The monk Gregor Mendel didn’t just work on inheritance; he also recorded weather. But much of his work is lost. CC-licensed photo by Russell McNeil 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. Papered over. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

The age of anti-social media is here • The Atlantic

Damon Beres:

»

Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, X, Reddit—all have aggressively put AI chatbots in front of users. On the podcast, Zuckerberg said that AI probably won’t “replace in-person connections or real-life connections”—at least not right away. Yet he also spoke of the potential for AI therapists and girlfriends to be embodied in virtual space; of Meta’s desire—he couldn’t seem to help himself from saying—to produce “always-on videochat” with an AI that looks, gestures, smiles, and sounds like a real person.

Meta is working to make that desire a reality. And it is hardly leading the charge: Many companies are doing the same, and many people already use AI for companionship, sexual gratification, mental-health care.

What Zuckerberg described—what is now unfolding—is the beginning of a new digital era, more actively anti-social than the last. Generative AI will automate a large number of jobs, removing people from the workplace. But it will almost certainly sap humanity from the social sphere as well. Over years of use—and product upgrades—many of us may simply slip into relationships with bots that we first used as helpers or entertainment, just as we were lulled into submission by algorithmic feeds and the glow of the smartphone screen. This seems likely to change our society at least as much as the social media era has.

…According to Zuckerberg, one of the main things people use Meta AI for today is advice about difficult conversations with bosses or loved ones—what to say, what responses to anticipate. Recently, MIT Technology Review reported on therapists who are taking things further, surreptitiously feeding their dialogue with their patients into ChatGPT during therapy sessions for ideas on how to reply.

The former activity can be useful; the latter is a clear betrayal. Yet the line between them is a little less distinct than it first appears. Among other things, bots may lead some people to outsource their efforts to truly understand others, in a way that may ultimately degrade them—to say nothing of the communities they inhabit.

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(Gift link.)
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Internet Archive’s legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost • Ars Technica

Ashely Belanger:

»

Last month, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine archived its trillionth webpage, and the nonprofit invited its more than 1,200 library partners and 800,000 daily users to join a celebration of the moment. To honor “three decades of safeguarding the world’s online heritage,” the city of San Francisco declared October 22 to be “Internet Archive Day.” The Archive was also recently designated a federal depository library by Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who proclaimed the organization a “perfect fit” to expand “access to federal government publications amid an increasingly digital landscape.”

The Internet Archive might sound like a thriving organization, but it only recently emerged from years of bruising copyright battles that threatened to bankrupt the beloved library project. In the end, the fight led to more than 500,000 books being removed from the Archive’s “Open Library.”

“We survived,” Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle told Ars. “But it wiped out the Library.”

An Internet Archive spokesperson confirmed to Ars that the archive currently faces no major lawsuits and no active threats to its collections. Kahle thinks “the world became stupider” when the Open Library was gutted—but he’s moving forward with new ideas.

Kahle has been striving since 1996 to transform the Internet Archive into a digital Library of Alexandria—but “with a better fire protection plan,” joked Kyle Courtney, a copyright lawyer and librarian who leads the nonprofit eBook Study Group, which helps states update laws to protect libraries.

When the Wayback Machine was born in 2001 as a way to take snapshots of the web, Kahle told The New York Times that building free archives was “worth it.” He was also excited that the Wayback Machine had drawn renewed media attention to libraries.

At the time, law professor Lawrence Lessig predicted that the Internet Archive would face copyright battles, but he also believed that the Wayback Machine would change the way the public understood copyright fights.

”We finally have a clear and tangible example of what’s at stake,” Lessig told the Times.

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Return of Chinese astronauts delayed after spacecraft struck by debris • The Guardian

Helen Davidson:

»

The return to Earth of three Chinese astronauts has been delayed until an unspecified date after their spacecraft was apparently struck by a small piece of debris, according to Chinese state media.

The three astronauts from the Shenzhou-20 mission flew to the Tiangong space station in April, and were expected to return on Wednesday at the end of a six month mission. Their replacements, the crew of Shenzhou-21, had already arrived on the weekend.

“The Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft is suspected to have been struck by a small piece of orbital debris, and assessment of the impact and associated risks is currently under way,” said the China Manned Space Agency in a statement.

“To ensure the health and safety of the astronauts and the successful completion of the mission, it has been decided that the originally planned return of Shenzhou-20 on November 5 will be postponed.”

Authorities didn’t say when the incident is believed to have occurred. There was no indication of any issues earlier this week, with state media reporting on the two crews enjoying a meal of baked chicken cooked on the space station’s first ever oven, delivered by the Shenzhou-21 team. On Tuesday the two teams were reported to have conducted a handover ceremony, with videos posted to social media.

A popular aerospace and science communicator, Yu Jun, who posts under the name Steed’s Scarf, said if the assessments determine it’s too high risk for the spacecraft to return, authorities would activate a “plan B”, potentially the deployment of a waiting backup ship on Earth.

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Obviously, not good; that debris is causing problems like this creates bigger problems in turn: how do you make the spacecraft safe for re-entry? When are you sure it is safe? What do you do with the damaged one if you’re using a different one?
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The makers of TurboTax gave Trump’s inauguration $1m. They just got their money’s worth • MSNBC via Yahoo

Helaine Owen:

»

One month before the start of Donald Trump’s second term, Intuit, the parent company of TurboTax, announced a $1m contribution to his inauguration committee. At the time, the company told Politico the donation was “part of our decades-long commitment to bipartisan advocacy.”

But that long-time “bipartisan advocacy” was done with a goal in mind. As Politico reported: “Intuit has numerous interests in Washington that would incentive it to gain favor with the incoming Trump administration. It has spent more than two decades lobbying against the IRS making it easier to file people’s taxes online.”

On Wednesday, the White House granted Intuit’s wish. The Associated Press reports that the Trump administration “plans to eliminate the IRS’ Direct File program,” the government initiative that allowed some taxpayers with simple returns to file with the Internal Revenue Service for free.

The industry’s gain is a major loss for American taxpayers. The 2025 edition of the National Retail Federation’s annual tax return survey found that almost 40% of US adults will prepare our taxes ourselves using computer software — nearly double the next most popular method of filing. Intuit, along with H&R Block, monopolizes the market for that software. And it’s a lucrative market: “Americans spend an estimated 1.7 billion hours and $31bn doing their taxes each year,” ProPublica reported in 2019.

Supporters of Direct File hold up the program as a powerful demonstration of how government can help people and save them both time and money on an annual chore almost all of us despise and stress over (to the point that fatal car accidents actually increase on April 15 compared to other days).

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It’s so craven. The government has a system that works, and which nobody has objected to (apart from Intuit). But it’s more important to uphold the corrupt system that encourages companies to pay politicians off so they can get elected.
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Gregor Mendel’s vanishing act • Asimov Press

Niko McCarty:

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On a winter’s day in 1884, a group of Augustinian friars gathered around a fire and tossed papers into its hungry flames. Thousands of pages withered and burned, each containing hand-written text, charts, and data from a lifetime of work. By the time the smoke dissipated into an azure sky, it had all vanished.

The papers eaten by those flames belonged to Gregor Mendel, a quiet scientist and religious man today revered as the “father” of genetics. Mendel published 14 scientific papers during his lifetime — mostly on meteorology [six] and insect pests — but left behind thousands of pages detailing additional experiments, which may have amounted to a dozen or more manuscripts. We’ll never know for sure, because most of those pages were destroyed after his death. Few details survive about this event; the only source is a second-hand account recorded decades after the fact by Mendel’s first biographer, Hugo Iltis.

This is a shame, for today much of Mendel’s work has been pigeon-holed. He has been reduced to the discoverer of a single thing — namely, the laws of inheritance. In school, students are taught about Punnett squares3 and asked to make simplistic crosses with lowercase and uppercase letters, like “aa” or “Aa.” They learn that Mendel bred peas, and little more. But the truth of this man is much deeper: Mendel was a genius of the highest order, who made important discoveries in a wide range of scientific fields.

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Though Mendel is taught in schools, his paradigm-breaking work is still seriously underrated for how much it went against the grain at the time.
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Tahoe’s terrible icons • One Foot Tsunami

Paul Kafasis:

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On the new MacOS 26 (Tahoe), Apple has mandated that all application icons fit into their prescribed squircle. No longer can icons have distinct shapes, nor even any fun frame-breaking accessories. Should an icon be so foolish as to try to have a bit of personality, it will find itself stuffed into a dingy gray icon jail.

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This is a visual post, so you have to see the before and after. It’s amazing how the icons on Mac OSX (as was) have gradually lost detail: Safari used to be a fully fledged compass (it’s for finding your way around the web, geddit?), and now it’s a rather blurry blue circle with a red/white arrow. You can see the history at Guis.org.
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“So much more menacing”: Formula E’s new Gen4 car breaks cover • Ars Technica

Jonathan Gitlin:

»

When season 13 picks up in late 2026, we might see a pretty different kind of Formula E [electric] racing.

“It feels like a real moment for us,” said Dodds. The new car will generate 603 hp in race mode, a 50% jump compared to the Gen3 Evo. That goes up to 804 hp (600 kW) in attack mode. For context, next year’s F1 cars will generate more power, but only when their batteries are fully charged; if the battery is depleted, that leaves just a 536 hp (400 kW) V6.

Acceleration should be extremely violent thanks to permanent AWD—the first for any single seater in FIA competition, at least for the last few decades. Top speed will be close to double that of the original race car, topping out at 210 mph (337 km/h). Now you can see why the sport decided that aerodynamic grip would be a useful addition.

In fact, there will be two different bodywork configurations, one for high downforce and the other with less. But that doesn’t mean Formula E teams will run out and build wind tunnels, like their F1 counterparts. “There’s significant gains that can be made out of software improvements, efficiency improvements, powertrain developments,” said Dodds, so there’s no incentive to spend lots of money on aero development that would only add fractions of a second.

The biggest opportunity for finding performance improvements may be with traction control and antilock braking systems. Formula E wants its technology to be road-relevant, so such driver aids will be unlimited in the Gen4 era. But efficiency will remain of utmost importance; the cars will still have to regenerate 40% of the energy they need to finish the race, as the 55 kWh battery is not sufficient to go flat-out to the end. Happily for the drivers, the new car can regen up to 700 kW of energy under braking.

«

The link about next year’s F1 cars is remarkable: the rear wheels have electric power. They’re becoming hybrids. Will there come a point when Formula 1 and Formula E merge, or overlap?
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AI firm wins high court ruling after photo agency’s copyright claim • The Guardian

Robert Booth:

»

A London-based artificial intelligence firm has won a landmark high court case examining the legality of AI models using vast troves of copyrighted data without permission.

Stability AI, whose directors include the Oscar-winning film-maker behind Avatar, James Cameron, successfully resisted a claim from Getty Images that it had infringed the international photo agency’s copyright.

The ruling is seen as a blow to copyright owners’ exclusive right to reap the rewards of their work, with one senior lawyer, Rebecca Newman, a legal director at Addleshaw Goddard, warning it means “the UK’s secondary copyright regime is not strong enough to protect its creators”.

There was evidence that Getty’s images were used to train Stability’s model, which allows users to generate images with text prompts. Stability was also found to have infringed Getty’s trademarks in some cases.

The judge, Mrs Justice Joanna Smith, said the question of where to strike the balance between the interests of the creative industries on one side and the AI industry on the other was “of very real societal importance”. But she was only able to rule on relatively narrow claims after Getty had to withdraw parts of its case during the trial this summer.

Getty Images sued Stability AI for infringement of its intellectual property, alleging the AI company was “completely indifferent to what they fed into the training data” and scraped and copied millions of its images.

The judgment comes amid a row over how the Labour government should legislate on the issue of copyright and AI, with artists and authors including Elton John, Kate Bush, Dua Lipa and Kazuo Ishiguro lobbying for protection. Meanwhile, tech companies are calling for wide access to copyrighted content to allow them to build the most powerful and effective generative AI systems.

«

This is the judgment (after all these years, people still don’t link to judgments?). Getty’s complaint seems to have revolved partly around the fact that some generated images would include a generated “Getty” watermark. (See paras 152 onwards of the judgment.)
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The case that AI is thinking • The New Yorker

James Somers is a programmer:

»

On a brutally hot day this summer, my friend Max met up with his family at a playground. For some reason, a sprinkler for kids was switched off, and Max’s wife had promised everyone that her husband would fix it. Confronted by red-faced six- and seven-year-olds, Max entered a utility shed hoping to find a big, fat “On” switch. Instead, he found a maze of ancient pipes and valves.

He was about to give up when, on a whim, he pulled out his phone and fed a photo into ChatGPT-4o, along with a description of his problem. The A.I. thought for a second, or maybe didn’t think, but all the same it said that he was looking at a backflow-preventer system typical of irrigation setups. Did he see that yellow ball valve toward the bottom? That probably controlled the flow. Max went for it, and cheers rang out across the playground as the water turned on.

Was ChatGPT mindlessly stringing words together, or did it understand the problem? The answer could teach us something important about understanding itself. “Neuroscientists have to confront this humbling truth,” Doris Tsao, a neuroscience professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told me. “The advances in machine learning have taught us more about the essence of intelligence than anything that neuroscience has discovered in the past hundred years.”

Tsao is best known for decoding how macaque monkeys perceive faces. Her team learned to predict which neurons would fire when a monkey saw a specific face; even more strikingly, given a pattern of neurons firing, Tsao’s team could render the face. Their work built on research into how faces are represented inside A.I. models. These days, her favorite question to ask people is “What is the deepest insight you have gained from ChatGPT?” “My own answer,” she said, “is that I think it radically demystifies thinking.”

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It would be a horrible downgrade if we discovered that thinking isn’t such a sophisticated thing to be able to do after all. Like discovering we’re not at the centre of the solar system, or even universe. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Folding towels is a skill that humans find easy, but robots need to learn it. Guess who gets to teach them? CC-licensed photo by arbyreed 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. Turned out. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Inside the race to train AI robots how to act human in the real world • Los Angeles Times

Nilesh Christopher:

»

Now that artificial intelligence has mastered almost everything we do online, it needs help learning how we physically move around in the real world.

A growing global army of trainers is helping it escape our computers and enter our living rooms, offices and factories by teaching it how we move.

In an industrial town in southern India, Naveen Kumar, 28, stands at his desk and starts his job for the day: folding hand towels hundreds of times, as precisely as possible.

He doesn’t work at a hotel; he works for a startup that creates physical data used to train AI. He mounts a GoPro camera to his forehead and follows a regimented list of hand movements to capture exact point-of-view footage of how a human folds.

That day, he had to pick up each towel from a basket on the right side of his desk, using only his right hand, shake the towel straight using both hands, then fold it neatly three times. Then he had to put each folded towel in the left corner of the desk. If it takes more than a minute or he misses any steps, he has to start over.

His firm, a data labeling company called Objectways, sent 200 towel-folding videos to its client in the United States. The company has more than 2,000 employees; about half of them label sensor data from autonomous cars and robotics, and the rest work on generative AI. Most of them are engineers, and few are well-practiced in folding towels, so they take turns doing the physical labor.

“Sometimes we have to delete nearly 150 or 200 videos because of silly errors in how we’re folding or placing items,” said Kumar, an engineering graduate who has worked at Objectways for six years.

The carefully choreographed movements are to capture all the nuances of what humans do — arm reaching, fingers gripping, fabric sliding — to fold clothes. The captured videos are then annotated by Kumar and his team. They draw boxes around the different parts of the video, tag the towels, and label whether the arm moved left or right, and classify each gesture.

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A recent episode of ATP discussed how computer programming is about spotting pitfalls, using the example of the schoolteacher who asks the class to instruct them, step by step but assuming no intuition, to make a peanut butter and jelly (jam, yes? Ugh) sandwich. It’s much harder than it seems. And so with folding towels, which we do almost reflexively once we’ve done it a couple of times.

Robots have so much to learn about the world. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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“I Deliver Parcels in Beijing” book author Hu Anyan on Chinese e-commerce, AI, and American readers • Rest of World

Viola Zhou:

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Hu Anyan has held 19 jobs in six cities across China — selling bicycles, running a clothing store, working in a bakery, making 3D architectural renderings, doing night shifts at a logistics warehouse, and eventually delivering packages. 

Hu, 46, wrote about these experiences in a memoir-style book, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing. An avid reader, Hu documents his encounters with abusive managers, irate customers, and sprawling residential complexes in casual language, and with colorful details and a touch of humor.

When published in 2023, Hu’s book became a bestseller in China. Readers lapped up anecdotes of the lives of some of the millions of couriers powering the country’s ultra-efficient e-commerce industry, which treats individual laborers as dispensable. Many also related to Hu’s experience with economic uncertainty, dwindling social mobility, unemployment, and unfulfilling work.

Ahead of the launch of the English-language translation of the book by Jack Hargreaves, Hu spoke to Rest of World about his literary journey, his views on whether couriers will be replaced by automation, and what he hopes Americans will learn from the book. 

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It’s a fun interview, if not particularly long.
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Apple prepares to sell low-cost laptops for first time • Bloomberg via Financial Post

Mark Gurman:

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Apple Inc. is preparing to enter the low-cost laptop market for the first time, developing a budget Mac aimed at luring away customers from Chromebooks and entry-level Windows PCs.

The new device — designed for students, businesses and casual users — will target people who primarily browse the web, work on documents or conduct light media editing, according to people familiar with the matter. Apple is also targeting would-be iPad buyers who might prefer a traditional laptop experience instead.

Code-named J700, the machine is currently in active testing at Apple and in early production with overseas suppliers. The Cupertino, California-based company plans to launch it in the first half of next year, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the product hasn’t been announced.

An Apple spokesperson declined to comment.

The move would represent a strategic shift for Apple, which has historically focused on premium devices with hefty profit margins. The company also has vowed not to chase market share with lower-end offerings.

But Apple is facing a growing threat from Chromebooks, the low-cost laptops that run Google’s operating system, Chrome OS. There’s also a potential opportunity to entice Windows customers. Microsoft Corp.’s shift to Windows 11 has rankled some users of the previous-generation software and left them without security updates.

Shares of personal computer maker HP Inc. briefly dipped to a session low on the news. The stock and that of fellow PC maker Dell Technologies Inc. were both down about two% as of 12:03 p.m. in New York. Apple gained less than one% to US$270.25.

Apple plans to sell the new machine for well under US$1,000 by using less-advanced components. The laptop will rely on an iPhone processor and a lower-end LCD display. The screen will also be the smallest of any current Mac, coming in at slightly below the 13.6in one used in the MacBook Air.

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If Apple is looking to take significant share from Chromebooks, it’s years late – Google has taken huge chunks of the education market by not only having a simple user login but also the cloud system behind it. There’s always a market for cheaper laptops, of course.
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A YouTube education • Cultural Capital

James Marriott:

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YouTube is now second only to the BBC as the most popular broadcaster in the UK.

I often write disparagingly about the modern internet’s inexorable slide towards video but I also have to (grudgingly) concede that I have learned an awful lot on YouTube over the years.

In my teens it helped introduce me to poetry, philosophy music and art. I thought I would make a list of videos which form a kind of curriculum in the humanities (and a tiny bit in the sciences).

This list is partial and biased towards my own interests. I’m sure I’ve missed many things (I’m not into animal documentaries but there must be one of those good David Attenborough-style things with baboons etc somewhere) so please send me your favourite educational YouTube videos in the comments.

Here is a YouTube education. Or my version of one.

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Marriott goes on to list multiple series which will educate and inform you – Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, Ways of Seeing by John Berger, Dawkins and Pinker on evolution, language and the brain, and so on.

Except.. you can find those on the BBC iPlayer. Which, OK, isn’t available outside the UK, but Marriott’s article seems to imply that this is “YouTube as a replacement for what the BBC doesn’t offer”. The BBC does! Or, alternatively, it’s for people who don’t have TV licences. Which then raises the question of how long that makes sense: if YouTube is effectively taking revenue from the BBC (those lost licence fees; I doubt the income from people watching Civilisation makes up for it).
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Chicago firm that resolves ransomware attacks had rogue workers carrying out their own hacks, FBI says • Chicago Sun-Times

Tom Schuba:

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Rogue employees of a Chicago company that specializes in negotiating ransoms to mitigate cyber attacks were carrying out their own piracy in a plot to extort millions of dollars from a series of companies, prosecutors say.

Kevin Tyler Martin, a ransomware threat negotiator for River North-based DigitalMint at the time of the alleged conspiracy, was among two men indicted in the scheme. A suspected accomplice who wasn’t indicted was also employed at DigitalMint, court records show.

DigitalMint has denied any wrongdoing, fired both employees and cooperated with the investigation.

Also indicted was Ryan Clifford Goldberg, an incident response manager for the multinational company Sygnia Cybersecurity Services. Sygnia said Goldberg no longer works for the company and it “is not the target of this investigation, however we continue to work closely with law enforcement.”

According to an affidavit filed in September by an FBI agent, the three men began using malicious software in May 2023 “to conduct ransomware attacks against victims,” first hitting a medical company in Florida by locking its servers and demanding $10m to unlock the systems, court records say .

The FBI agent noted the men ultimately made off with $1.2m, although it was apparently the only successful attack.

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Struggling to find a description here. Playing both ends against the middle? Man-in-the-middle attack? But it’s an amazing piece of exploitation.
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Inside NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain Combat Center, c.1966 • Flashbak

Paul Sorene:

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In 1966, the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) Cheyenne Mountain underground facility became America’s command and control centre for when the Cold War turned white and the nuclear apocalypse became real.

We can take a look around the bunker in pictures published in a 1966 official NORAD report by David W. Shircliffe, Directorate of Command History, Command Public Affairs Office, and the 1970s book NORAD Command Post: The City Inside Cheyenne Mountain by Henry W. Hough.

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Dr Strangelove is just out of picture in the one with Nixon. I observe that seniority and rank are still expressed through the quality of chairs at monitoring desks.
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Bending Spoons cofounders become billionaires after Italian startup raises at $11bn valuation • Forbes

Iain Martin:

»

Luca Ferrari bought his first app back in 2014 for just $10,000 with the hope that he and his three cofounders in Milan-based startup Bending Spoons could turn it around. A decade later, Ferrari has become one of tech’s biggest dealmakers, and a new billionaire, after a new funding round valued his startup at more than $11bn.

Forbes estimates that Ferrari’s stake in the startup, which is named after a scene from the Matrix movie, is worth $1.4bn, while his cofounders Matteo Danieli, Luca Querella and Francesco Patarnello each hold a $1.3bn stake based on shareholder data published by the Italian Business Register.

The valuation comes from Bending Spoon’s fresh funding round of $270m from investors including T. Rowe Price and existing investors Baillie Gifford, Cox Enterprises, Durable Capital Partners and Fidelity. There was also a $440m secondary share sale by existing shareholders in the company. It’s unclear whether any of the cofounders sold stock in the secondary transaction.

…“Our strategy is very clear and sharp but it doesn’t include any bias to any particular segment,’ says Ferrari.

That strategy involves Bending Spoons using debt to snap up apps, products and websites with healthy revenue but where growth has often stalled. In some deals, like Evernote, it seems to have followed a private equity playbook of cutting staff, and hiking prices, but Bending Spoons says it has also invested heavily to overhaul and expand other apps it has acquired, like Meetup.

Bending Spoons, which was largely self-funded until 2021, has drawn comparison to a buyout fund, and Canadian software consolidator Constellation ($52.2bn market cap), but neither label fits, said early investor Peter Singlehurst of British fund manager Baillie Gifford. “They own and operate digital applications and are great at growing them very profitably because of the level of talent in the organization,” Singlehurst told Forbes.

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1) Bending spoons… so nothing to do with Uri Geller?
2) I still don’t get what BSpoons’s business model is to have such a gigantic valuation. OK, so they own AOL now, but they got that in a fire sale because, well, there was essentially no further value in it to a giant media company. But these guys will make it into a rocket?
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Metaphors for biology: sizes • Asimov Magazine

Sam Clamons:

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Biology can be hard to intuit, in part because it operates across vastly different scales, from single atoms all the way up to entire ecosystems. Students of biology therefore often first meet its agents and mechanisms through metaphors: molecules are charged balls connected by sticks! evolution designs organisms to maximize their fitness! mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cell! While metaphors give us qualitative handles to grasp, they often oversimplify complex ideas.

This is because most metaphors fail to address specifics — especially regarding numbers. Consider another common bio-metaphor: DNA is the blueprint of the cell. That’s useful for conceptual understanding, but how big is this blueprint? Is it as big as a novel or an encyclopedia? How much space does it take up? It’s possible to look up or calculate the answers to these questions; the human genome is 6.2 billion base pairs, which takes up about 10 cubic microns. But how big is that compared to the total volume of a cell? Is it most of it or just a tiny fraction?

To answer questions like these, you need more quantitative metaphors. Whereas a standard metaphor says that mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cell, a quantitative metaphor says how big a battery a mitochondrion would be, say, if a cell were a toaster. If qualitative metaphors are like containers, then quantitative metaphors are closer to yardsticks.

And these yardsticks are exceptionally useful down at the scales where biology operates. We all know cells are small. But so are proteins, nucleic acids, and water molecules. We often think of everything “small” as equally small, but that is not the case. Proteins are titanic, hulking machines compared to water molecules, and the mRNA that encodes a protein is orders of magnitude larger still!

To make the sizes and shapes of various biomolecules concrete, let’s imagine that each water molecule within a cell has been blown up to the size of a grain of sand. If this were the case, then…

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The scale is still hard to grasp even with this sort of scale offered.
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1979: Alpha particule-induced soft errors in dynamic memories

Timothy May and Murray Woods in 1979:

»

A new physical soft error mechanism in dynamic RAM and CCDs is the upset of stored data by the passage of alpha particles through the memory array area.

The alpha particles are emitted by the radioactive decay of uranium and thorium which are present in parts- per-rnillion levels in packaging materials.

When an alpha particle penetrates the die surface, it can create enough electron-hole pairs near a storage node to cause a random, single-bit error. Results of experiments and measurements of alpha activity of materials are reported and a physical model for the soft error is developed. Implications for the future of dynamic memories are also discussed.

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This is how Intel and the rest of the semiconductor industry discovered “bit flipping”: they were using water from wells which were themselves polluted with uranium and thorium (sometimes from nuclear testing) to make the packaging for the chips. This paper figured out how much energy the alpha particles needed to flip bits, and so how much refining of their sources was needed. (Turned out it was 100-1000 times better than they had going.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

You might have noticed that there are fewer buses in squares and traffic lights in squares. Where are all the Captchas? CC-licensed photo by Becky Stern on Flickr.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Not a robot. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

The curious case of the bizarre, disappearing Captcha • WIRED

Reece Rogers:

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As I browse the web in 2025, I rarely encounter captchas anymore. There’s no slanted text to discern. No image grid of stoplights to identify.

And on the rare occasion that I am asked to complete some bot-deterring task, the experience almost always feels surreal. A colleague shared recent tests where they were presented with images of dogs and ducks wearing hats, from bowler caps to French berets. The security questions ignored the animal’s hats, rudely, asking them to select the photos that showed animals with four legs.

Other puzzles are hyper-specific to their audience. For example, the captcha for Sniffies, a gay hookup site, has users slide a jockstrap across their smartphone screen to find the matching pair of underwear.

So, where have all the captchas gone? And why are the few existing challenges so damn weird? I spoke with cybersecurity experts to better understand the current state of these vanishing challenges and why the future will probably look even more peculiar.

“When the captcha was first invented, the idea was that this was literally a task a computer could not do,” says Reid Tatoris, who leads Cloudflare’s application security detection team. The term captcha—Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart—was coined by researchers in 2003 and presented as a way to protect websites from malicious, nonhuman users.

…in 2022, Cloudflare dropped Turnstile, another reCaptcha alternative. It was an additional major move away from human-completed tests and toward pattern-based usage analysis. Similar to the standard version of reCaptcha, Turnstile can be added to websites for free. You might not remember the name, but you’ve likely encountered one of these Turnstile challenges before. It’s the random-seeming request to click on a box to prove you’re human.

On the user end, Turnstile appears sometimes as a basic checkbox, but it’s more complicated than that. “Clicking the button doesn’t at all mean you pass,” says Tatoris. “That is a way for us to gather more information from the client, from the device, from the software to figure out what’s going on.” After gathering data, then a decision is made about whether the user is allowed to access the site.

Leading companies have a clear reason for the gratis implementation of their security software. “Cloudflare gives Turnstile away for free to the whole internet because we want more training data,” says Tatoris. “We see 20% of all HTTP requests across the internet. So, getting that massive training data set helps us know what a human looks like on the page versus what a bot does.”

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DeFi protocol Balancer hit by multimillion-dollar exploit • CoinTelegraph

Zoltan Vardai:

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The decentralized exchange (DEX) and automated market maker (AMM) Balancer has been exploited, with more than $116m worth of digital assets transferred to a newly created wallet.

“We’re aware of a potential exploit impacting Balancer v2 pools. Our engineering and security teams are investigating with high priority,” the Balancer team said in a Monday X post, adding that it will share more updates as information becomes available.

Onchain data initially showed that the decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol was exploited for $70.9m worth of liquid staked Ether tokens transferred to a fresh wallet across three transactions, according to Etherscan logs. The transfers included 6,850 StakeWise Staked ETH (OSETH), 6,590 Wrapped Ether (WETH) and 4,260 Lido wstETH (wSTETH), crypto intelligence platform Nansen said in a Monday X post.

By 8:52 am UTC on Monday, the ongoing exploit has swelled to over $116.6m in stolen funds, according to blockchain data platform Lookonchain.

The Balancer exploit may stem from smart contract issues that had a “faulty access check allowing the attacker to send a command to withdraw funds,” Nicolai Sondergaard, research analyst at Nansen, told Cointelegraph. “From what I see, losses are now greater than $100 million and have affected Balancer v2 + various forks.”

Aiming to recover the funds, the team behind Balancer offered a white hat bounty of up to 20% of the stolen funds if the full amount, minus the reward, is returned immediately. If the funds are not returned within the next 48 hours, Balancer stated that it will continue to cooperate with blockchain forensics specialists and law enforcement agencies to identify the perpetrator.

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I had to read through a ton of other writeups of this hack before finding this one, which at least gives a vague idea of what has happened. What it doesn’t make clear is that this is money (even Monopoly money) which belongs to people who are now substantially out of pocket. “DeFi” – decentralised finance – is still somewhere in the 18th century as far as the trustworthiness of its “banks” goes.
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Tesla sued over claim faulty doors led to deaths in fiery crash • Bloomberg via NDTV

Emily Chang:

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Tesla is being sued over a crash in Wisconsin last November that killed all five occupants of a Model S who allegedly became trapped in a fast-moving inferno when the doors wouldn’t open, adding to scrutiny over whether a design choice by the automaker is a fatal flaw.

The suit was filed on behalf of a couple who died when the four-door sedan hit a tree and caught on fire. Jeffrey Bauer, 54, and Michelle Bauer, 55, survived the initial impact, but were unable to escape because the doors locked them inside, according to the complaint brought by their children in state court.

A nearby homeowner who called 911 said she could hear people screaming from within the vehicle, according to the lawsuit. A report by the local sheriff’s office said a cluster of bodies in the front seat suggested there may have been a struggle to escape.

“Tesla’s design choices created a highly foreseeable risk: that occupants who survived a crash would remain trapped inside a burning vehicle,” lawyers for the children said in the complaint. The lawsuit accuses Tesla of negligence, arguing that Elon Musk’s electric vehicle maker was aware of the dangers of its door handle designs and the risk of post-collision fire hazards from the EV’s lithium-ion battery pack but did nothing to address either issue.
Tesla didn’t immediately return a request for comment. The suit was filed on Friday in state court in Wisconsin.

Tesla’s door handles have drawn increased attention after a Bloomberg News investigation uncovered a series of incidents in which people were seriously injured or died after they were unable to open doors following a loss of power, particularly after crashes. The Wisconsin crash was one of several such incidents reviewed as part of the investigation. The company is also being sued over the deaths of three college students who allegedly were trapped inside a burning Tesla that crashed last November in a San Francisco suburb.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the US auto safety regulator, disclosed in September that it’s investigating whether some Tesla doors are defective, citing incidents in which exterior handles stopped working and trapped children and other occupants inside. Franz von Holzhausen, Tesla’s design chief, told Bloomberg that the company is working on a redesign of its door handles to make them more intuitive for occupants “in a panic situation.”

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Bad design really does kill.
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Ukrainian computer game-style drone attack system goes ‘viral’ • The Guardian

Robert Booth:

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A computer game-style drone attack system has gone “viral” among Ukrainian military units and is being extended to reconnaissance, artillery and logistics operations, the nation’s first deputy prime minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, has told the Guardian.

Drone teams competing for points under the “Army of Drones Bonus System” killed or wounded 18,000 Russian soldiers in September, with 400 drone units now taking part in the competition, up from 95 in August, Ukrainian officials said.

The system, which launched more than a year ago, rewards soldiers who achieve strikes with points that can be exchanged to buy more weapons in an “Amazon-for-war” online store called Brave1 filled with more than 100 different drones, autonomous vehicles and other drone war material. It has a leaderboard topped by teams with names such as Achilles and Phoenix.

“It’s become truly popular among units,” said Fedorov, of the system, which is a prime example of the increasing automation of warfare. “All the defence forces know about this and there’s competition for the points, for getting these drones, electronic warfare systems and other things to help them in warfighting. The more infantry you kill, the more drones you get to kill more infantry. This is becoming kind of a self-reinforcing cycle.”

The number of Russian casualties in September is double the number from last October, in part because the Kyiv government doubled the rewards for killing Russian infantry from six to 12 points, reflecting changing battlefield priorities.

Ukrainian intelligence suggests Russia may be developing its own gamified system to compete, he said.

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The arms race takes a weird turn.
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How AGI became the most consequential conspiracy theory of our time • MIT Technology Review

Will Douglas Heaven:

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Every age has its believers, people with an unshakeable faith that something huge is about to happen—a before and an after that they are privileged (or doomed) to live through.  

For us, that’s the promised advent of AGI [artificial general intelligence]. People are used to hearing that this or that is the next big thing, says Shannon Vallor, who studies the ethics of technology at the University of Edinburgh. “It used to be the computer age and then it was the internet age and now it’s the AI age,” she says. “It’s normal to have something presented to you and be told that this thing is the future. What’s different, of course, is that in contrast to computers and the internet, AGI doesn’t exist.”

And that’s why feeling the AGI [as felt at OpenAI meetings] is not the same as boosting the next big thing. There’s something weirder going on. Here’s what I think: AGI is a lot like a conspiracy theory, and it may be the most consequential one of our time.

I have been reporting on artificial intelligence for more than a decade, and I’ve watched the idea of AGI bubble up from the backwaters to become the dominant narrative shaping an entire industry. A onetime pipe dream now props up the profit lines of some of the world’s most valuable companies and thus, you could argue, the US stock market. It justifies dizzying down payments on the new power plants and data centers that we’re told are needed to make the dream come true. Fixated on this hypothetical technology, AI firms are selling us hard. 

Just listen to what the heads of some of those companies are telling us. AGI will be as smart as an entire “country of geniuses” (Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic); it will kick-start “an era of maximum human flourishing, where we travel to the stars and colonize the galaxy” (Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind); it will “massively increase abundance and prosperity,” even encourage people to enjoy life more and have more children (Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI). That’s some product.

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Try this Kool-Aid, it’s delicious!
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Meet the real screen addicts: the elderly • The Economist

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Hundreds of teenagers, sometimes strong-armed by their parents, have trooped through the doors of Britain’s National Centre for Gaming Disorders since it opened in 2019. Yet lately the publicly funded clinic has admitted a steady trickle of rather different patients. Its specialists in video-game addiction have so far treated 67 people over the age of 40. The oldest, with an obsession for games on her smartphone, was 72.

…As today’s 60-somethings, already familiar with digital technology, enter retirement, time spent on smart devices is shooting up among the elderly. Some older adults “are increasingly living their lives through their phones, the way teenagers or adolescents sometimes do”, says Ipsit Vahia, head of the Technology and Ageing Laboratory at McLean Hospital, part of Harvard Medical School. The digital habits that have transformed the teenage years are now coming to old age.

…Older people have traditionally lagged behind when it comes to digital technology. A decade ago only a fifth of Americans over 65 owned a smartphone. That is changing. The newly retired, most of whom have been online since middle age, are among the most enthusiastic adopters of digital gadgets. Over-65s are more likely than under-25s to own tablets, smart TVs, e-readers, and desktop and laptop computers, according to a seven-country survey by GWI, a research firm.

Tech companies have identified oldies as a growing market. Apple makes earphones that double as hearing aids and watches that can carry out electrocardiograms or call an ambulance if the wearer falls. (Partly as a result of this, 17% of over-65s now own a smartwatch.)

The next generation of pensioners looks as if it will be even keener on digital gadgets: nearly a fifth of 55- to 64-year-olds own a games console. Retirement is starting to look a lot less about golf and more about “Grand Theft Auto”.

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Real humans don’t stream Drake songs 23 hours a day, rapper suing Spotify says • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

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Spotify profits off fake Drake streams that rob other artists of perhaps hundreds of millions in revenue shares, a lawsuit filed Sunday alleged—hoping to force Spotify to reimburse every artist impacted.

The lawsuit was filed by an American rapper known as RBX, who may be best known for cameos on two of the 1990s’ biggest hip-hop records, Dr. Dre’s The Chronic and Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle.

The problem goes beyond Drake, RBX alleged. It claims Spotify ignores “billions of fraudulent streams” each month, selfishly benefiting from bot networks that artificially inflate user numbers to help Spotify attract significantly higher ad revenue.

Drake’s account is a prime example of the kinds of fake streams Spotify is inclined to overlook, RBX alleged, since Drake is “the most streamed artist of all time on the platform,” in September becoming “the first artist to nominally achieve 120 billion total streams.” Watching Drake hit this milestone, the platform chose to ignore a “substantial” amount of inauthentic activity that contributed to about 37 billion streams between January 2022 and September 2025, the lawsuit alleged.

This activity, RBX alleged, “appeared to be the work of a sprawling network of Bot Accounts” that Spotify reasonably should have detected.

Apparently, RBX noticed that while most artists see an “initial spike” in streams when a song or album is released, followed by a predictable drop-off as more time passes, the listening patterns of Drake’s fans weren’t as predictable. After releases, some of Drake’s music would see “significant and irregular uptick months” over not just ensuing months, but years, allegedly “with no reasonable explanations for those upticks other than streaming fraud.”

Most suspiciously, individual accounts would sometimes listen to Drake “exclusively” for “23 hours a day”—which seems like the sort of “staggering and irregular” streaming that Spotify should flag, the lawsuit alleged.

…Spotify artists are supposed to get paid based on valid streams that represent their rightful portion of revenue pools. If RBX’s claims are true, based on the allegedly fake boosting of Drake’s streams alone, losses to all other artists in the revenue pool are “estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars,” the complaint said. Actual damages, including punitive damages, are to be determined at trial, the lawsuit noted, and are likely much higher.

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Michael Mann to Bill Gates: You can’t reboot the planet if you crash it • Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Michael Mann (erstwhile Nasa climate scientist):

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[Bill] Gates became a household name in the 1990s as the Microsoft CEO who delivered the Windows operating system. (I must confess, I was a Mac guy.) Microsoft was notorious for releasing software mired with security vulnerabilities. Critics argued that Gates was prioritizing the premature release of features and profit over security and reliability. His response to the latest worm or virus crashing your PC and compromising your personal data? “Hey, we’ve got a patch for that!”

That’s the very same approach Gates has taken with the climate crisis. His venture capital group, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, invests in fossil fuel-based infrastructure (like natural gas with carbon capture and enhanced oil recovery), while Gates downplays the role of clean energy and rapid decarbonization. Instead, he favors hypothetical new energy tech, including “modular nuclear reactors” that couldn’t possibly be scaled up over the time frame in which the world must transition off fossil fuels.

Most troublingly, Gates has peddled a planetary “patch” for the climate crisis. He has financed for-profit schemes to implement geoengineering interventions that involve spraying massive amounts of sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere to block out sunlight and cool the planet. What could possibly go wrong? And hey, if we screw up this planet, we’ll just geoengineer Mars. Right Elon?

Such technofixes for the climate, in fact, lead us down a dangerous road, both because they displace far safer and more reliable options—namely the clean energy transition—and because they provide an excuse for business-as-usual burning of fossil fuels. Why decarbonize, after all, if we can just solve the problem with a “patch” later?

Here’s the thing, Bill Gates: There is no “patch” for the climate crisis. And there is no way to reboot the planet if you crash it. The only safe and reliable way out when you find yourself in a climate hole is to stop digging—and burning—fossil fuels.

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Gates’s latest memo is intended to influence proceedings at the upcoming COP30 climate summit in Brazil. In short, he backs technology as the way to solve the climate crisis – because we are definitely not getting there through self-denial; the Paris agreement has not worked out. It’s hard to see why Mann is so against trying any sort of idea that might work.
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The Super PAC trying to free Democrats from the cult of the quants • POLITICO

Issie Lapowsky:

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Future Forward, the dominant Democratic outside funder which raised some $950m between its super PAC and other entities, had gained prominence for its aggressive approach to ad testing. Run by a small inner circle of number crunchers, the firm commissioned more than 1,500 ads throughout 2024 and, with the methodological rigor of a drug company testing a new vaccine, ran each one through randomized-control trials, surveying millions of voters to determine which ads would be the most persuasive to the most people.

Future Forward’s tests spelled out a pretty consistent theory of the case: elevating and contrasting Biden with Trump was more persuasive to voters than attacking Trump outright. But the debate scrambled this strategy. How to promote a candidate who had all but self-immolated on stage? And was it worth spending money now when it was anyone’s guess what the next few months would hold? Without something nice to say about Biden, for a few critical weeks, Future Forward didn’t say much at all.

To [rival Democrat Super PAC director Danielle] Butterfield, that was a wakeup call. Democrats, she believed, were allowing data about what supposedly sways people to stand in the way of intuition. For all their parsing and fine tuning, she felt her party was failing to simply read the room. “Trump was attacking us from every angle, and we were not doing anything,” Butterfield said. “We were really letting data drive a decision that should be pretty crystal clear.”

…Getting people to watch and give their opinions about an ad in a vacuum bears little resemblance to the way people actually consume content online. These tests don’t measure whether people will grasp a candidate’s message when they’re half-listening to a podcast at work. They don’t tell you if people get the ick when a slick, highly-produced political spot pops up in the middle of a video of a guy ranking fast food french fries. They don’t tell you if an ad is really “breaking through,” Butterfield said, a hand-wavy term she uses both liberally and intentionally.

“We try to treat advertising like this, like black and white, measurable thing, but in the world we’re dealing with, it’s not,” she said.

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There’s something too there about those at the top being cut off from voters – unsurprisingly, since the country is enormous, and trying to go with your gut about what people want is sure to go wrong.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Charging stations in the UK will be hit by new business rates in April that could make their prices for electricity rocket. CC-licensed photo by JCT 600 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. Discharged. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Here’s how the AI crash happens • The Atlantic

Matteo Wong and Charlie :

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The amount of energy and money being poured into AI is breathtaking. Global spending on the technology is projected to hit $375bn by the end of the year, and half a trillion dollars in 2026. Three-quarters of gains in the S&P 500 since the launch of ChatGPT came from AI-related stocks; the value of every publicly traded company has, in a sense, been buoyed by an AI-driven bull market. To cement the point, Nvidia, a maker of the advanced computer chips underlying the AI boom, last week became the first company in history to be worth $5 trillion.

Here’s another way of thinking about the transformation under way: multiplying Ford’s current market cap 94 times over wouldn’t quite get you to Nvidia’s. Yet 20 years ago, Ford was worth nearly triple what Nvidia was. Much like how Saudi Arabia is a petrostate, the US is a burgeoning AI state—and, in particular, an Nvidia-state. The number keeps going up, which has a buoying effect on markets that is, in the short term, good. But every good earnings report further entrenches Nvidia as a precariously placed, load-bearing piece of the global economy.

America appears to be, at the moment, in a sort of benevolent hostage situation. AI-related spending now contributes more to the nation’s GDP growth than all consumer spending combined, and by another calculation, those AI expenditures accounted for 92% of GDP growth during the first half of 2025. Since the launch of ChatGPT, in late 2022, the tech industry has gone from making up 22% of the value in the S&P 500 to roughly one-third.

…The economic nightmare scenario is that the unprecedented spending on AI doesn’t yield a profit anytime soon, if ever, and data centers sit at the center of those fears. Such a collapse has come for infrastructure booms past: Rapid construction of canals, railroads, and the fiber-optic cables laid during the dot-com bubble all created frenzies of hype, investment, and financial speculation that crashed markets. Of course, all of these build-outs did transform the world; generative AI, bubble or not, may do the same.

This is why OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta are willing to spend as much as possible, as rapidly as possible, to eke out the tiniest advantage. Even if a bubble pops, there will be winners—each company would like to be the first to build a superintelligent machine.

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UK charging industry could face £100m bill under business rate changes • The Guardian

Jasper Jolly:

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The UK charging industry has said it could face a £100m bill as the government considers making public charger operators pay business rates for the first time, at a time when slower-than-expected electric car sales have put pressure on the sector.

ChargeUK, an industry body, said that its estimates suggest that operators will have to pay business rates on as many as 64,000 parking bays beside chargers which have not, up to now, been liable for the taxes. The lobby group said the change could add as much as £300 to the annual charging bill for some people if the cost is passed on to the customer.

The number of public chargers has soared during recent years to cater for more than 1m battery electric cars on British roads. There were 86,000 public chargers at the end of September, an 18% increase on the 73,000 at the end of 2024, according to data company Zap Map.

Business rates are taxes paid on most commercial properties in the UK to fund local services, but charging bays have not yet been added to lists of rateable properties. The Valuation Office Agency (VOA) has told the charging industry this will change next April – meaning charging companies will have to pay the taxes for the first time.

Ian Johnston, the chief executive of Osprey Charging, said that his business would consider closing some sites and slowing down investment because of the extra costs – particularly away from London, which has the highest number of electric cars.

“Large, high-power hubs in certain regions of the Midlands and north [of England] are more likely to be loss-making because we have built ahead of EV uptake,” he added.

ChargeUK said it believed that the VOA’s own assumptions of a £25m cost for the sector were too small, because it had underestimated how many bays would be rateable, and the average rents paid.

To make matters worse for the charger companies, the bill may be backdated as far as 1 April 2023 as the VOA works out the final details of its review. That might mean that the first bill for the current financial year could be more than double the £100m.

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Totally insane. If you were trying to devise a plan to dissuade people from buying EVs, then raising the price at chargers would be right up there in your Evil Scheme. The amount raised is tiny compared to what could be achieved by raising fuel duty, which hasn’t been raised since 2010.
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How many AI artists have debuted on Billboard’s charts? • Billboard

Xander Zellner:

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AI music is no longer a fantasy or niche curiosity among internet sleuths — it’s here, and it’s already beginning to have an impact on Billboard’s charts.

In just the past few months, at least six AI or AI-assisted artists have debuted on various Billboard rankings. That figure could be higher, as it’s become increasingly difficult to tell who or what is powered by AI — and to what extent. Many of these charting projects, whose music spans every genre from gospel to rock to country, also arrive with anonymous or mysterious origins.

How do we know these charting titles are AI or AI-assisted? For some, their artist pages on DSPs claim their music was made with the help of AI. For others, Billboard cross-checked the songs using Deezer’s AI detection tool, which adds a flag to all AI-generated content on the platform.

One of the most prominent examples is Xania Monet, an artist with an animated avatar created by Mississippi-based songwriter Telisha “Nikki” Jones. Jones writes the lyrics and has used Suno — along with help from some other humans — to create the songs. Monet made headlines in September when she debuted on multiple Billboard charts: Hot Gospel Songs with “Let Go, Let Go” (which climbed to No. 3 on the chart dated Oct. 25) and Hot R&B Songs with “How Was I Supposed to Know?” (No. 20 peak).

There was a bidding war to sign Xania Monet with offers reaching $3m. Hallwood Media, led by former Interscope executive Neil Jacobson, ultimately signed Monet to a multimillion-dollar deal.

Monet has since become the first known AI artist to earn enough radio airplay to debut on a Billboard radio chart, debuting at No. 30 on this week’s Adult R&B Airplay chart (dated Nov. 11). She’s also topped R&B Digital Song Sales (with “How Was I Supposed to Know?” on Sept. 20) and debuted on Emerging Artists (reaching No. 18).

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There tend to be generational differences in detecting AI music: kids, oddly, are better at it than older people. If you listen to the Monet song (I don’t recommend it) you can detect the fake vocal wobble. It’s a terrible song – completely lacking in variation and with no middle 8. Welcome to your AI future.
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Manufacturer issues remote kill command to disable smart vacuum after engineer blocks it from collecting data • Tom’s Hardware

Jowi Morales:

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An engineer got curious about how his iLife A11 smart vacuum worked and monitored the network traffic coming from the device. That’s when he noticed it was constantly sending logs and telemetry data to the manufacturer — something he hadn’t consented to. The user, Harishankar, decided to block the telemetry servers’ IP addresses on his network, while keeping the firmware and OTA servers open. While his smart gadget worked for a while, it just refused to turn on soon after. After a lengthy investigation, he discovered that a remote kill command had been issued to his device.

He sent it to the service center multiple times, wherein the technicians would turn it on and see nothing wrong with the vacuum. When they returned it to him, it would work for a few days and then fail to boot again. After several rounds of back-and-forth, the service center probably got tired and just stopped accepting it, saying it was out of warranty. Because of this, he decided to disassemble the thing to determine what killed it and to see if he could get it working again.

…He then discovered that it used Google Cartographer to build a live 3D map of his home.

This isn’t unusual, by far. After all, it’s a smart vacuum, and it needs that data to navigate around his home. However, the concerning thing is that it was sending off all this data to the manufacturer’s server. It makes sense for the device to send this data to the manufacturer, as its onboard SoC is nowhere near powerful enough to process all that data. However, it seems that iLife did not clear this with its customers. Furthermore, the engineer made one disturbing discovery — deep in the logs of his non-functioning smart vacuum, he found a command with a timestamp that matched exactly the time the gadget stopped working. This was clearly a kill command, and after he reversed it and rebooted the appliance, it roared back to life.

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But… was it really back to life?
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Why doesn’t anyone trust the media? • Harpers Magazine

A transcript of a series of interviews about why trust in the media has fallen so badly:

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Christopher Carroll: Why don’t we begin with the biggest question. A Gallup poll from last year showed that the media was the least trusted civic or political institution in the United States—among other things, Americans trust Congress more than they trust the media. What accounts for this? Why don’t we trust the media?

Taylor Lorenz: Well, I think there’s a lot of culpability on the media side. Corporate media in particular has spent years selling people out and getting things wrong. Look at mainstream coverage of the Iraq War, the COVID-19 pandemic, or the genocide in Palestine. And that’s the tip of the iceberg. These media outlets do not center the lives of poor people, disabled people, immigrants, or the working class. The civil-rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis has done an excellent job reporting on how legacy news outlets push pro-police messaging. He looks at coverage of issues like crime surges or shoplifting epidemics—for instance, the widely reported but unsubstantiated claim that shoplifting forced Walgreens to close stores.

I do think that the corporate media—having worked in it myself—has done things to erode trust, whether it’s kowtowing to power or simply failing to represent the truth.

jelani cobb: I agree that the media has made a lot of mistakes. As you suggest, Taylor, there are some obvious ones, such as the credulous coverage that facilitated the Iraq War or, I would add, the self-interested coverage of the 2016 election.

But I’m not sure that there’s a correlation between the mistakes the media has made and the distrust the public feels toward it. Here’s what I mean: every one of us has been in a conversation in which someone says, “What the media won’t tell you . . . ” There are certain sentences that, when you hear the first half, you should immediately ignore the second half—and that’s one of them.

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Not short, but very interesting.
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Artificial intelligence is helping Indian farmers adapt to climate change • Human Centred Weather Forecasts

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Thirty-eight million farmers across India received forecasts this summer accurately predicting the start of the rainy season. This forecast, powered by artificial intelligence (AI), was tailored to farmers’ needs, providing them with advance prediction of the rainy season earlier than ever before—up to four weeks ahead of the rain. This represents a paradigm shift for smallholder farmers who had to make important farming decisions like what, how much, and when to plant without this information.

With this initiative, the Indian Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare set a model for what the future of weather services for farming could look like for hundreds of millions of smallholder farmers across the tropics who depend on information about when the rainy season, known as the monsoon, will come each year. Nearly two-thirds of the global population live in areas with monsoon climates.

“This program harnesses the revolution in AI-based weather forecasting to predict the arrival of continuous rains, empowering farmers to plan agricultural activities with greater confidence and manage risks. We look forward to continuing to improve this effort in future years,” says Dr. Meherda, Additional Secretary at the Indian Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare.

The Indian Ministry partnered with an international team of researchers to select its forecast. The Human-Centered Weather Forecasts Initiative at the University of Chicago Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth led the effort to evaluate forecasting models, recruiting researchers from IIT Bombay, IISc Bangalore, and the University of California, Berkeley.

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Rather as with the mobile phone, we’re discovering non-trivial applications for AI.
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London’s phones thieves are burying stolen devices in flowerbeds • London Centric

Riya Sharma and Polly Smythe:

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At 8.45pm on 3rd October, a phone thief bumped up against a woman walking down Shaftesbury Avenue. It was a rainy Friday evening and the streets were busy with tourists and Londoners buzzing about Soho. Discreetly swiping the phone inside the victim’s jacket pocket, the thief made off with both her device and the thousands of irreplaceable photos and messages it held. It’s an experience familiar to many who live in the capital or have spent a holiday here.

What happened next will be far less familiar. The thief took the phone around the corner to the Phoenix Garden, a small community-run patch of green behind Shaftesbury Avenue in the middle of central London. It’s a special space where volunteers maintain an urban oasis on a former bomb site for locals and tourists to take a breather. To the despair of the volunteers, Phoenix Garden is doubling up as a storage facility for central London’s stolen phones – and they can’t get the Metropolitan police to take it seriously.

Once at the park, the thief buried the device an inch down in the dirt, alongside many others. Other criminals are less fastidious, with some phone thieves on e-bikes pulling up by the railings and chucking the phones over the fence into the shrubbery.

The following day, the thieves — or their accomplices — return to pick up their bounty. They are often found scrabbling in the dirt to recover stolen devices that can be shipped abroad to markets in Algeria or China.

Sometimes the thieves are beaten to their buried treasure by their victims. Last year, the garden’s staff said, a Canadian tourist whose phone had been stolen followed his Find My iPhone app to Phoenix Garden and spent a day of his holiday digging through its flowerbeds. By the end, he had unearthed his phone – and three others.

On other occasions the thieves simply fail to return, meaning the volunteers find abandoned devices as they tend to the plants. Some of them are wrapped in tinfoil to block GPS trackers such as Apple’s Find My.

«

Guess what happened when they told the police? That’s right – absolutely nothing.
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77-year-old cyclist survives three days in ravine after fall • Entrevue

Emma Ray:

»

A 77-year-old man was found alive after spending three days in a ravine in southern Lozère, following a cycling accident. The man, considered a true miracle survivor, owes his life to his shopping bag and an incredible survival instinct.

While out shopping in La Grand-Combe, in the Gard department, the 77-year-old was returning home to Saint-Julien-des-Points when he missed a turn on the RN 106, the road that marks the border between the two departments. His bicycle plunged down a steep slope before crashing forty meters below into the Gardon riverbed. Trapped in the ravine, he couldn’t get out on his own. For three days, he tried to attract the attention of motorists by shouting at every sound from the road. All to no avail. Exposed to the cold and damp, he relied on his supplies to survive: a shopping bag containing food and a few bottles, including some wine, which miraculously remained undamaged after the fall.

It was finally on Tuesday afternoon that road workers from the Interdepartmental Directorate of Roads heard his cries. Below, they spotted a twisted bicycle, then the silhouette of the elderly man, visibly exhausted but conscious.

«

“Miraculously remained undamaged” in what is surely the most French survival story ever; could only have been bettered if he’d been wearing a striped shirt (still might be), a beret and had a baguette in the back.
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Vertical floating PV plant comes online in Germany • PV Magazine International

Jochen Siemer:

»

German developer Sinn Power has announced the completion of what it claims to be the world’s largest floating photovoltaic plant featuring vertically oriented solar panels.

The company said its SKipp-Float system offers notable advantages in terms of storm resistance. The mounting structure is designed so the modules can deflect under wind load via a cable system, minimizing wind resistance while also providing significant stability against wave motion.

The system became operational on August 21 at a gravel pit lake in Gilching, Bavaria, in southern Germany, and was officially inaugurated last Friday. Bavaria’s Minister-President Markus Söder was among the keynote speakers. The groundbreaking ceremony in November, when around 50 modules had already been installed, had already drawn high-profile visitors, including Minister of Economic Affairs Hubert Aiwanger. Sinn Power first announced the project in April of last year.

Despite the relatively long implementation phase, unplanned delays were reportedly minimal. Gottfried Jais, Managing Director of Kies- und Quetschwerk Jais GmbH & Co. KG, the project partner that owns the quarry lake and uses the generated electricity for its operations, expressed gratitude for the speedy approval process during the inauguration.

According to yield forecasts, the gravel pit can cut its grid electricity purchases by up to 70%, with any surplus electricity fed into the public grid.

The solar modules are arranged vertically in an east-west orientation with a four-metre row spacing. Each SKipp-Float unit requires only a narrow, keel-like base extending approximately 1.6 metres underwater, which the company says ensures a small footprint.

Exact figures were not provided in Sinn Power’s press release, and the Federal Network Agency’s market data register contains no entry for the site. According to Sinn Power, the floating array occupies just 4.65% of the lake’s surface, well below the 15% maximum allowed under Germany’s Water Resources Act. Plans are already underway for a second expansion phase, which would add another 1.7 MW to the site.

«

Clever idea, and the vertical orientation really is surprising.
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Age and gender distortion in online media and large language models • Nature

Douglas Guilbeault, Solène Delecourt and Bhargav Srinivasa Desikan:

»

Despite there being no systematic age differences between women and men in the workforce according to the US Census, we found that women are represented as younger than men across occupations and social roles in nearly 1.4 million images and videos from Google, Wikipedia, IMDb, Flickr and YouTube, as well as in nine language models trained on billions of words from the internet.

This age gap is the starkest for content depicting occupations with higher status and earnings. We demonstrate how mainstream algorithms amplify this bias. A nationally representative pre-registered experiment (n = 459) found that Googling images of occupations amplifies age-related gender bias in participants’ beliefs and hiring preferences.

Furthermore, when generating and evaluating resumes, ChatGPT assumes that women are younger and less experienced, rating older male applicants as of higher quality. Our study shows how gender and age are jointly distorted throughout the internet and its mediating algorithms, thereby revealing critical challenges and opportunities in the fight against inequality.

«

Model based on contents of internet has same biases as contents of internet. AI-generated film at 11.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

An experiment in Finland has shown that children benefit from lots of contact with mud pies. CC-licensed photo by JBColorado 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. Well fed. 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: Israel demanded Google and Amazon use secret ‘wink’ to sidestep legal orders • The Guardian

Harry Davies and Yuval Abraham (in Jerusalem):

»

When Google and Amazon negotiated a major $1.2bn cloud-computing deal in 2021, their customer – the Israeli government – had an unusual demand: agree to use a secret code as part of an arrangement that would become known as the “winking mechanism”.

The demand, which would require Google and Amazon to effectively sidestep legal obligations in countries around the world, was born out of Israel’s concerns that data it moves into the global corporations’ cloud platforms could end up in the hands of foreign law enforcement authorities.

Like other big tech companies, Google and Amazon’s cloud businesses routinely comply with requests from police, prosecutors and security services to hand over customer data to assist investigations.

This process is often cloaked in secrecy. The companies are frequently gagged from alerting the affected customer their information has been turned over. This is either because the law enforcement agency has the power to demand this or a court has ordered them to stay silent.

For Israel, losing control of its data to authorities overseas was a significant concern. So to deal with the threat, officials created a secret warning system: the companies must send signals hidden in payments to the Israeli government, tipping it off when it has disclosed Israeli data to foreign courts or investigators.

To clinch the lucrative contract, Google and Amazon agreed to the so-called winking mechanism, according to leaked documents seen by the Guardian, as part of a joint investigation with Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and Hebrew-language outlet Local Call.

Based on the documents and descriptions of the contract by Israeli officials, the investigation reveals how the companies bowed to a series of stringent and unorthodox “controls” contained within the 2021 deal, known as Project Nimbus. Both Google and Amazon’s cloud businesses have denied evading any legal obligations.

The strict controls include measures that prohibit the US companies from restricting how an array of Israeli government agencies, security services and military units use their cloud services. According to the deal’s terms, the companies cannot suspend or withdraw Israel’s access to its technology, even if it’s found to have violated their terms of service.

«

It’s that last sentence which is (as journalists say) the marmalade-dropper. What?? You break the terms of the contract but you still get to use the technology?
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ChatGPT maker reportedly eyes $1 trillion IPO despite major quarterly losses • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

»

On Tuesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Reuters during a livestream that going public “is the most likely path for us, given the capital needs that we’ll have.” Now sources familiar with the matter say the ChatGPT maker is preparing for an initial public offering that could value the company at up to $1 trillion, with filings possible as early as the second half of 2026. However, news of the potential IPO comes as the company faces mounting losses that may have reached as much as $11.5bn in the most recent quarter, according to one estimate.

Going public could give OpenAI more efficient access to capital and enable larger acquisitions using public stock, helping finance Altman’s plans to spend trillions of dollars on AI infrastructure, according to people familiar with the company’s thinking who spoke with Reuters. Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar has reportedly told some associates the company targets a 2027 IPO listing, while some financial advisors predict 2026 could be possible.

Three people with knowledge of the plans told Reuters that OpenAI has discussed raising $60bn at the low end in preliminary talks. That figure refers to how much money the company would raise by selling shares to investors, not the total worth of the company. If OpenAI sold that amount of stock while keeping most shares private, the entire company could be valued at $1 trillion or more. The final figures and timing will likely change based on business growth and market conditions.

An OpenAI spokesperson told Reuters that “an IPO is not our focus, so we could not possibly have set a date,” adding that the company is “building a durable business and advancing our mission so everyone benefits from AGI.”

The IPO preparations follow a restructuring of OpenAI completed on October 28 that reduced the company’s reliance on Microsoft, which has committed to investments of $13bn and now owns about 27% of the company. OpenAI was most recently valued around $500bn in private markets.

«

Each new instantiation of the internet creates its own apparently insane flotation. Netscape. Google. Facebook (as was). And now, almost surely, OpenAI. (Notice how there’s no NFT or cryptocoin name in there.)
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iOS 26 leak co-defendant says Jon Prosser paid him $650 • The Verge

Jay Peters:

»

Earlier this year, Apple sued leaker Jon Prosser alongside Michael Ramacciotti, alleging the two had a “coordinated scheme to break into an Apple development iPhone, steal Apple’s trade secrets, and profit from the theft.” However, in a new filing, Ramacciotti “denies that he planned or participated in any conspiracy or coordinated scheme” with Prosser” and that, to the best of his recollection, any payment he received from Prosser “was paid after the fact and was not agreed to in advance of the actions and communications.”

Apple’s lawsuit accused Ramacciotti of accessing the development iPhone of former Apple employee Ethan Lipnik after using location tracking to determine when Lipnik “would be gone for an extended period.” He then allegedly showed Prosser features of the yet-unreleased iOS 26 over a FaceTime call. But in his court filing, Ramacciotti “admits that he accessed Lipnik’s Apple Development iPhone and conducted a FaceTime call with Prosser, and Prosser asked Defendant to show certain iOS features,” though he “denies that he tracked Lipnik’s location.”

According to Ramaccioti’s filing, several weeks prior to that call, Lipnik had “sat down” with Ramacciotti and “swiped through” new iOS features on that iPhone. Ramacciotti “did not fully appreciate the sensitivity of the development version of iOS on the Development iPhone” because of Lipnik’s “willingness” to show the features to him.

«

There’s a colossal amount of under-bus-throwing: Ramacciotti (roommate of Lipnik) says Lipnik (the Apple employee) showed him iOS 26 in its pre-beta super-hush-hush form, but admits then calling Prosser (YouTuber who makes money from Apple reaction videos) and showing him the contents of Lipnik’s phone (uh-oh) and getting paid afterwards. I think that’s all three people underbussed in a single filing.
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cursedsit.com

It’s Not Friends, made by AI, with utterly bonkers content: watch on mute for a while to see how many bizarre AI artefacts you can see. Hands passing through guitar necks. Fingers sprouting and vanishing. Coffee cups spontaneously changing shape.

OK, this is the worst it will ever be. But then again, that’s pretty bad.
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Chimps are capable of human-like rational thought, breakthrough study finds • 404 Media

Becky Ferreira:

»

Chimpanzees revise their beliefs if they encounter new information, a hallmark of rationality that was once assumed to be unique to humans, according to a study published on Thursday in Science.

Researchers working with chimpanzees at the Ngamba Island Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Uganda probed how the primates judged evidence using treats inside boxes, such as a “weak” clue—for example, the sound of a treat inside a shaken box—and a “strong” clue, such as a direct line of sight to the treat. 

The chimpanzees were able to rationally evaluate forms of evidence and to change their existing beliefs if presented with more compelling clues. The results reveal that non-human animals can exhibit key aspects of rationality, some of which had never been directly tested before, which shed new light on the evolution of rational thought and critical thinking in humans and other intelligent animals.   
   
“Rationality has been linked to this ability to think about evidence and revise your beliefs in light of evidence,” said co-author Jan Engelmann, associate professor at the department of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, in a call with 404 Media. “That’s the real big picture perspective of this study.”

«

In this regard, chimpanzees are doing better than many posters on social media.
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Ex-L3Harris cyber boss pleads guilty to selling trade secrets to Russian firm • WIRED

Kim Zetter:

»

Peter Williams, a 39-year-old Australia native who resides in the US, faced two charges related to the theft of trade secrets. Williams faces a maximum sentence of 20 years—10 years for each count—and a possible fine of $250,000 or up to twice the amount of the losses incurred from his crimes. Prosecutors noted at the hearing, however, that based on his specific circumstances, sentencing guidelines suggested he’d more likely face a sentence of between 87 and 108 months in prison, and fines of up to $300,000. As part of the plea agreement, he has agreed to pay restitution of $1.3m.

Williams will be sentenced early next year. Until then, he will remain on house confinement at his apartment, must undergo electronic monitoring, and is permitted to leave his home for one hour each day, according to the plea agreement.

Williams worked for less than a year as a director at L3 Harris Trenchant—a subsidiary of the US-based defense contractor L3Harris Technologies—when he resigned in mid-August from the company for unspecified reasons, according to UK corporate records. Prosecutors, however, said at the hearing that he was employed by the company or its predecessor since at least 2016. Prior to his time at Trenchant, Williams reportedly worked for the Australian Signals Directorate, during the 2010s. The ASD is equivalent to the US National Security Agency and is responsible for the cyber defense of Australian government systems as well as the collection of foreign signals intelligence. As part of its signals intelligence work, the ASD has authority to conduct hacking operations using the kinds of tools that Trenchant and other companies sell.

This month the Justice Department accused Williams of stealing eight trade secrets from two companies and selling them to a buyer in Russia between April 2022 and August 2025, a time period that coincides in part with Williams’ employment at L3 Trenchant.

«

Nice to have $1.3m on hand to pay restitution, unless he’s paying very very small amounts over a long time. Which he might be doing if he gets 20 years in chokey. The ASD might want to look at quite how reliable its security was in the 2010s, too. (As a reminder, Trenchant is the company where a developer got a warning from Apple that his phone was being targeted with government spyware. Suspicious coincidence.)
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22 of Earth’s 34 ‘vital signs’ are flashing red, new climate report reveals — but there’s still time to act • Live Science

Sascha Pare:

»

Without deep cuts to emissions, there’s a chance Earth could embark on a dangerous “hothouse trajectory” to complete climate chaos. That’s one takeaway from a new report that found 22 of Earth’s 34 “vital signs” are flashing red, signaling that the planet is in distress.

Earth’s vital signs are markers of planetary health, such as atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane concentrations, ocean heat content, sea level fluctuations, and the yearly percentage of extremely hot days relative to the 1961-to-1990 average. Most of these markers hit record levels in 2024, and 2025 looks like it’s on the same trajectory, according to the report, published on Oct. 29 in the journal BioScience.

“This report is both a warning and a call to action,” co-lead author William Ripple, a distinguished professor of ecology at Oregon State University, told Live Science in an email. “2024 was the hottest year ever recorded in modern times, and likely the warmest in at least 125,000 years. Ocean heat and ice loss hit record highs. Global surface temperatures exceeded 1.5 degrees Centigrade [2.7ºF] above pre-industrial levels for the first time over a 12-month period. We also saw record wildfire activity and the most widespread coral bleaching event in recent history.”

«

Everyone knows. We just hope that incrementalism – the replacement of fossil fuels for energy generation by renewable sources – will save us. Nobody’s coming to save us, except perhaps technology. We actually have enough generation to sort this. But it’s misdirected.
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Hi, it’s me, Wikipedia, and I am ready for your apology • McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

Tom Ellison, reliably sourcing the thoughts of Wikipedia:

»

Well, well, well. Look who it is.

The global academic, scientific, and pro-fact community.

I suppose you’ve come to say you’re sorry? I hope so, given your years of sneering and hand-wringing about how I was ruining knowledge. Meanwhile, you turned your information environment into a hypercapitalist post-truth digital snuff film.

A lot can change in a couple of decades, huh? Used to be, it was hard to keep up with all you nerds decrying me as the downfall of truth and human inquiry [1] [2] [3]… [44].

Well, great job, geniuses. Since you’re so horny for facts, here’s a fact: The White House just appointed a new deputy press secretary, and it’s a three-armed AI Joseph McCarthy doing the Cha Cha Slide [pictured, right].

Are you also going to apologize to that student you expelled? (See also: Ridgeview University Wikipedia Controversy.) In 2004, you saw some college guy using me and thought, “What a lazy cheater.”

Now you’d think, “At least he’s not asking Gemini.”

In a few years, you’ll say, “Wow, look, a human being who can read.”

Listen, in some ways, I get it. When I came on the scene in 2001, I probably seemed pretty unsavoury compared to the competitors. But that was when academic research happened in libraries and George W. Bush was considered the stupidest president.

Tell me, how have you guardians of facts been doing recently? (See also: Techno-Feudalist Infocide.)

Maybe twenty years ago, the alternative to my 100,000 crowd-sourced editors was a PhD expert, or Edward R. Murrow [citation needed]. But today, I’m not looking so bad, huh? Absolute best case, the LLM-generated legal advice you get is merely plagiarizing, probably from me.

«

(Via John Gruber)
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How a radical experiment to bring a forest into a preschool transformed children’s health • The Guardian

Phoebe Weston:

»

Aurora Nikula, 5, is having a normal day at her nursery. She is making a cake out of sand and mud, adding in make-believe carrots, potatoes and meat. “It’s overcooked,” she says as she splashes water in, then adds another dollop of sand. “More sugar, it tastes better,” she says. A handful of mud goes in, and the dish evolves into a chocolate cake.

Aki Sinkkonen, a principal scientist with the Natural Resources Institute Finland, is watching. He’s also very interested in Aurora’s cake, but for different reasons. “Perfect,” he says, admiring the way she is mixing soil, sand and leaves and then putting it on her face. “She’s really getting her hands in it.”

To a hygiene-conscious kindergarten, this could be a problem, but at Humpula daycare centre in Lahti, north of Helsinki, children are encouraged to get muddy. Across Finland, 43 daycare centres have been awarded a total of €1m (£830,000) to rewild yards and to increase children’s exposure to the microscopic biodiversity – such as bacteria and fungi – that lives in nature.

We already know that access to the outdoors is important for children and their development. But this study goes one step further. It is part of a growing body of research linking two layers of biodiversity. There is the outer layer – the more familiar vision of biodiversity, made up of soil, water, plants, animals and microbial life, that lives in the forest, playground (or any other environment). And then there is the inner layer: the biodiversity that lives within and upon the human body, including the gut, skin and airways.

Increasingly, scientists are learning that our health is intimately linked to our surroundings, and to the ecological health of the world around us. The first 1,000 days of human life – when the brain and body are most rapidly developing – are considered particularly crucial.

…children playing in the green kindergartens had less disease-causing bacteria – such as Streptococcus – on their skin, and stronger immune defences. Their gut microbiota showed reduced levels of Clostridium bacteria – associated with inflammatory bowel disease, colitis and infections such as sepsis and botulism. Within 28 days it found an increase in cells in the blood – called T regulatory cells – that protect the body from autoimmune diseases.

«

In some ways, not surprising: our neolithic ancestors grew up in the mud and dirt and leaves, and their newborn bodies adapted to what they encountered, because they had to.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Obesity rates have declined in the US for the past three years after rising for years before that. Guess why. CC-licensed photo by stuart anthony 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. Slimline. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Republican lawmaker says don’t give China Nvidia’s Blackwell chip • Reuters via Yahoo

Karen Freifeld:

»

A leading Republican voice in Congress on China policy said on Wednesday that selling Nvidia’s best AI chip to China “would be akin (to) giving Iran weapons grade uranium”, as experts argued it would shrink the American ​advantage in artificial intelligence.

House Select Committee on China Chairman John Moolenaar said in a post on X that he told the administration, “we cannot sell the latest advanced AI chips to our country’s primary adversary.”

His comment came after President Donald Trump opened the door on Wednesday to Nvidia selling a lesser version of its Blackwell AI chip to China.

US trade experts said giving China the chips could effectively spell the end of US chip export restrictions, which were put in place in 2022 to make sure Beijing’s military would not benefit from American technology, and to slow the development of China’s AI efforts.

“If we decide to export B30As, it would dramatically shrink the US’s main advantage it currently has over China in AI,” said Tim Fist, co-author of an analysis of the impact of allowing China the B30A chip, a downgraded version of Nvidia’s state-of- the-art Blackwell chip.

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and 11 Democratic senators also urged Trump on Wednesday to not lift restrictions on AI chips and American technology in pursuit of a trade deal.

Moolenaar said, “these chips should instead go to the US companies ‍that are building American AI dominance for years to come — not the future of the Chinese military.”

«

The B30A may be downgraded – half the power of Nvidia’s top-end chip – but that’s OK, China can just buy twice as many. Meanwhile Nvidia’s market capitalisation (which is the market’s guess at the net present value of its total future profits over its lifespan) hit $5 trillion on this news: the first company ever to do so.
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Obesity rate declining in US • Gallup

Dan Witters and Mary Page James:

»

After peaking at a record high of 39.9% in 2022, the U.S. adult obesity rate has gradually declined to 37.0% in 2025. This is a statistically meaningful decrease representing an estimated 7.6 million fewer obese adults compared with three years ago. Meanwhile, diagnoses of diabetes — a lifetime disease that can be managed but not cured — have now reached an all-time high of 13.8%. Both metrics are part of the ongoing Gallup National Health and Well-Being Index.

Gallup calculates obesity using the federal standard of having a BMI [body mass index: square of weight in kg, divided by height in metres] of 30 or higher, while the diabetes rate includes both those with Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes. This is based on a question that asks US adults, “Has a doctor or nurse ever told you that you have diabetes?”

The most recent results are based on combined data from three nationally representative surveys of 16,946 U.S. adults interviewed by web in the first three quarters of 2025 using the probability-based Gallup Panel.

…Over the past year, more Americans have turned to Type 2 antidiabetic GLP-1 drugs such as semaglutide (brand names Ozempic and Wegovy) for weight loss purposes. The percentage of adults who report taking this class of medicine specifically for weight loss has increased to 12.4%, compared with 5.8% in February 2024 when Gallup first measured it.

«

This is very notable. Now perhaps we will start to see the second-order effects.
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The hatred of podcasting • The Baffler

Brace Belden is the co-host of the podcast TrueAnon:

»

Of course, most aren’t actively listening to Fridman and Huberman for two hours at a time. The episodes are a layer of white noise, a way to blot out thoughts. Podcasts came of age amid the growing absence of meaningful contact in the average person’s day, in a time when silence is hated. That’s probably why parasocial relationships—that two-dollar phrase for people who are also excited to write things like “ontology”—are so popular now, being simulacra that work just good enough to replace the real thing. The “friendship simulator” element is crucial in all this, and also its most sordid part. The hugely popular shows have a familiarity to them, the host drawing listeners in such that you feel like you might just be a shy participant in an exciting conversation.

…Shows like this have a flow that the listener doesn’t actually participate in—the hosts have gone home, you’re the only one in the room, and it’s a dead conversation that’s already happened—but, given the intimacy of how the product is consumed, can get the same psychic impression. On your commute, while you do laundry or cook dinner, your best friend lives in your phone.

This is tricky for the hosts, especially if you didn’t get into the business to pretend to be the number-one pal of thousands of strangers. Many embrace this relationship with fans, promoting a feeling of intimacy by making certain disclosures about yourself. Your audience, for the most part, will love it. Many will even prefer that to other content featured on the show. Many shows contain a dizzying mixture of news, political opinions, and debased confessions, resembling a chat with an outré friend you can’t give up, no matter how strange their opinions.

«

There’s plenty more – the whole historical sweep. Strangely, it isn’t available to listen to. The subhead is “Talking has finished off writing”. Maybe.
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EU carmakers ‘days away’ from halting work as chip war with China escalates • The Guardian

Lisa O’Carroll:

»

Carmakers in the EU are “days away” from closing production lines, the industry has warned, as a crisis over computer chip supplies from China escalates.

The European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA) issued an urgent warning on Wednesday saying its members, which include BMW, Fiat, Peugeot and Volkswagen, were now working on “reserve stocks but supplies are dwindling”.

“Assembly line stoppages might only be days away. We urge all involved to redouble their efforts to find a diplomatic way out of this critical situation,” said its director general, Sigrid de Vries.

Another ACEA member, Mercedes, is now searching globally for alternative sources of the crucial semiconductors, according to its chief executive, Ola Källenius.

The chip shortage is also causing problems in Japan, where Nissan’s chief performance officer, Guillaume Cartier, told reporters at a car show in Tokyo that the company was only “OK to the first week of November” in terms of supply.

Beijing banned exports of Nexperia chips near the start of the month in response to the Dutch government’s decision to take over the Netherlands-headquartered company on 30 September and suspend its Chinese chief executive after the US flagged security concerns.

Last week car companies in the UK, EU and Japan, including brands such as Honda, Nissan, Volkswagen and Volvo, said the ban on exports from Nexperia factories in China could halt production lines.

“The industry is currently working through reserve stocks but supplies are rapidly dwindling. From a survey of our members this week, some are already expecting imminent assembly line stoppages,” de Vries said.

«

Jaguar: has to shut production because of ransomware.

Other car manufacturers: have to shut production because the Dutch became itchy about Chinese control of a local chip company, took it over, and are now reaping the consequences. The Chinese are better at these games than the Dutch and Americans, evidently.
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Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses users film and harass massage parlour workers • 404 Media

Emanuel Maiberg:

»

A number of Instagram accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers and millions of views have uploaded videos filmed with Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses show men entering massage parlors across the country and soliciting the workers there for “tuggy” massages, or sex work. In some cases, the women laugh at the men, dismiss them, or don’t understand what they’re talking about, but in a few cases they discuss specific sex acts and what they would cost.

It doesn’t appear that the women in the videos know they are being filmed and that the videos are being shared online, where they’re viewed by millions of people. In some cases, the exact location of the massage parlor is easy to find because the videos show its sign upon entering. This is extremely dangerous to the women in the videos who can be targeted by both law enforcement and racist, sexist extremists. In 2021, a man who shot and killed eight people at massage parlors told police he targeted them because he had a “sexual addiction.”

The videos show how Meta has built an entire supply chain for dangerous, privacy violating content on the internet. It sells glasses that allow people to surreptitiously film others in public and operates a social network where inflammatory, outrageous content is rewarded and monetized, and where Instagram often only moderates violating content after journalists reach out for comment. 

«

Who could have predicted etc etc. There’s so little consideration of how terrible some people are in create products like this.
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Bending Spoons to acquire AOL • TechCrunch

Aisha Malik:

»

Bending Spoons, one of Europe’s largest mobile app developers, announced on Wednesday that it has agreed to buy AOL from Yahoo, which is backed by private equity giant Apollo. Bending Spoons says it has secured a $2.8bn debt financing package to support the purchase.

The acquisition is expected to close by the end of the year and is subject to closing conditions and regulatory approvals.
“AOL is an iconic, beloved business that’s in good health, has stood the test of time, and we believe has unexpressed potential,” said Bending Spoons CEO and co-founder Luca Ferrari in a press release.

“By our estimation, AOL is one of the top ten most-used email providers in the world, with a highly retained customer base counting around 8 million daily and 30 million monthly active users,” he continued. “We intend to invest significantly to help the product and the business flourish. Bending Spoons has never sold an acquired business—we’re confident we’re the right long-term steward for AOL, and look forward to serving its large, loyal customer base for many years to come.”

The news doesn’t come as a surprise, as Reuters reported earlier this month that Yahoo was in talks to sell AOL to Bending Spoons for around $1.4bn.

«

But what the hell is this mobile app development company going to do with AOL? It’s a shell of a company, and this transaction is the last gasp of a company whose merger in January 2000 with Time Warner in a $350bn deal marked the moment the dot-com bubble had inflated to its peak.

Now, though? It’s a portal to nowhere. I don’t see why you’d spend a million on it, let alone a billion.
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Injuries and deaths in children fell after backup camera mandate • MedPage Today

Jennifer Henderson:

»

After a 2018 federal mandate requiring backup cameras in all new vehicles, there were far fewer severe injuries and deaths in young children, a retrospective cohort study suggested.

Among children aged under five treated at a level 1 pediatric trauma centre in Texas, the trauma rate before the mandate was approximately 7.2 backovers per year, compared with 2.7 backovers per year after the mandate was implemented (rate ratio [RR] 0.38, 95% CI 0.21-0.66), reported Natalie Drucker, MD, of UTHealth Houston.

A similar trend was observed among children included in publicly available injury records from surrounding metropolitan counties, with rates of events also reduced to approximately one-third, from 3.0 backovers per year pre-mandate to 0.9 backovers per year post-mandate (RR 0.30, 95% CI 0.12-0.75), she noted during a presentation at the American Academy of Pediatrics annual meeting.

Backover trauma is an injury to a person hit by a motor vehicle going in reverse, Drucker said. “This disproportionately affects small children because they’re hard to see, they don’t have common sense to get out of the way of the car, and they can be injured really severely … because of their short stature.”

“We noted in our level 1 trauma centre in Houston an anecdotal decrease in the number of these injuries that we were seeing, and decided to study it,” she said.

Indeed, “these are among the most terrible injuries to take care of,” pediatric and trauma surgeon Aaron Jensen, MD, of the University of California San Francisco, who was not involved in the study, told MedPage Today. This is because often in such traumas, a parent has backed over their own child, and many of the children don’t survive, or have a lifelong injury.

«

Europe made the same requirement of new vehicles in 2022. The UK hasn’t mandated it (or any of the GSR 22 mandates), though of course most vehicles will already have those functions.
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Microsoft Azure outage: Websites come back online – BBC News

Imran Rahman-Jones and Lily Jamali:

»

Websites for Heathrow, NatWest and Minecraft returned to service late on Wednesday after experiencing problems amid a global Microsoft outage.

Outage tracker Downdetector showed thousands of reports of issues with a number of websites around the world over several hours.

Microsoft said some users of Microsoft 365, external saw delays with Outlook among other services, but by 21:00GMT, many websites that went down were once again accessible after the company restored a prior update.

The company’s Azure cloud computing platform, which underpins large parts of the internet, had reported a “degradation of some services, external” at 16:00 GMT. It said this was due to “DNS issues” – the same root cause of the huge Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage last week.

Amazon said AWS was operating normally. [Amazon East 1 went down briefly on Tuesday – Overspill Ed.]

Other sites that were impacted in the UK include supermarket Asda and mobile phone operator O2 – while in the US, people reported issues accessing the websites of coffee chain Starbucks and retailer Kroger.

The M&S website remained unavailable late on Wednesday even after many others returned online.

Microsoft said business Microsoft 365 customers experienced problems. Some web pages on Microsoft also directed users to an error notifications that read “Uh oh! Something went wrong with the previous request.”

«

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Monkeys escape after truck overturns on Mississippi highway; three still missing • CBS News

Lucia Suarez Sang and Associated Press:

»

Monkeys being transported Tuesday on a Mississippi highway escaped after the truck carrying them overturned, and all but three that got out have since been killed, authorities said.

The crash happened approximately 100 miles from the state capital of Jackson. It’s not clear what caused the truck to overturn. Video showed monkeys crawling through the tall grass on the side of Interstate 59 just north of Heidelberg, Mississippi, with wooden crates labeled “live animals” crumpled and strewn about.

The Jasper County Sheriff’s Department said the rhesus monkeys were from Tulane University, and initially wrote in a post on Facebook that “they are aggressive to humans and they require PPE to handle.”

The department later said on Facebook that “[t]here are 3 monkeys still on the loose after the officials from Tulane were able to get inside the truck and get a correct count.”

It’s not clear how many monkeys were originally in the truck or how many were killed.

The sheriff’s department said the driver of the truck relayed that “the monkeys were dangerous and posed a threat to humans,” and that it took “appropriate actions after being given that information.”

…The sheriff’s department initially said the monkeys were carrying diseases, including herpes, but Tulane University said in a statement that the monkeys “are not infectious.”

«

I feel sure that the instructions to the truck driver would have included phrases like “drive carefully” and “monkeys”. And yet, like something from a sitcom, there’s the truck steaming by the side of the road. We TOLD you AND YET.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

An emerging use of AI is to fake images for expenses claims. Ambitious or stupid? CC-licensed photo by Joe Loong 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. Honestly. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Meet the humanoid robot headed for homes • Fast Company

Harry McCracken:

»

With one sweeping gesture, Dar Sleeper hoists the humanoid robot off the ground. Bracing its back with one arm and its legs with the other, he gently carries it across the room and lowers it onto a sofa, where it lies in repose as if catching a quick nap.

It’s a slightly surreal scene, but it has a serious point. I am visiting the Palo Alto headquarters of 1X Technologies, and Sleeper, the company’s VP of growth, is demonstrating that Neo, its home robot, is a lightweight at a mere 66 pounds [30kg]. That’s a crucial design feature, given that a weighty domestic bot could prove hazardous if it toppled over in the vicinity of a human, a pet, or just a pricey vase.

Soon, Neo will take on the ultimate proving ground for a home robot: actual homes. 1X is announcing that it’s taking preorders and plans to ship units to its earliest customers next year. The price is $20,000, or $499 per month as a subscription service, with a six-month minimum. Like a smartphone, the robot will come in multiple color options—tan, gray, and dark brown.

Wait, $20,000? There isn’t much precedent for mainstream consumer products in that price range. Cars, of course. (The average price for a new one just topped $50,000.) Maybe boats? Even if you can come up with another example or two, it’s a short list.

Then again, 1X founder and CEO Bernd Børnich’s goals for his robots involve attaining a degree of utility that few inventions ever have. He wants to teach Neo to handle every household task that people perform because they need to, not because they want to. Even if the time saved came in bits and pieces—five minutes of dishwasher unloading here, 15 minutes of laundry folding there—it would add up to many hours newly available for more rewarding pursuits.

…By 2050, according to a Morgan Stanley report in May, there could be more than a billion humanoid robots in service, with the vast majority in commercial and industrial settings. Only 80 million would be in homes, the report speculates.

«

A 30-kilo weight falling over will make quite a mess. I don’t believe that Morgan Stanley report, but if it’s only off by an order of magnitude – even two – that’s 800,000 humanoid robots in homes (or similar, such as care homes?), which is substantial. Of course Elon Musk will say he’s got something better coming in two years.
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Nvidia invests $1bn in Nokia to push AI to the edge • The Register

Thomas Claburn:

»

Nvidia’s deal with Nokia, one of the largest telecom equipment vendors in the world, will give the company access to Nvidia’s AI-RAN products, which make AI available to radio access networks to improve spectral efficiency (AI for RAN) and also will make AI available via cloud computing for wireless communications (AI on RAN). And Nokia will ensure that its 5G and 6G software runs on Nvidia hardware.

The partnership comes with a $1bn Nvidia investment in Nokia, which lifted the telecom company’s shares more than 25% in the hours after the announcement. Nvidia has also recently announced investments in Intel ($5bn) and OpenAI ($100bn). The GPU biz has a lot of spare change lying around.

“Telecommunications is a critical national infrastructure – the digital nervous system of our economy and security,” said Huang in a statement. “Built on Nvidia CUDA and AI, AI-RAN will revolutionize telecommunications – a generational platform shift that empowers the United States to regain global leadership in this vital infrastructure technology.”

In conjunction with the partnership, Nvidia is rolling out Aerial RAN Computer Pro (ARC-Pro), a 6G-ready accelerated computing platform for telecommunication companies.

«

6G! I’ve hardly made use of all the incredible benefits of 5G, such as inter-car connectivity, robotics, virtual reality, and the internet of things! Wonder what wonders 6G will bring.
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How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry • Construction Physics

Brian Potter:

»

during the war, developments had taken place that would threaten the skilled labor-intensive production model that British shipbuilders relied on. To win the Battle of the Atlantic and overcome destruction to their fleet caused by German U-boats, the US had used welded, prefabricated construction to rapidly build enormous numbers of simple cargo ships: Liberty ships, Victory ships, and T-2 Tankers. In the 1950s, those methods of ship construction were brought to Japan, where they continued to be refined.

British shipbuilders could have taken advantage of these methods as well. They had seen firsthand the huge number of Liberty ships American shipyards were producing (the Liberty ship was, after all, originally a British design), and had made use of welded, prefabricated construction themselves to build vessels during wartime.

But British shipbuilders perceived adopting these radically different production methods as risky. It would require enormous capital expenditure, and British shipbuilders had only survived the brutal 1930s thanks to their comparatively light overheads and labor-intensive methods. Dramatic changes to production methods would also require changes to the very strict demarcation system of its unionized labor force, which the unions, naturally distrustful of shipyard operators, were sure to resist.

And while the US had successfully built thousands of ships very rapidly during the war, it had come at a cost: the US cargo ships, using modern methods, were more expensive to build than similar British ships. Though some British shipbuilders recognized the potential of welding and prefabrication, they weren’t clearly worth reorganizing the entire industry around.

…Thus, even as the world shipbuilding market boomed in the 1950s, UK shipbuilding output stayed roughly constant. Between 1947 and 1957, UK ship output rose by 18%, while worldwide output comparatively rose by over 300%. Countries like Germany, Sweden, and Japan picked up the slack. The UK lost its position as the world’s biggest shipbuilder by tonnage to Japan in 1956.

«

The US figured out welding and preconstruction in WW2, and having got a new technology, refined it and made it cheaper. The UK’s story is repeated again and again. (Apologies: I can’t find the person’s tweet/skeet/email/whatever that pointed me here.)
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New image-generating AIs are being used for fake expense reports • Financial Times via Ars Technica

Cristina Criddle:

»

Businesses are increasingly being deceived by employees using artificial intelligence for an age-old scam: faking expense receipts.

The launch of new image-generation models by top AI groups such as OpenAI and Google in recent months has sparked an influx of AI-generated receipts submitted internally within companies, according to leading expense software platforms.

Software provider AppZen said fake AI receipts accounted for about 14% of fraudulent documents submitted in September, compared with none last year. Fintech group Ramp said its new software flagged more than $1m in fraudulent invoices within 90 days.

About 30% of US and UK financial professionals surveyed by expense management platform Medius reported they had seen a rise in falsified receipts following the launch of OpenAI’s GPT-4o last year.

“These receipts have become so good, we tell our customers, ‘do not trust your eyes’,” said Chris Juneau, senior vice-president and head of product marketing for SAP Concur, one of the world’s leading expense platforms, which processes more than 80 million compliance checks monthly using AI.

Several platforms attributed a significant jump in the number of AI-generated receipts after OpenAI launched GPT-4o’s improved image generation model in March.

OpenAI told the Financial Times that it takes action when its policies are violated and its images contained metadata that signaled they were created by ChatGPT.

Creating fraudulent documents previously required skills in photo editing or paying for such services through online vendors. The advent of free and accessible image generation software has made it easy for employees to quickly falsify receipts in seconds by writing simple text instructions to chatbots.

Several receipts shown to the FT by expense management platforms demonstrated the realistic nature of the images, which included wrinkles in paper, detailed itemization that matched real-life menus, and signatures.

“This isn’t a future threat; it’s already happening. While currently only a small percentage of non-compliant receipts are AI-generated, this is only going to grow,” said Sebastien Marchon, chief executive of Rydoo, an expense management platform.

«

How shocking, because up till now every expense receipt has been absolutely 100% really incurred.
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Wind power has cut £104bn from UK energy costs since 2010, study finds • The Guardian

Fiona Harvey:

»

Wind power has cut at least £104bn from energy costs in the UK since 2010, a study has found.

Users of gas have been among the biggest beneficiaries, the research suggested.

Research by University College London found that from 2010 to 2023, energy from windfarms resulted in electricity bills being lower by about £14.2bn than they would have been if gas had been needed to generate the same amount of power.

However, the reduction in the cost of gas that could be attributed to wind generation – owing to the cut in demand and not needing to build new infrastructure – was much greater, at about £133.3bn.

Over the same period, consumers paid about £43.2bn in green subsidies, levied on electricity bills rather than gas bills. The net result was a reduction of £104.3bn in UK energy bills over the 13-year period, according to the researchers.

Surging renewable energy generation across Europe made demand for gas – and thus gas prices – lower than they would otherwise have been, and meant electricity companies had less need to build costly new gas-fired power stations, according to the analysis. The way that the UK’s energy market works also means gas-fired power stations are in effect allowed to set the price of electricity.

The analysis applied to 2010-23, leaving out the lingering impacts of the leap in gas prices in early 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine.

«

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Meta lays off 600 from ‘bloated’ AI unit as Wang cements leadership • CNBC

Ashley Capoot and Jonathan Vanian:

»

Meta will lay off roughly 600 employees within its artificial intelligence unit as the company looks to reduce layers and operate more nimbly, a spokesperson confirmed to CNBC on Wednesday.

The company announced the cuts in a memo from its chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, who was hired in June as part of Meta’s $14.3bn investment in Scale AI. Workers across Meta’s AI infrastructure units, Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research unit (FAIR) and other product-related positions will be impacted.

However, the cuts did not impact employees within TBD Labs, which includes many of the top-tier AI hires brought into the social media company this summer, people familiar with the matter told CNBC. Those employees, overseen by Wang, were spared by the layoffs, underscoring Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s bet on his expensive hires versus the legacy employees, the people said.

Within Meta, the AI unit was considered to be bloated, with teams like FAIR and more product-oriented groups often vying for computing resources, the people said. When the company’s new hires joined the company to create Superintelligence Labs, it inherited the oversized Meta AI unit, they said. The layoffs are an attempt by Meta to continue trim the department and further cement Wang’s role in steering the company’s AI strategy.

«

So really just cleaning out the old people who have been industriously getting Meta’s AI up to scratch for years, and keeping the new ones who were just signed on for megagigantobucks.

The people over at the metaverse labs are surely polishing their CVs.
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AI news anchor debuts on Channel 4 in British TV stunt • Variety

Ethan Shanfeld:

»

A news special on Britain’s Channel 4 titled “Will AI Take My Job?” investigated how automation is reshaping the workplace and pitting humans against machines. At the end of the hour-long program, a major twist was revealed: the anchor, who narrates and appears throughout the telecast reporting from different locations, was entirely AI-generated.

In the final moments of the special, the host says: “AI is going to touch everybody’s lives in the next few years. And for some, it will take their jobs. Call centre workers? Customer service agents? Maybe even TV presenters like me. Because I’m not real. In a British TV first, I’m an AI presenter. Some of you might have guessed: I don’t exist, I wasn’t on location reporting this story. My image and voice were generated using AI.”

«

Max Headroom got there first, though.
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Major NHS AI trial delivers unprecedented time and cost savings • GOV.UK

»

The largest artificial intelligence (AI) trial of its kind globally in healthcare, involving more than 30,000 NHS workers, has shown how new technology could generate unprecedented time savings for NHS staff and lead to better care for patients, in a major productivity drive.

A groundbreaking pilot of Microsoft 365 Copilot across 90 NHS organisations found that AI-powered administrative support could save NHS staff on average 43 minutes per staff member per day or more – that’s 5 weeks of time per person annually. Results from the trial show that a full roll-out could save up to 400,000 hours of staff time per month, equating to millions of hours every year, enabling staff to focus more effectively on frontline care.

The NHS estimates that the technology could save it millions of pounds every month based on 100,000 users, which could reach hundreds of millions of pounds in cost savings every year – cost savings that would be spent on directly improving patient care and frontline services.

The government is creating a more efficient NHS by harnessing technology while cutting waste and duplication. NHS productivity for acute trusts increased by 2.7% between April 2024 and March 2025, exceeding the government’s 2% year-on-year target set in the 10 Year Health Plan.

…Currently, over one million online Teams meetings take place across the NHS each month. With Microsoft 365 Copilot, 83,333 hours in note-taking time could be saved every month. Another 13,200 hours per month could be saved.

The AI personal assistant could also save the health service 271,000 hours a month by summarising complex and long email chains for clinicians and staff. More than 10.3 million emails are sent in the NHS each month.

Reducing the administrative burden on NHS staff frees up valuable time that can be redirected towards patient care and clinical activities as the health service undergoes the largest digital transformation in its history.

«

Could they… send fewer emails? But this feels like a reasonable replacement. Nothing on analysis of X-rays or similar.

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ChatGPT’s Atlas: the browser that’s anti-web • Anil Dash

Anil Dash:

»

When I first got Atlas up and running, I tried giving it the easiest and most obvious tasks I could possibly give it. I looked up “Taylor Swift showgirl” to see if it would give me links to videos or playlists to watch or listen to the most popular music on the charts right now; this has to be just about the easiest possible prompt.

The results that came back looked like a web page, but they weren’t. Instead, what I got was something closer to a last-minute book report written by a kid who had mostly plagiarized Wikipedia. The response mentioned some basic biographical information and had a few photos. Now we know that AI tools are prone to this kind of confabulation, but this is new, because it felt like I was in a web browser, typing into a search box on the Internet. And here’s what was most notable: there was no link to her website.

I had typed “Taylor Swift” in a browser, and the response had literally zero links to Taylor Swift’s actual website. If you stayed within what Atlas generated, you would have no way of knowing that Taylor Swift has a website at all.

Unless you were an expert, you would almost certainly think I had typed in a search box and gotten back a web page with search results. But in reality, I had typed in a prompt box and gotten back a synthesized response that superficially resembles a web page, and it uses some web technologies to display its output. Instead of a list of links to websites that had information about the topic, it had bullet points describing things it thought I should know. There were a few footnotes buried within some of those response, but the clear intent was that I was meant to stay within the AI-generated results, trapped in that walled garden.

During its first run, there’s a brief warning buried amidst all the other messages that says, “ChatGPT may give you inaccurate information”, but nobody is going to think that means “sometimes this tool completely fabricates content, gives me a box that looks like a search box, and shows me the fabricated content in a display that looks like a web page when I type in the fake search box”.

And it’s not like the generated response is even that satisfying.

«

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

iRobot, which makes the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner, says it may soon go bust unless it gets a bailout or buyer. CC-licensed photo by Patrick 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. That sucks. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Elon Musk launches Grokipedia, an AI-powered Wikipedia rival • The Washington Post

Will Oremus and Faiz Siddiqui:

»

Elon Musk on Monday launched an early version of Grokipedia, an online encyclopedia written by AI, only for the site to stop working soon after.

The project, which the billionaire has touted as a less biased alternative to the venerable online resource Wikipedia, was visible to the public for about an hour before it began blocking visitors. Musk and his social media company, X, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

When it first went live Monday afternoon, the site resembled Wikipedia in style and format, with articles on topics such as ChatGPT, Diane Keaton and the 2026 FIFA World Cup. But it appeared significantly smaller, more opaque in its workings — and more right-leaning in how it framed some articles.

Grokipedia’s entry on gender, for instance, began with the sentence: “Gender refers to the binary classification of humans as male or female based on biological sex….” Wikipedia’s starts with: “Gender is the range of social, psychological, cultural, and behavioral aspects of being a man (or boy), woman (or girl), or third gender.”

Musk’s own Grokipedia entry differed strikingly from the Wikipedia page on the same subject. It described some of his pursuits in breathless terms, saying his pushes for artificial intelligence “emphasize AI safety through truth-oriented development rather than heavy regulation” and that certain releases “releases reflect xAI’s rapid iteration, with Musk highlighting Grok’s design for maximal truth-seeking and reduced censorship,” citing xAI’s own website to make that point.

On the section about Musk’s work in the U.S. DOGE Service, it included an error regarding Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who left the group before it became part of Trump’s administration in January: “Post-departure, the initiative emphasized sustained, less aggressive efficiencies, with Ramaswamy assuming a more prominent role.”

«

Google tried this – remember Google Knol? No? Launched in 2007, abandoned in 2011. I don’t think this will catch on either. Wikipedia has its problems, but it isn’t going anywhere.
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Apple reportedly put cameras in Real Madrid’s stadium to test Vision Pro broadcast • UploadVR

David Heaney:

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Spain’s OKDiario claims that Apple installed more than 100 cameras in Real Madrid’s stadium to privately test broadcasting to Vision Pro.

If you’re an American reading this who doesn’t know much about what you call “soccer”, here’s some context: Real Madrid is one of the most successful clubs of all time, and has signed some of the best players of all time, including both Ronaldos, Zinedine Zidane, and David Beckham. In the year 2000, FIFA even officially declared Real Madrid “Club of the Century”.

In November last year, OKDiario first reported that the president of Real Madrid, Florentino Pérez, wanted to let fans watch games in immersive VR, hoping to court a company “like Apple” as the partner. Pérez called the concept “infinite stadium”.

Now, almost a year later, OKDiario released a new report claiming that Apple is installing more than 100 cameras at Santiago Bernabéu Stadium, Real Madrid’s home, to conduct tests during the Wednesday match against Juventus.

We should note that there’s no confirmation from Apple or Real Madrid in the article, and 100 immersive cameras would seem like overkill, costing millions of dollars. It’s possible the outlet is wrong about the exact number, or perhaps that many of the cameras are for tracking the players for a tabletop view similar to what the NBA rolled out to Vision Pro earlier this year, not just an immersive view.

«

Promising: Apple has to do more of this – a lot more – if it’s going to entice owners to use and non-owners to buy Vision Pros. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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What really doomed Napoleon’s army? Scientists find new clues in DNA • 404 Media

Becky Ferreira:

»

Of all the classic blunders, the most famous is getting involved in a land war in Asia (source: The Princess Bride). Napoleon Bonaparte’s troops learned this lesson the hard way during their disastrous retreat from Moscow at the wintry tail of 1812, which claimed the lives of 300,000 soldiers—more than half of the French army—largely from exposure and disease.  

While the epic death toll has been notorious for centuries, the exact pathogens responsible for the losses have remained a matter of debate. Contemporaneous reports from the field suggested that typhus and trench fever commonly afflicted the army. But when scientists sequenced DNA from the teeth of 13 soldiers, they did not find the bacteria that causes those diseases.

Instead, the results revealed the presence of “previously unsuspected pathogens” that suggest paratyphoid fever and relapsing fever were major killers during the mad rush from Moscow, according to a new study.  

“Throughout Napoleon’s Russian campaign, paratyphoid or typhoid fever was not mentioned in any historical sources of our knowledge, likely due to…nonspecific and varied symptoms,” said researchers led by Rémi Barbieri of Institut Pasteur in Paris. “Our study thus provides the first direct evidence that paratyphoid fever contributed to the deaths of Napoleonic soldiers during their catastrophic retreat from Russia.”

The team noted the sample size of 13 soldiers, whose remains were exhumed from a mass grave of French troops in Vilnius, Lithuania, is too small to make sweeping judgments. It’s possible that DNA analysis on other remains would reveal the presence of typhus, trench fever, and other pathogens.

“A reasonable scenario for the deaths of these soldiers would be a combination of fatigue, cold, and several diseases, including paratyphoid fever and louse-borne relapsing fever,” the team added. “While not necessarily fatal, the louse-borne relapsing fever could significantly weaken an already exhausted individual.”

The study also speculated that these poor soldiers suffered from consumption of contaminated beets, based on a contemporaneous report from the French army physician J.R.L. de Kirckhoff.

«

If you really want to know what eating contaminated beets does to you, the article’s there. Perhaps for after breakfast.
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Why are AI companies suddenly opening up coffee shops? • San Francisco Standard

Zara Stone:

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A few weeks ago, the San Francisco-based AI company Perplexity made a surprising move: It opened a coffee shop in South Korea. 

At Café Curious in the fancy Seoul neighborhood of Cheongdam-dong, an AI DJ picks the music customers hear, but nothing else immediately gives away that this café is a brand play for an artificial intelligence company. Human baristas, not robots, serve the iced Americanos. The store’s merch is Perplexity-branded, but the hats and sweatshirts look like any other coffee-shop swag. 

The first hint that this place is run by an AI company comes at checkout, when guests are asked via touchscreen if they’re Perplexity Pro subscribers. A “yes” earns them 50% off drinks; a “no” triggers a QR code for a one-month free trial of the $20 service.

The café is part of a growing trend among AI companies to use physical spaces to reach customers, with coffee as the lure. Along with Perplexity, Anthropic and Notion have also added coffee pop-ups to their brand-building playbook.

In early October, Anthropic ran a weeklong pop-up promoting its Claude chatbot inside former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter’s Air Mail Newsstand (opens in new tab) in New York, offering free coffee and swag to over 5,000 guests. The baseball caps emblazoned with the word “thinking” became a hot-ticket item (opens in new tab), with customers sharing them on social media for a certain kind of cred. (One person even claimed (opens in new tab) they flew to NYC just to get the hat.)

…When patrons at the Seoul café bring their beverages to the downstairs seating area, they will notice a podcast studio and a single computer opened to the Perplexity search engine. This is the real point of the place, it seems: to get people to try the AI service.

The café wasn’t Perplexity’s first coffee push, either. Its Curiosity Café truck rolled through New York in June for that city’s Tech Week, offering free coffee to Perplexity users, and last year it launched a Perplexity-branded coffee bean line (opens in new tab) available at the company’s online merch store. (The Seoul café, curiously, does not use Perplexity beans.)

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iRobot stock drops 30% after Roomba maker warns buyer search stalled • CNBC

Annie Palmer:

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Shares of iRobot plunged more than 30% on Monday after the company warned its search for a buyer has hit a substantial roadblock and its financial condition remains dire.

The Roomba maker has been vying to sell itself since March, but last week, the only remaining potential buyer withdrew from the process following a “lengthy period of exclusive negotiations,” iRobot disclosed in a regulatory filing.

iRobot’s future has remained uncertain after Amazon abandoned its planned $1.7bn acquisition of the company in January 2024, citing regulatory scrutiny.

Since then, iRobot has struggled to generate cash and pay off debts, and in March warned there’s “substantial doubt” about its ability to stay in business.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy called regulators’ efforts to block the deal a “sad story,” arguing it would’ve allowed iRobot to scale and compete against rapidly growing rivals, such as China-based Anker, Ecovacs and Roborock.

«

“…we have no sources upon which we can draw additional capital at this time”, the SEC filing says plaintively. It can’t pay its manufacturer. It’s quite a collapse. Revenues in Q2 (to the end of June) were $127m, but it lost $27m. It’s been shrinking – in revenue and units shipped – for the past two years.

Maybe there just isn’t an amazing market for robot vacuums.

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Ads likely coming to Apple Maps next year • Extremetech

Devesh Beri:

»

Apple is preparing to bring ads to Apple Maps search in 2026, according to Mark Gurman’s “Power On” newsletter. Rather than displaying searched locations in order of proximity or relevance, Apple Maps will allow businesses to pay for their names to appear at the top of the list. Gurman says the move is part of Apple’s larger plan to increase advertising across iOS.

Supposedly, Apple will use AI to ensure that sponsored Maps results are actually relevant to users. Gurman also says he’s told that the new version of Maps “will have a better interface than what Google and other companies offer inside of mapping services.” It will be interesting to see what changes Apple will bring to an app that otherwise remains relatively stable.

Gurman indicates the potential for consumer backlash, noting that some users “are already unhappy that the iPhone has been turned into a digital billboard for services like AppleCare+, Apple Music, Apple TV, and Fitness+” despite any given iPhone’s high upfront cost.

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This is a supremely bad idea. Is Apple that short of a few bob that it needs to do this? For Google Maps, OK, advertising is Google’s principal source of revenue. But Apple? Not at all. A classic example of what Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification”.
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Google Home is hallucinating fictional identities • Android Authority

Matt Horne:

»

With Halloween week upon us, it probably isn’t the best time for your smart home to start suggesting that people you aren’t familiar with have been wandering your property. However, a couple of Reddit users claim their Google Home devices have started describing people they don’t know.

According to a post on the r/googlehome subreddit, a user’s Nest camera described an activity summary saying “Michael was seen taking out the trash,” even though no one by that name lives there. When the user asked about it, Google’s assistant reportedly replied that its camera “can identify faces even if you haven’t explicitly named them,” and that it had spotted “Michael” between October 26 and 27. The user said they’d never entered that name into the system, but the actions described were what he himself had done. He found the response “pretty creepy.”

While one commenter in the thread chirped up with a Halloween joke about it being Michael Myers, others shared similar oddities. One person said their Google Home randomly reminded them to take out the trash, denied ever doing so, and then insisted they must be mistaken, prompting the joke that it was an example of Google gaslighting. Another claimed that his device reported that his friend David had visited and vacuumed the living room. The user has a friend by that name, but that person hadn’t visited, and no one had vacuumed.

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We aren’t really surprised, are we?
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Nike’s new sneaker contains an exoskeleton to boost your leg performance • Futurism

Victor Tangermann:

»

Nike has shown off an intriguing new sneaker that it claims is the “world’s first powered footwear system.”

The project, dubbed “Project Amplify,” is essentially an exoskeleton for your lower leg and foot, strapping an ankle movement-augmenting motor, drive belt, and rechargeable battery to a carbon fiber-reinforced sneaker.

The goal, it says, is to provide an “unparalleled boost to anyone who wants to move,” while “creating a new future for running, jogging and walking.”

Nike compared its project to “how electric bikes have made it easier to ride farther and more frequently,” an intriguing comparison seemingly intended to emphasize that this isn’t an accessibility play, like other more fully-featured exoskeletons, intended only for those with limited mobility.

But besides causing even more drama on Strava, where cheating scandals on leaderboards involving e-bikes have become all too common, we’re not convinced Project Amplify will catch on in the mainstream. Nike has already garnered a reputation for outlandish concepts, most notably its “Back to the Future”-inspired self-lacing shoes — which, as you can tell from nobody around you wearing them, never really took off.

“The Amplify makes your 5K PR feel like a casual trot, and a casual trot feel like a gentle stroll,” GQ‘s Calun Marsh wrote after taking a pair for a spin.

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OK, but in that case you might as well take a bike, or a car. Certainly could be useful for people with mobility issues, though.
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Bosses and employees battle over AI at video game giant Electronic Arts • Business Insider

Sarah Needleman:

»

At Electronic Arts, maker of “The Sims,” “Madden NFL,” and several other megapopular video-game franchises, leadership has spent the past year urging its nearly 15,000 employees to use AI for just about everything — from creative projects like cranking out code and concept art to managerial work like scripting conversations with direct reports about sensitive topics such as pay and promotions, Business Insider has learned.

Employees in some areas of the business are expected to complete multiple AI training courses, use AI tools daily to accelerate their work, and view generative AI as a “thought partner,” internal documents show. One sample chatbot prompt advises managers on how to talk to a direct report whose performance is negatively affecting business results but who believes otherwise. Another guides employees on how to phrase constructive questions when a sought-after promotion is denied.

Some Electronic Arts staffers who spoke with Business Insider under the condition of anonymity say the AI tools they’re encouraged to use, including the company’s in-house chatbot ReefGPT, produce flawed code and other so-called hallucinations that they need to correct. Others say that creative staff are expected to train AI programs on their own work, and that they fear the technology will ultimately slash demand for talent, such as character artists and level designers.

A spokesman for Electronic Arts declined to comment for this story.

One recently laid-off Electronic Arts employee, who held a senior quality-assurance design position, says that AI was able to perform a key part of his job — reviewing and summarizing feedback from hundreds of play testers. He suspects that this was at least partly why he was among about 100 of his colleagues who were let go this past spring from the company’s Respawn Entertainment studio.

While the AI divide plays out across corporate America and beyond, it’s especially fraught in creative fields like the video-game industry. In a survey of 3,000 video-game creators, nearly a third of respondents said generative AI was having a negative impact on the sector, a 12-point increase from 2024. About half said they were very concerned about the ethics of generative AI in game development, up from 42% last year.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A new study has made a 3D reconstruction of a quadrillion connections in the human brain – equivalent to a cubic mm of tissue. CC-licensed photo by Rev314159 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. Makes you think. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Myanmar military detains 2,000 people in raid at cybercrime center • AP News

Grant Peck:

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Myanmar’s military has shut down a major online scam operation near the border with Thailand, detaining more than 2,000 people and seizing dozens of Starlink satellite internet terminals, state media reported Monday.

Myanmar is notorious for hosting cyberscam operations responsible for bilking people all over the world. These usually involve gaining victims’ confidence online with romantic ploys and bogus investment pitches. The centres are infamous for recruiting workers from other countries under false pretences, promising them legitimate jobs and then holding them captive and forcing them to carry out criminal activities.

Scam operations were in the international spotlight last week when the United States and Britain enacted sanctions against organizers of a major Cambodian cyberscam gang, and its alleged ringleader was indicted by a federal court in New York.

According to a report in Monday’s Myanma Alinn newspaper, the army raided KK Park, a well-documented cybercrime centre, as part of operations starting in early September to suppress online fraud, illegal gambling, and cross-border cybercrime. It published photos displaying seized Starlink equipment and soldiers said to be carrying out the raid, though it was unclear when exactly they were taken.

KK Park is located on the outskirts of Myawaddy, a major trading town on the border with Thailand in Myanmar’s Kayin state. The area is only loosely under the control of Myanmar’s military government, and also falls under the influence of ethnic minority militias.

Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun, the spokesperson for the military government, charged in a statement Monday night that the top leaders of the Karen National Union, an armed ethnic organization opposed to army rule, were involved in the scam projects at KK Park.

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It’s quite possible that the military shut down an operation that wasn’t paying enough money to the junta. Or the good version: the military actually does care about Myanmar’s reputation and the wellbeing of the people in the centres. Regrettably, it’s easier to believe the former.
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Sora allows people to make ‘fetish’ content using other people’s faces • Business Insider

Katie Notopoulos:

»

We need to talk about something uncomfortable when it comes to Sora 2 — OpenAI’s new video-making app that I’ve truly enjoyed using.

Looking at some of the videos people have made — starring me — a little red light went off in my mind: this looks like fetish content.

Here’s what happened. A few days into playing around with Sora, I noticed an unsettling video someone had made of me. I’ve allowed anyone to make “cameos” using my face. (You don’t have to do this: You can choose settings that make your likeness private, or open to just your friends — but I figured, why not? And left my likeness open to everyone, just like Sam Altman.)

I found a stranger had made a video where I appeared pregnant. A quick look at the user’s profile, and I saw that this person’s entire Sora profile was made up of this genre — video after video of women with big, pregnant bellies. I recognized immediately what this was: fetish content.

Like I said, I’d been having a lot of fun on Sora, letting friends and even strangers make silly videos with my face. But the idea that someone was making a video that had some potential sexual gratification element made me feel fairly icked out.

Over the next week or so, I noticed a few more videos that I immediately recognized from years of poking around the underbelly of the internet as niche fetishes: belly inflation videos where my stomach inflated massively, Violet Beaugregard-style, or giantess videos where I and two other women towered over a cityscape (and another where we were miniature). Some of these accounts make these kinds of videos with purely AI-generated women, not cameos of real people — I found a bunch of accounts like this dedicated to making vore, foot worship, crushing, and other niche, non-nude fetishes.

«

People (well, men) are weird. Some are deeply weird. So it’s really lazy – and negligent – of Sora not to have imagined this would happen (are there not enough other examples, in other generation formats?) and at least offered warnings?
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a16z-backed startup sells thousands of ‘synthetic influencers’ to manipulate social media as a service • 404 Media

Emanuel Maiberg:

»

A new startup backed by one of the biggest venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), is building a service that allows clients to “orchestrate actions on thousands of social accounts through both bulk content creation and deployment.” Essentially, the startup, called Doublespeed, is pitching an astroturfing AI-powered bot service, which is in clear violation of policies for all major social media platforms. 

“Our deployment layer mimics natural user interaction on physical devices to get our content to appear human to the algorithims [sic],” the company’s site says. Doublespeed did not respond to a request for comment, so we don’t know exactly how its service works, but the company appears to be pitching a service designed to circumvent many of the methods social media platforms use to detect inauthentic behavior. It uses AI to generate social media accounts and posts, with a human doing 5% of “touch up” work at the end of the process. 

On a podcast earlier this month, Doublespeed cofounder Zuhair Lakhani said that the company uses a “phone farm” to run AI-generated accounts on TikTok. So-called “click farms” often use hundreds of mobile phones to fake online engagement of reviews for the same reason. Lakhani said one Doublespeed client generated 4.7 million views in less than four weeks with just 15 of its AI-generated accounts. 

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But a16z always backs good things like.. er, crypto? Of course it’s up to the social media companies to shut it down.
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Neato’s cloud is shutting down, leaving its robovacs stuck in manual mode • The Verge

Stevie Bonifield:

»

Two years after US-based Neato Robotics closed up shop in 2023, its robot vacuum cleaners have reached the end of the road (or rather, hallway). Users are receiving emails notifying them that their Neato robovacs will no longer have access to cloud services, meaning they can’t be controlled through the robots’ MyNeato app anymore.

In an email obtained by The Verge, Neato Robotics explained the decision to users, stating, “Since Neato ceased operations in 2023, Vorwerk [which acquired Neato in 2017 – Overspill Ed] has continued maintaining the Neato cloud platform to honor the original five-year service promise. However, cybersecurity standards, compliance obligations, and regulations have advanced in ways that make it no longer possible to safely and sustainably operate these legacy systems.”

The end of cloud support means Neato’s robovacs will now only work in manual mode, meaning no more customizing your routines or controlling your robot from the MyNeato app.

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Strange that a cloud service is needed for an app to connect to a vacuum cleaner that is literally metres away. Local Wi-Fi not good enough? What magic does the server do? Anyway, another smart home service bites the..
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Lithium price crash hits mining towns in Argentina, Chile, Bolivia • Rest of World

David Feliba:

»

Tolar Grande, a windswept settlement perched at 11,500 feet above sea level in northern Argentina, once received little more than a trickle of visitors. Then, in the late 2010s, hostels in the lithium-rich town began filling up with workers at mining companies, while the handful of small eateries shifted from serving the occasional tourist to feeding miners.

“Mining absorbed almost everyone,” Marta Ríos, who runs the civil registry in Tolar Grande, home to around 300 people, told Rest of World. “At first it was strange to see trucks all the time, buses full of workers — suddenly, there was no unemployment.”

As demand for electric vehicles soared, the so-called lithium triangle — spanning northern Argentina, Chile, and southern Bolivia — became the beating heart of the energy transition. Home to nearly half the world’s known lithium resources, the region drew a flood of foreign investors eager to secure “white gold,” as well as workers from across the country keen to cash in on the boom. The output of some of these mines ultimately ends up in batteries for Toyota, Hyundai, and Ford. 

But after peaking in late 2022, lithium prices have fallen sharply as supply outpaced demand with a weakening Chinese economy and slower EV sales growth. Large operators scaled back investment and cut staff, leaving locals who had redirected their businesses to serve the industry scrambling to find new clients or new work altogether. 

“In many of these remote towns, there’s no alternative economy,” Martín Fellner, a lawmaker in Jujuy, one of Argentina’s largest lithium-exporting provinces, told Rest of World. “Communities themselves [are] asking for more mining projects because without them, there are no formal jobs, no decent salaries.”

…The price of lithium has plummeted roughly 80% from its 2022 peak, with prices currently hovering at around $10,000 per ton. The impact on mining operations worldwide has been swift: In Australia, the world’s top producer, companies have cut jobs and shelved projects. In the U.S., large lithium ventures have been delayed or cancelled as investors weigh the risks.

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3D reconstruction of human brain fragment offers tiny glimpse of neuronal intricacy • Psychiatric News

Richard Karel:

»

The one cubic millimeter sample—approximately the size of a single sesame seed—was extracted during a surgical procedure to treat refractory epilepsy.

…The current effort mapped out more than one quadrillion voxels of cortical tissue. (A voxel is a three-dimensional cubic analog of a pixel).

The sample extended through all layers of the cortex. The scientists were able to reconstruct images of thousands of neurons and more than 100 million synaptic connections. Among the novel findings were the discovery of a previously unrecognized class of directionally oriented neurons in deep layers, and what they described as “very powerful and rare multisynaptic connections between neurons throughout the sample.”

In their discussion, the authors acknowledged the challenges facing the use of such data to create connectomes that can be clearly correlated with human behavior. Some of the anomalies observed in this brain fragment—such as some neuronal fibers called axons curling into extensive spirals—may be unique to the individual or may be associated with the neuropathology or pharmacotherapy of epilepsy, the authors said. Further, human experience, as well as genetics, alter neural circuits, which presents the challenge of meaningfully comparing neural circuits between human brains that have been shaped by different experiences.

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The photos are utterly amazing. When people say the human brain is the most complex structure in the universe, you can believe them. We now have genomics, proteomics and connectomics.
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US student handcuffed after AI system apparently mistook bag of chips for gun • The Guardian

Guardian staff:

»

Taki Allen was sitting with friends on Monday night outside Kenwood high school in Baltimore and eating a snack when police officers with guns approached him.

“At first, I didn’t know where they were going until they started walking toward me with guns, talking about, ‘Get on the ground,’ and I was like, ‘What?’” Allen told the WBAL-TV 11 News television station.

Allen said they made him get on his knees, handcuffed and searched him – finding nothing. They then showed him a copy of the picture that had triggered the alert.

“I was just holding a Doritos bag – it was two hands and one finger out, and they said it looked like a gun,” Allen said.

Baltimore county high schools last year began using a gun detection system using school cameras and AI to detect potential weapons. If it spots something it believes to be suspicious, it sends an alert to the school and law enforcement officials.

In a letter to school families obtained by WBAL TV 11 News, the school wrote: “We understand how upsetting this was for the individual that was searched as well as the other students who witnessed the incident. Our counselors will provide direct support to the students who were involved in this incident and are also available to speak with any student who may need support.”

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I wonder what sort of support the counsellors will provide? “Here’s how to avoid being targeted by an AI system next time: sit stock still without doing anything”?
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Record-breaking CO₂ rise shows the Amazon is faltering — yet the satellite that spotted this may soon be shut down • The Conversation

Paul Palmer and Liang Feng:

»

Atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) rose faster in 2024 than in any year since records began – far faster than scientists expected.

Our new satellite analysis shows that the Amazon rainforest, which has long been a huge absorber of carbon, is struggling to keep up. And worryingly, the satellite that made this discovery could soon be switched off.

Systematic measurements of CO₂ in the atmosphere began in the late 1950s, when the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii (chosen for its remoteness and untainted air) registered about 315 parts per million (ppm). Today, it’s more than 420ppm.

But just as important is the rate of change. The annual rise in global CO₂ has gone from below 1ppm in the 1960s to more than 2ppm a year in the 2010s. Every extra ppm represents about 2 billion tonnes of carbon – roughly four times the combined mass of every human alive today.

…Until recently, we could only monitor CO₂ through stations on the ground like the one in Hawaii. That changed with satellites such as Nasa’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO-2), launched in 2014.

The OCO-2 satellite analyses sunlight reflected from Earth. Carbon dioxide acts like a filter, absorbing specific wavelengths of light. By observing how much of that specific light is missing or dimmed when it reaches the satellite, scientists can accurately calculate how much CO₂ is in the atmosphere.

…Yet, despite being fit and healthy and having enough fuel to keep it going until 2040, OCO-2 is at risk of being shut down due to proposed Nasa budget cuts.

We wouldn’t be blind without it – but we’d be seeing far less clearly. Losing OCO-2 would mean losing our best tool for monitoring changes in the carbon cycle, and we will all be scientifically poorer for it.

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UK court loss could cost Apple £1.5bn • BBC News

Chris Vallance:

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Apple could be forced to pay up to £1.5bn in damages after losing a collective legal action court case brought on behalf of 36 million UK iPhone and iPad users, both consumers and businesses.

The Competition Appeals Tribunal (CAT) found that Apple had abused its dominant position by charging “excessive and unfair” prices in the form of the 30% commission, which it usually levies both on app sales and in-app payments.

The claimants argued that this meant that consumers had been overcharged for apps, subscriptions to apps, and when buying digital content in apps. Apple said it strongly disagreed with the ruling and would appeal.

The case was pursued by academic Dr Rachael Kent. Her lawyers argue it is the first such claim brought under the UK’s collective action regime to have succeeded. Dr Kent called the decision a “landmark victory, not only for App Store users, but for anyone who has ever felt powerless against a global tech giant”.

“Today’s ruling sends a clear message: no company, however wealthy or powerful, is above the law.”

The tribunal’s decision comes a day after the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) designated both Apple and Google as having “strategic market status” – effectively saying they have a lot of power over mobile platforms.

It means the competition watchdog could force Apple to allow rivals to operate their own app stores on iPhones in the UK. This would be a significant change to Apple’s “closed system”, where apps can only be downloaded from its own App Store.

Apple maintains that because commission is only charged on the sale of paid apps and on in-app purchases, 85% of apps on the App Store do not pay any commission at all. And it points to its introduction of a programme for small businesses where the usual 30% rate of commission is halved. In a statement sent to the BBC, Apple wrote that it strongly disagreed with the ruling, which took a flawed view of the “thriving and competitive app economy”.

…According to lawyers Hausfeld & Co. LLP, who represented Dr Kent, “any UK user of an iPhone or iPad who purchased paid-for apps, subscriptions or made in-app purchases of digital content within the UK storefront of the App Store at any point since 1 October 2015 is potentially entitled to compensation from Apple”.

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(For reference: I’m a member of a class representative partnership that’s bringing a case against Google before the CAT. The partnership is represented by Hausfeld.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In the US, you can give up your house keys for a facial recognition unlocking system – if you want to give ADT $40 per month. Deal? CC-licensed photo by the Original Muddog 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 11 links for you. Unsecured. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

ADT Plus review: home security gets smarter • The Verge

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:

»

My front door unlocks automatically as I walk up to it, and the home security system disarms itself — no code or app required. The system has recognized me using the Google Nest Doorbell’s Familiar Faces, and confirmed I’m me using my phone’s location. The dual-factor authentication triggers the automatic disarming and unlocking, so all I have to do is walk inside.

This hands-free Auto Unlock experience is powered by ADT Plus, the newest security system from America’s oldest security company. It features the usual hardware — a base, sensors, and various accessories — but represents a major upgrade from fumbling for keys or racing to silence a beeping keypad.

I hate that “beeping pressure” home alarm systems put on you, so I tend to avoid turning them on. But ADT’s Auto Unlock, along with other automated features the system offers, has meant I’ve found myself using it much more consistently than any security system I’ve tested. That alone makes it better.

A home that responds to you automatically, without requiring you to bark commands, punch in codes, or fiddle with apps, is the future of the smart home. The most surprising part is that this is coming from a legacy security company like ADT (with help from Google). Less surprising is that you have to pay ADT prices for this convenience.

…ADT Plus is only compatible with Google Home. Also, if you’re averse to high-cost monitoring packages, you should look elsewhere — for the full feature set I tested, ADT Plus will set you back $40 a month.

…The Nest doorbell specifically helps power Auto Unlock and a unique feature called Trusted Neighbor. This uses the same principles as Auto Unlock, but instead of only allowing in residents of the home, it can unlock the doors (and deactivate the alarm) for any approved person based on set parameters.

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Like the idea of face unlock. Very much dislike the idea of paying that amount for it. Proximity locks (with RFID) seem like a good idea, except cars which use those get stolen – so maybe not. Keys might not be high tech, but they’re really robust, impossible to copy except in specific places, cheap, and proximity dependent.
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Review: The Real North Korea, by Andrei Lankov • Mr and Mrs Psmith’s Bookshelf

John Psmith:

»

In the 1980s, Japan experienced a crisis of disinformation. For years, there had been mysterious disappearances of Japanese people with no known history of mental illness, drug addiction, or gambling debts. All kinds of people — men and women, young and old, just suddenly vanishing without a trace. Many theories were put forward to explain the puzzle (for instance, some believed it was alien abductions), but the most widespread, pernicious, and dangerous view was that North Korea was responsible. There were people who claimed to have actually seen teams of North Korean commandos lurking on beaches, nabbing random passers-by, and bundling them into waiting submersibles just off the coast. This was obviously crazy. Products, no doubt, of atavistic xenophobia and reactionary sentiments. The Japanese media, government, and academic authorities put a lot of effort into refuting this dangerous disinformation throughout the 1980s and 1990s…which made them look real silly when in 2002 Kim Jong-Il issued a formal apology for the abductions and ordered the surviving captives returned to Japan.

This has always felt like the ur-North Korea story to me, because it has a little bit of everything. First of all, it’s delightfully madcap — they KIDNAPPED RANDOM PEOPLE on BEACHES using SUBMARINES and they did it for DECADES. Second, it’s full of bizarre irony. The North Koreans got away with this scot-free until, in a gesture of goodwill and altruism designed to improve relations with Japan, they fessed up and tried to make things right…at which point everything blew up in their faces and had the exact opposite effect.

…It’s estimated that around 80% of all goods and services in North Korea are provided in secret and in shadow. It’s capitalism as an extremophile species of lichen, colonizing the cracks and crevices of the official society, and keeping the whole system afloat. They are actually speedrunning the entire history of primitive accumulation leading to investment leading to the joint stock corporation. Large (secret) transportation companies now exist in North Korea and maintain unofficial roads forming an unofficial transit network. The trucks and buses are smuggled in from abroad, then “donated” to various government agencies, which then lease them back in exchange for kickbacks. In this way, they’ve reinvented the idea of funding government operations through corporate taxation in a hilariously roundabout way. There is a booming private restaurant scene.

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This is a fabulous review which, despite being full of detail, really makes you want to read the book. Though the review’s comments about the author are worth turning up for too. (Via Andrew Brown.)
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Google and Check Point nuke massive YouTube malware network • The Register

Carly Page:

»

Google has taken down thousands of YouTube videos that were quietly spreading password-stealing malware disguised as cracked software and game cheats.

Researchers at Check Point say the so-called “YouTube Ghost Network” hijacked and weaponized legitimate YouTube accounts to post tutorial videos that promised free copies of Photoshop, FL Studio, and Roblox hacks, but instead lured viewers into installing infostealers such as Rhadamanthys and Lumma. 

The campaign, which has been running since 2021, surged in 2025, with the number of malicious videos tripling compared to previous years. More than 3,000 malware-laced videos have now been scrubbed from the platform after Check Point worked with Google to dismantle what it called one of the most significant malware delivery operations ever seen on YouTube.

Check Point says the Ghost Network relied on thousands of fake and compromised accounts working in concert to make malicious content look legitimate. Some posted the “tutorial” videos, others flooded comment sections with praise, likes, and emojis to give the illusion of trust, while a third set handled “community posts” that shared download links and passwords for the supposed cracked software.

“This operation took advantage of trust signals, including views, likes, and comments, to make malicious content seem safe,” said Eli Smadja, security research group manager at Check Point. “What looks like a helpful tutorial can actually be a polished cyber trap. The scale, modularity, and sophistication of this network make it a blueprint for how threat actors now weaponise engagement tools to spread malware.”

Once hooked, victims were typically instructed to disable antivirus software, then download an archive hosted on Dropbox, Google Drive, or MediaFire. Inside was malware rather than a working copy of the promised program, and once opened, the infostealers exfiltrated credentials, crypto wallets, and system data to remote command-and-control servers.

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Beginning to wonder about this “internet” thing. Also, it had been there since 2021?
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Offshoring automation: Filipino tech workers power global AI jobs • Rest of World

Michael Beltran:

»

Inside a multistory office building in Manila’s financial district, around 60 young men and women monitored and controlled artificial intelligence robots restocking convenience store shelves in distant Japan. 

Occasionally, when a bot dropped a can, someone would don a virtual-reality headset and use joysticks to help recover it. 

The AI robots are designed by Tokyo-based startup Telexistence, and run on Nvidia and Microsoft platforms. Since 2022, the company has deployed the machines in the back rooms of over 300 FamilyMart and Lawson stores in Tokyo. It is also planning to use them soon in 7-Elevens.

The bots are remotely monitored 24/7 in Manila by the employees of Astro Robotics, a robot-workforce startup. Japan faces a worker shortage as its population ages, and the country has been cautious about expanding immigration. Telexistence’s bots offer a workaround, allowing physical labor to be offshored, Juan Paolo Villonco, Astro Robotics’ founder, told Rest of World. This lowers costs for companies and increases their scale of operations, he said. 

“It’s hard to find workers to do stacking [in Japan],” said Villonco. “If you get one who’s willing to do it, it’s going to be very expensive. The minimum wage is quite expensive.”

It’s easy to get young, tech-savvy Filipinos to operate the robots, he said. Each tele-operator, called a “pilot,” monitors around 50 robots at a time, an employee told Rest of World. Most workers in this article requested anonymity to safeguard their jobs.

The bots are usually autonomous, but occasionally — about 4% of the time — they mess up. Perhaps they drop a bottle, which rolls away. Getting the AI bot to recover it by mimicking the human grip perfectly — the friction, the feel of metal in the hand — is one of the more challenging problems in robotics. That’s when a pilot steps in.

Astro Robotics’ tele-operators are benefiting from an AI- and automation-related boom in IT-service work and tech jobs in the Philippines, even as layoffs hit similar workers in richer countries.

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This is one of the weirdest piece of telepresence, mixed with robotics, mixed with globalisation, that I’ve ever come across.
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Inside Apple’s quest to add a heart-rate sensor and full workout tracking into AirPods Pro 3 | TechRadar

Jacob Krol:

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The heart-rate sensor in the AirPods Pro 3 is not Apple’s first foray into this sensor type. Apple initially offered such a sensor when the Apple Watch first launched in 2015, so as Waydo explained, “it was really cool here to get to bring everything we learned over more than a decade of that work to this very different form factor.”

[Apple director of health sensing Steve] Waydo’s team at Apple has been working on heart-rate sensing algorithms since the original Apple Watch, and that 10-year journey proved helpful in the development of the new sensor – but it’s not one for one. “The heart rate sensor in the AirPods Pro uses invisible infrared light. We pulse it up to 256 times per second, and we take that data and we fuse it together with what we’re getting from the onboard accelerometers to measure the blood flow in your ears,” explained Waydo, who noted that’s where the final measurement for heart rate comes from.

This differs from the Apple Watch, which uses green LEDs. Here, the sensors are invisible, and there are either two sources or a single, as AirPods Pro 3 can provide a heart-rate reading with just one bud in or with both in. With the latter, the algorithms work in real time to pick the best, most accurate source.

On those algorithms, the base for how AirPods track heart rate comes from the Apple Watch, but Waydo explained that given these are much smaller, the team “had to shrink those algorithms down to fit within the processing and memory constraints, so that we could deliver the same kind of speed, efficiency, and battery life that our users really love.”

To get there, the team had to ensure the new sensor would work for everyone. As Waydo explained, “there’s a huge amount of variation in ear geometry that we had to tackle, both through fit and through our studies to understand if we could get great signals across everybody who’s going to use these AirPods.”

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There’s a lot more to this; the AirPods Pro being able to measure heart rate is quite a feat.
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How the brain moves from waking life to sleep (and back again) • Quanta Magazine

Yasemin Saplakoglu:

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To fall asleep, “everything has to change,” said Adam Horowitz (opens a new tab), a research affiliate in sleep science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The flow of blood to the brain slows down, and the circulation of cerebrospinal fluid speeds up. Neurons release neurotransmitters that shift the brain’s chemistry, and they start to behave differently, firing more in sync with one another. Mental images float in and out. Thoughts begin to warp.

“Our brains can really rapidly transform us from being aware of our environments to being unconscious, or even experiencing things that aren’t there,” said Laura Lewis (opens a new tab), a sleep researcher at MIT. “This raises deeply fascinating questions about our human experience.”

It’s still largely mysterious how the brain manages to move between these states safely and efficiently. But studies targeting transitions both into and out of sleep are starting to unravel the neurobiological underpinnings of these in-between states, yielding an understanding that could explain how sleep disorders, such as insomnia or sleep paralysis, can result when things go awry.

Sleep has been traditionally thought of as an all-or-nothing phenomenon, Lewis said. You’re either awake or asleep. But the new findings are showing that it’s “much more of a spectrum than it is a category.”

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Not short, but very interesting, particularly about how you are more creative in the moments where you’re slipping over the edge into sleep.
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Man detained for protesting National Guard with Darth Vader theme sues • The Washington Post

Joe Heim:

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A District resident who was briefly detained and handcuffed in Washington DC last month for following an Ohio National Guard patrol while playing “The Imperial March” from Star Wars on his phone has filed a lawsuit saying his constitutional rights were violated.

The American Civil Liberties Union of DC filed the lawsuit Thursday in the US District Court for the District of Columbia on behalf of Sam O’Hara against an Ohio National Guard sergeant, four DC police officers and the District of Columbia. The suit said they had infringed on O’Hara’s First Amendment rights and violated DC law when they detained him on Sept. 11 on a public street in Northwest Washington.

The ACLU suit says that when O’Hara saw the National Guard members that day, he began walking behind them playing “The Imperial March” on his phone and recording them. It alleges that within two minutes, one of the Guard members “turned around and threatened to call the police officers to ‘handle’ Mr. O’Hara if he did not stop.”

O’Hara continued to play the song, also known as “Darth Vader’s Theme,” and the soldier called the DC police. When police arrived, the suit alleges, O’Hara was “tightly handcuffed” and detained for 15 to 20 minutes.

“Government conduct of this sort might have received legal sanction a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” the ACLU wrote in its filing. “But in the here and now, the First Amendment bars government officials from restraining individuals from recording law enforcement or peacefully protesting, and the Fourth Amendment (along with the District’s prohibition on false arrest) bars groundless seizures.”

A DC police spokesman said the department cannot comment on active litigation.

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I bet. The thing that authoritarians can’t bear is satire, because it’s not proper dissent, which they would know how to suppress. I do hope the ACLU demands that, in restitution, all of those involved have to sit a test on the First and Fourth Amendments while the Imperial March plays at full volume. Make it memorable.
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US accuses former L3Harris cyber boss of stealing and selling secrets to Russian buyer • TechCrunch

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai:

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The US government has accused a former executive at defense contractor L3Harris of stealing trade secrets and selling them to a buyer in Russia, according to court documents seen by TechCrunch. 

On October 14, the Department of Justice accused Peter Williams of stealing eight trade secrets from two unnamed companies. The DOJ made the allegation in a “criminal information” document, which, like an indictment, represents a formal accusation of alleged crimes.  

The document does not specify Williams’ relationship with the two companies or the types of trade secrets, nor does it name the alleged Russian buyer. 

TechCrunch has confirmed that the Williams mentioned in the document, which does not specify where he worked, is the former general manager at Trenchant, a division of L3Harris that develops hacking and surveillance tools for Western governments, including the United States.

Williams became Trenchant’s general manager on October 23, 2024, and he worked at Trenchant until August 21, 2025, per UK business records. Williams, a 39-year-old Australian citizen, resided in Washington DC, according to the court document.

Four former Trenchant employees had previously told TechCrunch that Williams, who was known inside the company as “Doogie,” had been arrested.  

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Does the company name “Trenchant” sound familiar? Well done – that’s the company from which a developer working on finding zero-day vulnerabilities was recently warned that he was being targeted with government spyware. There’s wheels within wheels on this.
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Tech’s love affair with Trump grows stronger by the day • TechPolicy.Press

Paul M. Barrett:

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Since the United States election in November 2024, the technology industry has distinguished itself in the race to capitulate to and enable the Trump administration. No gesture of obsequiousness or loyalty has been too great or trivial for the moguls of Silicon Valley.

In recent days:

• Representatives of Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft attended a White House dinner where the president thanked wealthy donors to his project of adding a 90,000-square-foot ballroom to the Executive Mansion
• Responding to administration demands, Meta, Apple, and Google restricted digital tools used by activists to flag sightings of masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents seeking to arrest immigrants allegedly lacking legal status
• Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, once seen as a progressive benefactor, said in an interview that he avidly supports President Trump and believed National Guard troops should be deployed to his hometown of San Francisco, over the objections of city leaders. (He has since apologized for beckoning the Guard.) Benioff’s company, meanwhile, reportedly has pitched ICE on using Salesforce’s artificial intelligence to help the agency staff up as it expands immigration raids and deportations.

…Why has Silicon Valley’s ardor for Trump, The Sequel been so intense? Tech CEOs’ business goals are part of the answer. Google, Meta, Apple and Amazon are all in the midst of federal antitrust litigation that they doubtless hope Trump may influence. Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, has billions of dollars in ongoing contracts with the US government and could benefit from closer federal ties.

…In some instances, tech companies are eager for Trump to fold their anti-regulatory agenda into his America First agenda — for example, by using US influence to reduce oversight by the European Union.

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It’s pure self-interest on the companies’ part, though also self-preservation – but it also looks like enabling a dictatorship. The photographs of the tech execs supping, with not very long spoons, at Trump’s table is strangely reminiscent of the leaders of German companies when they were called in by.. someone else, nearly a century ago.
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This ‘privacy browser’ has dangerous hidden features • WIRED

Matt Burgess:

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The Universe Browser makes some big promises to its potential users. Its online advertisements claim it’s the “fastest browser,” that people using it will “avoid privacy leaks” and that the software will help “keep you away from danger.” However, everything likely isn’t as it seems.

The browser, which is linked to Chinese online gambling websites and is thought to have been downloaded millions of times, actually routes all internet traffic through servers in China and “covertly installs several programs that run silently in the background,” according to new findings from network security company Infoblox. The researchers say the “hidden” elements include features similar to malware—including “key logging, surreptitious connections,” and changing a device’s network connections.

Perhaps most significantly, the Infoblox researchers who collaborated with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) on the work, found links between the browser’s operation and Southeast Asia’s sprawling, multibillion-dollar cybercrime ecosystem, which has connections to money-laundering, illegal online gambling, human trafficking, and scam operations that use forced labor. The browser itself, the researchers says, is directly linked to a network around major online gambling company BBIN, which the researchers have labeled a threat group they call Vault Viper.

The researchers say the discovery of the browser—plus its suspicious and risky behaviour—indicates that criminals in the region are becoming increasingly sophisticated.

…Tens of thousands of web domains, plus various command-and-control infrastructure and registered companies, are linked to Vault Viper activity, Infoblox researchers say in a report shared with WIRED. They also say they examined hundreds of pages of corporate documents, legal records, and court filings with links to BBIN or other subsidiaries. Time and time again, they came across the Universe Browser online.

“We haven’t seen the Universe Browser advertised outside of the domains Vault Viper controls,” says Maël Le Touz, a threat researcher at Infoblox. The Infoblox report says the browser was “specifically” designed to help people in Asia—where online gambling is largely illegal—bypass restrictions. “Each of the casino websites they operate seem to contain a link and advertisement to it,” Le Touz says.

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Not surprising, though, because we have already heard that these guys have stolen millions, perhaps billions from the scammed.
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Volkswagen warns of output stoppages amid Nexperia chip disruption • CNBC

Sam Meredith:

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German auto giant Volkswagen on Wednesday warned of temporary production outages citing China’s export restrictions on semiconductors made by Nexperia.

The update comes shortly after the German Association of the Automotive Industry (VDA), the country’s main car industry lobby, said the China-Netherlands dispute over Nexperia could lead to “significant production restrictions in the near future” if the supply interruption of chips cannot be swiftly resolved.

A spokesperson for Volkswagen told CNBC by email that while Nexperia is not a direct supplier of the company, some Nexperia parts are used in its vehicle components, which are supplied by Volkswagen’s direct suppliers.

“We are in close contact with all relevant stakeholders in light of the current situation to identify potential risks at an early stage and to be able to make decisions regarding any necessary measures,” a Volkswagen spokesperson said, noting that the firm’s production is currently unaffected. “However, given the evolving circumstances, short-term effects on production cannot be ruled out,” they added.

Last month, the Dutch government took control of Nexperia, a Chinese-owned semiconductor maker based in the Netherlands, in what was seen as a highly unusual move. The Dutch government seized control of the company, which specializes in the high-volume production of chips used in automotive, consumer electronics and other industries, citing fears the firm’s tech “would become unavailable in an emergency.”

China responded by blocking exports of the firm’s finished products, sparking alarm among Europe’s auto industry.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified