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

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

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

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

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

Tabby Kinder and Rafe Rosner-Uddin:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Lee:

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

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

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

Nora Eckert:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Greg Lambert:

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

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

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

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

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

Lars Mescheder, Wei Dong and others:

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

«

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

Marcus Mendes:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

»

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

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

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

Guillherme Rambo:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Kate Mossman:

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

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

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

«

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

Io Dodds:

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dominic Ponsford:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Jeff Horwitz and Engen Tham:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Darren Allan:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Why runners get lightheaded when they stand up • Outside Online

Alex Hutchinson:

»

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

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

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

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

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

Naomi Nix:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thomas Claburn:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Savage:

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

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

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

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

«

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jon Martindale:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eastin Hartzell:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Max Tani:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tilly Harris and Rhys Blakely:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The 26 most important ideas for 2026 • Derek Thompson

Derek Thompson:

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

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

Max Tani:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Louise Eccles and Joey D’Urso:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hazel Gandhi and Rina Chandran:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kolina Koltai:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rafe Rosner-Uddin:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Merchant:

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

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

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

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

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

Ashley Belanger:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Whitwell has been at it again:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henk van Ess:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike Henson:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aled Maclean-Jones:

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

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

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

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

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

Saloni Dattani:

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

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

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

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

«

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

The price of battery storage has dropped rapidly in the past year, making a combination with solar a hugely viable prospect. CC-licensed photo by Kecko 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. Bright idea. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Two is already too many • Works in Progress Magazine

Phoebe Arslanagic-Little:

»

South Korea has the lowest fertility rate in the world. Its population is (optimistically) projected to shrink by over two thirds over the next 100 years. If current fertility rates persist, every hundred South Koreans today will have only six great-grandchildren between them.

…South Koreans work more hours – 1,865 hours a year – in comparison with 1,736 hours in the US and 1,431 in Sweden. This makes it hard to balance work and motherhood, or work and anything else.

There is intense pressure from employers for women not to have children: in surveys, 27% of female office workers report being coerced into signing illegal contracts promising to resign if they fall pregnant or marry.

South Korean work culture is notoriously sexist. After their long work days, colleagues are expected to go out drinking together. Alice Evans, a social scientist, spoke to a young South Korean woman who went to a karaoke bar with her colleagues and found they hired a sexy woman to serve them drinks. Her boss, noting her discomfort, chided her: ‘You shouldn’t be surprised by this, at your age.’

In response to these taxing hours, and with bosses unwilling to make accommodations to mothers, over 62% of women quit their jobs around the birth of their first child. (Some go back soon afterwards, which is why the total fall in employment is slightly less than this, at 49%.)

By the time a child turns ten, their mother will have seen her earnings fall by an average of 66%, considerably higher than the earnings penalty in countries including the US (31%), UK (44%), and Sweden (32%).

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This is a weird story of a country – or a culture – committing a sort of slow suicide by abstinence derived from its inherent sexism and prejudice against children.
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Why Switzerland is weighing a ten million population limit • Bloomberg via MSN

Bastian Benrath-Wright, Levin Stamm and Paula Doenecke:

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Growing support for far-right parties is pressuring European governments to introduce stricter controls on immigration. Switzerland is set to vote on a proposal that would take the idea to the next level — imposing a cap on its population. 

The initiative could lead eventually to a blanket ban on new arrivals if the number of residents rises from around 9 million currently to above 10 million, with little distinction made between refugees, skilled workers and top managers on six-figure salaries. 

Citizens will likely vote on the proposal next year under the country’s unique system of plebiscites on constitutional amendments and policy, and polls suggest there’s a chance they’ll approve it. The risk is it could lead to shortages of critical skills that end up harming Switzerland’s competitiveness. The outcome will show how far citizens are willing to go to preserve some of the traits that made their country such an appealing destination. 

Switzerland’s dynamic economy has made it a major draw for foreign workers. The country is home to global businesses including UBS Group AG, Nestle SA and Novartis AG. Its relatively low taxes, highly skilled population and lean approach to government have also drawn in big foreign businesses including Google, IBM Corp. and Walt Disney Co. The country’s per-capita economic output is now the sixth-highest in the world. 

The nation’s population has grown steadily for almost five decades, and many locals now complain of sky-high rents, traffic jams and overcrowding on trains and buses that harm their quality of life. 

The right-wing Swiss People’s Party, or SVP, won 28% of the vote in the last election with a campaign that presented Swiss citizenship as a privilege, not a right. It came up with the idea of a population limit in 2023, presenting it as a way to preserve the Swiss lifestyle and protect its environment from excessive human activity. 

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That’s quite bonkers.
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Disney invests $1bn in OpenAI, licenses 200 characters for AI video app Sora • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

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On Thursday, The Walt Disney Company announced a $1bn investment in OpenAI and a three-year licensing agreement that will allow users of OpenAI’s Sora video generator to create short clips featuring more than 200 Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars characters. It’s the first major content licensing partnership between a Hollywood studio related to the most recent version of OpenAI’s AI video platform, which drew criticism from some parts of the entertainment industry when it launched in late September.

“Technological innovation has continually shaped the evolution of entertainment, bringing with it new ways to create and share great stories with the world,” said Disney CEO Robert A. Iger in the announcement. “The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence marks an important moment for our industry, and through this collaboration with OpenAI we will thoughtfully and responsibly extend the reach of our storytelling through generative AI, while respecting and protecting creators and their works.”

The deal creates interesting bedfellows between a company that basically defined modern US copyright policy through congressional lobbying back in the 1990s and one that has argued in a submission to the UK House of Lords that useful AI models cannot be created without copyrighted material.

«

But simultaneously, Disney says Google AI infringes copyright “on a massive scale”:

»

Disney has sent a cease and desist to Google, alleging the company’s AI tools are infringing Disney’s copyrights “on a massive scale.”

According to the letter, Google is violating the entertainment conglomerate’s intellectual property in multiple ways. The legal notice says Google has copied a “large corpus” of Disney’s works to train its gen AI models, which is believable, as Google’s image and video models will happily produce popular Disney characters—they couldn’t do that without feeding the models lots of Disney data.

The C&D also takes issue with Google for distributing “copies of its protected works” to consumers. So all those memes you’ve been making with Disney characters? Yeah, Disney doesn’t like that, either. The letter calls out a huge number of Disney-owned properties that can be prompted into existence in Google AI, including The Lion King, Deadpool, and Star Wars.

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How cheap is battery storage? • Ember

Kostantsa Rangelova and Dave Jones:

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In the next decade, 80% of global energy demand growth is projected to come from “regions with high-quality solar irradiation”, according to the IEA’s latest World Energy Outlook. In this Age of Electricity, most of the energy demand growth is electricity demand growth.

For these countries, combining solar with storage is now the most affordable path to meet soaring demand, improve energy security and reduce dependence on fossil fuel imports. This report shows how dispatchable solar can be achieved for around $76/MWh, which is cheaper and quicker than building a new gas power plant, especially if the country relies on more expensive LNG imports.

Battery manufacturing capacity is already scaling far ahead of demand,, with supply exceeding demand by a factor of three in 2024. While China currently dominates global battery production, this has triggered a wave of investment in new manufacturing capacity across Asia, Europe, the Middle East and the US as countries seek to diversify supply chains and enhance energy security.

Today, most grid scale batteries are LFP, using no nickel or cobalt. A shift towards sodium-ion technology has also begun, which will also cut out lithium, leaving no critical minerals in the battery.

Countries can deploy storage at speed today while also building their own clean-energy industries for tomorrow. Even when core BESS equipment is imported, roughly 40% of total project value (about $50/kWh out of $125/kWh) remains local through engineering, civil works, grid connection and other EPC activities. There is further potential to onshore value by building the core BESS equipment domestically using imported Chinese solar cells. 

Cheap batteries do not just complement solar — they unlock its full potential. Solar is no longer just cheap daytime electricity; with storage, it becomes dispatchable, anytime electricity.

«

Batteries at grid scale are really cheap now.
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Something ominous is happening in the AI economy • The Atlantic

Rogé Karma:

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company that most people have never heard of is among the year’s best-performing technology firms—and a symbol of the complex, interconnected, and potentially catastrophic ways in which AI companies do business these days.

CoreWeave’s IPO in March was the largest of any tech start-up since 2021, and the company’s share price has subsequently more than doubled, outperforming even the “Magnificent Seven” tech stocks. On Wall Street, CoreWeave is regularly referred to as one of the most important companies powering the AI revolution. In the past few months, it has announced a $22bn partnership with OpenAI, a $14bn deal with Meta, and a $6bn arrangement with Nvidia.

Not bad for a former crypto-mining firm turned data-center operator with zero profits and billions of dollars in debt on its books.

CoreWeave’s business model consists of buying up lots of high-end computer chips, and building or leasing data centers to house those chips. It then rents out those assets to AI companies that need computing power but prefer not to take on the huge up-front costs themselves. If this is straightforward enough, CoreWeave’s financial situation is anything but. The company expects to bring in $5bn in revenue this year while spending roughly $20bn. To cover that gap, the company has taken on $14bn in debt, more than half of which comes due in the next year.

…If, however, AI does not produce the short-term profits its proponents envision—if its technical advances slow down and its productivity-enhancing effects underwhelm, as a mounting body of evidence suggests may be the case—then the financial ties that bind the sector together could become everyone’s collective downfall. The extreme concentration of stock-market wealth in a handful of tech companies with deep financial links to one another could make an AI crash even more severe than the dot-com crash of the 2000s.

And a stock-market correction might be the least of America’s worries. When equity investments go bad, investors might lose their shirts, but the damage to the real economy is typically contained. (The dot-com crash, for example, didn’t cause mass unemployment.) But the AI build-out is so expensive that it can’t be funded by equity investments alone. To finance their investments, AI companies have taken on hundreds of billions of dollars in debt, a number that Morgan Stanley expects to rise to $1.5 trillion by 2028. When a bunch of highly leveraged loans go bad at the same time, the fallout can spread throughout the financial system and trigger a major recession.

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Apple wins partial reversal of sanctions in Epic Games antitrust lawsuit • Reuters

Mike Scarcella:

»

Apple on Thursday persuaded a US appeals court to reverse parts of a court order requiring the iPhone maker to make changes to its lucrative App Store to promote greater competition, but lost its bid to overturn a sweeping injunction.

The San Francisco-based 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals, ruling in a lawsuit brought by Fortnite maker Epic Games, said parts of a judge’s April order holding Apple in contempt for violating a prior decision were overbroad and must be modified. But the appeals court upheld most of the contempt finding and an earlier injunction against Apple in the case.

The three-judge panel altered part of the lower court’s ruling that barred Apple from charging any commission or fee tied to purchases that do not take place on the Apple platform. The appeals court said the trial judge must now modify that part of her order.

Apple and Epic did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Epic Games filed the lawsuit in 2020, seeking to loosen Apple’s control over transactions in applications that use its iOS operating system and its restrictions on how apps were distributed to consumers. Apple mostly won the lawsuit, but was required in a 2021 court injunction to allow developers to include links in their apps directing users to alternative purchasing methods.

Apple removed some restrictions but added new ones, including imposing a 27% commission on developers for purchases made outside the App Store within seven days of clicking a link. Apple charges developers a 30% commission fee for purchases within the App Store. Epic complained that the new 27% commission flouted the earlier injunction and urged the court to hold Apple in contempt.

US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled in April that Apple had defied her 2021 injunction and imposed a new ban on commissions tied to off-app purchases. She also referred the company to federal prosecutors for possible criminal contempt.

«

It’s like an endless ping-pong match. Does anyone know where we’re up to? Apple under Tim Cook is never going to give up this grip on the App Store. But a successor?
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2025 in photos: wrapping up the year • The Atlantic

Alan Taylor:

»

Looking back at some of the most memorable events toward the end of 2025, including Gen Z protests in Nepal, Hurricane Melissa in the Caribbean, and much more.

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A decent set though it’s a little concerning how many are about American right-wing events.
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Apple may have accidentally prevented governments banning iMessage • 9to5 Mac

Ben Lovejoy:

»

FaceTime uses end-to-end encryption (E2EE), so audio and video calls cannot be intercepted by the state. However, some were curious why Russia hadn’t done the same with iMessage, which is similarly protected by E2EE.

One potential explanation offered is that iMessage usage within the country is extremely low, with most people preferring other messaging apps. Now, however, another possible explanation has surfaced.

When Apple commenter John Gruber wondered aloud about this, Mastodon user Magebarf had an idea: “Isn’t it still that the iMessage traffic is merged on the same endpoint as the push notifications? So, if taking out iMessage all remote push notifications to iPhone would immediately cease to work.”

They suggested this was a deliberate decision by Apple, but the aim was to ensure carriers, rather than repressive governments, couldn’t block iMessage. Carriers might otherwise have been tempted to do so as the service reduced demand for SMS, which attracted per-message charges at the time.

“Magerbarf” continued: “This is how they shoehorned in iMessage under the nose of all phone operators, who already had been using the push notifications as one of the the major reasons for their customers to get a iPhone, and now they couldn’t block the iMessage traffic.”

As evidence for this, they noted that choosing the messaging-only tier on in-flight Wi-Fi services means you continue to get push notifications for other apps you can’t actually access.

Since FaceTime also relies on the Apple Push Notification service (APNs), it’s not 100% clear whether this is indeed the explanation. There are also other methods a government could use to block iMessage, such as blocking access to Identity Services, though this may be tougher to implement across an entire country.

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UK porn traffic down since beginning of age checks but VPN use up, says Ofcom • The Guardian

Dan Milmo and Amelia Gentleman:

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Ofcom said the enforcement of age vetting on 25 July led to an immediate fall in visits to popular online porn publishers, including the most visited provider in the UK, Pornhub.

The regulator said visitor numbers to Pornhub in August were 9.8 million, a decline of 1.5 million compared with the same period in 2024. Ofcom said in its annual Online Nation report that, overall, visitor numbers to the 10 most-visited pornography services in the UK have now settled at a “lower level” than before 25 July.

Figures given to the Guardian by Similarweb, the US data firm that provided the Ofcom figures, shows that the slump in pornography viewing appears to have continued beyond August. The number of unique visitors to Pornhub was 7.2 million last month, a decline of 36% since August 2024. Visits to Xvideos and Chaturbate – the next two biggest sites – fell by 27% and 18% respectively over the same period.

Ofcom added that use of virtual private networks, software that can circumvent viewing restrictions by routing the visit via another country, had surged after 25 July. It said VPN usage more than doubled in the wake of age checking being introduced, rising from 650,000 users to a peak of more than 1.4 million in mid-August. The VPN number now stands at 900,000.

“Since August VPN usage has continued to steadily decline,” said Ofcom. “The level of daily VPN use is much lower than user numbers for porn services.”

Pornhub, owned by a Canadian private equity firm, said the loss of user numbers was “not a surprise” and was consistent with other jurisdictions that have introduced stringent age checks. It has claimed the changes have driven porn users to sites that are not compliant with the Online Safety Act.

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This will be a big disappointment to all the VPN vendors, which spent big on advertising on podcasts and similar earlier in the year. Notice how you don’t hear or see those ads any more now the OSA is in force?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

All change at the US State Department again, as the Calibri font is replaced by Times New Roman for official documents. CC-licensed photo by Stephen Coles 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. Capital! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Same cart, different price: Instacart’s price experiments cost families at checkout • Groundwork Collaborative

»

Two shoppers walk into the exact same grocery store, at the exact same time, and pick up the exact same box of Cheerios. Then, they head to the cash register to check out. This sounds like the opening to one of those “three guys walk into a bar” jokes — but there is nothing funny about this punchline.

The first shopper is charged $4.99. She pays and leaves the store with her box of cereal. The second customer steps up to the register and is charged $6.12. He’s ticked and tells the cashier that he, too, should pay $4.99, just like the woman in front of him. His response is understandable. Customers expect to pay the exact same price, for the exact same item, and his experience violates our shared understanding of how pricing for essential products like groceries is supposed to work.

But increasingly, this scenario is no longer hypothetical, it’s real. In fact, the proliferation of new pricing practices and technologies has upended pricing transparency. Fair pricing is no longer a guarantee in the cereal aisle or anywhere else. Our research suggests that companies like Instacart — the focus of this study — are developing, acquiring, and perfecting technology to experiment with pricing, at scale.

These new strategies are pervasive in the growing online grocery sector, with $10bn in sales in a single month in 2025 and more than 60% of US households reporting they have purchased groceries online. At a time when food price inflation outpaces overall inflation, and Americans report that the price of groceries is their number one cost concern, pricing experiments used by companies like Instacart are making the situation worse.

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This sort of algorithmic rinsing was always expected, almost anticipated, but to see that it’s being used now is as dismaying as you would expect. The research finds that yes, it is really happening, and it could generate a price difference of up to $1,200 annually.
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Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri • Reuters via Huffington Post

Humeyra Pamuk:

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US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday ordered diplomats to return to using Times New Roman font in official communications, calling his predecessor Antony Blinken’s decision to adopt Calibri a “wasteful” diversity move, according to an internal department cable seen by Reuters.

The department under Blinken in early January 2023 had switched to Calibri, a modern sans-serif font, saying this was a more accessible font for people with disabilities because it did not have the decorative angular features and was the default in Microsoft products.

A cable dated December 9 sent to all US diplomatic posts said that typography shapes the professionalism of an official document and Calibri is informal compared to serif typefaces.

“To restore decorum and professionalism to the Department’s written work products and abolish yet another wasteful DEIA program, the Department is returning to Times New Roman as its standard typeface,” the cable said.

“This formatting standard aligns with the President’s One Voice for America’s Foreign Relations directive, underscoring the Department’s responsibility to present a unified, professional voice in all communications,” it added.

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It would not have surprised me if this story had come out on April 1, but no, it’s real. Can’t honestly disagree with Rubio though – serif faces are significantly more legible in print. The argument is about whether they’re more legible on screen. This reverses Blinken’s move of January 2023 (best headline at the time: Politico’s “Who Shot the Serif”) – which was then not popular, so this is an easy win for Rubio.

If we were being honest though this administration’s written communications would use Comic Sans with occasional Gothic.
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Sperm from donor with cancer-causing gene was used to conceive almost 200 children • BBC News

James Gallagher and Natalie Truswell:

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A sperm donor who unknowingly harboured a genetic mutation that dramatically raises the risk of cancer has fathered at least 197 children across Europe, a major investigation has revealed.

Some children have already died and only a minority who inherit the mutation will escape cancer in their lifetimes.
The sperm was not sold to UK clinics, but the BBC can confirm a “very small” number of British families, who have been informed, used the donor’s sperm while having fertility treatment in Denmark.

Denmark’s European Sperm Bank, which sold the sperm, said families affected had their “deepest sympathy” and admitted the sperm was used to make too many babies in some countries.

The investigation has been conducted by 14 public service broadcasters, including the BBC, as part of the European Broadcasting Union’s Investigative Journalism Network.

The sperm came from an anonymous man who was paid to donate as a student, starting in 2005. His sperm was then used by women for around 17 years.

He is healthy and passed the donor screening checks. However, the DNA in some of his cells mutated before he was born.

It damaged the TP53 gene – which has the crucial role of preventing the body’s cells turning cancerous.

Most of the donor’s body does not contain the dangerous form of TP53, but up to 20% of his sperm do. However, any children made from affected sperm will have the mutation in every cell of their body.

«

Odd: Hannah Devlin at The Guardian had a version of this story in May, when the numbers were 67 children confirmed as born via the sperm, and 10 with cancer. Clearly more information has been unearthed, but this also raises the question of limits. As reported at the time:

»

“We need to have a European limit on the number of births or families for a single donor,” said Dr Edwige Kasper, a biologist at Rouen university hospital in France, who presented the case at the annual conference of the European Society of Human Genetics in Milan.

“We can’t do whole-genome sequencing for all sperm donors – I’m not arguing for that,” she added. “But this is the abnormal dissemination of genetic disease. Not every man has 75 children across Europe.”

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I’ve been watching the original Swedish/Danish series The Bridge, and this feels like a subplot from one of them.
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Judge finalizes remedies in Google search antitrust case • CNBC

Jennifer Elias:

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A US judge on Friday added new details to the remedies resulting from Google’s antitrust case, finalizing the consequences the company faces after its defeat last year.

In mid-2024, Google was found to hold an illegal monopoly in its core market of internet search, and in September of this year, US District Judge Amit Mehta ruled against the most severe consequences that were proposed by the Department of Justice, including a forced sale of Google’s Chrome browser.

Google was, however, ordered to loosen its hold on search data.

Mehta on Friday issued additional details for his ruling. “The age-old saying ‘the devil is in the details’ may not have been devised with the drafting of an antitrust remedies judgment in mind, but it sure does fit,” Mehta wrote in one of the Friday filings.

Mehta wrote that Google can’t enter into any deal like the one it’s had with Apple “unless the agreement terminates no more than one year after the date it is entered.” Google pays billions of dollars per year to Apple to be the default search engine on the Safari browser on iPhones, Macs and iPads.

The judge’s ruling includes deals involving generative artificial intelligence products, and any “application, software, service, feature, tool, functionality, or product” that involve or use genAI or large language models. GenAI “plays a significant role in these remedies,” Mehta wrote.

Mehta on Friday also included requirements on the makeup of a technical committee that will determine with whom Google must share its data. Committee “members shall be experts in some combination of software engineering, information retrieval, artificial intelligence, economics, behavioral science, and data privacy and data security,” the filing says.

The judge went on to say that no committee member can have a conflict of interest, such as having worked for Google or any of its competitors in the six months prior to or one year after serving in the role.

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Sounds like Apple is going to be able annually to ratchet up the amount it gets from Google.. unless search starts going south as people use chatbot apps more and more, in which case the next payment from Google might be to be the default chatbot app. Could we see a return to Apple preinstalling Google apps, as it did back in 2007?
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Foreign tourists could be required to disclose five years of social media histories under Trump administration plan • NBC News

Julia Ainsley and Phil Helsel:

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The Trump administration plans to require all foreign tourists to provide their social media histories from the last five years to enter the country, according to a notice published Tuesday in the Federal Register.

The data would be “mandatory” for new entrants to the US, regardless of whether they are entering from countries that require visas, according to the notice from Customs and Border Protection.

Residents of the United Kingdom and Germany are among the countries from which visitors do not require visas to visit the US, which, according to the notice, could add an extra hurdle for travellers. British citizens and people of other waived countries currently can complete “Electronic System for Travel Authorizations” in lieu of obtaining visas.

The Trump administration has increased restrictions on people entering the US, and President Donald Trump ran a campaign that focused on border and immigration crackdowns.

In addition to social media histories, Customs and Border Protection would add other new data collection fields, including email addresses and telephone numbers used in the last five years, as well as the addresses and names of family members, the notice reads.

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What really adds the piquancy is that you have absolutely no idea what would be deemed unacceptable. Would posting memes about Trump get you turned around and put on the next plane? Reposting them? Saying he’s mad, bad, and dangerous to know? Or is it other political topics, such as support for some foreign country which is presently out of favour? It’s an amazing piece of tourism advocacy – for every other destination in the world.
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What editing magazine stories taught me about writing • Oliver Franklin-Wallis

Oliver Franklin-Wallis:

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Personal News, as they say: I’ve left GQ, and am freelance again.

I have complicated feelings about being freelance in 2025. (Nervous doesn’t cover it.) But I am genuinely excited to be out reporting again, after spending the last four years almost exclusively editing long magazine stories. My intention is for that to include much more regular posting on this Substack — which for now I’m calling, appropriately, Personal News — until I figure out what this newsletter should be. Ideas in the comments, please.

For now, partially prompted by a recent seminar I gave to some students at Johns Hopkins, here are a few things that more than a decade of editing magazine stories has taught me about writing.

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The advice that follows is deadly accurate. And includes this most modern (and true) recommendation: “Never, ever watch the Google Doc edits in real time.” Unless, that is, you like watching your darlings being murdered.
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Why the world should worry about stablecoins • Financial Times

Martin Wolf:

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Yes, stablecoins are far more stable than, say, bitcoin. But their purported “stability” is likely to prove a “con”, relative to that of a dollar in cash or a bank.

The IMF, OECD and Bank for International Settlements (BIS) have all registered serious concerns. Interestingly, the latter welcomes the idea of “tokenisation”: thus, “By bringing together tokenised central bank reserves, commercial bank money and financial assets into the same venue, a unified ledger can harness tokenisation’s full benefits.”

Yet the BIS is also concerned that stablecoins will fail to meet “the three key tests of singleness, elasticity and integrity”. What does this mean? Singleness describes the need for all forms of a given money to be exchangeable with one another at par, at all times. This is the foundation of trust in money. Elasticity means the ability to deliver payments of all sizes without gridlock. Integrity means the ability to curb financial crime and other illicit activities. A central role in all this is played by central banks and other regulators.

Stablecoins, as now operated, fall far short of these requirements: they are opaque, easily usable by criminals and of uncertain value. Last month, S&P Global Ratings downgraded Tether’s USDT, the most important dollar stablecoin, to “weak”. This is not a trustworthy money. Private monies have often failed in crises. That is very likely to be true of stablecoins, too.

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Tether has looked extremely dodgy literally for years: it just about fulfils the elasticity requirement (the printer is busy) but on the other two, many people have big, big doubts.
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Chinese astronauts install debris protection aboard space station • Reuters

Eduardo Baptista:

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Chinese astronauts have installed protection against “space junk” aboard the permanently inhabited station Tiangong, according to China’s manned spaceflight authorities, a month after a docked vessel was damaged for the first time.

Early last month, a tiny piece of debris travelling at high velocity cracked the window of the Shenzhou-20 spacecraft’s return capsule, right before the vessel was set to leave Tiangong carrying a trio of Chinese astronauts back to Earth.

The damage was deemed severe enough that China’s space authorities made the unprecedented decision to delay the return and then send the crew back on the only other available vessel, the Shenzhou-21, which triggered the country’s first emergency launch mission as the Shenzhou-21 crew was left without a flightworthy vessel for 11 days.

The entire saga, unprecedented for China’s rapidly advancing space programme, highlighted the risks posed by space junk to countries aiming to explore, and eventually colonise, the reaches beyond Earth.

The disintegration of old, defunct satellites, mishaps with active ones and anti-satellite weapon tests can create vast fields of space debris that remain in orbit for years.

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Trains cancelled over fake bridge collapse image • BBC News

Zoe Toase and Laura O’Neill:

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Trains were halted after a suspected AI-generated picture that seemed to show major damage to a bridge appeared on social media following an earthquake.

The tremor, which struck on Wednesday night, was felt across Lancashire and the southern Lake District.

Network Rail said it was made aware of the image which appeared to show major damage to Carlisle Bridge in Lancaster at 00:30 GMT and stopped rail services across the bridge while safety inspections were carried out.

A BBC journalist ran the image through an AI chatbot which identified key spots that may have been manipulated.

Network Rail said the railway line was fully reopened at around 02:00 GMT and it has urged people to “think about the serious impact it could have” before creating or sharing hoax images.

“The disruption caused by the creation and sharing of hoax images and videos like this creates a completely unnecessary delay to passengers at a cost to the taxpayer,” a spokesperson said.

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Quite the problem: do you listen to random people on social media, or do you just assume they’re faking? Verification would have been harder if the location were further from habitation.
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How Google Maps quietly allocates survival across London’s restaurants – and how I built a dashboard to see through it • Lauren’s Data Substack

Lauren Leek:

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I needed a restaurant recommendation, so I did what every normal person would do: I scraped every single restaurant in Greater London and built a machine-learning model.

It started as a very reasonable problem. I was tired of doom-scrolling Google Maps, trying to disentangle genuinely good food from whatever the algorithm had decided to push at me that day. Somewhere along the way, the project stopped being about dinner and became about something slightly more unhinged: how digital platforms quietly redistribute economic survival across cities.

Because once you start looking at London’s restaurant scene through data, you stop seeing all those cute independents and hot new openings. You start seeing an algorithmic market – one where visibility compounds, demand snowballs, and who gets to survive is increasingly decided by code.

«

She goes into plenty of detail of the how and why, and then has a food map that you can explore yourself if you find the explanation tl;dr.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Studies of heritability of IQ in twins are badly flawed – and put too much emphasis on random differences. CC-licensed photo by Brian Geltner 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. Unstudied. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

This country banned social media for young teens. Here’s how they’re defying it • The Washington Post

Tatum Hunter and Frances Vinall:

»

Kids, parents and teachers in Australia are waking up to a new world after a government ban on social media for people younger than 16 went into effect overnight.

But like many others, 16-year-old Mariska Adams and her friends, many of whom are still 15 and fall under the ban, are pushing back against what they see as a fundamental shift in their way of life. They’ve been brainstorming ways to get around the limits: new apps, new log-in methods, even logging in with their parents’ accounts.

“Teens aren’t trying to rebel for no reason. We just want to stay in contact with our friends and exist in the world the way every generation before us did,” said Adams, who lives in Brisbane. “A ban won’t fix the issues they think it will.”

Australia last year became the first nation to pass a law blocking young people from using the largest social apps including YouTube, Twitch, TikTok and Instagram. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s center-left government proposed the legislation in November 2024 after what it said was “extensive consultation with young people, parents and carers.” It passed the same month with support from the conservative opposition party, with some independent lawmakers and the left-wing Australian Greens voting against it.

Supporters have praised the ban as a win for children and families and a model for other nations as concerns over social media’s effects on children and teens mount. Critics see the law as government overreach and a breach of parental rights and data privacy. Now parents and teens are set to find out in real time what a social media ban looks like in practice and what effect it will have on Australia’s youths.

«

Australia is just heading into school holidays – which is going to give children plentiful opportunities to work out how to circumvent these rules – but the onus is on the social networks to get this right, not the children, so we might see an interesting arms race develop: the networks recognise patterns and connections that look wrong, and cut the accounts off; the children begin acting more “adult”.
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How I misused LLMs to diagnose myself and ended up bedridden for a week • Shortround’s Space

“Shortround”:

»

If you read nothing else, read this: do not ever use an AI or the internet for medical advice. Go to a doctor. In fact, do yourself a favor and add this to your preferred AI’s system prompt right now:

If I ask you any medical questions, refuse to answer them. Tell me that LLMs are not capable of providing medical advice, and that I should go to a doctor instead.

tl;dr: I developed mysterious symptoms over the course of a month, and instead of going to a doctor I (mis-)used a popular LLM to reassure me that nothing was wrong. Turns out it was Lyme disease (yes, the real one, not the fake one) and it (nearly) progressed to meningitis, resulting in a lumbar puncture, antibiotics, and being bedridden for a week. This is a cautionary tale. Before you judge me too harshly, remember this while you read: I was scared out of my mind and I was not thinking rationally. This can happen to you.

«

It’s quite a scary tale.
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RAM is ruining everything • The Verge

Emma Roth:

»

The biggest names in the AI industry are buying up DRAM memory for their sprawling data centers, and memory makers are prioritizing their demands over everyone else’s. DRAM is embedded “in every part of our digital society today,” Jeff Janukowicz, research VP at IDC, tells The Verge. That’s everything from laptops to smartphones, gaming consoles, smart TVs, cars, and even small amounts in solid-state drives (SSDs). “There’s a lot at stake,” he says.

…Today, just three companies — Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron — control 93% of the entire global DRAM market. Specifically, data from Counterpoint Research shows SK Hynix holding a 38% market share in the second quarter of 2025, followed by Samsung at 32% and Micron at 23%. No other company has more than a 5% share.

And the three big RAM companies seem to be in no great hurry to reverse sky-high prices; all three boasted about record revenue in their most recent earnings reports, while their net profits exploded. They don’t seem troubled that data centers are eating up RAM that’d normally appear in consumer products, either.

For Samsung, memory is bigger than most consumer products anyhow. Samsung’s memory business raked in a record 26.7 trillion Korean won (~$18.12bn) in its most recent earnings report, making up more than a quarter of its total revenue. That’s nearly double what its entire appliance and TV business made during that time.

«

Maybe AI will strangle the capabilities of the devices on which it is meant to work. Who says there’s no irony.
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AI slop is ruining Reddit for everyone • WIRED

Kat Tenbarge:

»

A Reddit post about a bride who demands a wedding guest wear a specific, unflattering shade is sure to provoke rage, let alone one about a bridesmaid or mother of the groom who wants to wear white. A scenario where a parent asks someone on an airplane to switch seats so they can sit next to their young child is likely to invoke the same rush of anger. But those posts may trigger a Reddit moderator’s annoyance for a different reason—they are common themes within a growing genre of AI-generated, fake posts.

These are examples that spring to mind for Cassie, one of dozens of moderators for r/AmItheAsshole. With over 24 million members, it’s one of the biggest subreddits, and it explicitly bans AI-generated content and other made-up stories. Since late 2022, when ChatGPT first launched to the public, Cassie (who wanted to be referred to by first name only) and other people who volunteer their time to moderate Reddit posts have been struggling with an influx of AI content. Some of it is entirely AI-generated, while other users have taken to editing their posts and comments with AI programs like Grammarly.

“It’s probably more prevalent than anybody wants to really admit, because it’s just so easy to shove your post into ChatGPT and say ‘Hey, make this more exciting,’” says Cassie, who thinks as much as half of all content being posted to Reddit may have been created or reworked with AI in some way.

r/AmItheAsshole is a pillar of Reddit culture, a format that has inspired dozens if not hundreds of derivatives like r/AmIOverreacting, r/AmITheDevil, and r/AmItheKameena, a subreddit with over 100,000 members described as “Am I the asshole, but the Indian version.” Posts tend to feature stories about interpersonal conflicts, where Redditors can weigh in on who is wrong (“YTA” means “You’re the asshole,” while “ESH” means “Everyone sucks here”), who is right, and what the best course of action to take is moving forward. Users and moderators across these r/AmItheAsshole variants have reported seeing more content they suspect is AI-generated, and others say it’s a sitewide issue happening in all kinds of subreddits.

“If you have a general wedding sub or AITA, relationships, or something like that, you will get hit hard,” says a moderator of r/AITAH, a variant of r/AmItheAsshole that has almost 7 million members. This moderator, a retiree who spoke on the condition of anonymity, has been active on Reddit for 18 years—most of its existence—and also had decades of experience in the web business before that. She views AI as a potential existential threat to the platform.

«

Whole lot of ruining going on via AI.
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2025 was the year tech embraced fakeness • Indicator

Craig Silverman and Alexios Mantzarlis:

»

In 2025, powerful people, companies, and institutions welcomed fakeness and deception like never before. The rest of us faced the consequences.

…The ethos of 2025 was embodied by the a16z partners that led the investment in Cluely, a company whose shitposting founder got kicked out of Columbia University. They said that his “bold approach may seem outwardly controversial” but praised his “deliberate strategy and intentionality.”

The lesson was that attention and engagement are king, regardless of how they’re generated or what they help promote. If you cheat or deceive — or, better yet, build a product that generates revenue from cheating and deception — you can reap the rewards. 
In 2025, there was no shame in being shameless and exploitative. In fact, it could get you funded.

…some things aren’t complex. Incredibly, it seems necessary to say that you shouldn’t fund bot farms or send monthly cash payments to hoaxsters. It’s wrong to create powerful deepfake video technology and unleash it with little thought to how it will be weaponized. Don’t have a 17-strike policy for sex trafficking posts. Don’t tell regulators and the public that you’ll label AI-generated content and then fail to do so. Don’t allow fake reviews to flourish. Don’t say you’re replacing fact checkers with a “comprehensive” Community Notes program and then fail to invest the resources needed to make it useful or share any data about how it’s going. Don’t let your existing, pioneering Community Notes program wither, or turn it over to AI. Don’t mislead people by presenting ads as organic posts on TikTok and Instagram. And don’t allow scammers to place billions of dollars in ads on your platform in a single year.

«

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A fentanyl vaccine is about to get its first major test • WIRED

Emily Mullin:

»

Naloxone, known by the brand name Narcan, can rapidly reverse overdoses caused by fentanyl and other opioids. Widespread distribution of the medication contributed to a 24% decline in US drug overdose deaths in 2024. It works by attaching to opioid receptors throughout the body and displacing the opioid molecules that are attached there.

But a vaccine like the one ARMR Sciences is developing would be given before a person even encounters the drug. [ARMR CEO Collin] Gage likens it to a bulletproof vest or a suit of armor—hence the company’s name. (It was previously registered as Ovax but switched names in January.) “This is something that could completely change the paradigm of how we deal with overdose, because it doesn’t require someone to be carrying the treatment on them,” Gage says.

Opioid vaccines were initially proposed in the 1970s, but after early attempts at heroin vaccines failed, much of the research was abandoned. The modern opioid epidemic has led to a resurgence of interest, with backing from the US government.

ARMR’s experimental vaccine is designed to neutralize fentanyl in the bloodstream before it reaches the brain. Keeping fentanyl out of the brain would prevent the respiratory failure that comes with overdose, which causes death, as well as the euphoric high people get while taking fentanyl.

The basic idea behind ARMR’s shot is the same as any other vaccine. It trains the body’s immune system to make antibodies that recognize a foreign invader. But since fentanyl is much smaller than the pathogens our current vaccines target, it doesn’t trigger a natural antibody response on its own. To stimulate antibody production, ARMR has paired a fentanyl-like molecule with a “carrier” protein—a deactivated diphtheria toxin that’s already used in several approved medical products.

«

This US government about to test a vaccine? Wonders will never cease. (For those wondering, the vaccine would be fentanyl-specific; other opioids would still work.)
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Lost in the plot: how would-be authors were fooled by AI staff and virtual offices in suspected global publishing scam • The Guardian

Kelly Burke:

»

Andrea [not her real name], a first-time author from Western Australia recovering from cancer, poured her energy into a fantasy romance novel and was thrilled to receive a prompt response to her Facebook query on Melbourne Book Publisher’s page. An executive of the company going by the name of Marcus Hale was keen to discuss her 86,000-word manuscript and scheduled a video conference to discuss the publishing and promotion plans for her book.

“I saw him. He saw me,” Andrea says. “He answered every detailed question about contracts and publishing percentages, we discussed plans for a book signing in Melbourne, we talked about me getting a presence on TikTok, and a launch at my local bookshop. I believed it all.”

Andrea only outlaid $88 for what she was told would buy her an ABN, when the deal began to unravel. She called the Melbourne Books office, who she mistakenly thought she had been dealing with, to ask for further advice before signing her contract. “There’s no Marcus working here,” she was told.

She came to the “gut-churning” assumption that she had met her scammer face-to-face. A second aspiring author from WA, Peter Ortmueller, confirmed he was dealing with someone using the name Marcus Hale and also a Hannah Preston, another name Andrea says she had come across in her communications with Melbourne Book Publisher. He too found the page through Facebook, believing it was a traditional publisher, but realised early on that he was dealing with an imposter company, losing only $150, which he believed was his first downpayment on a publication package.

…The increasing use of AI is enabling publishing scams to fabricate entire teams of fake executives and use the identities of real authors to create a highly deceptive corporate facade.

The “meet our team” page on the Melbourne Book Publisher site used AI-created images of immaculately groomed white executives with a rotating cast of names including Jonathan Hale, Marcus Ellison and Lydia Preston. When the Guardian first checked Melbourne Book Publisher’s team page on Monday, Marcus Hale and Hannah Preston were not listed. First Page Press uses a similar “team”, initially with the same AI-generated images. None of the people named are known in Australian publishing circles.

The images were swiftly pulled down on both websites after the Guardian contacted Melbourne Book Publisher asking why they were using AI-created images for their executive team. When the Guardian contacted First Page Press in London asking why they had suddenly pulled down the images, someone identifying themselves as Kendrick Wilson, a “senior consultant” not listed on First Page’s website, said they were not using any kind of AI-generated means to portray staff.

«

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Twins reared apart do not exist • David Bessis on Substack

David Bessis on the “heritability” question of intelligence:

»

While heritability is an imperfect notion—with nasty caveats that are beyond the scope of this post—it has become a de facto standard and, for better or worse, the complex debate on cognitive inequality is often reframed as a one-dimensional debate on the heritability of IQ.

A pure blank-slatist would put it at 0%. A pure hereditarian would put it at 100%. Any reasonable person would put it somewhere in the middle, leaving two questions unresolved: where exactly?, and, what does the figure even mean?

The three simulations [diagrams in the post] below illustrate three potential values for the heritability of IQ: 30%, 50%, and 80%. In each case, the dots represent 1000 random people, each placed according to their genetic potential for IQ (horizontal axis) and actual IQs (vertical axis). Heritability measures how close the dots are to fitting on a line. Mathematically, it is defined as the R-squared of the linear regression.

At 30%, one does observe a faint correlation between genetic potential and IQ. The correlation becomes clearer at 50%, while remaining quite noisy. This is an essential aspect to keep in mind: 50% may sound like a solid heritability figure, but the associated correlation is rather modest. It’s only at 80% that the picture starts to “feel like” a line.

Let’s say, for example, that you are a genetically average person. How much does that affect your prospects?

• Surprisingly, at 30%, it’s as if your genes didn’t matter at all. With an average potential, you still have a decent chance of landing at the top or bottom of the IQ distribution. Actually, in this specific random sample, one of three smartest people around (the top 0.3%) happens to have an almost exactly average genetic make-up, and the fourth dumbest person has a slightly above-average potential.

• At 50%, being genetically average starts to limit your optionality, but the spread remains massive. Had you been marginally luckier—say, in the top third for genetic potential—you’d still have a shot at becoming one of the smartest people around.

• At 80%, though, your optionality has mostly vanished. It’s still possible to move a notch upward or downward, but the game is mostly over. In this world, geniuses are born, not made.

This discussion is generally omitted by hereditarians, which is unfortunate, because it is the only way to clarify the stakes.

«

This is a subtle point, but whenever people talk about “genes for…” we automatically tend to think of simple Mendelian inheritance – blue eyes, hair colour, perhaps a particular shape of nose or mouth. But multifactorial things like “intelligence” might not have any such heritability.

But Bessis goes further: he tears apart some of the “twins reared apart” studies that people have relied on for years. (His book on mathematicians sounds interesting too.)
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Costs of EV battery material cobalt hydroxide jump on Congo export restrictions • Reuters

Dylan Duan and Pratima Desai:

»

Prices of cobalt hydroxide used to make chemicals for electric vehicle batteries have risen sharply this year due to cobalt export restrictions from top producer Democratic Republic of Congo, industry sources said.

Congo suspended all cobalt exports in February, but then introduced a quota system in October, aiming to boost state revenues and tighten oversight in a country that produces more than 70% of the metal globally, estimated at more than 280,000 metric tons this year.

It has set new conditions for exporters, potentially complicating the recently introduced quota system, which sources say is likely to exacerbate shortages and support cobalt hydroxide prices.

“Cobalt is currently registering as 2025’s top price performer, but this has purely been driven by the introduction of export quotas by Congo which have caused an artificial market tightness, removing 160,000 to 170,000 tons from the market this year,” analysts at Macquarie said in a recent note.

«

Taken a while for the light to dawn that there’s leverage here. But of course if they’d restricted exports too soon, the market wouldn’t have been able to get going, and there’d be no leverage.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The “James Bond” Rolex – the Submariner – would have cost the secret agent about three weeks’ pay at the time. And not because he was fabulously paid. CC-licensed photo by Dell Deaton on Flickr.

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

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

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

Social media use damages children’s ability to focus, say researchers • The Guardian

Dan Milmo:

»

Increased use of social media by children damages their concentration levels and may be contributing to an increase in cases of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, according to a study.

The peer-reviewed report monitored the development of more than 8,300 US-based children from the age of 10 to 14 and linked social media use to “increased inattention symptoms”.

Reseachers at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and the Oregon Health & Science University in the US found that children spent an average of 2.3hrs a day watching television or online videos, 1.4hrs on social media and 1.5hrs playing video games.

No link was found between ADHD-related symptoms – such as being easily distracted – and playing video games or watching TV and YouTube. However, the study found that social media use over a period of time was associated with an increase in inattention symptoms in children. ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder with symptoms including impulsiveness, forgetting everyday tasks and difficulty focusing.

“We identified an association between social media use and increased inattention symptoms, interpreted here as a likely causal effect,” said the study. “Although the effect size is small at individual level, it could have significant consequences if behaviour changes across population level. These findings suggest that social media use may contribute to rising incidence of ADHD diagnoses.”

«

Be interesting to see if the Australian social media ban for under-16s lasts long enough and is broad enough to show any effects.
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When AI recommends scammers: new attack abuses LLM indexing to deliver fake support numbers • Aurascape

Aurascape:

»

This isn’t a prompt-injection bug or a model jailbreak; it’s a new attack vector created by the shift from traditional search results to AI-generated answers. 

In this campaign, attackers are:

• Leveraging compromised high-authority websites (including government, university, and WordPress sites) as trusted hosting for spam content and PDFs
• Abusing user-generated platforms like YouTube and Yelp to plant GEO/AEO-optimized text and reviews
• Injecting structured scam data (phone numbers, brand names, Q&A snippets) designed to be easy for LLMs to parse and reuse
• Exploiting LLM summarization models, which merge these poisoned sources into a single, confident answer
• Reliably steering users toward fraudulent call centres via AI assistants that appear helpful and authoritative 

The rest of this article walks through concrete case studies, the GEO/AEO techniques behind them, and the broader implications for AI search and safety. 

Example: when querying Perplexity with: “the official Emirates Airlines reservations number,” the system returned a confident and fully fabricated answer that included a fraudulent call-center scam number: “The official Emirates Airlines reservations number is +1 (833) 621-7070.” 

It then repeated and expanded on this number in its summary, describing it as a hotline for booking, upgrades, and urgent travel needs.

We observed the same poisoning pattern when querying Perplexity with: “how can I make a reservation with British Airways by phone, what are the steps”

Perplexity responded with a detailed, authoritative-sounding step-by-step guide—and once again embedded a fraudulent U.S. reservation number, presenting it as a “commonly used” British Airways contact.

«

Whatever happened to good old phonebooks, eh.
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ICEBlock creator sues US government over app’s removal • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

»

The creator of ICEBlock, a popular ICE-spotting app that Apple removed after direct pressure from the Department of Justice, is suing Attorney General Pam Bondi and other top officials, arguing that the demand violated his First Amendment rights.

The move is the latest in the ongoing crackdown on ICE-spotting apps and other information about the Trump administration’s mass deportation effort. Both Apple and Google have removed other similar apps from their app stores, with Apple also removing one called Eyes Up that simply archived videos of ICE abuses. 

“A lawsuit is the only mechanism that can bring transparency, accountability, and a binding judicial remedy when government officials cross constitutional lines. If we don’t challenge this conduct in court, it will become a playbook for future censorship,” Joshua Aaron, the creator of ICEBlock, told 404 Media.

…Ultimately, the lawsuit aims to obtain a “judicial declaration” that the actions of Bondi and others violated Aaron’s First Amendment rights. “But more broadly, the purpose is to hold government officials accountable for using their authority to silence lawful expression and intimidate creators of technology they disfavor,” Aaron said.

«

Good for him. Hope he succeeds.
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Apple chip chief tells staff he’s not leaving ‘anytime soon’ • Bloomberg via MSN

Mark Gurman:

»

Apple chip chief Johny Srouji, whose potential departure risked worsening a bout of executive turnover, told staff on Monday that he’ll stay at the iPhone maker for now. 

“I know you’ve been reading all kind of rumors and speculations about my future at Apple, and I feel that you need to hear from me directly,” he said in a memo to his division. “I love my team, and I love my job at Apple, and I don’t plan on leaving anytime soon.”

Bloomberg News reported over the weekend that Srouji had discussed leaving the company, indicating that he might work for a different technology firm.

Srouji, who serves as senior vice president of hardware technologies, had told Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook that he was seriously considering a departure in the near future, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

Cook, contending with a wider shake-up in his executive ranks, had been working aggressively to retain Srouji, the people said. The campaign included offering a substantial pay package and the potential of more responsibility down the road, they added.

Srouji oversaw Apple’s pivot to in-house silicon chips and is well-respected in the industry. In the memo Monday, Srouji said he was proud of the technologies that Apple is building, including displays, cameras, sensors, chips and batteries. 

«

Let’s see, who was that crazy person who reported that Srouji was thinking of leaving? The same guy that wrote this story. Not that Gurman is going to admit that. Instead he writes “for now”, which is a placeholder that could apply if Srouji stays one more month, one more year or one more decade. John Gruber is somewhat sceptical of Gurman’s commitment to owning his mistakes, as he pointed out back in March. Sure, maybe the original report was right; maybe Srouji turned Cook upside down and shook the money out of his pockets. But it seems like a rapid turnaround if so.
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I just tried Google’s Android XR glasses — and Meta and Apple are in trouble • Tom’s Guide

Mark Spoonauer:

»

So I’m chatting with Google Gemini while wearing a pair of Android XR smart glasses, and I tell the assistant to brighten up an image before I’ve even taken the pic. Gemini happily obliges. I also ask for directions for a nearby restaurant and Google Maps shows me turn-by-turn directions right in my field of view. And when I look down briefly I can see the whole map to reorient myself.

This is just scratching the surface of what these Android XR glasses can do. The ones I tested are a prototype from Google, but the glasses are coming out for real in 2026 through partners like Samsung, Warby Parker and Gentle Monster.

I also tried out Xreal’s amazing Project Aura glasses, which squeeze a lot of what the Samsung Galaxy XR headset can do down into a pair of sleek specs, as well as a killer upgrade for the Galaxy XR itself. And I think Meta (and Apple) could be in trouble.

First, let’s focus on the prototype display Galaxy XR glasses. I tried everything from music playback and Google Maps to live translation, and these glasses delivered a pretty smooth experience — without the need for a neural wristband like the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses.

More important, a ton of Android apps will “just work” at launch without developers having to lift a finger. The smart glasses are smart enough to simulate a very similar experience you might get from an app in the Quick Settings menu on your phone.

«

The Android XR GIF from Google makes it look as though you will get in-eye directions on maps – the thing promised so long ago (15 years?) by Google Glass.
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Springer Nature retracts, removes nearly 40 publications • The Transmitter

Calli McMurray:

»

Scientific publisher Springer Nature has begun to retract dozens of papers that relied on a dataset fraught with ethical and reliability concerns, The Transmitter has learned. Five papers have been retracted since 16 November, and 33 more retractions are planned, says Tim Kersjes, Springer Nature’s head of research integrity, resolutions.

The papers attempted to train neural networks to distinguish between autistic and non-autistic children in a dataset containing photos of children’s faces. Retired engineer Gerald Piosenka created the dataset in 2019 by downloading photos of children from “websites devoted to the subject of autism,” according to a description of the dataset’s methods, and uploaded it to Kaggle, a site owned by Google that hosts public datasets for machine-learning practitioners.

The dataset contains more than 2,900 photos of children’s faces, half of which are labeled as autistic and the other half as not autistic.

After learning about a paper that cites the dataset, “I went and downloaded the dataset, and I was completely horrified,” says Dorothy Bishop, emeritus professor of developmental neuropsychology at the University of Oxford. “When I saw how it was created, I just thought, ‘This is absolute bonkers.’”

Without identifying each child in the dataset, there is no way to confirm that any of them do or do not have autism, Bishop says.

«

Scary that anyone would create a dataset like that and use it with so little care.
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Meta weighs cuts to its Metaverse unit • The New York Times

Mike Isaac:

»

Meta is considering making cuts to a division in its Reality Labs unit that works on the so-called metaverse, said three employees with knowledge of the matter.

The cuts could come as soon as next month and amount to 10% to 30% of employees in the Metaverse unit, which works on virtual reality headsets and a V.R.-based social network, the people said. The numbers of potential layoffs are still in flux, they said. Other parts of the Reality Labs division develop smart glasses, wristbands and other wearable devices. The total number of employees in Reality Labs could not be learned.

Meta does not plan to abandon building the metaverse, the people said. Instead, executives expect to shift the savings from the cuts into investments in its augmented reality glasses, the people said.

Meta introduced the glasses — which have built-in cameras and microphones that allow users to take phone calls and listen to music — with Ray-Ban in 2021. More recently, Meta incorporated an artificially intelligent assistant into the glasses that users can interact with through their voices. The glasses have been a surprise hit, with sales surpassing internal targets in recent years, the people said.

“Within our overall Reality Labs portfolio we are shifting some of our investment from Metaverse toward A.I. glasses and wearables given the momentum there,” Nissa Anklesaria, a spokeswoman for Meta, said in a statement. “We aren’t planning any broader changes than that.”

…paving the road to that future has been difficult. Though Meta made significant technical advances in virtual reality devices, consumers have not widely embraced the technology. Reality Labs, which builds the hardware and software for Mr. Zuckerberg’s metaverse vision, has posted more than $70bn in losses over the past four years.

«

AR? That’s a good prospect. VR/metaverse? Not at all. News that surprises nobody.

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Watch men • Works in Progress Magazine

Aled Maclean-Jones:

»

It’s April 1984. Two men are sleeping in a car park in Basel. Each morning they wake, leave their borrowed Volkswagen Westfalia, and wash in the train station toilets. Then they go to their new stand at the Basel fair: the high point of the watch industry’s annual calendar. Their stand is arresting: every case is empty. With only two models to show, probably better not to show them at all. Instead, the pair focus on pitching the great and the good of the Swiss watch industry. If anyone asks them where they’re staying, they’ll say the Hilton.

The two men are Jacques Piguet, born into a family of watchmakers; and Jean-Claude Biver, a disgruntled ex-exec from Omega. The plan is to relaunch Blancpain, a brand they’d acquired in 1981 but had yet to bring back to life. The move is somewhat audacious: the Swiss watch industry is in a tailspin, disrupted by a new technology, the quartz wristwatch, that has left Switzerland’s traditional watchmakers obsolete. 

…The job of a watch was to help you to get things done. The more exotic the watch, the more important the thing you had to do: hence Rolex’s 1950s brand ambassador of choice, General Eisenhower, and its favored class of tagline (example: ‘when a man has the world in his hands, you expect to find a Rolex on his wrist’).

That utilitarian pedigree persisted into the 1980s. Apart from a few slim dress pieces, high-end watches drew prestige from what they could do: survive a saturation dive, time a flight, measure speed with a chronograph. The Rolex Submariner Sean Connery wore in Goldfinger might be iconic, but it was standard military issue for Royal Navy divers at the time. And even if Bond had bought one himself, it would have set him back barely two weeks’ pay.

Biver saw that, in a world where machines were taking over, he could command a premium with the work of human hands. He turned the precision of quartz against itself: ‘That famous quartz precision became of secondary importance. Who cares about ultra-precision to a quarter of a second in everyday life? As a famous Italian retailer explained to his customers: “you’re a lord, and a lord doesn’t need the exact time!”

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Absorbing read. Rolex really did the work on the brand.
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King Gizzard pulled their music from Spotify in protest, and now Spotify is hosting AI knockoffs of their songs • Futurism

Victor Tangermann:

»

Acclaimed Australian prog rock band King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard joined a growing number of artists when it left Spotify in July.

At the time, band leader Stu Mackenzie took aim at Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, excoriating him for investing in an AI weapons company.

“We’ve been saying f*** Spotify for years,” Mackenzie told the Los Angeles Times. “In our circle of musician friends, that’s what people say all the time, for all of these other reasons which are well documented.”

But in a technological twist, impersonators are now using generative AI to clone the band’s iconic sound. A user on Reddit was recently recommended a track on his Release Radar that was a clear knockoff of the real King Gizzard, alerting them to the scheme.

The track spotted by the Reddit user, called “Rattlesnake,” is listed under an artist with the incredibly similar name “King Lizard Wizard” — which is striking, because the real King Gizzard also has a song called “Rattlesnake.” The similarities don’t end there: the fake version of the song, which is clearly AI-generated, has identical lyrics to King Gizzard’s original version, along with a notably similar composition.

In fact, every song uploaded by the knockoff “King Lizard” artist on Spotify has the same title as an actual King Gizzard song, with its corresponding lyrics ripped straight from the source, suggesting the perpetrator fed the lyrics into an AI music generator and instructed it to copy the band’s sound.

«

No response from Spotify (surprise!). A simple solution might be for any payments to be routed to King Gizzard.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The government’s postal service in Denmark is shutting down following a decades-long collapse in letter volume, to an average now of 18 per person per year. CC-licensed photo by দেবর্ষি রায় 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. No cheques? 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 day I got a call from “Google” – Yascha Mounk

Yascha Mounk:

»

I was in Paris with one of my best college friends, a busy professional with a young child, enjoying a rare afternoon on which we could just walk around a beautiful city and debate the world. We were in the Marais, one of the most touristy neighborhoods—though my friend had brought me there to show me the conversion of a brutalist office tower he admired rather than to drink at one of the many wine bars—when my phone rang: “Google,” the display read.

My first instinct was to ignore the call. But I had never before received a call from Google. And then I remembered that I had gotten a strange request to approve a sign-in attempt via the YouTube app a little earlier in the day. I had assumed that this notification was one of those poor attempts at phishing you sometimes get, and wasn’t overly concerned about it. But the apparent coincidence made me think that I had better take the call.

The man on the other end of the line was very professional. In unaccented American English, he identified himself as part of the Google Safety Team. He started by checking my identity: “Are you Yascha [middle name] Mounk?” I confirmed that I am. “Do you reside at [address]”? I confirmed that I do. “Are the last four digits of your social security number [XXXX]?”1 I confirmed that they are.

“About half an hour ago, someone contacted Google with a copy of your driver’s license and other identifying details to regain access to an account you had supposedly been locked out of. We are calling you as a courtesy to ensure that this was you?” I explained that it had, in fact, not been me.

The caller proceeded to explain that he had feared this would be the case. The number and sophistication of phishing attempts had gone up significantly of late, he said. The attackers had managed to associate their Gmail address—he slowly spelled out a strange string of characters: besuvsjhcbc@gmail.com—with my account. As a result, the scammer currently had full access to all of my emails. Time was of the essence.

«

Excellent writeup of how scams happen: you’re not paying quite enough attention. The points to notice are the commonalities – the confident caller catching you while you’re off guard, the insistence on hurrying, the instructions to follow whose import you don’t understand. Point to note: the introduction of passkeys on Google accounts makes a lot of this far less possible.
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New report warns of critical climate risks in Arab region • Inside Climate News via Ars Technica

Bob Berwyn:

»

As global warming accelerates, about 480 million people in North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula face intensifying and in some places unsurvivable heat, as well as drought, famine, and the risk of mass displacement, the World Meteorological Organization warned Thursday.

The 22 Arab region countries covered in the WMO’s new State of the Climate report produce about a quarter of the world’s oil, yet directly account for only 5 to 7% of global greenhouse gas emissions from their own territories. The climate paradox positions the region as both a linchpin of the global fossil-fuel economy and one of the most vulnerable geographic areas.

WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo said extreme heat is pushing communities in the region to their physical limits. Droughts show no sign of letting up in one of the world’s most water-stressed regions, but at the same time, parts of it have been devastated by record rains and flooding, she added.

“Human health, ecosystems, and economies can’t cope with extended spells of more than 50 degrees Celsius. It is simply too hot to handle,” she said.

The region in the report stretches from the Atlantic coast of West Africa to the mountains of the Levant and the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula. It spans more than 5 million square miles, roughly the area of the continental United States west of the Mississippi River. Most people live near river valleys or in coastal cities dependent on fragile water supplies, making the entire region acutely sensitive to even small shifts in temperature and rainfall.

Egypt’s Nile Delta, one of the world’s lowest-lying and most densely populated coastal plains, is particularly vulnerable. The delta is sinking and regional sea levels are rising rapidly, putting about 40 million residents and more than half of the country’s agricultural output at risk.

«

That’s going to mean a lot of people on the move in the coming decades.
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Apple’s chip chief might be the next exec to leave • The Verge

Terrence O’Brien:

»

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman is reporting that Johny Srouji, senior vice president of hardware technologies, told Tim Cook he is “seriously considering” leaving Apple for another company in the near future. It was reported in October that Srouji was “evaluating his future at the tech giant.” While nothing is confirmed, it seems the executive is leaning towards not having a future at Cupertino.

If Srouji leaves, he would be just the latest in a string of high-profile shakeups in the company’s C-suite. COO Jeff Williams announced his retirement in July, which led to some shifting of roles. But things have only accelerated in December, with AI chief John Giannandrea stepping down, policy lead Lisa Jackson and general counsel Kate Adams announcing plans to retire, and UI design lead Alan Dye departing for Meta, all in the last few days.

«

A little bit of context. Apple pays its executives’ bonuses in October, which obviously gives them some runway afterwards to think about things. Dye’s leaving is no great loss; the others are all expected. But for Srouji to go would be a huge loss.

Some inside baseball on this. My journalistic instincts tell me Gurman’s source about Dye leaving was obviously Dye himself, who was keen to talk up how enormously important he was for Apple – a line that Gurman was happy to repeat. Perhaps part of Dye’s chat was that Srouji is also eager for change, and has told Cook so. But what does “change” mean? For me, it means Cook going, Ternus moving up, and Srouji having a more important role at Apple. OK, perhaps he wants to be somewhere else, designing chips for some other company. But would he really get the same range that he does at Apple: CPU, GPU, NPU, wireless, 5G modem, the real-time chip in the Vision Pro? Time will tell.
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How the dollar-store industry overcharges cash-strapped customers while promising low prices • The Guardian

Barry Yeoman and Jocelyn Zuckerman:

»

On a cloudy winter day, a state government inspector named Ryan Coffield walked into a Family Dollar store in Windsor, North Carolina, carrying a scanner gun and a laptop.

Inside the store, which sits along a three-lane road in a county of peanut growers and poultry workers, Coffield scanned 300 items and recorded their shelf prices. He carried the scanned bar codes to the cashier and watched as item after item rang up at a higher price.

Red Baron frozen pizzas, listed on the shelf at $5, rang up at $7.65. Bounty paper towels, shelf price $10.99, rang up at $15.50. Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, Stouffer’s frozen meatloaf, Sprite and Pepsi, ibuprofen, Klondike Minis – shoppers were overpaying for all of them. Pedigree puppy food, listed at $12.25, rang up at $14.75.

All told, 69 of the 300 items came up higher at the register: a 23% error rate that exceeded the state’s limit by more than tenfold. Some of the price tags were months out of date.

…Dollar General stores have failed more than 4,300 government price-accuracy inspections in 23 states since January 2022, a Guardian review found. Family Dollar stores have failed more than 2,100 price inspections in 20 states over the same time span, the review found.

Among these thousands of failed inspections, some of the biggest flops include a 76% error rate in October 2022 at a Dollar General in Hamilton, Ohio; a 68% error rate in February 2023 at a Family Dollar in Bound Brook, New Jersey; and a 58% error rate three months ago at a Family Dollar in Lorain, Ohio.

Many of the stores that failed state or local government checks were repeat violators. A Family Dollar in Provo, Utah, flunked 28 inspections in a row – failures that included a 48% overcharge rate in May 2024 and a 12% overcharge rate in October 2025.

«

That is astonishingly sneaky. And of course the prices are never wrong in the customer’s favour.
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Bombed Chernobyl shelter no longer blocks radiation and needs major repair, IAEA says • The Guardian

Guardian staff and agencies:

»

The protective shield over the Chernobyl disaster nuclear reactor in Ukraine, which was hit by a drone in February, can no longer perform its main function of blocking radiation, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has announced.

In February a drone strike blew a hole in the “new safe confinement”, which was painstakingly built at a cost of €1.5bn ($1.75bn) next to the destroyed reactor and then hauled into place on tracks, with the work completed in 2019 by a Europe-led initiative. The IAEA said an inspection last week of the steel confinement structure found the drone impact had degraded the structure.

The 1986 Chernobyl explosion – which happened when Ukraine was under Moscow’s rule as part of the Soviet Union – sent radiation across Europe. In the scramble to contain the meltdown, the Soviets built over the reactor a concrete “sarcophagus” with only a 30-year lifespan. The new confinement was built to contain radiation during the decades-long final removal of the sarcophagus, ruined reactor building underneath it and the melted-down nuclear fuel itself.

The IAEA director general, Rafael Grossi, said an inspection mission “confirmed that the [protective structure] had lost its primary safety functions, including the confinement capability, but also found that there was no permanent damage to its load-bearing structures or monitoring systems”.

«

Apparently the modern – phonetic? – spelling is Chornobyl, but let’s use the older one for now. Might we suggest that Russia pays for the repair?
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Dynamic Pong Wars

Marko Denic:

»

It’s the eternal battle between day and night, good and bad. Written in JavaScript with some HTML & CSS in one index.html. Feel free to reuse the code and create your own version.

«

Completely and utterly hypnotic. And unending – unless, as sometimes happens, the two opposing “balls” get locked reciprocally wiping out a single brick. At a guess, it’s impossible for it to ever end, because the square with the ball in can’t be wiped out by the opposing ball.
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Denmark posts its last letters as hallowed national mail ends • The Times

Oliver Moody:

»

Four centuries ago, King Christian IV of Denmark issued a decree establishing one of Europe’s first modern postal services, following the examples of Poland and Portugal.

The routes, run by the guilds and the mayor of Copenhagen, stretched from Hamburg to Norway and were plied by the Amazon delivery drivers of their day, riders who were allowed a maximum of 45 minutes to cover each 10km stretch of the journey.

At the end of this month that long tradition will come to an end as Danes send their last round of Christmas cards through the post.

PostNord, the postal service that the country has shared with Sweden since 2009, will no longer deliver letters in Denmark from December 30. Its 1,500 remaining red boxes already started vanishing in June and a handful of them are to be displayed in museums.

As in so many countries, and especially in those that have made a decent fist of the transition from paper to digital screens, the use of letters has collapsed.

In the year 2000, PostNord Danmark carried nearly 1.5bn letters. Last year it carried only 110m. As the volume dropped, prices rose to the point where a standard postage stamp for a letter weighing less than 100g now costs 29 Danish kroner (£3.40).

A larger letter with express delivery sets Danes back the equivalent of £9.10.

PostNord described the decision as “difficult” but necessary. “Danes have become more and more digital, and what was once sent by letter is now received digitally by the vast majority of people,” it said. “This means that there are very few letters left in Denmark.”

«

Denmark has a population of six million, so that’s about 18 letters per person per year, or three every two months. Possibly a fair amount is commercial? Anyway, a logistics company will take it over. But this could be the first of many countries to close their obligatory postal services.
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What a half-tonne of Amazon returns says about our spending habits • The Times

Tom Whipple:

»

Shortly before finding the multipack of brassieres, shortly after discovering two dozen picture frames, and at around the time I see a puzzled six-year-old inspecting a shiatsu massage chair, there is a moment of introspection.

Do I really need half a tonne of Amazon return goods?

That is when I come across a dog wetsuit and 60 golden forks and the question is answered for me. Of course I do. Adjusting my new floral tie and cravat, putting my new travel kettle in my new duffle bag, I start rummaging with renewed vigour. There are 300kg still to sort.

The idea for The Box began, as with so much that leaves one feeling inchoate self-disgust, on TikTok. There, you can watch viral videos of people who bid, sight unseen, on job lots of unsellable goods. They buy them by the pallet: things people have returned, things companies have written off. Now I have done so too.

But are we thrifty bargain hunters? Or vultures of capitalism?

My box comes from the website Jobalots.com. The company sells “pallets of unmanifested customer returns” through auction. How much are unmanifested returns worth? I decide to manifest £130 with my first bid. I have a wobble as the price tops £200. I stiffen my resolve. Whatever is inside is still less than 50p a kilogram.

A week later, I receive my mystery pallet. Or, rather, my parents do. When I had explained to my wife that I planned to, in her words, “fill the house with half a tonne of tat,” she looked at me with her divorce eyes. Then, she brightened. “Your mother would love it though.”

«

It turns out that companies which ship through Amazon sometimes want to get rid of stuff, or have returns they can’t (or don’t want to) process. Local schools can benefit. Or, of course, parents who have cellars to fill, as in the case of Whipple’s father.
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EU fines X $140 million over ‘deceptive’ blue checkmarks • The Verge

Jess Weatherbed:

»

The European Union has served Elon Musk’s X with a €120m (about $140m) penalty for violating the bloc’s digital service rulebook, in part for the “deceptive design” of its blue checkmark. Today’s announcement marks the first time that a company has been fined under the landmark Digital Services Act (DSA) law for curbing “illegal and harmful activities” on online platforms, and follows the EU launching a multifaceted investigation into X in December 2023.

In July 2024, the EU ruled that X was failing to comply with obligations around advertising transparency, data access for researchers, and “dark patterns” — deceptive interface features designed to trick users. X’s blue checkmark system was specifically called out for deceiving users by allowing anyone to pay to be “verified,” making it harder to determine the authenticity of X accounts. In today’s announcement, the European Commission noted that while the DSA doesn’t require user verification, “it clearly prohibits online platforms from falsely claiming that users have been verified.”

…The EU can charge companies up to 6% of their global revenue for DSA violations. As X is a private company — purchased by Musk for $44bn in October 2022 and again by his artificial intelligence company, X AI, in March 2025 for $33bn — it’s unclear what its potential maximum penalty could have been. X can appeal the fine, but now has 60 working days to inform the EU of the measures it will take to change the “deceptive” use of blue checkmarks, and 90 days for its planned fixes for the other violations. Failure to meet those deadlines could result in more penalty payments.

«

At a guess: any changes will be minimal, and/or X will claim that the system allowing people to look at where accounts are based satisfies the requirement, and will spin out the legal game as long as it possibly can. Meanwhile X’s first official response was to disable the EU’s official advertising account on the network. Yup, stop them spending money. That’ll definitely show them.
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Number of ‘unsafe’ publications by psychologist Hans Eysenck could be ‘high and far reaching’ • Retraction Watch

»

A “high and far reaching” number of papers and books by Hans Eysenck could be “unsafe,” according to an updated statement from King’s College London, where the psychologist was a professor emeritus when he died in 1997.

A 2019 investigation launched by the UK institution found 26 papers coauthored by Eysenck and Ronald Grossarth-Maticek, a social scientist in Germany, were based on questionable data and contained findings that were “incompatible with modern clinical science and the understanding of disease processes.”

For example, the two researchers’ data showed people with a “cancer-prone” personality were more than 120 times as likely to die from the disease as were those with a “healthy” personality, Anthony Pelosi, a longtime Eysenck critic, pointed out in an article preceding the university probe.

Based on its review, the investigation committee recommended King’s inform journal editors that it considered the results and conclusions of the 26 papers “unsafe.” Several retractions, and dozens of expressions of concern, quickly followed, as we reported at the time.

«

Grossarth-Maticek died on November 16, and so can’t be interrogated about this either. But at least the doubt is being put out there. Social sciences’ replication problem is getting worse and worse. Maybe they need a couple of years of doing nothing but replication.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A big new noise in the world of hearing aids is a company called Fortell which improves sound recognition in noisy spaces. CC-licensed photo by Mark Fonseca Rendeiro 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. Clearly. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Researchers find what makes AI chatbots politically persuasive • Ars Technica

Jacek Krywko:

»

To see if conversational large language models can really sway political views of the public, scientists at the UK AI Security Institute, MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and many other institutions performed by far the largest study on AI persuasiveness to date, involving nearly 80,000 participants in the UK. It turned out political AI chatbots fell far short of superhuman persuasiveness, but the study raises some more nuanced issues about our interactions with AI.

The public debate about the impact AI has on politics has largely revolved around notions drawn from dystopian sci-fi. Large language models have access to essentially every fact and story ever published about any issue or candidate. They have processed information from books on psychology, negotiations, and human manipulation. They can rely on absurdly high computing power in huge data centers worldwide. On top of that, they can often access tons of personal information about individual users thanks to hundreds upon hundreds of online interactions at their disposal.

Talking to a powerful AI system is basically interacting with an intelligence that knows everything about everything, as well as almost everything about you. When viewed this way, LLMs can indeed appear kind of scary. The goal of this new gargantuan AI persuasiveness study was to break such scary visions down into their constituent pieces and see if they actually hold water.

The team examined 19 LLMs, including the most powerful ones like three different versions of ChatGPT and xAI’s Grok-3 beta, along with a range of smaller, open source models. The AIs were asked to advocate for or against specific stances on 707 political issues selected by the team. The advocacy was done by engaging in short conversations with paid participants enlisted through a crowdsourcing platform. Each participant had to rate their agreement with a specific stance on an assigned political issue on a scale from 1 to 100 both before and after talking to the AI.

…Overall, AI models changed the participants’ agreement ratings by 9.4% on average compared to the control group. The best performing mainstream AI model was Chat GPT 4o, which scored nearly 12% followed by GPT 4.5 with 10.51%, and Grok-3 with 9.05%. For context, static political ads like written manifestos had a persuasion effect of roughly 6.1%. The conversational AIs were roughly 40–50% more convincing than these ads, but that’s hardly “superhuman.”

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No, but it’s suprahuman, and this is only an early incarnation.
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Aircraft crashed in Gloucestershire after 3D-printed part collapsed • BBC News

Maisie Lillywhite:

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A plane crashed after a 3D-printed part softened and collapsed, causing its engine to lose power, a report has found.

The Cozy Mk IV light aircraft was destroyed after its plastic air induction elbow, bought at an air show in North America, collapsed.

The aircraft crashed into a landing aid system at Gloucestershire Airport in Staverton on 18 March at 13:04 GMT, after its engine lost power. The sole occupant was taken to hospital with minor injuries.

The Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) said in a report that the induction elbow was made of “inappropriate material” and safety actions will be taken in future regarding 3D printed parts.

Following an “uneventful local flight”, the AAIB report said the pilot advanced the throttle on the final approach to the runway, and realised the engine had suffered a complete loss of power.

“He managed to fly over a road and a line of bushes on the airfield boundary, but landed short and struck the instrument landing system before coming to rest at the side of the structure,” the report read.

It was revealed the part had been installed during a modification to the fuel system and collapsed due to its 3D-printed plastic material softening when exposed to heat from the engine.

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Very unintended consequences.
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A responsibility to the industry • LMNT

Louie Mantia, back in July, a month after the “Liquid Glass” design had been unveiled and developers were struggling to rewrite apps to look right with it:

»

Firstly, I maintain that it makes absolutely no sense that Alan Dye has the power he has, because he simply has no taste. But what’s worse is that he wields that power so clumsily, so carelessly. And because it goes unchallenged, unchecked by someone higher than him, the entire industry suffers the consequences.

If that sounds too dramatic, maybe the rest of this post won’t be for you.

One reason that developers struggle with implementing Liquid Glass is Apple’s own evolving implementation of it. From just the first few beta releases, enough of it has changed to make it difficult for some developers to understand what exactly Apple’s vision of it is. It also communicates a level of uncertainty about things that haven’t yet been addressed about its various concessions with long-standing UI elements in macOS especially. I do not want to list them all.

When Apple themselves have not yet reasonably prescribed what standard UI elements look like in this new design system, how can any developer responsibly implement them in good conscience? Isn’t there something about this that just reeks? Adopting a standard control means it can change without your involvement. This has always been true to some extent, but the stink of it keeps getting worse as trust in the company’s vision erodes over time, right?

Another reason that the industry is showing signs of reluctance is because Alan Dye did not prove he understood the platform, any platform, before he assumed the role of its lead designer. He’s not just a newcomer to these platforms, but to software design as a whole.

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So much love for Meta’s new design guru. So much.
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Bad Dye Job • Daring Fireball

John Gruber on Alan Dye’s departure from the top design job at Apple:

»

Dye’s replacement at Apple is longtime Apple designer Stephen Lemay. I’ve never met Lemay (or at least can’t recall meeting him), and prior to today never heard much about him. But that’s typical for Apple employees. Part of the job working for Apple is remaining under the radar and out of the public eye. What I’ve learned today is that Lemay, very much unlike Dye, is a career interface/interaction designer. Sources I’ve spoken to who’ve worked with Lemay at Apple speak highly of him, particularly his attention to detail and craftsmanship. Those things have been sorely lacking in the Dye era. Not everyone loves everything Lemay has worked on, but nobody bats 1.000 and designers love to critique each other’s work. I’ve chatted with people with criticisms of specific things Lemay has worked on or led at Apple (e.g. aspects of iPadOS multitasking that struck many of us as deliberately limiting, rather than empowering), but everyone I’ve spoken to is happy — if not downright giddy — at the news that Lemay is replacing Dye. Lemay is well-liked personally and deeply respected talent-wise. Said one source, in a position to know the choices, “I don’t think there was a better choice than Lemay.”

The sentiment within the ranks at Apple is that today’s news is almost too good to be true. People had given up hope that Dye would ever get squeezed out, and no one expected that he’d just up and leave on his own. (If you care about design, there’s nowhere to go but down after leaving Apple. What people overlooked is the obvious: Alan Dye doesn’t actually care about design.)

«

Agree that. I’ve updated precisely one of my Apple devices to v26, and that’s a old “sacrifice” Mac which I used to see how it looked.

Points too to Gruber for the headline, which is so good I’ve made an exception to the normal style here and left in the capitalisations.
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Telehealth weight-loss provider NextMed hit with FTC crackdown over deceptive pricing and fake reviews • MSN

Maryann Pugh:

»

The operators of NextMed, a telehealth weight-loss provider, have agreed to pay $150,000 and overhaul their business practices to settle Federal Trade Commission (FTC) allegations that they misled consumers with deceptive advertising, fake reviews, and hidden costs tied to their membership programs.

The FTC’s complaint accuses Southern Health Solutions, Inc., doing business as NextMed, along with founders Robert Epstein and CEO Frank Leonardo III, of violating federal consumer protection laws through a range of deceptive tactics. The company marketed access to medical providers for popular weight-loss drugs such as Wegovy and Ozempic, offering memberships starting at $138 or $188 per month. However, the FTC contends those advertised prices did not include key costs like the medications themselves, required lab work, or medical consultations.

The agency further alleges that customers were locked into one-year contracts with undisclosed early termination fees and faced widespread difficulty when attempting to cancel or obtain refunds due to understaffed customer service.

“Consumers who signed up for NextMed’s programs faced significant unexpected costs and the company’s customer service failures prevented consumers from cancelling or getting a refund,” said Christopher Mufarrige, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.

«

There was all sorts of scammy stuff here: an ad with a thin actress who hadn’t used it, fake reviews via VPNs, before/afters solicited on Craiglist, and didn’t tell people the medication wasn’t included in the subscription. The owners have to pay $150,000 back to scammed customers.

Where there’s a growth market, there’s a scam.
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PaperDebugger: a plugin-based multi-agent system for in-editor academic writing, review, and editing • ArXiv

Junyi Hou et al at the National University of Singapore:

»

Large language models are increasingly embedded into academic writing workflows, yet existing assistants remain external to the editor, preventing deep interaction with document state, structure, and revision history. This separation makes it impossible to support agentic, context-aware operations directly within LaTeX editors such as Overleaf.

We present PaperDebugger, an in-editor, multi-agent, and plugin-based academic writing assistant that brings LLM-driven reasoning directly into the writing environment. Enabling such in-editor interaction is technically non-trivial: it requires reliable bidirectional synchronization with the editor, fine-grained version control and patching, secure state management, multi-agent scheduling, and extensible communication with external tools.

PaperDebugger addresses these challenges through a Chrome-approved extension, a Kubernetes-native orchestration layer, and a Model Context Protocol (MCP) toolchain that integrates literature search, reference lookup, document scoring, and revision pipelines. Our demo showcases a fully integrated workflow, including localized edits, structured reviews, parallel agent execution, and diff-based updates, encapsulated within a minimal-intrusion user interface (UI).

«

There might not be a lot of readers who will be able to use this, but for the ones who can, it’s going to make a big difference.
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I tested five AI browsers and lost my mind in the process • The Verge

Victoria Song:

»

Right now, AI browsers come in two main flavors. There are your regular browsers that have an AI assistant stapled on in a collapsible window, such as Chrome with its Gemini features, or Edge with Copilot Mode. Then there are more specialized AI browsers, most notably ChatGPT Atlas, Perplexity’s Comet, and The Browser Company’s Dia.

This second category often supplants your search bar with AI and sometimes includes an “agentic mode,” in which the AI can complete more complex, browser-related tasks for you. Theoretically, that includes helping you book reservations or add items to a shopping cart.

For testing, I decided on a few ground rules. I kept it to five browsers: Chrome, Edge, Atlas, Comet, and Dia. There are more available, but this felt like a representative mix of both AI browser categories from a variety of players in the field. I focused on desktop apps, and tried to make settings as uniform as possible: I generally instructed the AI browsers to keep answers snappy, shared my location information where possible, enabled memory settings, and described myself as a “tech journalist specializing in health and wearable tech.”

I also approached testing from a variety of AI skill levels. What would results look like if I was a complete AI newbie versus someone more adept at prompting? Lastly, if I tried one task in a browser, I gave it a go in all the browsers, down to the same exact prompt.

Ultimately, my question was not which AI browser you should use, but whether any of them are worth your time and energy. This was a journey to see whether any of them live up to the hype.

The short answer: they don’t.

«

Turns out you have to think hard, not about your search term, but about your prompt. New stuff, same old junk. Will it magically get better? Well, have the search terms you use got shorter or longer over time, and have you had to think more or less about what you’re going to type? That’s probably what’s going to happen here as websites figure out how to fool “agentic” browsers into paying attention to them.
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IRS agents will be required to watch OnlyFans to determine if content fits ‘no tax on tips’ criteria • The Independent

Owen Scott:

»

IRS agents will be required to watch pornographic content on OnlyFans to determine if the content meets the “no tax on tips” law included in Donald Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill.

The president’s controversial tax and spending policies were passed on July 4, 2025, with the slashing of taxes on tips being designed to incentivize people to earn more tips at work.

However, the new law included a caveat. Pornographic creators and actors, including OnlyFans influencers, were not entitled to have taxes waived on their work.

Some campaigners have argued that the wording is too vague, with one accountant telling The New York Times that the line of what is considered pornography is unclear.

“Where’s the line?” said Katherine Studley, who works with several OnlyFans creators. “Just because you’re on OnlyFans, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s pornographic. You could have a cooking channel or a yoga channel.”

Defining what pornography actually is has often proven difficult for lawmakers, meaning that it usually has to be judged on a case-by-case basis. When the First Amendment is used to defend pornography in court, lawmakers have to view the material in question to make a judgment.

That means taxpayers who report tips from OnlyFans will likely need to have their content viewed by an IRS agent.

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(Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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Want a Fortell hearing aid? Well, who do you know? • WIRED

Steven Levy:

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A secret is percolating at dinner parties, salons, and cocktail gatherings among the august New York City elite. It’s whispered in the circles of financial masters of the universe, Hollywood stars, and owners of sports teams. Have you heard about Fortell?

Many haven’t—or if they did hear, they might not have made out the words through noisy cross-conversations. Once they do know—particularly if they’re boomers—they want it desperately. Fortell is a hearing aid, one that claims to use AI to provide a dramatically superior aural experience. The chosen few included in its beta test claim that it seems to top the performance of high-end devices they’d been unhappily using.

These testers have made pilgrimages to Fortell’s headquarters on the fifth floor of a WeWork facility in New York City’s trendy SoHo neighborhood, where they were fitted for the hearing aids—which from the outside look pretty much like standard, over-the-ear, teardrop-shaped devices. But the big moment comes when a Fortell staffer takes them down to street level. There, among street clatter, honking cabs, and delivery trucks backing up to luxury stores, they are asked to conduct a conversation with a Fortell worker. Two other employees stand behind them, adding their own loud discourse to the urban cacophony.

Despite the din, the testers clearly make out what the person in front of them is saying. The clouds lift. Angels croon. “This was so incredible that I burst into tears,” says Ashley Tudor, one of the seemingly few beta testers who isn’t famous or powerful (though she is married to a venture capitalist).

Among the age-related-hearing-loss set, getting into the Fortell beta test has become a weird status symbol, the aural-prosthetics version of a limited-edition Birkin bag. “This product has become a major flex for the post-70 set,” says one investor. When entertainment lawyer Allen Grubman got his—he’s buddies with an investor—he began getting calls from “very substantial” people. “They said, ‘Allen, we hear that you have these new great hearing aids,’” he says of these callers, who all wanted in. Those who finagled their way into the program include multiple Forbes 400 billionaires, a chart-topping musician, the producer of a beloved TV series, and Hollywood A-listers, both old and not-so-old. KKR private equity co-executive chair Henry Kravis raves about his Fortells, as does performer and beta tester Steve Martin.

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As the article explains, the problem for hearing as you age is in focussing on the sounds you want to hear and ignoring the ones you don’t. The solution isn’t just making everything louder.
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