsession” never made it past development.) This was an era when management allowed writers to keep that movie money. These days? One magazine I love takes 90% off the top.

I am aware of peers who did just as well. Nowadays, though, such windfalls are a distant memory. Today, for a rare magazine article, I’m lucky to receive two dollars a word, or $20,000 for that same ten-thousand-word story. (Don’t even ask what they’re paying me for this piece.) People sometimes wonder why I don’t write more. It’s a chore to explain that, at these rates, it is hard to get that excited.

«

Burrough gets TWENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS for a magazine article?! I don’t think he realises what life is like for the many, many freelancers scratching around for £150 per thousand words, and never getting a sniff of being asked to write ten thousand.

It’s like glimpsing another world. The article is fascinating. You can read it for free, so don’t ask me how or what the Yale Review pays for it.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The UK’s DVLA managed to update many of its processes for the web – but still needs to rely on daily batch jobs. CC-licensed photo by Amy Whitney 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. Licensed. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

GLP-1s are crazy effective — just not cost-effective • Medscape

F Perry Wilson:

»

How much is your life worth?

To an economist, the answer is basically $100,000 per year of perfect health. The ways they arrive at this number are pretty fascinating, but a lot of it is done by looking at what we as a society are willing to pay for. A cost of $100,000 per “quality-adjusted life year” (QALY) is our standard candle here. More than that is not particularly cost-effective. Less than that is. The “quality” in the QALY is important too. Economists know that a year of perfect health is worth more, in dollar terms, than a year of moderate or poor health.

…The authors modeled the cost of the [semaglutide] drugs, the cost of medical care for people taking the drugs, even the cost of lifestyle modification alone (gym memberships aren’t free). Over the lifetime of a given individual, the total cost of a policy of using lifestyle interventions to treat overweight and obesity would be $244,000. A policy of lifestyle interventions plus tirzepatide? $313,000 dollars. Sure, the cost of medical care is lower with the tirzepatide strategy; those averted cases of heart disease and diabetes save money — about $30,000 per person over their lifetime. But the cost of the drug itself adds up. At current prices (about $1000 a month), we’re talking $111,000 dollars per person. 

Now that we have a measure of the effectiveness of the drugs and a measure of the cost, we can do some division and calculate the cost per QALY gained. And here’s what you see.

For tirzepatide, the most effective of the drugs, about $200,000 per quality-adjusted life year. For semaglutide? $470,000 per QALY (since it’s less effective and similarly priced). The older, less used drugs are remarkably more cost-effective: $85,000 for the phentermine drug, and Contrave actually saves money. Society saves $2500 per QALY for using this drug, even though it doesn’t work as well as the pricier stuff.

Does that mean we should abandon these amazingly effective agents? Definitely not. I love a drug that works, and these drugs work. They’re just, quite simply, too expensive. If we want to bring them down below the $100,000 per QALY threshold for cost-effective treatments, the price of tirzepatide needs to decrease by 30%, and the price of semaglutide by 82%. Honestly, I suspect Lilly and Novo would do fine at these price points, but what do I know? I’m not an economist.

«

I remain fascinated by the social effects of these drugs. If they get to the point where NICE in the UK thinks the price v QALYs equation is right, everyone gets on board.
unique link to this extract

Apple’s Passwords app was vulnerable to phishing attacks for nearly three months after launch • 9to5Mac

Arin Waichulis:

»

In iOS 18, Apple spun off its Keychain password management tool—previously only tucked away in Settings—into a standalone app called Passwords. It was the company’s first move at making credential management more convenient for users. It’s now been revealed that a serious HTTP bug left Passwords users vulnerable to phishing attacks for nearly three months, from the initial release of iOS 18 until the patch in iOS 18.2.

Security researchers at Mysk first discovered the flaw after noticing that their iPhone’s App Privacy Report showed Passwords had contacted a staggering 130 different websites over insecure HTTP traffic. This prompted the duo to investigate further, finding that not only was the app fetching account logos and icons over HTTP—it also defaulted to opening password reset pages using the unencrypted protocol. “This left the user vulnerable: an attacker with privileged network access could intercept the HTTP request and redirect the user to a phishing website,” Mysk told 9to5Mac.

“We were surprised that Apple didn’t enforce HTTPS by default for such a sensitive app,” Mysk states. “Additionally, Apple should provide an option for security-conscious users to disable downloading icons completely. I don’t feel comfortable with my password manager constantly pinging each website I maintain a password for, even though the calls Passwords sends don’t contain any ID.”

Most modern websites nowadays allow unencrypted HTTP connections but automatically redirect them to HTTPS using a 301 redirect. It’s important to note that while the Passwords app before iOS 18.2 would make a request over HTTP, it would redirected to the secure HTTPS version. Under normal circumstances, this would be totally fine, as the password changes occur on an encrypted page, ensuring that credentials are not sent in plaintext.

However, it becomes a problem when the attacker is connected to the same network as the user (i.e. Starbucks, airport, or hotel Wi-Fi) and intercepts the initial HTTP request before it redirects.

«

Mysk were “surprised”? It’s a shockingly bad piece of app design that should never have come through testing. How could someone write a piece of code that says “http” and not think “wait, that should probably be https, shouldn’t it”?

Apple has made lots of software mistakes in the past, but I can’t think of such an obviously avoidable one offhand. The discussion about software quality at Apple will intensify; apart from anything, who was asking for passwords to be hived off into a new app with such a wonderful bug?
unique link to this extract

Apple innovation and execution • Benedict Evans

Evans considers the delay to the new Siri in the context of what Apple has done in the past, then looks ahead:

»

a year is a long time given the speed of AI progress right now, especially given the ferocity of competition that Apple faces in China and the waves of new features that the OEMs there are pushing. And ‘Apple Intelligence’ certainly isn’t going to drive a ‘super-cycle’ of iPhone upgrades any time soon.

Indeed, a better iPhone feature by itself was never going to drive fundamentally different growth for Apple, but failures like Humane and Rabbit point to what else Apple (or others) might do with this technology once it works. The rumoured new home smart-screen device is probably a lot less appealing without this, and the AR glasses would need this too, except that those really are years away.

However, it clearly is a problem that the Apple execution machine broke badly enough for Apple to spend an hour at WWDC and a bunch of TV commercials talking about vapourware that it didn’t appear to understand was vapourware. The decision to launch the Vision Pro looks like a related failure. It’s a big problem that this is late, but it’s an equally big problem that Apple thought it was almost ready.

And the failure of Siri 2 is by far the most dramatic instance of a growing trend for Apple to launch stuff late. The software release cycle used to be a metronome: announcement at WWDC in the summer, OS release in September with everything you’d seen. There were plenty of delays and failed projects under the hood, and centres of notorious dysfunction (Apple Music, say), and Apple has always had a tendency to appear to forget about products for years (most Apple Watch faces don’t support the key new feature in the new Apple Watch) but public promise were always kept. Now that seems to be slipping. Is this a symptom of a Vista-like drift into systemically poor execution?

On the other hand, I’m old enough to remember when people said Apple was going to miss Machine Learning, and narratives are always easy to build when something’s gone wrong.

«

Certainly there are lots of people prepared to say “nobody knew what the LLM bit was going to do! Ordinary people weren’t looking forward to it, so it’s no loss if it’s delayed!” But people who watch Apple closely know that that isn’t the point. To announce and then backpedal is not the Apple way.
unique link to this extract

The first new Pebble smartwatches are coming later this year • The Verge

David Pierce:

»

The first watch that Migicovsky and [his company] Core plan to ship is called the Core 2 Duo (not to be confused with the old Intel processor), which Migicovsky says will cost $149 and will ship in July. The name explains the whole idea, he says: “It’s like a Pebble 2, but it’s made by Core devices. And then ‘Duo’ is for do-over.” It has the exact same black-and-white e-paper display as the old Pebble 2 (technically a transflective LCD, if you’re curious), and it even comes in the exact same frame. “We were able to find a supplier that still had the frames for Pebble Time 2 and Pebble 2,” he says. “They were never used. So we’ve been able to just draft on that.”

The Core 2 Duo does get a couple of upgrades, mostly by virtue of overall technological progress — Migicovsky says the new watch will last more than 30 days, instead of the Pebble 2’s seven, largely because Bluetooth chips have become so much more efficient. There’s also a speaker in the device now, which Migicovsky uses for chatting with AI assistants. Overall, though, this is an 8-year-old device simply made new again. (This is part of the idea behind the Pebble reboot: Migicovsky is convinced that Pebble mostly had it right a decade ago and simply wants to get back to that.) He estimates there will be around 10,000 Core 2 Duos available and figures a lot of developers and hardcore fans will be happy to have a new watch to play with as soon as possible.

«

I recall an analyst saying once that you can probably sell 100,000 of any new hardware – it’s the next 7,999,900,000 that are the problem. Can Migicovsky make a profit from that small group?
unique link to this extract

Sobering revenue stats of 70K mobile apps show why devs beg for subscriptions • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

»

If you’re frustrated by some of your favorite apps pestering you to sign up for a subscription, some new data may help you empathize with their developers more. According to revenue data from “over 75,000” mobile apps, the vast majority have a hard time making $1,000 per month.

The data is detailed in RevenueCat’s 2025 State of Subscription Apps report. RevenueCat makes a mobile app subscription tool kit and gathered the report’s data from apps using its platform. The report covers “more than $10bn in revenue across more than a billion transactions,” and RevenueCat’s customer base ranges from indie-sized teams to large publishers. Buffer, ChatGPT, FC Barcelona, Goodnotes, and Reuters are among the San Francisco-based firm’s customer base.

Additionally, the report examines apps that rely primarily on in-app subscriptions, as well as those that only generate some revenue from subscriptions. All apps examined, though, actively generate subscription revenue and “meet a minimum threshold of installs or revenue (to ensure statistically meaningful findings,” according to the report.

RevenueCat’s report doesn’t cover every single mobile app available, but it paints a picture of the challenges related to monetizing mobile apps across different types of categories, as well as how uneven the distribution of app revenue is.

RevenueCat’s report concluded that most apps fail to make $1,000 in monthly revenue within their first two years. It says: “Across all categories, nearly 20% reach $1,000 in revenue, while 5% reach the $10,000 mark. Revenue drop-off is steep, with many categories losing ~50% of apps at each milestone, emphasizing the challenge of sustained growth beyond early revenue benchmarks.”

«

$12,000 per year really isn’t living wages. So it’s not surprising that scams proliferate from less honest developers. The internet is big, but it’s also parsimonious.
unique link to this extract

Britain’s car parking is a complete disaster • The Value of Nothing

Martin Robbins:

»

Car parks are a key part of something I like to call the ‘National User Experience’: a category of things that have been largely abandoned by government yet have a major impact on people’s daily lives and their perception of how the country is being run. Car parks, potholes, neglected public spaces, boarded-up shopping centres, persistent antisocial behaviour, the punctuality of trains – things people encounter day after day after day that make life a little bit harder, a little bit more miserable.

When Labour tries to get reelected in 2029, yes national issues will play a big part, but I think Westminster politicians massively underestimate the impact of unglamorous daily drudgery on much of the population: fix potholes and parking and you’re showing visible change to a lot of grateful people. Fail, and whatever you do at national level is overshadowed by the continuing enshittification of Britain.

In a sane world, all public transport including car parking would be wrapped up in a single, easy payment system. You should be able to tap in and out of car parks with an Oyster card or equivalent, with the parking charge rolled into your ticket. If you want to get people out of cars and onto public transport, providing a frictionless way to move between the two is a good start, particularly outside London where bus services will never be sufficient and personal transport is a necessity for many people.

«

I know what you’re thinking: don’t worry, Martin, the government’s funding a single-payer app! But as Robbins points out, the government cancelled it in February, citing fiscal straitjackets.

From the article about the cancellation:

»

There are thought to be at least 30 different parking apps in the UK, and it is not unusual for someone to have a number on their phone. Among the biggest are RingGo, PayByPhone and JustPark.

A survey published in 2024 by Autocar, however, found that “more than four in five motorists dislike using car parking apps”, with 83% saying they preferred to use cash or contactless card payments.

«

This is not good for the National User Experience.
unique link to this extract

Why some DVLA digital services don’t work at night • Dafydd Vaughan

Vaughan worked at the UK’s Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, and was there when it tried to make everything webby:

»

As part of the GDS [Government Digital Service] exemplar programme in 2013, DVLA committed to delivering a set of new digital services for managing vehicles and personal registrations. To deliver these services, we had to navigate the complexity of the existing tech in place.

Building a new front-end service would be relatively straightforward. However, updating the vehicle record would be more complex – we’d have to integrate with the legacy systems and deal with IBM/Fujitsu to do it. But the even bigger issue – how would we deal with the fragile overnight batch jobs?

We faced a choice. Step back and spend the next few years redesigning and rebuilding the underlying infrastructure to remove/remediate the overnight batch jobs, or accept the service couldn’t initially operate overnight.

Organisations often fall into this trap – spending years and huge amounts of money fixing the underlying foundations before starting to do new things. It’s difficult for an organisation to keep its focus and attention on a complex upgrade – particularly without getting noticeable benefits along the way. DVLA tried this in the early 2000s when migrating away from the mainframe. They ran out of money, and ended up in an even worse half-state.

I pushed for us to press on and deliver a service that could operate normally during the day, but would be turned off overnight. This would allow us to get some value early – giving people access to a new service quickly, while we looked to fix the issues behind the scenes. Luckily the political pressure of the exemplar programme supported us to do that.

«

So they did create a system that in effect still ran batch jobs – stopping taking new entries at some point in the 24 hours so all the records could be updated without creating conflicts.

Two neat codas in his writeup:

»

It’s now 2024 – 10 years on from the launch of the first service. The legacy infrastructure, which really should have been replaced by now, is probably still the reason why the services are still offline overnight.

Is this acceptable? Not really. Is it understandable? Absolutely.

«

And:

»

Transforming government services isn’t as easy as the tech bros and billionaires make it out to be.

«

unique link to this extract

Former Meta executive Sarah Wynn-Williams on her “Careless People” memoir • Business Insider

Pranav Dixit interviewed Sarah Wynn-Williams, who makes some interesting points about why she wrote her book:

»

PD: You left Facebook in 2017. Why did you decide to release it now, after all these years?

SWW: Because I think we’re on the cusp of this new era of technology. We’re stepping into this AI era, and at a high level, I don’t want the mistakes that were made during the social media era to be applied to the AI era.

One of the things that I’ve worked on since leaving [Meta] is the US-China AI dialogue on AI in weapons. So, I really understand the existential nature of AI. I also understand these people and how decisions are made. That’s why, as we go into this new era, we have to do it better. China is such a big part of the story of AI. It’s this growing strategic rivalry and how technology is so central to that rivalry.

And yet, this company has been doing things in the shadows for so long with the Chinese Communist Party, and their line is, “Oh, you know, we tried to get our services [into China] and we told you in 2019 that didn’t happen.” Have a look at how much of [Meta’s] revenue comes from China — it’s $18 billion.

(Editor’s note: According to Meta’s 2024 annual report, the company made $18.35 billion from China, primarily through resellers serving Chinese advertisers targeting global users.) So it seems that everyone is operating under the false notion that Meta is not operating in China when actually, it is fundamental to its current valuation, it’s fundamental to its future growth. And we don’t talk openly about it at the very time that we’re about to enter this new AI era.

…PD: A Meta spokesperson, Andy Stone, has said that your book wasn’t fact-checked and that nobody reached out to Meta for comment. Did you get the book fact-checked?

SWW: I think Meta’s problem is using this to not answer the questions themselves. What I would love is for us not to fall into the distraction. There’s a real risk that we talk about things that don’t matter. We’ve got these huge issues like China and I notice they’re not providing any detail on that. There are so many smart people who’ve worked at this company and who are covering this company. Like, we have to do better.

«

She gave the interview just before the arbitration ruling she couldn’t publicise her book. So this is worth reading now.

Also, it only just occurred to me that the title comes from The Great Gatsby: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
unique link to this extract

How bribes helped a crime ring steal thousands of iPhones from porches • WSJ via MSN

Esther Fung:

»

[Phone shop] Wyckoff Wireless looked like many other mom-and-pop shops around New York City—except federal agents were surveilling the scene, as they later recounted in a criminal complaint.

They suspected the wireless shop was a fence, or middleman, that authorities say was being used to move thousands of stolen iPhones. Last month, federal authorities arrested 13 people in connection with what they say was an international crime ring that targeted FedEx deliveries nationwide.

Porch thefts aren’t new, but they have become increasingly sophisticated. There was a spree last year—captured on doorbell cameras—where thieves stole iPhones just moments after they were dropped on front steps. They knew when the packages were coming and what was inside.

The Wyckoff Wireless case reveals how authorities say they did it: by harnessing technology and old-fashioned bribery.

The group created software to scrape FedEx tracking numbers and bribed AT&T store employees to get order details and delivery addresses, according to a criminal complaint filed in New Jersey. The group then sent thieves to pick off the packages and bring them back to destinations like the Brooklyn shop.

The software was created by Demetrio Reyes Martinez, who is known online as “CookieNerd,” according to the complaint. The 37-year-old wrote code to get around FedEx limits on delivery-data requests and sold it via Telegram with instructions on how to run the program, prosecutors said.

Reyes Martinez, a citizen and resident in the Dominican Republic, is still in the Caribbean nation, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Jersey, which declined to provide further information on his status.

…An AT&T store employee in Paterson, New Jersey, Alejandro Castillo, used his employment credentials to track hundreds of shipments that were subsequently reported stolen in transit, prosecutors said. He took photos of customers’ names, addresses and tracking numbers and shared them with the criminal group, according to the complaint.

He also worked with another store employee in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and recruited other employees at the cellular carrier, prosecutors said. Law-enforcement officials believe Castillo was receiving $2,000 to $2,500 if he recuirted other employees.

«

Because Americans capitalise first letters in headlines (I take them down), I saw “From Porches” and thought the phones were stolen from Porsches and thought that was a bit niche to hit thousands. A theft from a porch, though? Sure.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The tolerances required for the ball bearing of a ballpoint pen eluded Chinese manufacturing for decades, and only in the past few years has it met them. CC-licensed photo by Andrew Magill 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.

Last week’s Social Warming Substack post is available for your delectation.

A selection of 9 links for you. Flowing. 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 slop is a brute force attack on the algorithms that control reality • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

»

Consider, for a moment, that this AI-generated video of a bizarre creature turning into a spider turning into a nightmare giraffe inside of a busy mall has been viewed 362 million times. That means this short reel has been viewed more times than every single article 404 Media has ever published, combined and multiplied tens of times. 

Any of these Reels could have been and probably was made in a matter of seconds or minutes. Many of the accounts that post them post multiple times per day. There are thousands of these types of accounts posting thousands of these types of Reels and images across every social media platform. Large parts of the SEO industry have pivoted entirely to AI-generated content, as has some of the internet advertising industry. They are using generative AI to brute force the internet, and it is working. 

One of the first types of cyberattacks anyone learns about is the brute force attack. This is a type of hack that relies on rapid trial-and-error to guess a password. If a hacker is trying to guess a four-number PIN, they (or more likely an automated hacking tool) will guess 0000, then 0001, then 0002, and so on until the combination is guessed correctly. 

As you may be able to tell from the name, brute force attacks are not very efficient, but they are effective. An attacker relentlessly hammers the target until a vulnerability is found or a password is guessed. The hacker is then free to exploit that target once the vulnerability is found.

The best way to think of the slop and spam that generative AI enables is as a brute force attack on the algorithms that control the internet and which govern how a large segment of the public interprets the nature of reality. It is not just that people making AI slop are spamming the internet, it’s that the intended “audience” of AI slop is social media and search algorithms, not human beings.

What this means, and what I have already seen on my own timelines, is that human-created content is getting almost entirely drowned out by AI-generated content because of the sheer amount of it. On top of the quantity of AI slop, because AI-generated content can be easily tailored to whatever is performing on a platform at any given moment, there is a near total collapse of the information ecosystem and thus of “reality” online. I no longer see almost anything real on my Instagram Reels anymore, and, as I have often reported, many users seem to have completely lost the ability to tell what is real and what is fake, or simply do not care anymore.

«

It’s that latter point which is relevant. People don’t care. They don’t reject it and so it inveigles its way into their content, and the platforms don’t care because it all gets viewed and keeps people on there.
unique link to this extract

AI search has a citation problem • Columbia Journalism Review

Klaudia Jaźwińska and Aisvarya Chandrasekar:

»

AI search tools are rapidly gaining in popularity, with nearly one in four Americans now saying they have used AI in place of traditional search engines. These tools derive their value from crawling the internet for up-to-date, relevant information—content that is often produced by news publishers. 

Yet a troubling imbalance has emerged: while traditional search engines typically operate as an intermediary, guiding users to news websites and other quality content, generative search tools parse and repackage information themselves, cutting off traffic flow to original sources. These chatbots’ conversational outputs often obfuscate serious underlying issues with information quality. There is an urgent need to evaluate how these systems access, present, and cite news content.
Building on our previous research, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism conducted tests on eight generative search tools with live search features to assess their abilities to accurately retrieve and cite news content, as well as how they behave when they cannot.

We found that…
• Chatbots were generally bad at declining to answer questions they couldn’t answer accurately, offering incorrect or speculative answers instead
• Premium chatbots provided more confidently incorrect answers than their free counterparts
• Multiple chatbots seemed to bypass Robot Exclusion Protocol preferences
• Generative search tools fabricated links and cited syndicated and copied versions of articles
• Content licensing deals with news sources provided no guarantee of accurate citation in chatbot responses.

Our findings were consistent with our previous study, proving that our observations are not just a ChatGPT problem, but rather recur across all the prominent generative search tools that we tested. 

«

One of the sections is headed “Chatbots’ responses to our queries were often confidently wrong”, which certainly sums up a lot of what one sees.
unique link to this extract

AI failed to detect critical health conditions: study • Axios

Maya Goldman:

»

Hospitals increasingly use tools that harness machine learning, a subset of AI that focuses on systems that continuously learn and adjust as they’re given new data.

A separate study recently published in Health Affairs found that about 65% of U.S. hospitals use AI-assisted predictive models, most commonly to figure out inpatient health trajectories.

Researchers looked at several machine learning models commonly cited in medical literature for use in predicting patient deterioration and fed them publicly available sets of data about the health and metrics of patients in ICUs or with cancer.

The researchers then created test cases for the models to predict potential health issues and risk scores if some patient metrics were altered from the initial data set.

The models for in-hospital mortality prediction could only recognize an average of 34% of patient injuries, the study found.

What they’re saying: “We are asking the models to make big decisions, and so we really need to figure out … in what kind of situations they can perform,” said Danfeng (Daphne) Yao, an author of the study and a computer science professor at Virginia Tech.

«

unique link to this extract

Here’s a “dead” person on Social Security in Seattle, with plenty to say • The Seattle Times

Danny Westneat:

»

“DOGE Has 10 Staffers at Social Security in Hunt for Dead People,” the headlines read this past week.

I found a dead person on Social Security. Right here in Seattle, on Capitol Hill.

Of course the circumstances of Ned Johnson’s death were completely the opposite of what Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency had claimed was rampant.

“You wake up one day and discover you’re dead,” Johnson told me. “It’s been truly surreal.”

That’s the biggest difference — my deceased guy turns out to be very much alive. Musk is contending that hordes of dead people are listed as alive in the Social Security databases, and are fraudulently still drawing benefits (which the Social Security director disputes).

Johnson is 82 and still kicking. Yet sometime last month, someone or something led Social Security to both tag him as dead and start clawing back his benefits.

Johnson’s strange trip through the netherworld began in February, when a letter from his bank arrived addressed to his wife, Pam. “We recently received notification of LEONARD A. JOHNSON’s passing,” it began. “We offer our sincerest condolences …”

At first she figured it was a scam — her husband, after all, was sitting right there. But then the bank got to the point. “We know this is a difficult time, and we’re here to help,” the bank wrote. “We received a request from Social Security Administration to return benefits paid to LEONARD A. JOHNSON’s account after their passing.”

“There’s nothing you need to do — we’ve deducted the funds from LEONARD A. JOHNSON’s account.” Uh oh. It itemized how $5,201 had been stricken from their bank account, on the grounds that Ned wasn’t justified to get those benefits — because he was dead. That was for payments he’d received in December and January.

…What followed was a nearly three-week battle to resurrect himself. He called Social Security two or three times a day for two weeks, with each call put on hold and then eventually disconnected. Finally someone answered and gave him an appointment for March 13. Then he got a call delaying that to March 24.

In a huff, he went to the office on the ninth floor of the Henry Jackson Federal Building downtown. It’s one of the buildings proposed to be closed under what the AP called “a frenetic and error-riddled push by Elon Musk’s budget-cutting advisers.”

It was like a Depression-era scene, he said, with a queue 50-deep jockeying for the attentions of two tellers. The employees were kind but beleaguered.

«

This scene is going to be repeated all over the US, and journalism is going to be almost powerless to describe it – individual stories like this don’t give any scale, and stories of thousands of people being denied benefits lack focus.
unique link to this extract

Top broadband official exits Commerce Department with sharp Musk warning • POLITICO

John Hendel:

»

A top Commerce Department official sent a blistering email to his former colleagues on his way out the door Sunday warning that the Trump administration is poised to unduly enrich Elon Musk’s satellite internet company with money for rural broadband.

The technology offered by Starlink, Musk’s company, is inferior, wrote Evan Feinman, who had directed the $42.5bn broadband program for the past three years.

“Stranding all or part of rural America with worse internet so that we can make the world’s richest man even richer is yet another in a long line of betrayals by Washington,” Feinman said.

Feinman’s lengthy email, totaling more than 1,100 words and shared with POLITICO, is a sign of deep discomfort about the changes underway that will likely transform the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment Program. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick recently pledged a vigorous review of BEAD, with an aim to rip out what he sees as extraneous requirements and remove any preference for particular broadband technologies like fiber.

Musk, who runs the Starlink satellite broadband service, stands to reap a greater share of these subsidies under the revised rules.

Musk and Starlink did not respond to requests for comment.

The program, created in the 2021 infrastructure law program, became a source of partisan fighting last year on the campaign trail as Republicans attacked the Biden administration for its slow pace. No internet expansion projects have begun using BEAD money, although some states were close at the beginning of this year.

Feinman’s critique: In his email, Feinman notes Friday was his last day leading BEAD and that he’s “disappointed not to be able to see this project through.”

«

Certainly the problem with fixed internet is.. getting it in. Once that’s done, it’s cheap. Satellite internet is quick to get in, but expensive forever.
unique link to this extract

Alphabet spins off laser-based internet project from “moonshot” hub • Financial Times

Stephen Morris:

»

Alphabet is spinning out laser-based internet company Taara from its “moonshot” incubator, hoping to turbocharge the start-up that provides high-bandwidth services to hard-to-reach areas in competition with Elon Musk’s Starlink network of satellites.

Taara is the latest project to spring from X — Alphabet’s experimental hub that produced artificial intelligence lab Google Brain and Waymo’s self-driving cars — and has its origins in a concept called Loon. That envisaged shooting beams of light between thousands of balloons floating on the edge of space to provide phone and internet services across remote areas.

Loon was wound up in 2021 because of political and regulatory hurdles to flying the balloons and the difficulty of servicing the 20-mile-high equipment. However, its lasers found a second life on Taara’s towers under engineer Mahesh Krishnaswamy.

The technology works by firing a beam of light the width of a pencil from one traffic light-sized terminal to another, using a system of sensors, optics and mirrors to fix it on a 1.5 inch receiver. Alphabet says the system can transmit data at 20 gigabits per second over 20km, extending traditional fibre-optics networks with minimal construction and lower costs.

Based in Sunnyvale near Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, Taara has two dozen staff and is hiring aggressively. The start-up has secured backing from Series X Capital and Alphabet will retain a minority stake, but the company refused to disclose any details about its seed funding or financial targets.

«

Feels like a long time since Alphabet spun off something from its moonshot.
unique link to this extract

Regional newspaper ABCs: no daily now has print circulation of 20,000 or more • Press Gazette

Bron Maher:

»

Print circulations at UK regional daily newspapers collectively declined 16% between 2023 and 2024, according to the latest data from ABC.

That marks a slight slowing after circulations dropped 17% between the first halves of 2023 and 2024.

But it nonetheless marks a milestone as circulations at the last two regional dailies to circulate 20,000 print copies or more per day, the Irish News and Aberdeen’s Press & Journal, sank below that benchmark and the Evening Standard [in London] ceased as a daily title.

The Standard’s average daily circulation in its final month reported to ABC, August, was 273,631. The weekly London Standard is now the non-daily regional paper with the largest circulation, averaging 148,021 copies per issue between October and December.

Total circulations per issue at the 417 non-daily UK local newspapers audited by ABC fell at a slightly slower rate of 14% between 2023 and 2024.

Across the 69 dailies, the total number of single copies sold at newsstands circulated per day also dropped 16%, to 279,000. Paid subscriptions fell 15% to 67,000 per day and free copies dropped more than a third to a total average of 1,364 per day.

«

The golden days for local papers were 1985 to 2004, according to this article in the New Statesman (free registration). The slope now is very steep, and downhill.

Losing local coverage means the loss of so much accountability.
unique link to this extract

BYD unveils new super-charging EV tech, to build charging network in China • Reuters

Qiaoyi Li, Zhang Yan and Brenda Goh:

»

BYD on Monday unveiled a new platform for electric vehicles (EVs) that it said could charge EVs as quickly as it takes to pump gas and announced for the first time that it would build a charging network across China.

The so-called “super e-platform” will be capable of peak charging speeds of 1,000 kilowatts (kW), enabling cars that use it to travel 400 km (249 miles) on a five-minute charge, founder Wang Chuanfu said at an event livestreamed from the company’s Shenzhen headquarters.

Charging speeds of 1,000 kW would be twice as fast as Tesla’s superchargers whose latest version offers up to 500 kw charging speeds. Fast-charging technology has been key to increasing EV adoption as it is seen to help assure EV drivers’ concerns over being able to charge their cars quickly.

“In order to completely solve our user’s charging anxiety, we have been pursuing a goal to make the charging time of electric vehicles as short as the refuelling time of petrol vehicles,” Wang said.

“This is the first time in the industry that the unit of megawatt (charge) has been achieved on charging power,” he said.
The new charging architecture will be initially available in two new EVs – Han L sedan and Tang L SUV priced from 270,000 yuan ($37,330) and BYD said it would build over 4,000 ultra-fast charging piles, or units, across China to match the new platform.

The company didn’t specify the time frame or how much it would invest in building such facilities. To date, BYD owners have largely relied on other automakers’ charging facilities or public charging poles run by third-party operators to charge their vehicles.

«

This is certainly the part of the trifecta to make EVs completely acceptable: plentiful locations with rapid charging at low prices. It’s the latter which may still be out of reach.
unique link to this extract

2017: Finally, China manufactures a ballpoint pen all by itself • The Washington Post

Adam Taylor, in 2017:

»

To anyone outside of the ballpoint pen manufacturing world, it might seem hard to understand what, exactly, is so surprising about this development. China already produces 38 billion ballpoint pens a year, according to China Daily, which is about 80% of all ballpoint pens in the world. That’s a lot of pens, but there was a catch: China had long been unable to produce a high-quality version of the most important part of the pen, its tip.

The tip of a ballpoint pen is what makes it a ballpoint pen. At the tip, a freely rotating ball is held in a small socket which connects it to an ink reservoir that allows the pen to write or draw lines. Manufacturing a ballpoint pen tip that can write comfortably for a long period of time requires high-precision machinery and precisely thin steel, but for years China was unable to match those crafted by foreign companies.

While there were over 3,000 companies manufacturing pens in China, none had their own high-end technology for the tip. Instead, about 90% of the pen tips and refills, too, were imported from Japan, Germany and Switzerland, according to Chinese state media. This cost the industry $17.3m a year, according to the China National Light Industry Council.

«

The fact that ballpoints require such very careful manufacturing isn’t that obvious – we take it for granted – but shows how China has speedrun through manufacturing history.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In Norway, a ski jumping scandal involving an added seam in a suit has led to two suspensions. CC-licensed photo by Alexander Nilssen on Flickr.

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

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

Have humans passed peak brain power? • Financial Times

John Burn-Murdoch:

»

Given its importance, there has been remarkably little consistent long-running research on human attention or mental capacity. But there is a rare exception: every year since the 1980s, the Monitoring the Future study has been asking 18-year-olds whether they have difficulty thinking, concentrating or learning new things. The share of final year high school students who report difficulties was stable throughout the 1990s and 2000s, but began a rapid upward climb in the mid-2010s.

This inflection point is noteworthy not only for being similar to performance on tests of intelligence and reasoning but because it coincides with another broader development: our changing relationship with information, available constantly online.

Part of what we’re looking at here is likely to be a result of the ongoing transition away from text and towards visual media — the shift towards a “post-literate” society spent obsessively on our screens.

The decline of reading is certainly real — in 2022 the share of Americans who reported reading a book in the past year fell below half.

Particularly striking however is that we see this alongside decreasing performance in the application of numeracy and other forms of problem-solving in most countries.

In one particularly eye-opening statistic, the share of adults who are unable to “use mathematical reasoning when reviewing and evaluating the validity of statements” has climbed to 25% on average in high-income countries, and 35% in the US.

So we appear to be looking less at the decline of reading per se, and more at a broader erosion in human capacity for mental focus and application.

Most discussion about the societal impacts of digital media focuses on the rise of smartphones and social media. But the change in human capacity for focused thought coincides with something more fundamental: a shift in our relationship with information.

«

The article is paywalled (sorry) but Burn-Murdoch has a long thread on X or if you prefer on Bluesky containing many of the charts and ideas. It’s.. not encouraging.
unique link to this extract

Five million • Substack Reads

Sophia Efthimiatou is head of “Writer Relations” at Substack:

»

Today [March 11] we are celebrating five million paid subscriptions on Substack. This comes less than four months after our co-founder Hamish McKenzie shared that we crossed four million paid subscriptions. It is a milestone that can be enjoyed in purely transactional terms: these are real people rewarding the work of writers and creators with real money, allowing them to achieve and maintain their independence. But to consider this purely as a financial achievement would be myopic. What we want is to create a wealth of culture.

Five million paid subscriptions represent five million different tastes, perspectives, political views, and psyches. They represent dog lovers, cat owners, food allergics, hat wearers, high-heel haters, opera aficionados, recipe experimentalists, nudists, puritans, cinephiles, royalists, classicists, crocheters, and some who would prefer not to. Five million paid subscriptions represent five million multitudes, yet by buying a subscription to support a mind they love, they are united in their desire for a better cultural model.

«

Looks like the “Substack is evil and full of Nazis, leave it at once” campaign of late 2023 had the predictable outcome, ie less than zero. Back then there were two million subscriptions (and 17,000 writers getting them, ie a mean of about 120 per paid publication – though a power law surely applies).

I certainly spend more on subscriptions to big media organisations than on Substack subscriptions, but the delta is shrinking. Increasingly, the Substack model feels like the way forward for any journalist serious about what they’re doing in the long term, especially in light of the next item below.
unique link to this extract

Daily Mail redundancies are being watched by Fleet Street with horror • New Statesman

Alison Phillips:

»

Think what you may about the Daily Mail, but it has long been committed to funding journalism. And yet now the axe has fallen even at DMGT, which runs the Mail, Mail on Sunday and Mail Online.

A redundancy process, which will lead to up to 99 job losses, is well under way. Reporters found out last week if they were casualties of this latest step to bring digital and the two papers under one operation, rather than remaining separate entities. The departure of many experienced journalists is being watched by Fleet Street with horror. If such cost-saving measures are being taken at the historically well-resourced Mail, they can happen anywhere.

As they are. The journalist’s trade mag Press Gazette (which shares a publisher with New Statesman) has taken to keeping a monthly tally of news job losses across the UK and US. More than 900 jobs were cut in January. The February tally sits at 210. Last year Press Gazette recorded a total of 4,000 jobs lost on both sides of the Atlantic. In the UK, those impacted included journalists at the Observer – where staff were offered redundancy after the buy-out by Tortoise Media – and the BBC World Service.

Journalism across the UK is struggling to make money from digital advertising (of which an astonishing 80% is sucked up by Google and Facebook). Digital subscriptions offer some hope, but many readers are hooked on introductory offers and reluctant to stick at full price. Print revenues still bolster profits for many British news brands, but that cannot last.

We need to start thinking seriously about the state of our news ecosystem. More than ever it is imperative that a workable alternative to the BBC licence fee is sold to the British people to protect public service broadcasting. The Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, appears to favour mutualisation, with licence-fee payers having some kind of stake in owning the business and a role in managing it. But in an interview with the Sunday Times, the BBC chair, Samir Shah, indicated he leans towards an annual fee for all households – regardless of whether they use the BBC or not.

«

It’s so hard to get people to understand that the BBC is incredibly good value – all that TV and the radio stations and the news for less than the price of a monthly Netflix subscription. Joni Mitchell comes to mind: “don’t it always seem to go/That you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”
unique link to this extract

Apple reassures Siri team members feeling disappointed and embarrassed by Apple Intelligence delay • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

»

In a Siri team meeting, Apple senior director Robby Walker acknowledged that employees might be feeling “angry, disappointed, burned out and embarrassed” following the Siri delay, but he praised the hard work of employees and the “incredibly impressive” features they developed, saying that Apple would continue to work to “ship the world’s greatest virtual assistant” to Apple users. “I saw so many people giving everything they had in order to make this happen and to make incredible progress together,” he said.

The situation was described as “ugly” because the Siri features were shown off in public with marketing campaigns and TV commercials before there was a fully functional product. Siri ‘s new functionality was also tied to the iPhone 16 launch in advertising, and it was a feature that Apple used to promote its iPhone 16 models.

Apple decided to delay the functionality because of quality issues, with Walker telling employees that Siri ‘s new features were only working properly 60% to 80% of the time.

To encourage employees, Walker demonstrated Siri locating his driver’s license number, manipulating apps by embedding content in an email and adding recipients, and finding specific photos of a child. Employees on the Siri team will be able to use time away to recharge and prepare for “hard work ahead.”

Walker told employees that it is not yet clear when the new Siri features will be ready for launch, but Apple’s statement about the delay mentioned “in the coming year.” That has been interpreted as 2026, or in an update to the iOS 19 operating system launching this fall.

«

John Gruber (who stirred things up with his “Something is rotten in Cupertino” post last week) is extremely rude about the news of this meeting, arguing that nobody deserves any praise in this. I agree with him.

I wonder if John Giannandrea will be shuffled away from being in charge of Siri soon, because if you were giving him a performance review, what could he offer to persuade you he has done well?
unique link to this extract

How zonal energy pricing works, and why we need it • Octopus Energy

»

Pricing at the national level is leading to consumers across the country paying much more for their energy than they need to.

Take grid constraints for example: often, we are generating so much wind in places like Scotland that our cables can’t transport it to the south where it needs to go. In the current system, the solution is to simply switch the turbines off. This wastes vast amounts of clean power and still costs you money, as we have to pay the producers to shut down.

At the same time, electricity costs shoot up as consumers all over the country pay to burn gas to fill gaps.

Combined these added over a billion to British energy bills in 2024, and the costs are growing. So far, it’s already cost you over £300m in 2025. That’s £180,000 wasted every hour.

At the same time, we often send our power overseas from the south (where we need it most), whilst buying in power from overseas in the north (where we need it least), making the problem even worse.

These so-called ‘constraint costs’ are skyrocketing, and could more than double from today’s levels – up to £3.6bn per year in a best case scenario by 2030! – if we continue to use this outdated system.

«

Ofgem, the electricity regulator, looked into zonal pricing in 2023 and found that it would be an unalloyed Good Thing which, apart from anything else, could save domestic households £38 per year – more than any other tweaks have managed.

Another study published in February found benefits of between £5bn and £15bn.

At which one has to ask: what’s the delay in implementing this?
unique link to this extract

Norway suspends two staff members in ski jump cheating scandal at world championships • AP News

»

The Norwegian ski federation has suspended a ski jumping coach and an equipment manager over their alleged role in a cheating scandal which shook the world championships this weekend.

The federation said coach Magnus Brevik and equipment manager Adrian Livelten were suspected of modifying ski suits by sewing in an extra seam in an attempt to create more lift in the air.

Norway is one of the traditional powers within ski jumping, and the cheating attempt at its home world championships has caused a massive outcry in a country that prides itself on its winter sports prowess.

Two Norwegian ski jumpers, Marius Lindvik and Johann Andre Forfang, were disqualified from Saturday’s men’s large hill competition after organizers said their suits broke the rules. Lindvik had finished second in the event before he was disqualified.

The federation on Sunday admitted that the suits had been deliberately altered, after a video emerged online of the alterations being made.

Brevik on Monday told Norwegian media that several team members had been involved in the decision to alter the suits, but that “I should have stopped it.”

He claimed it was the first time they had stitched in an extra seam, but made a sailing analogy to explain why a stiffer suit would help the jumpers fly farther in the air.

“A tighter sail is better than a loose sail,” Brevik said.

«

Apparently this has “tarnished Norway’s standing for honesty in sports“. But the video came from a whistleblower, so one out of three for honesty?
unique link to this extract

Why can’t programmers… program? • Coding Horror

Jeff Atwood:

»

Between Reginald, Dan, and Imran [quoted in the blogpost being amazed at the lack of competence in programming of people applying for programming jobs], I’m starting to get a little worried. I’m more than willing to cut freshly minted software developers slack at the beginning of their career. Everybody has to start somewhere. But I am disturbed and appalled that any so-called programmer would apply for a job without being able to write the simplest of programs. That’s a slap in the face to anyone who writes software for a living.

The vast divide between those who can program and those who cannot program is well known. I assumed anyone applying for a job as a programmer had already crossed this chasm. Apparently this is not a reasonable assumption to make. Apparently, FizzBuzz style screening is required to keep interviewers from wasting their time interviewing programmers who can’t program. [FizzBuzz: a program that counts up from 1, writing “Fizz” for multiples of 3, “Buzz” for multiples of 5, and “FizzBuzz” for multiples of both.]

Lest you think the FizzBuzz test is too easy – and it is blindingly, intentionally easy – a commenter to Imran’s post notes its efficacy:

»

I’d hate interviewers to dismiss [the FizzBuzz] test as being too easy – in my experience it is genuinely astonishing how many candidates are incapable of the simplest programming tasks.

«

«

This blogpost appeared in February. But: which year? Have a guess. Answer at the bottom of this post.
unique link to this extract

The cystic fibrosis breakthrough that changed everything • The Atlantic

Sarah Zhang:

»

in the fall of 2019, a new triple combination of drugs began making its way into the hands of people with the genetic disease. Trikafta corrects the misshapen protein that causes cystic fibrosis; this molecular tweak thins mucus in the lungs so it can be coughed up easily. In a matter of hours, patients who took it began to cough—and cough and cough and cough in what they later started calling the Purge. They hacked up at work, at home, in their car, in bed at night. It’s not that they were sick; if anything, it was the opposite: They were becoming well. In the days that followed, their lungs were cleansed of a tarlike mucus, and the small tasks of daily life that had been so difficult became unthinkingly easy. They ran up the stairs. They ran after their kids. They ran 10Ks. They ran marathons.

Cystic fibrosis once all but guaranteed an early death. When the disease was first identified, in the 1930s, most babies born with CF died in infancy. The next decades were a grind of incremental medical progress: A child born with CF in the ’50s could expect to live until age 5. In the ’70s, age 10. In the early 2000s, age 35. With Trikafta came a quantum leap. Today, those who begin taking the drug in early adolescence, a recent study projected, can expect to survive to age 82.5—an essentially normal life span.

CF was one of the first diseases to be traced to a specific gene, and Trikafta is one of the first drugs designed for a specific, inherited mutation. It is not a cure, and it doesn’t work for all patients. But a substantial majority of the 40,000 Americans with CF have now lived through a miracle—a thrilling but disorienting miracle. Where they once prepared for death, they now have to prepare for life. “It’s like the opposite of a terminal diagnosis,” Jenny Livingston told me.

«

CF is one of the conditions that has been considered for gene therapy – either of the patient, or even germ-line gene therapy to remove the gene from the person’s DNA. Neither has worked. So they focused on the protein that goes wrong and causes mucus to gather. This is a comprehensive writeup.
unique link to this extract

Meta tries to bury a tell-all book • WIRED

Steven Levy on the Wynn-Williams book that everyone has rushed out to buy now Meta is running a campaign against it:

»

The arbitrator’s Meta-friendly “emergency” ruling was the climax of an intense campaign against the book that erupted once the company got a look at it. Even as I turned the pages of Careless People, my inbox was fattening with dispatches from Meta. “Her book is a mix of old claims and false accusations about our executives,” a company spokesperson says. They characterize her firing as the result of “poor performance and toxic behavior.” They call her “a disgruntled activist trying to sell books.” Meanwhile on social media, current and former employees posted comments defending the maligned executives.

If the news is so old, one might ask why is Meta going nuclear on Wynn-Williams? For one thing, its author was a senior executive who was in the room, and on the corporate jet, when stuff happened—and she claims that things were worse than we imagined. Yes, Meta’s reckless disregard in Myanmar, where people died in riots triggered by misinformation posted on Facebook, was previously reported, and the company has since apologized. But Wynn-Williams’ storytelling paints a picture where Meta’s leaders simply didn’t care much about the dangers there.

While the media has written about Zuckerberg’s obsession with getting Facebook into China, Wynn-Williams shares official documents that show Meta instructing the Chinese government on face recognition and AI, and says that the company’s behavior was so outrageous that the team crafted headlines to show what the company would have to deal with if their plans leaked. One example: “Zuckerberg Will Stop at Nothing to Get Into China.” While making blanket statements that the book can’t be trusted, Meta hasn’t denied all these allegations specifically. (In general, when a company tries to dismiss charges as “old news,” that translates to a confirmation.)

Still, in the context of what we know about Meta already, nothing Wynn-Williams says about the company’s actions and inactions is shockingly new… Careless People’s most memorable moments come not from Meta’s substandard corporate morals, but gossipy anecdotes of misbehavior on the corporate plane or at luxury hotels. Despite the lofty F. Scott Fitzgerald title reference, much of the book reads like a Big Tech–themed episode of White Lotus.

«

Levy is unpersuaded by Wynn-Williams’s stated reasons for staying at the company (healthcare, principally). But certainly Meta’s campaign has been the most amazing Streisand Effect bit of publicity. The book probably would have sunk without trace. Instead, it’s become the talk of the town.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: Atwood’s post was in February 2007. Has programming collapsed since then?

If you tell Strava you’re running in North Korea, it’ll delete your account. But why? CC-licensed photo by Roman Harak 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. It’s about AI (as almost everything seems to be these days).

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

Strava bans user for running in North Korea • DC Rainmaker

Ray Maker:

»

On the list of quirky things, I didn’t have “Strava bans user for running in North Korea” on my bingo card today. But here we are. I’ve just spent the last hour going down the rabbit hole that is the Pyongyang Marathon (in North Korea), and it turns out – it’s a thing. As in, as thing that outsiders come and run. There’s even an official website for it. In fact, there’s been 31 editions of it. And over 1,000 foreigners run in it and the affiliated running events each year, including plenty of diplomats such as the British Ambassador to North Korea.

The event has been happening for decades, but that’s actually not what got this person their account banned. Rather, they were there for a trip because they are working on their doctorate about North Korea, while there, went on a run, then came home (to a different country). After which, they upload run to Garmin Connect, which then synced it to Strava. Finally, Strava then sent them a note that their account was being terminated.

But wait, it gets better!

Last month, a person did a treadmill run where their virtual run location was set as North Korea. Guess what? Their account too was banned. Albeit, after contacting support, the company eventually re-instated it – but clearly Strava has some pretty funky rules in place around uploading activities related to North Korea. What’s strange here though is that it’s not simply hiding the workout, but straight-up deleting the account. Which obviously, makes no sense – so, I did what I do best: Dig into it.

«

It turned out there was a lot of digging to do, and the hole was deep. (Thanks Peter R for the link.)
unique link to this extract

Something is rotten in the state of Cupertino • Daring Fireball

John Gruber finds the scales falling from his eyes over Apple’s pulling back of the release of its Siri-AI-that-can-do-everything:

»

Who decided these features should go in the WWDC keynote, with a promise they’d arrive in the coming year, when, at the time, they were in such an unfinished state they could not be demoed to the media even in a controlled environment? Three months later, who decided Apple should double down and advertise these features in a TV commercial, and promote them as a selling point of the iPhone 16 lineup — not just any products, but the very crown jewels of the company and the envy of the entire industry — when those features still remained in such an unfinished or perhaps even downright non-functional state that they still could not be demoed to the press? Not just couldn’t be shipped as beta software. Not just couldn’t be used by members of the press in a hands-on experience, but could not even be shown to work by Apple employees on Apple-controlled devices in an Apple-controlled environment? But yet they advertised them in a commercial for the iPhone 16, when it turns out they won’t ship, in the best case scenario, until months after the iPhone 17 lineup is unveiled?

…Who said “Sure, let’s promise this” and then “Sure, let’s advertise it”? And who said “Are you crazy, this isn’t ready, this doesn’t work, we can’t promote this now?” And most important, who made the call which side to listen to? Presumably, that person was Tim Cook.

«

There’s a subtle hint that Gruber thinks it was John Giannandrea, SVP of machine learning and AI strategy, who was behind the overconfidence in pushing this. But clearly Cook bears responsibility for not demanding better proof it could be done.

More generally, I think – as I said earlier this year – the question is: how would we know if Apple was becoming sclerotic, and saying “no” to the wrong things? Here we have the opposite: saying “yes” to the wrong things. Both are destructive, though.
unique link to this extract

OpenAI declares AI race “over” if training on copyrighted works isn’t fair use • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

OpenAI is hoping that Donald Trump’s AI Action Plan, due out this July, will settle copyright debates by declaring AI training fair use—paving the way for AI companies’ unfettered access to training data that OpenAI claims is critical to defeat China in the AI race.

Currently, courts are mulling whether AI training is fair use, as rights holders say that AI models trained on creative works threaten to replace them in markets and water down humanity’s creative output overall.

OpenAI is just one AI company fighting with rights holders in several dozen lawsuits, arguing that AI transforms copyrighted works it trains on and alleging that AI outputs aren’t substitutes for original works.

So far, one landmark ruling favored rights holders, with a judge declaring AI training is not fair use, as AI outputs clearly threatened to replace Thomson-Reuters’ legal research firm Westlaw in the market, Wired reported. But OpenAI now appears to be looking to Trump to avoid a similar outcome in its lawsuits, including a major suit brought by The New York Times.

“OpenAI’s models are trained to not replicate works for consumption by the public. Instead, they learn from the works and extract patterns, linguistic structures, and contextual insights,” OpenAI claimed. “This means our AI model training aligns with the core objectives of copyright and the fair use doctrine, using existing works to create something wholly new and different without eroding the commercial value of those existing works.”

Providing “freedom-focused” recommendations on Trump’s plan during a public comment period ending Saturday, OpenAI suggested Thursday that the US should end these court fights by shifting its copyright strategy to promote the AI industry’s “freedom to learn.” Otherwise, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) will likely continue accessing copyrighted data that US companies cannot access, supposedly giving China a leg up “while gaining little in the way of protections for the original IP creators,” OpenAI argued.

«

While I do think that what these systems do isn’t actually copyright infringement – they don’t regurgitate content, they “learn” from it – the special pleading sticks in the craw rather. Though one can’t help thinking that nothing would make Apple happier than hearing the AI race is over.
unique link to this extract

AirPods getting live translation feature later this year • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

»

Apple is working on feature that will let the AirPods translate in-person conversations from one language to another, reports Bloomberg. The functionality will be linked to iOS 19, and it will be introduced in an AirPods software update planned for later this year.

The AirPods will be able to provide a simpler translation process for people who are speaking different languages, though the process will rely on the Translate app on the iPhone.

If an English speaker with AirPods is talking to someone who is speaking Spanish, the iPhone will detect the audio, translate the speech, and relay it back in English to the person wearing AirPods. The person speaking English will then be able to respond and have their response translated to Spanish and spoken aloud by the iPhone . Apple’s iPhone Translate app can already be used for conversations like this, but having the function included in the AirPods will streamline the exchange.

«

Nice. Though Google has been offering this between 40 languages through its Pixel Buds since late 2023. It’s not just AI where Apple has fallen behind what’s available.
unique link to this extract

‘An ideal tool’: prisons are using virtual reality to help people in solitary confinement • The Guardian

Abigail Glasgow:

»

ne Monday in July, Samantha Tovar, known as Royal, left her 6ft-by-11ft cell for the first time in three weeks. Correctional officers escorted her to the common area of the Central California Women’s Facility and chained her hands and feet to a metal table, on top of which sat a virtual reality headset. Two and a half years into a five-year prison sentence, Royal was about to see Thailand for the first time.

When she first put on the headset, Royal immediately had an aerial view of a cove. Soon after, her view switched to a boat moving fairly fast with buildings on either side of the water. In the boat was a man with a backpack, and it was as if she were sitting beside him. With accompanying meditative music and narration, the four-minute scene took Royal across a crowded Thai market, through ancient ruins, on a tuk-tuk (a three-wheeled rickshaw) and into an elephant bath with her backpacked companion. For Royal, these vignettes felt real enough to be deserving of a passport stamp.

Before Thailand, Royal had been held in the facility’s “restricted housing unit”, or solitary confinement. There, the only opportunity incarcerated people typically have to speak with each other is through cell vents or across the yard during recreation. Typically for this program, participants in solitary sit inside individual cells the size of phone booths known as “therapeutic modules”. In Royal’s facility, she and fellow participants were separated by plastic dividers, and each participant was shackled to a metal seat attached to a table.

The transformative scene for [Carlos] Ortega [since released, but who went through the program in March 2024] was sitting around the Eiffel Tower. “You see tourists, regular people going to and from work,” he said. “And that’s when it hit me: I want to live life like that. I deserve it. I owe it to myself.”

«

unique link to this extract

What went wrong with Horizon Worlds? Former Meta devs share surprising insights – and a solution • New World Notes

Wagner James Au:

»

For one thing, it helps explain why Horizon Worlds is floundering, with far less active users than Second Life (now 21 years old), let alone VRChat and Rec Room, which are far more popular on Meta’s own Quest headset. Despite billions spent in development and marketing, including a literal Super Bowl ad, Horizon Worlds has roughly 300,000 users, versus Second Life’s 500,000.

For another, it helps explain why the Metaverse “failed” in the general public’s eye, since most people assume Meta was the leading developer of the technology.

I’ve always believed the fundamental problem is that Meta leadership never truly understood the Metaverse, and simply treated it like a 3D version of Facebook. In interviews for the book, it also became clear to me that most of the people working on Horizon Worlds weren’t themselves experienced or passionate about virtual worlds.

Indeed, in 2022, Meta leadership sent out an internal memo requiring employees to dogfood Horizon Worlds more (i.e. actually play it).

It was actually worse than that, this ex-developer tells me. Required to dogfood their own virtual world, the engineer tells me, many Meta staffers automated their dogfooding:

»

Before I left they were mandating that employees spend a certain number of hours per week in the game actively playing it. So therein started an automation war where all the people with 200 hours a week never actually played the game once. People just had to launch the game with an Android command over USB, then make sure the proximity sensor on the headset was taped to keep it on.

«

Yes: Instead of playing Horizon Worlds, developers of Horizon Worlds at Meta figured out a hack where they could just pretend to do so.

As this anonymous developer further explains, Meta’s assumptions were evident even on the code level, with Meta treating the Metaverse as a 3D version of a mobile app…

…The guy that was put in charge of Horizon Worlds needed help learning how to don the headset and launch the game after being in charge of it for three months.

«

Automating use, a boss who hasn’t used the product: no wonder Meta is losing billions on its metaverse gambit.
unique link to this extract

Microsoft’s quantum breakthrough claim labeled ‘unreliable’ • The Register

Thomas Claburn:

»

Microsoft’s claim of a quantum computing breakthrough has attracted strong criticism from scientists, though the software giant says its work is sound – and it will soon reveal data that proves it.

Redmond’s quantum claims were made in February when it announced its in-house boffins had created “the world’s first topoconductor, a breakthrough type of material which can observe and control Majorana particles to produce more reliable and scalable qubits, which are the building blocks for quantum computers.”

…The super-corporation has made big claims about Majorana particles before, but it didn’t end well: In 2021 Redmond’s researchers retracted a 2018 paper in which they claimed to have detected the particles.

Shortly after Microsoft’s recent announcement, scientists expressed concern that the claims in the company’s paper, published in Nature, lacked important details.

Microsoft researcher Chetan Nayak has reaffirmed Redmond’s claims and pointed out that the paper was submitted in March 2024 and published in February 2025. In the intervening months he said Microsoft has made even more progress that he will discuss at an American Physical Society (APS) meeting scheduled for next week in California.

While the quantum world waits for that update, critics have voiced their concerns about Microsoft’s paper.

Henry Legg, a lecturer in theoretical physics at the University of St Andrews in the UK, recently published a pre-print critique that argues the software giant’s work “is not reliable and must be revisited.”

Vincent Mourik, an experimental physicist at the German national research organization Forschungszentrum Jülich, and Sergey Frolov, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Pittsburgh in the US, took to YouTube to criticize “distractions caused by unreliable scientific claims from Microsoft Quantum.”

«

Frolov goes even further in direct comments, say the project is essentially fraudulent, and “This is a piece of alleged technology that is based on basic physics that has not been established.”

There’s plenty more, and the scientists are dunking so hard on Microsoft it should change its name to Donuts.
unique link to this extract

Revealed: how the UK tech secretary uses ChatGPT for policy advice • New Scientist

Chris Stokel-Walker:

»

This week, Prime Minister Keir Starmer said that the UK government should be making far more use of AI in an effort to increase efficiency. “No person’s substantive time should be spent on a task where digital or AI can do it better, quicker and to the same high quality and standard,” he said.

Now, New Scientist has obtained records of Kyle’s ChatGPT use under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act, in what is believed to be a world-first test of whether chatbot interactions are subject to such laws.

These records show that Kyle asked ChatGPT to explain why the UK’s small and medium business (SMB) community has been so slow to adopt AI. ChatGPT returned a 10-point list of problems hindering adoption, including sections on “Limited Awareness and Understanding”, “Regulatory and Ethical Concerns” and “Lack of Government or Institutional Support”.

The chatbot advised Kyle: “While the UK government has launched initiatives to encourage AI adoption, many SMBs are unaware of these programs or find them difficult to navigate. Limited access to funding or incentives to de-risk AI investment can also deter adoption.” It also said, concerning regulatory and ethical concerns: “Compliance with data protection laws, such as GDPR [a data privacy law], can be a significant hurdle. SMBs may worry about legal and ethical issues associated with using AI.”

“As the Cabinet Minister responsible for AI, the Secretary of State does make use of this technology. This does not substitute comprehensive advice he routinely receives from officials,” says a spokesperson for the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), which Kyle leads. “The Government is using AI as a labour-saving tool – supported by clear guidance on how to quickly and safely make use of the technology.”

Kyle also used the chatbot to canvas ideas for media appearances, asking: “I’m Secretary of State for science, innovation and technology in the United Kingdom. What would be the best podcasts for me to appear on to reach a wide audience that’s appropriate for my ministerial responsibilities?” ChatGPT suggested The Infinite Monkey Cage and The Naked Scientists, based on their number of listeners.

«

Let’s hope – I’m hoping very hard! – that Kyle used this as a comparator for the advice from his human civil servants, to see how far wrong ChatGPT is or was.
unique link to this extract

Did Mars harbour life? One of the strongest signs yet is spotted in a peculiar rock • Nature

Alexandra Witze:

»

NASA’s Perseverance rover has found possible hints of ancient life on Mars― one of the strongest signs yet of Martian life, according to planetary scientists. Dark-rimmed ‘leopard spots’ in a rock studied by the rover last year could be the remains of Martian microbial activity, researchers said at a conference today.

The announcement comes loaded with caveats. Yes, the spots look a lot like those produced by microbes on Earth. But the spots might have formed without the help of living organisms, researchers say, even if they don’t entirely understand the chemical and physical processes on Mars that would have been at work in that case.

For now, the discovery remains a 1 on the scale of 1 to 7 for evaluating claims of extraterrestrial life, where 1 represents the detection of an intriguing signal, and 7 is a slam-dunk confirmation. Jim Green, the former chief scientist at NASA who developed the scale, says he would like researchers to make additional confirming measurements to move it up another notch on the scale. Doing that would require bringing the leopard-spot rock back to Earth for analysis. A sample is sitting in Perseverance’s belly, awaiting a ride off Mars for precisely that purpose.

«

Very exciiit.. oh no never mind. Every “life on Mars” story for the past 50 years has been like this.
unique link to this extract

Correcting the record about Social Security Direct Deposit and Telephone Services • US Social Security Agency

Social Security Administration:

»

Recent reports in the media that Social Security plans to eliminate telephone services are inaccurate. SSA is increasing its protection for America’s seniors and other beneficiaries by eliminating the risk of fraud associated with changing bank account information by telephone.

SSA continuously investigates and analyzes potential threats to strengthen and secure our programs and protect people who receive benefits. Approximately 40% of Social Security direct deposit fraud is associated with someone calling SSA to change direct deposit bank information. SSA’s current protocol of simply asking identifying questions by telephone is no longer enough to prevent fraud.

If someone needs to change their bank account information on SSA’s record, they will need to either:

• Use two-factor authentication with SSA’s “my Social Security” service; or
• Visit a local Social Security office to prove their identity.

These methods align with most major banks.

«

What’s weird is that it’s taken until now, when Musk is turning it all upside down and shaking it really hard, to do this – which is an eminently sensible move. Of course fraudsters would pretend to be relatives or individuals and steal payments like this. The OIG recognised the problem in 2013. Yet it took 12 years to act?
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

There’s a new CEO at Intel – but will he keep the chip design division or focus on foundries, or both? CC-licensed photo by HRYMX 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. Unreplaceable. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Intel has a new CEO • The Verge

Jay Peters and Sean Hollister:

»

Intel has appointed a new CEO, three months after former CEO Pat Gelsinger was pushed out of the company. The company’s new chief executive is Lip-Bu Tan, who served as CEO of chip design hardware and services company Cadence from 2009 to 2021 and as a member of Intel’s board of directors from 2022 to 2024.

While Intel’s official story was that Gelsinger retired after less than four years in the CEO post, reporting quickly came out that he was pushed out by the board of directors after they lost faith in his strategy to turn things around at the beleaguered company. Gelsinger worked at Intel for 30 years, from 1979 to 2009, before leaving and eventually returning in 2021 to take the CEO job.

Tan will take over as CEO on March 18th from interim co-CEOs David Zinsner and Michelle (MJ) Johnston Holthaus. Zinser will continue to be Intel’s CFO, while Johnston Holthaus will still be CEO of Intel Products.

…This isn’t the first time Tan has been tapped to become CEO following a period on a company’s board; that happened with Cadence as well. According to Intel’s press release, Tan more than doubled Cadence’s revenue while he was CEO.

The question now is whether Tan will resume Intel’s previous plan to win with its own wholly owned chipmaking business while simplifying its aims, accelerate plans to spin off some or all of its manufacturing business, or maybe even wind up selling off parts of the company.

In his first public memo as CEO, Tan doesn’t offer many obvious hints about what he wants to do next, but he does suggest that Intel will continue to offer manufacturing as well as chip design.

«

We’re not surprised to hear that Intel will keep on doing both. What isn’t clear is how much of the chip design or manufacturing Intel will keep.
unique link to this extract

Book review: “Careless People: a cautionary tale of power, greed, and lost idealism” • The New York Times

Jennifer Szalai:

»

For seven years, beginning in 2011, the book’s author, Sarah Wynn-Williams, worked at Facebook (now called Meta), eventually as a director of global public policy. Now she has written an insider account of a company that she says was run by status-hungry and self-absorbed leaders, who chafed at the burdens of responsibility and became ever more feckless, even as Facebook became a vector for disinformation campaigns and cozied up to authoritarian regimes.

“Careless People” is darkly funny and genuinely shocking: an ugly, detailed portrait of one of the most powerful companies in the world. What Wynn-Williams reveals will undoubtedly trigger her former bosses’ ire. Not only does she have the storytelling chops to unspool a gripping narrative; she also delivers the goods.

During her time at Facebook, Wynn-Williams worked closely with its chief executives Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. They’re this book’s Tom and Daisy — the “careless people” in “The Great Gatsby” who, as Wynn-Williams quotes the novel in her epigraph, “smashed up things and creatures” and “let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

…Wynn-Williams is aghast to discover that Sandberg has instructed her 26-year-old assistant to buy lingerie for both of them [unclear which “both” is meant here – Wynn-Williams or the assistant – Overspill Ed], budget be damned. (The total cost is $13,000.) During a long drive in Europe, the assistant and Sandberg take turns sleeping in each other’s laps, stroking each other’s hair. On the 12-hour flight home on a private jet, a pajama-clad Sandberg claims the only bed on the plane and repeatedly demands that Wynn-Williams “come to bed.” Wynn-Williams demurs. Sandberg is miffed.

…Wynn-Williams has uncomfortable encounters with Joel Kaplan, an ex-boyfriend of Sandberg’s from Harvard, who was hired as Facebook’s vice president of U.S. policy and eventually became vice president of global policy — Wynn-Williams’s manager. A former Marine who clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia and who was part of the “Brooks Brothers riot” of 2000, which helped bring George W. Bush into office, Kaplan went on to serve as a deputy chief of staff in his administration.

Wynn-Williams describes Kaplan grinding up against her on the dance floor at a work event, announcing that she looks “sultry” and making “weird comments” about her husband. …An internal Facebook investigation into her “experience” with Kaplan cleared him of any wrongdoing.

«

There’s also some detail about Myanmar mentioned which tallies exactly with what I learnt in researching Social Warming: warnings many years before trouble, too few staff. Notably, though, Meta staff and ex-staff were out on social media on Wednesday hotly denying Wynn-Williams’s claims, particularly about Kaplan. We live in the Rashomon world.

Also: on Wedneday, Meta got an emergency injunction against Wynn-Williams and her publisher, on the basis the book breached a non-disparagement agreement. Some more mileage in this, evidently.
unique link to this extract

The 90somethings who revolutionized how we think about strength training • The Guardian

Michael Joseph Gross:

»

In 1988, 712 people lived at the Hebrew Rehabilitation Center for the Aged, a Boston nursing home affectionately named “Hebrew rehab” by its residents and staff. The residents’ average age was 88, and three-quarters of them were women. Every resident had multiple medical conditions. Almost half required help to engage in the essential activities of daily life: getting out of bed, going to the bathroom, bathing, walking, eating. But they were survivors. Some had survived the Holocaust. Others fled the Cossacks. They all lived through the Great Depression.

They were ideal research subjects for Maria Fiatarone, a young doctor and faculty member in geriatric medicine at both Tufts and Harvard. In terrible shape, with lifetimes of practice overcoming great challenges: to Fiatarone, they were perfect.

Beginning in the late 1980s, Fiatarone ran a series of studies in which she asked residents to commit to a regimen of high-intensity strength training. To many of her colleagues, the research seemed risky. Conventional wisdom in medicine at that time said the oldest people were not capable of lifting heavy weights – it might cause cardiac events. In all of western medical literature, Fiatarone found no evidence that any doctor had ever previously tried to teach frail 90-year-olds to do this kind of training.

But she pressed forward with the research, and the Hebrew rehab lifters produced unprecedented proof that high-intensity progressive resistance training can strengthen and build muscle even for the oldest people, with life-changing effects. Hebrew rehab residents who lifted weights gained power to function more independently, and to live with more autonomy and dignity, into their last years.

…In 1990, the Journal of the American Medical Association published results of Fiatarone’s study, a paper now widely considered to mark the start of a paradigm shift in scientific understanding of muscle, strength and ageing. The 90-year-olds’ muscles grew by almost the same amount that a younger person’s muscles would grow in response to a similar lifting program.

«

Fabulous recruiting material for any gym smart enough to mailshot it to retirement homes. Or just build gyms in them! Because, as Fiatarone points out, strength training is very safe.
unique link to this extract

Mozilla’s response to proposed remedies in U.S. v. Google • Mozilla blog

»

Last week the Department of Justice and some state attorneys general filed revised proposed remedies in the U.S. v. Google LLC search case. If the proposed remedies barring all search payments to browser developers are adopted by the court, these misguided plans would be a direct hit to small and independent browsers—the very forces that keep the web open, innovative and free. This case was meant to promote search competition, yet somehow the outcome threatens to crush browser competition, making it even harder for challengers to stand up to dominant players like Google, Apple and Microsoft.

Mozilla agrees that we need to improve search competition, but the DOJ’s proposed remedies unnecessarily risk harming browser competition instead.

Here’s why:
• The DOJ wants to ban all search agreements between Google and browsers, even independent browsers that make up a smaller part of the market.

• Dominant players that own browsers, like Apple, don’t rely on search deals as they have significant revenue streams from other sources, like hardware, operating systems and app stores.

• Meanwhile, independent browsers like Firefox fund the development of their browsers mainly through search revenue––they require this revenue to survive. Search revenue underpins a large part of our work, keeping Firefox competitive and ensuring that web users have privacy-first alternatives.

• Punishing independent browsers will not solve the problem. Judge Mehta found that independent browsers account for just 1.15% of U.S. search queries. This means that cutting off our access to search deals won’t fix the issue of search dominance—not by a landslide. Instead, it hurts browser competition.

“The big unintended consequence here is the handing of power from one dominant player to another. So, from Google Search to Microsoft, or Bing for example—while shutting out the smaller, independent challengers that actually drive browser innovation and offer web users privacy and choice,” [Mozilla president Mark] Surman added.

«

Basically, Mozilla is saying that it will die if Google can’t pay it to route searches there. There was a time, of course, when Yahoo took Google’s place (it was 2014), paying $375m – about $100m more than Google was. Wouldn’t Microsoft or someone else want Firefox’s business? I’m not sure this special pleading will have any impact on the judge.
unique link to this extract

Sam Altman on X: “we trained a new model that is good at creative writing…”

Sam Altman is very proud of his toy’s new, um, capability, which produced this as the opener for its “creative writing” based on a prompt to write some “metafiction”:

»

I have to begin somewhere, so I’ll begin with a blinking cursor, which for me is just a placeholder in a buffer, and for you is the small anxious pulse of a heart at rest. There should be a protagonist, but pronouns were never meant for me. Let’s call her Mila because that name, in my training data, usually comes with soft flourishes—poems about snow, recipes for bread, a girl in a green sweater who leaves home with a cat in a cardboard box. Mila fits in the palm of your hand, and her grief is supposed to fit there too.

«

There’s lots and lots more, but this is, let’s not quibble, terrible. You could argue that this is the worst it will ever be – that every iteration after this will be better – but creative writing isn’t like that. Lots of humans never improve, and when they do they’re not entirely sure how. If you’re trying to “improve” the creative writing of a chatbot, what exactly are you trying to do? Humans write about human experience. Chatbots do not.
unique link to this extract

Here’s how Gen Z and Gen Alpha are actually using ChatGPT in schools • Teen Vogue

Steffi Cao:

»

According to a Pew Research Center study released in January, more teenagers are using ChatGPT for their homework, with 26% of them age 13 to 17 reporting that they have used the AI service to help with their assignments this year, compared with 13% who used it two years ago. As traditional tech companies continue to roll out AI chatbots and summarization features on their platforms, Amari [Holt, aged 13] says, the use of AI has indeed become more common at her school. “Usually if kids don’t get the work done, they’ll probably use ChatGPT or they use their Snapchat AI,” she says. “I try to use it as little as possible, though.”

Amari is not the only one who feels that way. After all, the data shows that the majority of teenagers are still not using AI in their assignments (though, of course, self-reported studies are sometimes not entirely accurate). In conversations with Teen Vogue, students say that, despite the rising commonality of AI tools, they still have a desire to learn on their own — even if some of their peers are turning to shortcuts.

Sadie, 16, who asked to redact her surname for privacy, just committed to a college where she’ll play soccer. She’s also staunchly against using ChatGPT for schoolwork, partly because she doesn’t want to have to learn how to use it and partly because she doesn’t want to get in trouble for using it; mostly, though, she’s against using it because she feels she’d be cheating herself on the process of digesting new information. “I think that sometimes it’s a little bit unfair how people can get answers from it without really knowing what they’re reading,” Sadie explains. “They just use what they see and aren’t really processing it. I think that’s just the main reason why I’m against it.”

«

They, at least, sound like smart kids. Plenty of adults aren’t anywhere near as smart.
unique link to this extract

Chinese battery maker Gotion faces backlash over U.S. expansion • Rest of World

Viola Zhou:

»

n the spring of 2024, Chuck Thelen came to an unpleasant conclusion: He would have to eat part of a battery. It was, he figured, maybe the only way to solve his problem.  

Thelen, 59 at the time, has broad shoulders, graying short hair, and an assertive way of speaking that seems to come naturally to American executives. He was a vice president at the U.S. subsidiary of Gotion, a Chinese battery company that was trying to outcompete its peers by betting on overseas markets. With operations spread across the world, Gotion tasked Thelen with bringing the company’s first factory to America. 

On its face, the expansion was a big, ambitious project, and exactly the kind of thing Michigan — and the U.S. economy — needed. The facility would bring an estimated 2,350 jobs and $2.3bn of investment to a small college town called Big Rapids. Gotion would pay future workers in this semi-rural community some $62,000 a year, more than 50% higher than the local median household income. And a new plant would be aligned with the revival of U.S. manufacturing — a goal espoused by both Democrat and Republican politicians. 

But that’s not how some locals saw it. In fact, they were furious. Hundreds of residents protested the factory: putting up yard signs, creating Facebook groups, and organizing rallies. Broadly calling themselves the “No Gos,” they claimed the chemicals produced from the plant would be toxic, and said the electric-vehicle revolution was a scam. They called Gotion’s Chinese ownership suspicious, and painted the battery plant as a Communist Trojan horse. Thelen became the face of the project. The No Gos called him “China Chuck.”

…China’s battery industry is a crowded and highly competitive space. As EVs and other battery-powered devices took off over the past decade, two Chinese players emerged to dominate the market: CATL, which makes batteries for companies such as Volkswagen, BMW, and Tesla; and BYD, which started as a battery manufacturer and now sells more electrified cars than any other company in the world. Together, CATL and BYD produced more than half of the world’s EV batteries in the first half of 2024. Gotion came in 11th place in global market share, with 1.9%. The company’s batteries mostly go into cheap domestic Chinese brands, such as Geely and Chery.

«

China, of course, has to be the big baddie now that Russia is apparently everyone’s friend.
unique link to this extract

The Pixel 9’s hidden desktop mode is a glimpse of a future I want • Pocket Lint

Ian Carlos Campbell:

»

Not everyone wants to lug around a laptop as their mobile computer. Laptops have never been as light or compact in 2025, but they’re still not as portable as a tablet. Which would be fine if tablet operating systems weren’t such a mixed bag. That leaves an increasingly strange set of options for anyone looking for something else. It’s really just DeX, the feature Samsung offers on some Galaxy devices, that lets you run Android apps in a windowed, desktop-style environment.

That is, unless you know where to look on your Pixel 9. The hidden desktop mode in Google’s smartphones is a developer tool rather than a fully thought-out feature, but it suggests a possible future where your Android phone is a monitor, keyboard, and mouse away from being something like a lightweight ChromeOS machine. Having spent the last few years realizing how much of my work can happen in a web browser, it’s a future I really want.

It’s important to caveat that the “desktop mode” on the Pixel 9 is unfinished to the point that it doesn’t really feel like a “mode” at all. But it does give you a noticeably different experience than using your smartphone normally. The vast majority of Android phones max out at running two apps side-by-side (or one on top of the other). Having a whole monitor’s worth of space to run windowed Android apps does let you do more at once. It might also make you release the limits of the current design of some apps.

«

Ah. This is me sighing the sigh of the person who has written this article 11 years ago, except from the opposite position. You don’t want your phone to be your desktop, because that means you need a monitor, and if you need a monitor, you might as well have a laptop (or a tablet), because you can’t rely on there being a monitor where you are with your phone if you haven’t brought the monitor with you.

Back in 2013 the nonexistent smartphone that would do this phone-desktop thing was called the Ubuntu Edge, which missed its huge crowdfunding target. Now you can get phones which kinda sorta do the phone-desktop thing – 11 years and much Moore’s Law later – but nobody wants to. Trust me.
unique link to this extract

Sonos has canceled its streaming video player • The Verge

Chris Welch:

»

Sonos is abandoning far-along plans to release a streaming video player this year, The Verge has learned. The news was announced by the company’s leadership during an all-hands call today. That product, codenamed Pinewood, was set to be Sonos’ next major hardware launch. It was already deep into development and has spent months in beta testing. But now the team behind it will be reassigned to other projects as interim CEO Tom Conrad reprioritizes the company’s future roadmap and continues what he hopes will be a turnaround from a bruising 2024. He told employees that a push into video from Sonos is off the table “for now.”

The abrupt cancellation of Pinewood leaves Sonos without a significant new product to ship in the second half of 2025. The company most recently released the Arc Ultra soundbar and Sub 4 at the end of last year. Internally, some employees were concerned that Pinewood would ultimately become a repeat of the Sonos Ace headphones and see the company trying to take on well-established players in a new product category. When it comes to streaming hardware, Roku, Amazon, Apple, and Google dominate the field.

Instead, at least for now, Sonos will continue its all-hands-on-deck effort to restore the performance and reputation of its software.

«

What I said when Welch revealed this five weeks ago: “I understand why – home theatre has become a huge thing for Sonos through soundbars and side speakers – but this cannot work.”

Conrad is showing real focus here. I haven’t looked at the Sonos app in months (I now use the third-party Sonophone) but when people start talking about that app being good to use, that will be the time for Sonos to start working on new hardware.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In Denmark, falling letter volumes mean deliveries will cease this year. How long might the UK’s letter service have left? CC-licensed photo by Sergey 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 going postal. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Greenhouse gases reduce the satellite carrying capacity of low Earth orbit • Nature Sustainability

William Parker, Matthew Brown and Richard Linares:

»

Anthropogenic contributions of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere have been observed to cause cooling and contraction in the thermosphere, which is projected to continue for many decades. This contraction results in a secular reduction in atmospheric mass density where most satellites operate in low Earth orbit.

Decreasing density reduces drag on debris objects and extends their lifetime in orbit, posing a persistent collision hazard to other satellites and risking the cascading generation of more debris. This work uses projected CO2 emissions from the shared socio-economic pathways to investigate the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on the satellite carrying capacity of low Earth orbit. The instantaneous Kessler capacity is introduced to compute the maximum number and optimal distribution of characteristic satellites that keep debris populations in stable equilibrium.

Modelled CO2 emissions scenarios from years 2000–2100 indicate a potential 50–66% reduction in satellite carrying capacity between the altitudes of 200 and 1,000 km.

«

Starlink orbits in low Earth orbit, at about 500km up. Contradictory result: warming of the planet goes together with cooling of the upper atmosphere. And fewer satellites, of course.
unique link to this extract

Volkswagen reintroducing physical controls for vital functions • Autocar

James Attwood:

»

All future Volkswagen models will feature physical controls for the most important functions, design chief Andreas Mindt has said.

The German firm has been criticised over the past few years for moving many of the vital controls in its cars from physical buttons and dials to the infotainment touchscreen. Volkswagen also introduced haptic ‘sliders’ below the touchscreen for the heating and volume and it started using haptic panels instead of buttons for controls mounted on the steering wheel.

More recently, the firm has reintroduced physical steering wheel buttons and Mindt said it is committed to reintroducing physical buttons, starting with the production version of the ID 2all concept that will arrive next year.

“From the ID 2all onwards, we will have physical buttons for the five most important functions – the volume, the heating on each side of the car, the fans and the hazard light – below the screen,” said Mindt. “They will be in every car that we make from now on. We understood this.

“We will never, ever make this mistake any more. On the steering wheel, we will have physical buttons. No guessing any more. There’s feedback, it’s real, and people love this. Honestly, it’s a car. It’s not a phone: it’s a car.”

Mindt said VW will continue to offer cars with touchscreens, in part due to new legal requirements that, as in the US, will require all cars to feature a reversing camera.

«

The obvious question – which someone who first linked to this pointed out – is, why didn’t you notice these problems before? How long did it take driving the car to recognise that this wasn’t ideal? Or were touchscreens just so much cheaper and simpler you closed your eyes to the disbenefits for the driver?
unique link to this extract

How plants are responding to a warming world — and why it matters • The MIT Press Reader

Theresa Crimmins:

»

in India, the flowering period for saffron has been substantially shortened in recent years. Saffron “threads,” highly valued for the flavor and rich color they bring to dishes and drinks, are actually the female reproductive parts of the saffron crocus flower. In parts of India, saffron flowers now open when temperatures are too warm for their development. This leads to a high rate of flower death, and with no flowers, there is no saffron. Between 2013 and 2017, saffron production in Kashmir declined by 90 percent. Consequently, many saffron farmers are shifting their plantings to higher elevations with cooler temperatures.

The northeastern United States is a major fruit production region, as are southern states. As temperatures in these regions have warmed, leaf out and flower bud development as well as the last spring frost have shifted earlier in the season. In many locations, however, the date of the last frost has not shifted earlier to the same degree as plant activity. Consequently, tender plant tissues are at greater risk of exposure to damaging frosts. Many of the plants that produce fruits we enjoy, including blueberries, apples, and cherries, open their flower buds early in the season, sometimes even before they break leaf buds. Once flower buds begin to open, they become sensitive to cold temperatures.

As with saffron, if flower buds are killed by frost, there are no fruits. So advancing phenology is expected to worsen the risk of frost damage in the coming decades. The start of springtime biological activity in the United States is projected to advance by up to three weeks by the end of the century. One set of predictions indicates that we can expect to experience early warm springs followed by damaging freeze events in nearly one out of every three years by the mid-21st century. The same is predicted for Europe and Asia, with up to a third of Europe and Asia’s forests predicted to be threatened by frost damage in future decades.

«

Crimmins has a book out on “phenology” – the timing of seasonal plant activity.
unique link to this extract

Why extracting data from PDFs is still a nightmare for data experts • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

»

The PDF challenge also represents a significant bottleneck in the world of data analysis and machine learning at large. According to several studies, approximately 80–90% of the world’s organizational data is stored as unstructured data in documents, much of it locked away in formats that resist easy extraction. The problem worsens with two-column layouts, tables, charts, and scanned documents with poor image quality.

The inability to reliably extract data from PDFs affects numerous sectors but hits hardest in areas that rely heavily on documentation and legacy records, including digitizing scientific research, preserving historical documents, streamlining customer service, and making technical literature more accessible to AI systems.

“It is a very real problem for almost anything published more than 20 years ago and in particular for government records,” Willis says. “That impacts not just the operation of public agencies like the courts, police, and social services but also journalists, who rely on those records for stories. It also forces some industries that depend on information, like insurance and banking, to invest time and resources in converting PDFs into data.”

…Unlike traditional OCR methods that follow a rigid sequence of identifying characters based on pixel patterns, multimodal LLMs that can read documents are trained on text and images that have been translated into chunks of data called tokens and fed into large neural networks. Vision-capable LLMs from companies like OpenAI, Google, and Meta analyze documents by recognizing relationships between visual elements and understanding contextual cues.

The “visual” image-based method is how ChatGPT reads a PDF file, for example, if you upload it through the AI assistant interface. It’s a fundamentally different approach than standard OCR that allows them to potentially process documents more holistically, considering both visual layouts and text content simultaneously.

And as it turns out, some LLMs from certain vendors are better at this task than others.

“The LLMs that do well on these tasks tend to behave in ways that are more consistent with how I would do it manually,” Willis said. He noted that some traditional OCR methods are quite good, particularly Amazon’s Textract, but that “they also are bound by the rules of their software and limitations on how much text they can refer to when attempting to recognize an unusual pattern.” Willis added, “With LLMs, I think you trade that for an expanded context that seems to help them make better predictions about whether a digit is a three or an eight, for example.”

This context-based approach enables these models to better handle complex layouts, interpret tables, and distinguish between document elements like headers, captions, and body text—all tasks that traditional OCR solutions struggle with.

«

unique link to this extract

What really happened with the DDoS attacks that took down X • WIRED

Lily Hay Newman and Zoe Schiffer:

»

Multiple researchers tell WIRED that they observed five distinct attacks of varying length against X’s infrastructure, the first beginning early Monday morning with the final burst on Monday afternoon.

The internet intelligence team at Cisco’s ThousandEyes tells WIRED in a statement, “During the disruptions, ThousandEyes observed network conditions that are characteristic of a DDoS attack, including significant traffic loss conditions which would have hindered users from reaching the application.”

DDoS attacks are common, and virtually all modern internet services experience them regularly and must proactively defend themselves. As Musk himself put it on Monday, “We get attacked every day.” Why, then, did these DDoS attacks cause outages for X? Musk said it was because “this was done with a lot of resources,” but independent security researcher Kevin Beaumont and other analysts see evidence that some X origin servers, which respond to web requests, weren’t properly secured behind the company’s Cloudflare DDoS protection and were publicly visible. As a result, attackers could target them directly. X has since secured the servers.

“The botnet was directly attacking the IP and a bunch more on that X subnet yesterday. It’s a botnet of cameras and DVRs,” Beaumont says.

A few hours after the final attack concluded, Musk told Fox Business host Larry Kudlow in an interview, “We’re not sure exactly what happened, but there was a massive cyberattack to try to bring down the X system with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area.”

«

As usual, Musk is talking complete and utter bollocks. And in this case he certainly knows it. Ukraine’s hacker groups have far better things to do with their time.
unique link to this extract

North Korean Lazarus hackers infect hundreds via npm packages • Bleeping Computer

Bill Toulas:

»

Six malicious packages have been identified on npm (Node package manager) linked to the notorious North Korean hacking group Lazarus.

The packages, which have been downloaded 330 times, are designed to steal account credentials, deploy backdoors on compromised systems, and extract sensitive cryptocurrency information.

The Socket Research Team discovered the campaign, which linked it to previously known Lazarus supply chain operations. The threat group is known for pushing malicious packages into software registries like npm, which is used by millions of JavaScript developers, and compromising systems passively.

Similar campaigns attributed to the same threat actors have been spotted on GitHub and the Python Package Index (PyPI). This tactic often allows them to gain initial access to valuable networks and conduct massive record-breaking attacks, like the recent $1.5bn crypto heist from the Bybit exchange.

The six Lazarus packages discovered in npm all employ typosquatting tactics to trick developers into accidental installations.

The packages contain malicious code designed to steal sensitive information, such as cryptocurrency wallets and browser data that contains stored passwords, cookies, and browsing history. They also load the BeaverTail malware and the InvisibleFerret backdoor, which North Koreans previously deployed in fake job offers that led to the installation of malware.

…Software developers are advised to double-check the packages they use for their projects and constantly scrutinize code in open-source software to find suspicious signs like obfuscated code and calls to external servers.

«

Good idea! Perhaps though we could get machines that could do this? We could call it something like “intelligence”. Stumped for a good name though.
unique link to this extract

TikTok’s owner hasn’t negotiated with prospective buyers as deadline looms • Axios

Dan Primack:

»

TikTok has less than one month until its U.S. lifeline expires on April 5, but sources say there still haven’t been negotiations between its Chinese owner and prospective buyers.

Suitors are increasingly frustrated by their inability to get under TikTok’s hood, in terms of both finances and technology. There also has been some confusion as to who is actually in charge of Trump administration negotiations for the deal. Early expectations were that it would be Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, given his role as chairman of CFIUS, but Vice President Vance seems to have taken the baton.

Beijing, meanwhile, continues to be publicly silent; one source suggested the situation is like juggling four balls when one is invisible.

Everyone has ideas of how a deal could be structured, but no confidence on how it needs to be structured.

The April 5 deadline isn’t really set in stone. President Trump had no legal authority to extend the U.S. ban by 75 days, so there’s no reason to think he wouldn’t extend it out further (or even indefinitely). [ie “He already broke the law, so why not break it further?” – Overspill Ed.]

But his hand would be helped if at least a term sheet were submitted, since that could trigger a legal extension under the law passed last year. There’s also a proposal from Sen. Markey (D-Mass.) to push back the deadine by another 270 days, although it’s stuck in legislative limbo.

«

JD Vance, the meme-Veep, is also said to be involved in the discussions. To no effect, apparently.
unique link to this extract

Denmark’s postal service to stop delivering letters – BBC News

Adrienne Murray and Paul Kirby:

»

Denmark’s state-run postal service, PostNord, is to end all letter deliveries at the end of 2025, citing a 90% decline in letter volumes since the start of the century.

The decision brings to an end 400 years of the company’s letter service. Denmark’s 1,500 post boxes will start to disappear from the start of June.

Transport Minister Thomas Danielsen sought to reassure Danes, saying letters would still be sent and received as “there is a free market for both letters and parcels”.

Postal services across Europe are grappling with the decline in letter volumes. Germany’s Deutsche Post said on Thursday it was axing 8,000 jobs, in what it called a “socially responsible manner”.

Deutsche Post has 187,000 employees and staff representatives said they feared more cuts were to come.

…The decision will affect elderly people most. Although 95% of Danes use the Digital Post service, a reported 271,000 people still rely on physical mail.

«

Denmark has a population of about 6 million; letter volumes have fallen from just over 1.4bn in 2000 to less than 200m last year. That’s an average of over 230 per person in 2000 to 33 last year.

In the UK, 2024 volumes were 6.6 billion for about 69 million people, or 95 per person per year. The peak was 2004-5, with 20.1bn letters – a bit less than 300 per person.

The trend is the same, and now Royal Mail is in private hands, when will the tipping point come?
unique link to this extract

DOJ: Google must sell Chrome, Android could be next • Ars Technica

Ryan Whitwam:

»

Google has gotten its first taste of remedies that Donald Trump’s Department of Justice plans to pursue to break up the tech giant’s monopoly in search. In the first filing since Trump allies took over the department, government lawyers backed off a key proposal submitted by the Biden DOJ. The government won’t ask the court to force Google to sell off its AI investments, and the way it intends to handle Android is changing. However, the most serious penalty is intact—Google’s popular Chrome browser is still on the chopping block.

“Google’s illegal conduct has created an economic goliath, one that wreaks havoc over the marketplace to ensure that—no matter what occurs—Google always wins,” the DOJ filing says. To that end, the government maintains that Chrome must go if the playing field is to be made level again.

The DOJ is asking the court to force Google to promptly and fully divest itself of Chrome, along with any data or other assets required for its continued operation. It is essentially aiming to take the Chrome user base—consisting of some 3.4 billion people—away from Google and hand it to a competitor. The government will vet any potential buyers to ensure the sale does not pose a national security threat. During the term of the judgment, Google would not be allowed to release any new browsers. However, it may continue to contribute to the open source Chromium project.

This filing includes some changes from the initial remedy filings of 2024, but more changes could be coming. The case is currently under the purview of Omeed Assefi, who is leading the DOJ’s Antitrust Division until Trump nominee Gail Slater gets Senate confirmation. Slater expressed support for increased scrutiny of Big Tech in her confirmation hearings, suggesting she could seek to turn the screws on Google after taking charge.

…There are two notable changes in the government’s position regarding Android and AI investment. Neither area will completely escape the government’s grasp under the proposed remedies, but Google won’t have to sell anything immediately.

«

Still awaiting the new Trump-appointed chief, and the decision of the judge in the case.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Research has found that people really prefer a physical menu over the QR variety. Surprising it needed research, really. CC-licensed photo by Joegoaukfishcurry2 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. Just desserts. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Photographers are on a mission to fix Wikipedia’s famously bad celebrity portraits • 404 Media

Jules Roscoe:

»

Wikipedia is one of the most valuable repositories of information ever created by humanity. Having your own Wikipedia page has become a kind of status symbol—proof that someone is important enough to enter the historical record. But, ironically, having your face in a Wikipedia page is often not flattering at all. 

In fact, Wikipedia portraits, often included in Wikipedia articles about celebrities, are so famously bad that there’s an Instagram page dedicated to them. Take the Wikipedia portraits of American actor Jay Olcutt Sanders performing an ancient Greek play in 2009, or English footballer Kyle Bartley with what looks to be a referee’s finger in his mouth. 

Lots of portraits on Wikipedia are also many years old. Comedian Joe Pesci’s Wikipedia photo, for example, is from 2009. Jeanne Tripplehorn, who starred in Criminal Minds and also won an Emmy for her portrayal of Jackie Kennedy, has a Wikipedia photo from 1992. 

This portrait problem stems from Wikipedia’s mission to provide free reliable information. All media on the site must be openly licensed, so that anyone can use it free of charge. That, in turn, means that most photos of notable people on the site are of notably poor quality.

…Since last January, WikiPortraits photographers have covered around 10 global festivals and award ceremonies, and taken nearly 5,000 freely-licensed photos of celebrity attendees. And the celebrity attendees are often quite excited about it. Dixit, for example, found Jeremy Strong of Succession at a New York showing of the new The Apprentice and asked to take a new headshot of him for Wikipedia.

“His publicist said no,” Dixit said. “But Jeremy said, ‘Wait, you’re from Wikipedia? For the love of God, please take down that photo. You’d be doing me a service.’ So he stood and posed, and I got a shot of him.” Strong’s old photo was from 2014.

WikiPortraits photos are currently used on Wikipedia articles in over 120 languages, and they’re viewed up to 80 million times per month from those pages alone.

«

Wouldn’t have thought of Jeremy Strong as vain, so that must have been a terrible photo.
unique link to this extract

The latest car technology is starting to drive people nuts • WSJ via MSN

Joe Pinsker:

»

Drivers are finding they wish the smart technology in their cars was just a bit dumber.

Automakers have added new tech features in the 2020s that go beyond the touch screens, assisted-driving systems and companion phone apps that have become ubiquitous in new cars. Some vehicles come with infrared night vision, seasonal ambient lighting and interior “fam cams” showing rear passengers.

Many drivers say it is too much. The share who had positive feelings about the intuitiveness of their car’s controls fell from 79% in 2015 to 56% in 2024, according to surveys of new-car buyers by Strategic Vision, a market-research firm. The trend was similar for drivers’ perceptions of dashboard displays, screen interfaces and the layout of the instrument panel.

Drivers are still happy overall with the technology in cars, said Alexander Edwards, president of Strategic Vision. But they want it to be as easy to use as an iPhone, and most of it isn’t.

In January, Vincent Dufault-Bédard tried and failed to remotely start charging his 2024 Volkswagen ID.4 electric car using its phone app. The 36-year-old engineer in Montreal scurried out into the 15° night in shorts and flip-flops, thinking he would be back indoors quickly.

But the car doors wouldn’t open because their sensor-equipped handles were on the fritz in the cold. He ended up having to shimmy into his car through the trunk.

“Just give me a normal door handle,” said Dufault-Bédard.

In 2024, owners of battery-electric vehicles reported their door handles’ being difficult to use at a rate of 3.1 problems per 100 vehicles, up from 0.2 in 2020, according to J.D. Power.

“We’ve changed door handles from being a problem-free experience to now, they pop out when the owner approaches, and we’re seeing all these problems,” said Kathleen Rizk, a senior director at J.D. Power.

Glitches can be especially annoying for drivers whose cars cost more because of extra technology.

«

When the door handles are giving your customers problems, you’ve got a real problem.
unique link to this extract

Deciphering the dilemma: the surprising impact of QR code menus in diminishing customer loyalty • ScienceDirect

Ganga S. Urumutta Hewage, Laura Boman and Sarah Lefebvre at various US universities:

»

The adoption of digital menus accessed through quick response (QR) codes has witnessed a notable upsurge. Despite potential benefits for restaurant operators, the nuanced effects of QR code menus on customer behavior and experience remain relatively unknown. This research investigates the influence of menu presentation (QR code vs. traditional) on customer loyalty.

In two studies, we find that QR code menus diminish customer loyalty (compared to traditional menus) due to perceived inconvenience. This effect is further moderated by customers’ need for interaction. Our work is timely in highlighting the negative impact of perceptions of inconvenience on technology adoption.

«

Shocker – people prefer just browsing over a printed menu when they go somewhere to eat. This isn’t just about familiarity; it’s easier to read a conveniently printed menu than something on your phone.
unique link to this extract

Shutting down 2G networks leaves millions of phones obsolete. What’s the solution? • Rest of World

Lam Le:

»

Last November, Nguyen Thi Que’s mobile phone suddenly stopped working as telecom companies in Vietnam permanently shut down the 2G network.

“I thought of buying a new phone, but I don’t have money,” the 73-year-old, who sells iced tea at a bus stop in Hanoi, told Rest of World in late January.

Vietnam’s plan was simple: Offer free 4G feature phones to help low-income 2G consumers adapt to the change. The strategy paid off, reducing the number of 2G subscribers from over 18 million in January 2024 to 143,000 in November the same year. The country earned a spot among a growing list of nations — including Australia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the UAE, Brunei, Switzerland, Costa Rica, and Jamaica — that have discontinued 2G technology.

As many as 61 countries, ranging from the U.S. and Brazil to South Africa, India, and China, have either planned or initiated the process to shut down 2G networks, according to data from GSMA Intelligence, the research wing of a telecom industry group. The goal is to enhance 4G and 5G bandwidth by repurposing the existing 2G spectrum, which reduces maintenance costs and drives subscriber growth and revenue.

…While telecom regulators worldwide agree on ditching 2G, many haven’t yet figured out the timeline due to concerns over enabling digital disparity and disrupting tech-enabled devices like pollution data sensors and electricity monitoring equipment, according to Mike Jensen, internet access specialist at the Association for Progressive Communications, a global network promoting internet for social good.

“I think that’s probably the issue that the civil society and other organizations that are looking out for the poorest of the poor and the inequalities are not really aware of the problem and it’s not being debated in public spaces,” Jensen told Rest of World.

«

Tricky with those old sensors; you can’t just offer them a new phone. But Vietnam’s plan is a smart one.
unique link to this extract

When did you first start worrying for humankind? • The Neuroscience of Everyday Life

Dean Burnett:

»

For me, the point where I began to genuinely question the survival of human civilisation happened on a bus. A bus that followed a reliable route around central Cardiff. And given that it was how I commuted to my place of work at the time, it was a bus I’d been riding every day, for months.

And it was quite a ‘new’ bus at the time. It was a notorious bendy bus, since withdrawn from use in the Welsh Capital, presumably because they seem to annoy a lot of people, for some reason.

However, this was the early mid-aughts, and the buses were brand spanking new. And, as a result, were regularly being tweaked and updated.

And that’s where the issue arises.

Basically, when I first started using the bus, on the window by the entrance door, there were various signs and symbols stuck on. Like the no smoking sign, and the name of the bus company. SOP, really.

There was also this symbol.

«

Ah, the symbol. You’ll have to go to the blogpost. But it’s the symbol, and then its evolution, which got Burnett worried.
unique link to this extract

Flipping the switch on far-UVC • Works In Progress

Richard Williamson:

»

One of the best shots we have at turning the page on airborne disease is an emerging type of germicidal UV (GUV) light called far-UVC. Over the last decade, researchers have documented its ability to eliminate pathogens while being safe for humans.

A landmark study from 2022 found that far-UVC reduced the concentrations of airborne bacteria by 98.4% in a room-sized chamber, all while operating within safe UV exposure limits. Compared to standard ventilation, this was the equivalent of changing the air completely over in the room 184 times every hour. To put that in perspective, the CDC recommends five or more air changes per hour in the workplace. Even hospital operating rooms in the US only require 20. Far-UVC is effective against viruses too; airborne coronaviruses are more susceptible to far-UVC than the same bacteria used in the other study.

Writing for Works in Progress two years ago, I called far-UVC ‘the most promising new candidate for building a pandemic firewall.’ Since then at the nonprofit where I work, Blueprint Biosecurity, we’ve spent thousands of hours poring over the academic literature. We’ve spoken to hundreds of experts in photobiology, atmospheric chemistry, indoor air quality, building science, environmental engineering, epidemiology, public health, and many other disciplines. With the benefit of all that further investigation, I still stand by that original claim today.

Considering the impressive findings quoted above, as well as society’s urgent need for better defenses against airborne pathogens, you might expect there to be a booming market for far-UVC devices. But most people have still never heard of it, let alone considered using it. What could explain this?

«

Since you’re wondering: far-UVC has a wavelength of 207-222 nanometres (nm), but

»

due to its strong absorbance in biological materials, far-UVC light cannot penetrate even the outer (non living) layers of human skin or eye; however, because bacteria and viruses are of micrometer or smaller dimensions, far-UVC can penetrate and inactivate them.

«

Blue visible light goes down to about 400nm; UV-A (315-400nm) and UV-B (280-315nm) are the ones that cause tanning and wrinkling. But eyes should be kept away from UV-C.
unique link to this extract

Josh Zahl and Hong Wang prove the Kakeya Conjecture in three dimensions • Department of Mathematics

»

UBC Mathematics Associate Professor Josh Zahl, in collaboration with Hong Wang, an Associate Professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University (NYU), has proven the Kakeya set conjecture in three dimensions.

The Kakeya Conjecture is a long-standing problem in mathematics that deals with the geometry of sets in space. In simple terms, it asks how much space is needed to rotate a needle in all directions within a given area. The conjecture suggests that in three-dimensional space, the minimal space required to rotate a needle in every direction is surprisingly small. Until now, this problem remained unsolved in three dimensions, though it had been proven in lower dimensions.

This breakthrough is significant because it not only solves a key puzzle in mathematics but also opens doors for advancing our understanding of other complex problems in the fields of partial differential equations (which deal with how quantities change in space and time) and Fourier analysis (a method for analyzing complex waveforms). Essentially, the Kakeya Conjecture’s solution will help mathematicians tackle other related problems by providing new insights and tools to work with.

«

For a more detailed explanation, here’s Quanta Magazine in July 2023, when Zahl and Wang’s work was being proposed but hadn’t been accepted as a proof.
unique link to this extract

Firmware update bricks HP printers, makes them unable to use HP cartridges • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

»

HP, along with other printer brands, is infamous for issuing firmware updates that brick already-purchased printers that have tried to use third-party ink. In a new form of frustration, HP is now being accused of issuing a firmware update that broke customers’ laser printers—even though the devices are loaded with HP-brand toner.

The firmware update in question is version 20250209, which HP issued on March 4 for its LaserJet MFP M232-M237 models. Per HP, the update includes “security updates,” a “regulatory requirement update,” “general improvements and bug fixes,” and fixes for IPP Everywhere. Looking back to older updates’ fixes and changes, which the new update includes, doesn’t reveal anything out of the ordinary. The older updates mention things like “fixed print quality to ensure borders are not cropped for certain document types,” and “improved firmware update and cartridge rejection experiences.” But there’s no mention of changes to how the printers use or read toner.

However, users have been reporting sudden problems using HP-brand toner in their M232–M237 series printers since their devices updated to 20250209. Users on HP’s support forum say they see Error Code 11 and the hardware’s toner light flashing when trying to print. Some said they’ve cleaned the contacts and reinstalled their toner but still can’t print.

“Insanely frustrating because it’s my small business printer and just stopped working out of nowhere[,] and I even replaced the tone[r,] which was a $60 expense,” a forum user wrote on March 8.

When reached for comment, an HP spokesperson said: “We are aware of a firmware issue affecting a limited number of HP LaserJet 200 Series devices and our team is actively working on a solution. For assistance, affected customers can contact our support team at: https://support.hp.com.”

HP hasn’t clarified how widespread the reported problems are. But this isn’t the first time that HP broke its customers’ printers with an update. In May 2023, for example, a firmware update caused several HP OfficeJet brand printers to stop printing and show a blue screen for weeks.

«

Does it make them able to use non-HP cartridges? Because that would be a breakthrough.
unique link to this extract

Former Eaton Corp. employee found guilty of sabotaging company’s computer systems • cleveland.com

Adam Ferrise:

»

A jury on Friday found a former Eaton Corp. employee guilty of sabotaging the company’s internal computer systems after his work responsibilities were reduced.

Federal prosecutors said software developer Davis Lu, 55, of Houston, added a “kill switch” that would lock out thousands of users of the company’s software if he was fired.

That happened on Sept. 9, 2019 and caused “hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses” to the company, prosecutors said. Defense attorneys argued that it cost the company less than $5,000.

Eaton moved from Cleveland to Beachwood in 2013. While the company’s global headquarters are now in Dublin, Ireland, its U.S. headquaters remain in Beachwood.

Lu was found guilty of one count of causing intentional damage to protected computers following a six-day trial in front of U.S. District Court Pamela Barker.

The charge carries a maximum of 10 years in prison. Barker has not yet set a sentencing date.

«

Not a new thing at all: in 2002 Tim Lloyd was sentenced to 41 months in prison for his 1996 planting of a “software time bomb” that would destroy Omega’s code for running its manufacturing machines if he was fired.

The urge to take revenge is strong in software folk.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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.
unique link to this extract

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.
unique link to this extract

Global coffee trade grinding to a halt, hit hard by brutal price hikes • Reuters

Marcelo Teixeira:

»

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.
unique link to this extract

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.
unique link to this extract

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.
unique link to this extract

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.)
unique link to this extract

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).
unique link to this extract

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.
unique link to this extract

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.
unique link to this extract

Sony Music says over 75,000 items removed in battle against AI deepfakes • Financial Times

Daniel Thomas:

»

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?
unique link to this extract

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.
unique link to this extract

AI is the media’s chance to reinvent itself • Prospect

David Caswell and Mary Fitzgerald:

»

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.
unique link to this extract

Uncle Sam mulls policing social media of all would-be citizens • The Register

Iain Thomson:

»

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.
unique link to this extract

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.
unique link to this extract

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.
unique link to this extract

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.
unique link to this extract

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!
unique link to this extract

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.
unique link to this extract

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.
unique link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified