Ahead of talks with Trump, China has imposed export controls on a wide range of materials such as rare earths essential for batteries and magnets. CC-licensed photo by Алексей Тараканов on Flickr.

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

It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time. It’s about LLMs showing signs of social warming. Two for the price of one!

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

Amazon’s giant ads have ruined the Echo Show • The Verge

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:

»

Last week, Amazon launched a major update of its line of Alexa-enabled Echo smart speakers and displays. The redesign — led by former Microsoft design chief Ralf Groene, whom Amazon Devices & Services head Panos Panay coaxed out of retirement — included two new Echo Show smart displays. According to Panay, these new models are the first step on a road to building “products that customers love.”

But there’s one big barrier to customers loving their Echo Shows: ads.

In recent months, full-screen display ads with the tag “sponsored” have been appearing on current Echo Shows, and users are not happy. These ads are new and very intrusive, appearing between photos when the Show is set to Photo Frame mode or between content if it’s set to show different categories (such as music, recipes, news).

As I type, the last-gen Echo Show 8 on my desk just showed an ad for an herbal supplement between a snapshot of my daughter dancing at her aunt’s wedding and a baby picture of my son. The ad reappeared two photos later, and then again. And again.

While advertising has been part of Alexa on Echo devices for a while, in the form of Alexa’s “By the way” feature, the Show’s Shopping category (which you can disable), and the occasional product ad, it’s never been so blatant.

As these new “sponsored” ads become more pervasive, it feels like a bait and switch. There was no indication on the packaging that you were buying an ad-supported product.

«

Something something frog and the scorpion.
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How well can large language models predict the future? • Forecasting Research Institute

Forecasting Research Institute:

»

When will artificial intelligence (AI) match top human forecasters at predicting the future? In a recent podcast episode, Nate Silver predicted 10–15 years. Tyler Cowen disagreed, expecting a 1–2 year timeline. Who’s more likely to be right?

Today, the Forecasting Research Institute is excited to release an update to ForecastBench—our benchmark tracking how well large language models (LLMs) forecast real-world events—with evidence that bears directly on this debate. We’re also opening the benchmark for submissions.

Here are our key findings:

• Superforecasters still outperform leading LLMs, but the gap is modest. The best-performing model in our sample is GPT-4.5, which achieves a Brier score of 0.101 versus superforecasters’ 0.081 (lower is better)
• LLMs now outperform non-expert public participants. A year ago, the median public forecast ranked #2 on our leaderboard, right behind superforecasters and ahead of all LLMs. Today it sits at #22. This achievement represents a significant milestone in AI forecasting capability
• State-of-the-art LLMs show steady improvement, with projected LLM-superforecaster parity in late 2026 (95% CI: December 2025 – January 2028). Across all questions in our sample, LLM performance improves by around 0.016 Brier points per year. Linear extrapolation suggests LLMs could match expert human performance on ForecastBench in around a year if current trends continue.

«

This is impressive and faintly scary. You can see that these systems are surely being adopted inside governments, quietly, to try to figure out policy strategies. (If they aren’t, then they should be.)
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China tightens export rules for crucial rare earths • BBC News

Peter Hoskins and Laura Bicker:

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China has tightened export controls on rare earths and other materials critical for advanced tech manufacturing as trade negotiations continue with the US.

It processes around 90% of the world’s rare earths, which go into everything from solar panels to smartphones – a key bargaining chip ahead of an expected meeting between Chinese leader Xi Jinping and his US counterpart Donald Trump this month.

Beijing had already restricted processing technology and unauthorised overseas co-operation, but Thursday’s announcement formalised the rules. Foreign companies now need the Chinese government’s approval to export products with even small amounts of rare earths and must explain their intended use.

The ministry announced similar restrictions on the export of lithium batteries and some forms of graphite, which are also essential components in the global tech supply chain and largely produced in China.

Beijing said the regulations are intended to “safeguard national security”. One of the main targets of these controls appears to be overseas defence manufacturers, including those in the US, who rely on rare earths from China.

China had added several rare earths and related material to its export control list in April, as the trade war with Washington ramped up, which caused a major global shortage.

But the new announcement makes clear that licenses are unlikely to be issued to arms manufacturers and certain companies in the chip industry.

Even the technology used to mine and process rare earths, or to make magnets from rare earths, can only be exported with permission from the government, the Commerce Ministry said.

«

This gives China a gigantic bargaining chip for the upcoming summit with Trump. Adding bureaucracy to such exports is a classic control move.
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US regulators launch investigation into self-driving Teslas after series of crashes • Reuters via The Guardian

»

US automobile safety regulators have opened an investigation into Tesla vehicles equipped with its full self-driving (FSD) technology over traffic-safety violations after a series of crashes.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said the electric carmaker’s FSD assistance system, which requires drivers to pay attention and intervene if needed, had “induced vehicle behaviour that violated traffic safety laws”.

The preliminary evaluation by the NHTSA is the first step before potentially seeking a recall of the vehicles if it believes they pose a risk to safety.

The agency said it had received reports of Teslas driving through red traffic lights and driving against the proper direction of travel during a lane change while in FSD mode, which is available in 2.88m vehicles.

NHTSA said it has six reports in which a Tesla vehicle, operating with full self-driving (FSD) engaged, “approached an intersection with a red traffic signal, continued to travel into the intersection against the red light and was subsequently involved in a crash with other motor vehicles in the intersection”.

The agency said four crashes had resulted in one or more injuries. Tesla did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

«

The self-driving nirvana has been delayed once more.
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Here’s how Apple is locking down iPhones to comply with Texas’s age verification law • The Verge

Jay Peters:

»

Starting next year, Texas will require companies like Apple and Google to verify the ages of people that use their app stores, and Apple shared today how it’s going to comply. Starting January 1st, 2026, anyone trying to make a new Apple Account must confirm if they are over 18, and any users under 18 must join a Family Sharing group. Parents and guardians will also be required to give their consent for users under 18 to download apps or to make in-app purchases.

Developers will also have to make changes to comply with the law. Apple already offers a Declared Age Range API that developers can implement to ask users their general age, and the API “will be updated in the coming months to provide the required age categories for new account users in Texas,” Apple says. Apple is also launching new APIs “later this year” that “will enable developers, when they determine a significant change is made to their app, to invoke a system experience to allow the user to request that parental consent be re-obtained.”

Utah and Louisiana have passed similar laws, and Apple says that “similar requirements will come into effect later next year” in those states. Google has also shared guidance about how it will support Google Play developers ahead of the age verification laws going into effect.

«

This is Apple following the law to the letter. Which is fine: that’s what we expect companies to do. What we don’t expect them to do is bow silently to governmental demands without requiring legal powers first.
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The 25 most interesting ideas I’ve found in 2025 (so far) • Derek Thompson

Derek Thompson:

»

When I’m reading on my phone, I take a screenshot of whatever interests me. After a few months, I’ll have dozens to hundreds of morsels to serve as inspiration for essays and podcasts, including excerpts from books, photographs of magazine text, charts from economic papers, and screen grabs of tweets.

Before I had a newsletter, there was nowhere for me to publish this information inventory. Now that I have this newsletter, and I thought it might be fun and useful to organize the most interesting things I’ve seen this year by subject matter and write something about why they struck me and what story they tell about America or the world.

«

No point even trying to precis these; except to say they’re all interesting (though some, such as housebuilding, are easily answered: too much NIMBYism).
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‘AI is here to stay and change things’: Mad Max director George Miller on why he is taking part in an AI film festival • The Guardian

Kelly Burke:

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In May, during heated discussions at the Cannes film festival, the industry was warned it was on a slippery slope, with AI threatening jobs, copyright protections and the integrity of the creative process.

But the film industry is far from united against AI; not everyone believes its rapid advance is eroding the very essence of human storytelling. “The wave is coming and it’s impossible to stop it,” one producer told a Cannes roundtable. “Our only option is to surf on it.”

Now, one of Australia’s most decorated film-makers is getting on his board: acclaimed Mad Max director and producer George Miller.

“AI is arguably the most dynamically evolving tool in making moving image,” Miller tells the Guardian. “As a film-maker, I’ve always been driven by the tools. AI is here to stay and change things.”

Miller is about to lead the judging panel at the Omni 1.0 AI film festival, Australia’s first fully fledged award festival for wholly AI-generated films. He joined the jury out of “intense curiosity” about the evolving role of AI in storytelling – and his interest goes beyond the technology. AI, he believes, is part of a deeper philosophical shift in our understanding of creative authorship.

“It’s the balance between human creativity and machine capability, that’s what the debate and the anxiety is about,” he says. “It strikes me how this debate echoes earlier moments in art history.”

He likens our current moment to the Renaissance, when the introduction of oil paint “gave artists the freedom to revise and enhance their work over time”.

“That shift sparked controversy – some argued that true artists should be able to commit to the canvas without corrections, others embraced the new flexibility,” Miller says. “A similar debate unfolded in the mid-19th century with the arrival of photography. Art has to evolve. And while photography became its own form, painting continued. Both changed, but both endured. Art changed.”

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Why are so many pedestrians killed by cars in the US? • Construction Physics

Brian Potter:

»

It’s unfortunately not uncommon for pedestrians to be killed by cars in the US. More than 7,300 pedestrians were killed in motor vehicle accidents in the US in 2023, around 18% of all motor vehicle deaths that year. Until around 2009, pedestrian deaths in the US had been falling, declining from 7,516 deaths in 1975 to just 4,109 in 2009 (in per capita terms, this decline would be even larger.) But since 2009, pedestrian deaths have surged.

Motor vehicle deaths overall are up, but not nearly to the same degree. From 2009 to 2023, non-pedestrian motor vehicle deaths in the US increased by around 13%, compared to a 78% increase in pedestrian deaths. (The low point in non-pedestrian motor vehicle deaths is actually 2014; deaths are up 20% since then.)

Other countries haven’t seen this increase in pedestrian deaths: in every other high-income country, rates are flat or declining. Whatever’s causing the problem seems to be limited to the US.

«

You’re probably thinking “it’s big SUVs which kill people more easily!” But other countries have bought SUVs with even more eagerness than the US without the same rise in pedestrian deaths. The article tortures the data, but the answer.. remains elusive. (I have a suspicion, based on the shape of the deaths graph.)
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JPMorgan reportedly foots $115m of legal bills for Charlie Javice, co-defendant who scammed bank out of $175m • NY Post

Ariel Zilber:

»

JPMorgan Chase is footing a staggering $115m bill for the army of lawyers who defended convicted fraudster Charlie Javice and her former colleague Olivier Amar — a sum nearly two-thirds of what the bank paid for their ill-fated student-finance startup Frank.

At trial, 19 lawyers appeared for Javice and 16 for Amar, an extraordinary show of legal firepower that helped drive the cost of their defense to a nine-figure sum.

By comparison, Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes spent around $30m on attorneys before she was sentenced to years behind bars for orchestrating her scheme.

JPMorgan Chase is paying a staggering $115m to cover the legal bills for Charlie Javice and Olivier Amar, who defrauded the bank out of $175m.

Javice was sentenced to seven years in prison last week.

The payments — mandated under the Frank merger agreement — were confirmed in filings after a Delaware court ruled JPMorgan must advance the pair’s legal costs, even though the bank later fired them for orchestrating the $175m fraud.

Former prosecutor Kevin O’Brien called the bill a “huge, huge number,” noting Javice “had a lot of high-priced legal talent.”

“It helps if someone else is picking up the bill,” O’Brien told Bloomberg.

«

For those who haven’t caught up, Javice got a clause put into the takeover document saying that JP Morgan would cover her legal bills. Which turned out to include being sued for defrauding JP Morgan by falsifying user numbers for the app, claiming 4.25 million when there were fewer than 300,000.
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The Chinese migrant workers powering the deadly EV nickel boom • Rest Of World

Wufei Yu:

»

Driven by economic and social pressures, tens of thousands of workers from China, mostly middle-aged men, are employed in eastern Indonesia’s nickel industry, which has sprung up in the last decade. Just as critical minerals crisscross the globe before they’re incorporated into cutting-edge products, so too do some of the people who make the world’s green dreams a reality.

Over seven months, Grist spoke to more than a dozen of these Chinese workers and their family members, as well as Indonesian labor leaders who have negotiated factory conditions with top Chinese executives. We’ve found that, even following fatal accidents at the smelters, efforts to improve working conditions have been slow, hindered by a lack of oversight from companies, governments, and international labor groups that were dependent on U.S. funding terminated by the Trump administration. We also obtained an internal company review of a nickel smelter expansion that shows facilities are likely spreading pollution and illness well beyond factory walls. Despite the challenges, new nickel processing plants continue to emerge in Indonesia and hire from China.

Before joining Indonesia’s nickel rush, most of these Chinese men had spent almost all their lives in their home country, working in declining steel factories. Like Wong, they had never before owned a passport or boarded a flight. Their leap into the nickel refining industry has helped create entire towns on remote islands in Indonesia, and it’s made them an unlikely backbone of the world’s green energy transition.

The men work alongside hundreds of thousands of Indonesian colleagues. Though Indonesia is the world’s fourth-most populous country, its workforce does not have the industrial experience needed in the new facilities. Companies have turned to China to fill the gap.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A man has been accused of starting California’s Palisades fire, in part because of pictures he generated with ChatGPT. CC-licensed photo by Frank Kovalchek 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. Unprompted. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Apple banned an app that simply archived videos of ICE abuses • 404 Media

Joseph Cox:

»

Apple removed an app for preserving TikToks, Instagram reels, news reports, and videos documenting abuses by ICE, 404 Media has learned. The app, called Eyes Up, differs from other banned apps such as ICEBlock which were designed to report sightings of ICE officials in real-time to warn local communities. Eyes Up, meanwhile, was more of an aggregation service pooling together information to preserve evidence in case the material is needed in the future in court.

The news shows that Apple and Google’s crackdown on ICE-spotting apps, which started after pressure from the Department of Justice against Apple, is broader in scope than apps that report sightings of ICE officials. It has also impacted at least one app that was more about creating a historical record of ICE’s activity during its mass deportation effort.

“Our goal is government accountability, we aren’t even doing real-time tracking,” the administrator of Eyes Up, who said their name was Mark, told 404 Media. Mark asked 404 Media to only use his first name to protect him from retaliation. “I think the [Trump] admin is just embarrassed by how many incriminating videos we have.”

…The website for Eyes Up which functions essentially the same way is still available. The site includes a map with dots that visitors can click on, which then plays a video from that location. Users are able to submit their own videos for inclusion. Mark said he manually reviews every video before it is uploaded to the service, to check its content and its location.

«

Google said ICE is a “vulnerable group”, which is an odd use of the word. The way these companies are kowtowing to the Trump administration is astonishing: have they lost their trust in the courts so quickly?
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Bank of England warns of growing risk that AI bubble could burst • The Guardian

Kalyeena Makortoff:

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The Bank of England has warned there is a growing risk of a “sudden correction” in global markets as it raised concerns about soaring valuations of leading AI tech companies.

Policymakers said there were also threats of a “sharp repricing of US dollar assets” if the Federal Reserve lost credibility in the eyes of global investors. It comes as Donald Trump’s continues to attack the US central bank and threaten its independence.

Continued hype and optimism about the potential for AI technology has led to a rise in valuations in recent months, with companies such as OpenAI now worth $500bn (£372bn), compared with $157bn last October. Another firm, Anthropic, has almost trebled its valuation, going from $60bn in March to $170bn last month.

However, the Bank of England’s financial policy committee (FPC) warned on Wednesday: “The risk of a sharp market correction has increased.

“On a number of measures, equity market valuations appear stretched, particularly for technology companies focused on artificial intelligence. This … leaves equity markets particularly exposed should expectations around the impact of AI become less optimistic.”

It said investors had not fully accounted for these potential risks, warning that “a sudden correction could occur” should any of them crystallise, resulting in finance drying up for households and businesses. The FPC added: “As an open economy with a global financial centre, the risk of spillovers to the UK financial system from such global shocks is material.”

Faith in the AI boom has recently been rattled by research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which showed that 95% of organisations are getting zero return from their investments in generative AI.

«

AI investment currently accounts for a quarter of US GDP growth (not, please note, GDP). And it’s largely faith-based. It’s not hard to imagine something like the dot-com boom, where valuations collapse and it’s only years later that the investments start to be useful.
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Salesforce says it won’t pay extortion demand in 1 billion records breach • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

The threat group making the demands began their campaign in May, when they made voice calls to organizations storing data on the Salesforce platform, Google-owned Mandiant said in June. The English-speaking callers would provide a pretense that necessitated the target connect an attacker-controlled app to their Salesforce portal. Amazingly—but not surprisingly—many of the people who received the calls complied.

The threat group behind the campaign is calling itself Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters, a mashup of three prolific data-extortion actors: Scattered Spider, LAPSuS$, and ShinyHunters. Mandiant, meanwhile, tracks the group as UNC6040, because the researchers so far have been unable to positively identify the connections.

Earlier this month, the group created a website that named Toyota, FedEx, and 37 other Salesforce customers whose data was stolen in the campaign. In all, the number of records recovered, Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters claimed, was “989.45m/~1B+.” The site called on Salesforce to begin negotiations for a ransom amount “or all your customers [sic] data will be leaked.” The site went on to say: “Nobody else will have to pay us, if you pay, Salesforce, Inc.” The site said the deadline for payment was Friday.

In an email Wednesday, a Salesforce representative said the company is spurning the demand. “I can confirm Salesforce will not engage, negotiate with, or pay any extortion demand,” the representative wrote. The confirmation came a day after Bloomberg reported that Salesforce told customers in an email that it won’t pay the ransom. The email went on to say that Salesforce had received “credible threat intelligence” indicating a group known as ShinyHunters planned to publish data stolen in the series of attacks on customers’ Salesforce portals.

The refusal comes amid a continuing explosion in the number of ransomware attacks on organizations around the world. The reason these breaches keep occurring is the hefty sums the attackers receive in return for decrypting encrypted data and/or promising not to publish stolen data online. Global Ransom Payments totaled $813m, last year, down from $1.1bn in 2023, security firm Deepstrike estimated. The group that breached drug distributor Cencora alone received a whopping $75m in ransomware payments, Bloomberg reported, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter.

«

I think that these hackers still haven’t learnt the difference between “vomit up a database” and “find truly valuable files that the company would be severely embarrassed to see made public, such as corporate plans”. Encrypting systems, of course, remains a serious threat.
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Logitech’s POP smart buttons are shutting down • How To Geek

Jorge Aguilar:

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The era of Logitech’s popular smart home control solution, the POP button system, is abruptly coming to an end. Logitech has announced the complete discontinuation of the service, in some emails to customers, stating that it is effective October 15, 2025.

The formal announcement was delivered to users via email, which was revealed on Reddit. It read, “Dear Logitech POP button user, Thank you for being a loyal Logitech customer and for making the POP button a part of your home. We are writing to inform you that we will be discontinuing the service for the Logitech POP button. For close to a decade, we have maintained the POP ecosystem, but as technology evolves, we have made the decision to end support for this device. As of October 15, 2025, your POP button(s) and the connected hub will no longer be supported and will lose all functionality. As a gesture of our appreciation for your loyalty, we would like to offer you a 15% discount on products purchased on http://www.logitech.com.”

While the email attempts to frame the decision as a natural progression, the consequences are anything but smooth for any remaining owners. This is not a partial service reduction, but a total crippling of the product ecosystem.

The POP buttons were designed to be a simple, versatile way to control a wide range of smart home devices and services.They were integrated with major platforms like Apple HomeKit, Sonos, IFTTT, and Philips Hue. The impending shutdown means that all these established, programmed interactions (the very purpose of the product) will instantly cease to exist.

«

Ah but! The coupon is only for US-based customers, and doesn’t apply to a wide range of Logitech products. Wonder how many smart home products have gone dead because the companies either give up on them, or introduce subscriptions that people choose not to take up. But as a category, it’s not in great shape.
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iOS 26: keep AirPods connected to your phone when you get in your car • MacRumors

Tim Hardwick:

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If you wear AirPods during your commute but don’t want your podcast or music suddenly blasting through the car speakers when you start the engine, there’s a new setting in iOS 26 that can ensure it doesn’t happen.

Apple has thoughtfully added a new “Keep Audio with Headphones” setting that prevents your iPhone from automatically switching audio to CarPlay or other Bluetooth speakers when you’re already listening through AirPods. Here’s how to toggle it on.

How to keep Audio in your AirPods:
• Open the Settings app on your iPhone
• Tap General
• Select AirPlay & Continuity
• Toggle on Keep Audio with Headphones.

«

Pretty simple, perhaps useful. Provided as a service to the reader.
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One-man spam campaign ravages EU “chat control” bill • POLITICO

Sam Clark:

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A website set up by an unknown Dane over the course of one weekend in August is giving a massive headache to those trying to pass a European bill aimed at stopping child sexual abuse material from spreading online.

The website, called Fight Chat Control, was set up by Joachim, a 30-year-old software engineer living in Aalborg, Denmark. He made it after learning of a new attempt to approve a European Union proposal to fight child sexual abuse material (CSAM) — a bill seen by privacy activists as breaking encryption and leading to mass surveillance.

The site lets visitors compile a mass email warning about the bill and send it to national government officials, members of the European Parliament and others with ease. Since launching, it has broken the inboxes of MEPs and caused a stir in Brussels’ corridors of power. 

“We are getting hundreds per day about it,” said Evin Incir, a Swedish Socialists and Democrats MEP, of the email deluge.

Three diplomats at national permanent representation offices said they too have received a large number of emails. 

Joachim’s website has stoked up an already red-hot debate around the CSAM proposal, which would give police the power to force companies like WhatsApp and Signal to scan their services for the illegal content. Critics fear the bill would enable online state surveillance.

«

The EU effectively abandoned the measure after the German government said on Wednesday that it won’t support the move. (Thanks Gregory B for the pointer.)
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Pacific Palisades fire suspect snared by ChatGPT image, say investigators • BBC News

Ana Faguy:

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A 29-year-old man has been arrested on suspicion of starting the Pacific Palisades fire in Los Angeles that killed 12 people and destroyed more than 6,000 homes in January.

Evidence collected from Jonathan Rinderknecht’s digital devices included an image he generated on ChatGPT depicting a burning city, justice department officials said.

The most destructive blaze in Los Angeles’ history, it was sparked on 7 January near a hiking trail overlooking the wealthy coastal neighbourhood. The Eaton Fire, ignited the same day in the LA area, killed another 19 people and razed 9,400 structures. The cause of that fire remains unclear. Mr Rinderknecht is due in court in Orlando, Florida, on Wednesday.

The fire scorched more than 23,000 acres (9,308 hectares) and caused about $150bn (£112bn) in damage. Wiping out whole neighbourhoods, the conflagration raged for more than three weeks, also ravaging parts of Topanga and Malibu.

…He lit the fire with an open flame after he completed a ride as an Uber driver on New Year’s Eve, according to the indictment.

…Officials said they had used his phone data to pinpoint his location when the fire initially started on 1 January, but when they pressed him on details he allegedly lied to investigators, claiming he was near the bottom of the trail. On his phone they found videos that Mr Rinderknecht had taken of firefighters trying to put out the flames.

They also found just after midnight on New Year’s Day that he repeatedly called 911, but could not get through because of patchy mobile reception on the trailhead. On his phone was a screen recording of him trying to call emergency services and at one point being connected with a dispatcher.

Mr Rinderknecht also asked ChatGPT: “Are you at fault if a fire is lift [sic] because of your cigarettes?” Investigators said the suspect wanted to “preserve evidence of himself trying to assist in the suppression of the fire”.

“He wanted to create evidence regarding a more innocent explanation for the cause of the fire,” the indictment said.

«

This is surely the first time that someone’s ChatGPT history has been used to indict them. I think we’ve already had at least one divorce and a few suicides. What’s next on the bingo card – poisonings from recipes involving bleach?
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Brussels moves to tackle satellite junk in space • POLITICO

Mathieu Pollet:

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The European Commission on Wednesday proposed a new Space Act that seeks to dial up regulatory oversight of satellite operators — including requiring them to tackle their impact on space debris and pollution, or face significant fines.

There are more than 10,000 satellites now in orbit and growing space junk to match. In recent years, more companies — most notably Elon Musk’s Starlink — have ventured into low-Earth orbit, from where stronger telecommunication connections can be established but which requires more satellites to ensure full coverage.
“Space is congested and contested,” a Commission official said ahead of Wednesday’s proposal in a briefing with reporters. The official was granted anonymity to disclose details ahead of the formal presentation.

The EU executive wants to set up a database to track objects circulating in space; make authorization processes clearer to help companies launch satellites and provide services in Europe; and force national governments to give regulators oversight powers.

The Space Act proposal would also require space companies to have launch safety and end-of-life disposal plans, take extra steps to limit space debris, light and radio pollution, and calculate the environmental footprint of their operations.

Mega and giga constellations, which are networks of at least 100 and 1,000 spacecraft, respectively, face extra rules to coordinate orbit traffic and avoid collisions.

“It’s starting to look like a jungle up there. We need to intervene,” said French liberal lawmaker Christophe Grudler. “Setting traffic rules for satellites might not sound as sexy as sending people to Mars. But that’s real, that’s now and that has an impact on our daily lives.”

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Isn’t going to do anything about the 50-odd satellites posing the biggest space junk threat, though there is an EU project called REMOVEDEBRIS (smart name!) set up in 2018 which did a couple of successful test flights in 2020.
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China confirms solar panel projects are irreversibly changing desert ecosystems • Glass Almanac

Brian Foster:

»

A team studying one of the largest photovoltaic parks in China, the Gonghe project in the Talatan Desert, found a striking difference between what was happening under the panels and what lay just beyond. They used a detailed framework measuring dozens of indicators—everything from soil chemistry to microbial life—and discovered that the micro-environment beneath the panels was noticeably healthier. The reasons track with physics: shade cools the surface and slows evaporation, letting scarce soil moisture linger longer; field experiments in western China report measurable soil-moisture gains beneath shaded arrays.²

Simple shade from panel rows can create a gentler microclimate at ground level, cutting wind stress and helping fragile seedlings establish.

In other desert locations like Gansu and the Gobi, year-round field data tell a similar story. Soil temperatures beneath arrays tend to be cooler during the day and a bit warmer at night than surrounding ground, with humidity patterns shifting in tandem—conditions that can make harsh surfaces more habitable when paired with basic land care.³

Even small shifts like these can help re-establish vegetation—if combined with erosion control and water management. These aren’t wildflowers blooming overnight, but they are signs that utility-scale solar can double as a modest micro-restorer.

It’s a tempting idea—energy infrastructure moonlighting as land-restoration tools. But not every desert is the same, and not every solar farm will have the same impact. Site layout, panel spacing, grazing pressure, and dust management all shape whether these micro-benefits take root or fade.

«

In the UK, there’s opposition because solar panels “take away valuable farmland”. (Except nobody wants to grow crops on them.) In China, they might be greening the desert.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The first rule of Qantas hacking is, Australia’s courts say hackers can’t release the data. Seriously. CC-licensed photo by Steven Coochin on Flickr.

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

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

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

Denmark plans social media ban for under-15s as PM warns phones “stealing childhood” • The Guardian

Miranda Bryant:

»

The Danish prime minister says the country will ban social media for under-15s, as she accused mobile phones and social networks of “stealing our children’s childhood”.

Mette Frederiksen used her speech on Tuesday at the opening of Folketing, the Danish parliament, to announce the proposal, in which she said: “We have unleashed a monster.” She added: “Never before have so many children and young people suffered from anxiety and depression.”

Many children also have difficulty reading and concentrating, said Frederiksen, adding that “on screens they see things no child or young person should see”.

She did not specify which social networks the new measures would affect, but said it would cover “several” social media platforms. She said there would be an option for parents to give permission to their children to use social media from the age of 13.

It is hoped the ban could come into effect as early as next year.

It follows the lead of Australia, which is introducing a ban on social media platforms including Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube for under-16s, and Norway where the prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, has also said he would enforce a strict minimum age limit of 15 on social media, raising it from 13.

Støre said last year that it would be “an uphill battle” but that politicians must intervene to protect children from the “power of the algorithms”.

Denmark’s minister of digitalisation, Caroline Stage, said her government’s announcement was a “breakthrough”. She said: “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: we’ve been too naive. We’ve left children’s digital lives to platforms that never had their wellbeing in mind. We must move from digital captivity to community.”

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Interesting move, and will probably be taken up in other countries. If, that is, parents can resist letting their children have access as soon as they demand it.
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Ted Cruz doesn’t seem to understand Wikipedia, lawyer for Wikimedia says • Ars Technica

Jon Brodkin:

»

The letter from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) accusing Wikipedia of left-wing bias seems to be based on fundamental misunderstandings of how the platform works, according to a lawyer for the nonprofit foundation that operates the online encyclopedia.

“The foundation is very much taking the approach that Wikipedia is actually pretty great and a lot of what’s in this letter is actually misunderstandings,” Jacob Rogers, associate general counsel at the Wikimedia Foundation, told Ars in an interview. “And so we are more than happy, despite the pressure that comes from these things, to help people better understand how Wikipedia works.”

Cruz’s letter to Wikimedia Foundation CEO Maryana Iskander expressed concern “about ideological bias on the Wikipedia platform and at the Wikimedia Foundation.” Cruz alleged that Wikipedia articles “often reflect a left-wing bias.” He asked the foundation for “documents sufficient to show what supervision, oversight, or influence, if any, the Wikimedia Foundation has over the editing community,” and “documents sufficient to show how the Wikimedia Foundation addresses political or ideological bias.”

As many people know, Wikipedia is edited by volunteers through a collaborative process.

“We’re not deciding what the editorial policies are for what is on Wikipedia,” Rogers said, describing the Wikimedia Foundation’s hands-off approach. “All of that, both the writing of the content and the determining of the editorial policies, is done through the volunteer editors” through “public conversation and discussion and trying to come to a consensus. They make all of that visible in various ways to the reader. So you go and you read a Wikipedia article, you can see what the sources are, what someone has written, you can follow the links yourselves.”

Cruz’s letter raised concerns about “the influence of large donors on Wikipedia’s content creation or editing practices.” But Rogers said that “people who donate to Wikipedia don’t have any influence over content and we don’t even have that many large donors to begin with. It is primarily funded by people donating through the website fundraisers, so I think they’re worried about something that is just not present at all.”

Anyone unhappy with Wikipedia content can participate in the writing and editing, he said. “It’s still open for everybody to participate. If someone doesn’t like what it says, they can go on and say, ‘Hey, I don’t like the sources that are being used, or I think a different source should be used that isn’t there,'” Rogers said. “Other people might disagree with them, but they can have that conversation and try to figure it out and make it better.”

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The Cruz letter does come across a bit clueless, though Rogers exaggerates the ease of pushing against the enormous inertia of Wikipedia’s immanent editors, who flick off unwanted but merited changes like flicking bugs. The bias is definitely there, but Cruz’s complaints aren’t the way it will be fixed.
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Sora 2 watermark removers flood the web • 404 Media

Matthew Gault:

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Sora 2, Open AI’s new AI video generator, puts a visual watermark on every video it generates. But the little cartoon-eyed cloud logo meant to help people distinguish between reality and AI-generated bullshit is easy to remove and there are half a dozen websites that will help anyone do it in a few minutes.

A simple search for “sora watermark” on any social media site will return links to places where a user can upload a Sora 2 video and remove the watermark. 404 Media tested three of these websites, and they all seamlessly removed the watermark from the video in a matter of seconds.

Hany Farid, a UC Berkeley professor and an expert on digitally manipulated images, said he’s not shocked at how fast people were able to remove watermarks from Sora 2 videos. “It was predictable,” he said. “Sora isn’t the first AI model to add visible watermarks and this isn’t the first time that within hours of these models being released, someone released code or a service to remove these watermarks.”

Hours after its release on September 30, Sora 2 emerged as a copyright violation machine full of Nazi SpongeBobs and criminal Pickachus. Open AI has tamped down on that kind of content after the initial thrill of seeing Rick and Morty shill for crypto sent people scrambling to download the app. Now that the novelty is wearing off we’re grappling with the unpleasant fact that Open AI’s new tool is very good at making realistic videos that are hard to distinguish from reality.

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Yup, the deluge starts here.
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Global electricity mid-year insights 2025 • Ember

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The increase in solar and wind power outpaced global electricity demand growth in the first half of 2025. Solar alone met 83% of the rise, with many countries setting new records. Fossil fuels remained mostly flat, with a slight decline. Fossil generation fell in China and India, but grew in the EU and the US.

As the world’s energy needs increase and electricity makes up a growing share of final energy consumption, spectacular solar growth, alongside increased wind generation, met and exceeded all new demand. This led to renewables overtaking coal’s share in the global mix and prevented further increases in CO2 emissions from the power sector.

Solar grew by a record 306 TWh (31%) in the first half of 2025. This increased solar’s share in the global electricity mix from 6.9% to 8.8%. China accounted for 55% of global solar generation growth, followed by the US (14%), the EU (12%), India (5.6%) and Brazil (3.2%), while the rest of the world contributed just 9%. Four countries generated over 25% of their electricity from solar, and at least 29 countries surpassed 10%, up from 22 countries in the same period last year and only 11 countries in H1-2021.

A strong rise in solar, and to a lesser extent wind, led to renewables overtaking coal generation for the first time on record in the first half of 2025.

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Though of course solar growth is going backwards in the US. What a world where China is the one we look to for technological progress and good sense.
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Spotify strengthens AI protections for artists, songwriters, and producers • Spotify

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We’ve always had a policy against deceptive content. But AI tools have made generating vocal deepfakes of your favorite artists easier than ever before.

We’ve introduced a new impersonation policy that clarifies how we handle claims about AI voice clones (and other forms of unauthorized vocal impersonation), giving artists stronger protections and clearer recourse. Vocal impersonation is only allowed in music on Spotify when the impersonated artist has authorized the usage. 

We’re also ramping up our investments to protect against another impersonation tactic—where uploaders fraudulently deliver music (AI-generated or otherwise) to another artist’s profile across streaming services. We’re testing new prevention tactics with leading artist distributors to equip them to better stop these attacks at the source. On our end, we’ll also be investing more resources into our content mismatch process, reducing the wait time for review, and enabling artists to report “mismatch” even in the pre-release state.

Unauthorized use of AI to clone an artist’s voice exploits their identity, undermines their artistry, and threatens the fundamental integrity of their work. Some artists may choose to license their voices to AI projects—and that’s their choice to make. Our job is to do what we can to ensure that the choice stays in their hands.

Total music payouts on Spotify have grown from $1bn in 2014 to $10bn in 2024. But big payouts entice bad actors. Spam tactics such as mass uploads, duplicates, SEO hacks, artificially short track abuse, and other forms of slop have become easier to exploit as AI tools make it simpler for anyone to generate large volumes of music.

This fall [autumn], we’ll roll out a new music spam filter—a system that will identify uploaders and tracks engaging in these tactics, tag them, and stop recommending them.

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The arms race intensifies. And some people probably like AI-generated music.
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My email to Tim Cook • Wiley Hodges

Hodges worked for Apple for 22 years, leaving in 2022:

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The removal of ICEBlock without evidence of the government either providing a lawful basis for such a demand or following a legal process to effect its removal represents an erosion of this principled stance. Acceding to a government ‘demand’ without demanding that the government follow legal process in order to back up its request (or at least shedding light on how the government did follow such process) raises the question of how easily Apple will accede to other requests. Will Apple lower its general standards for law enforcement requests from those outlined at https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/law-enforcement-guidelines-us.pdf? Will Apple give data on the identities of users who downloaded the ICEBlock app to the government? Will Apple block podcasts that advocate points of view opposed to the current US administration? I imagine and hope that these are ridiculous questions, but without a clearer demonstration of Apple’s principled commitment to lawful action and due process, I feel uncertain.

I don’t know where this leaves me as an Apple customer, but I do know that it upsets me as an Apple shareholder. I am asking you and your team to more clearly explain the basis on which you made the decision to remove ICEBlock—and how the government showed good faith and strong evidence in making its demand of Apple, or that you reinstate the app in the App Store.

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John Gruber links to this and is excoriating about Apple once again. (Are they having discussions in the Apple PR offices, since he used to just be the “hardware review and links” guy?) ICEBlock, as Gruber points out, contains no harmful content; it just tells you where law enforcement are, which both Maps and Waze, still available, also do.

When the FBI demanded a backdoor to crack the San Bernadino shooter’s phone in 2016, Apple refused. When the UK government demanded a backdoor into encrypted iCloud backups in 2025, Apple refused (though it did turn off encrypted backups in the UK). When the Trump administration demanded – without any legal authority – that ICEBlock be removed, it was.

What’s the difference? Tim Cook may be thinking that retirement looks welcoming rather than fighting these contradictions.
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OpenAI and Jony Ive grapple with technical issues on secretive AI device

Tim Bradshaw, Cristina Criddle, Michael Acton and Ryan McMorrow:

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OpenAI and star designer Jony Ive are grappling with a series of technical issues with their secretive new artificial intelligence device, as they push to launch a blockbuster tech product next year.

The San Francisco-based startup run by Sam Altman acquired the former Apple design chief’s company io for $6.5bn in May, but the pair have shared few details on the projects they are building.

Their aim is to create a palm-sized device without a screen that can take audio and visual cues from the physical environment and respond to users’ requests.

People familiar with their plans said OpenAI and Ive had yet to solve critical problems that could delay the device’s release. Despite having hardware developed by Ive and his team — whose alluring designs of the iMac, iPod and iPhone helped turn Apple into one of the most valuable companies in the world — obstacles remain in the device’s software and the infrastructure needed to power it.

These include deciding on the assistant’s “personality”, privacy issues and budgeting for the computing power needed to run OpenAI’s models on a mass consumer device.

“Compute is another huge factor for the delay,” said one person close to Ive. “Amazon has the compute for an Alexa, so does Google [for its Home device], but OpenAI is struggling to get enough compute for ChatGPT, let alone an AI device — they need to fix that first.”

A person close to OpenAI said the teething troubles were simply normal parts of the product development process.

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Of course, the device is being built in China (so there’s a byline from China in there). It’s not surprising if they’re having challenges, but that doesn’t mean they won’t hit their deadline.
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Removing these 50 objects from orbit would cut danger from space junk in half • Ars Technica

Stephen Clark:

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A new listing of the 50 most concerning pieces of space debris in low-Earth orbit is dominated by relics more than a quarter-century old, primarily dead rockets left to hurtle through space at the end of their missions.

“The things left before 2000 are still the majority of the problem,” said Darren McKnight, lead author of a paper presented Friday at the International Astronautical Congress in Sydney. “Seventy-six% of the objects in the top 50 were deposited last century, and 88% of the objects are rocket bodies. That’s important to note, especially with some disturbing trends right now.”

The 50 objects identified by McKnight and his coauthors are the ones most likely to drive the creation of more space junk in low-Earth orbit (LEO) through collisions with other debris fragments. The objects are whizzing around the Earth at nearly five miles per second, flying in a heavily trafficked part of LEO between 700 and 1,000 kilometers (435 to 621 miles) above the Earth.

An impact with even a modestly sized object at orbital velocity would create countless pieces of debris, potentially triggering a cascading series of additional collisions clogging LEO with more and more space junk, a scenario called the Kessler Syndrome.

McKnight, a senior technical fellow at the orbital intelligence company LeoLabs, spoke with Ars before the paper’s release. In the paper, analysts considered how close objects are to other space traffic, their altitude, and their mass. Larger debris at higher altitudes pose a higher long-term risk because they could create more debris that would remain in orbit for centuries or longer.

Russia and the Soviet Union lead the pack with 34 objects listed in McKnight’s Top 50, followed by China with 10, the United States with three, Europe with two, and Japan with one. Russia’s SL-16 and SL-8 rockets are the worst offenders, combining to take 30 of the Top 50 slots.

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What isn’t stated is how you’d do this. Heading up there and nudging them down seems like a proposition, but nobody seems to be suggesting it.
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UAE’s AI university lures global talent to fuel tech ambitions • Rest of World

Amar Diwakar:

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In the six years since its founding, Abu Dhabi’s Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence has hired more than 100 faculty from China, the US, Germany, and other countries. MBZUAI currently has over 700 students and alumni from 49 nations. The government-funded institute promises students full scholarships, and professors freedom from having to secure academic grants. It works closely with the UAE’s multibillion-dollar AI firm G42, and in May, it opened a satellite research facility in Silicon Valley dedicated to developing AI models. 

There is a lot riding on the institute, which is central to the nation’s vision of becoming a global AI powerhouse. The government has bet billions on the tech, and hopes a steady talent pipeline will help diversify its oil-based economy. AI is expected to contribute 20% of the UAE’s non-oil GDP by 2031, according to a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank based in Washington, D.C.

MBZUAI should “create an AI district that would become the bedrock of the next level of advancement of the UAE’s and MENA’s [Middle East and North Africa] economy and global impact,” Eric Xing, the university’s president, said at an event in January.

The university says its ambition to be the “Stanford of the Middle East” is already beginning to pay off. It is currently among the top 20 universities publishing on AI topics, according to CSRanking, a global computer-science ranking initiative.

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In case you thought that AI study was the sole preserve of the US and China. (And maybe a bit the UK.)
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Qantas shrouds stolen data in secrecy: will it help?​ • Cybernews

Gintaras Radauskas:

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When it emerged in early July that almost six million customer details were stolen from Qantas in a security breach, it seemed a bit bizarre that the airline kept saying that its operations weren’t actually impacted.

At the time, the company explained that its system doesn’t store credit card details, personal financial information, or passport details. Customer names, email addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, and frequent flyer numbers were nabbed.

While this might not seem like the most sensitive data, threat actors could still use the information to craft sophisticated phishing scams that urge flyers to hand over their credentials.

However, there’s another reason why Qantas remained remarkably calm over the seemingly major cyber incident. Soon after the attack, the company was granted an interim injunction in the NSW Supreme Court, aimed at stopping the data from being accessed or released.

The court has now made the injunction permanent. Essentially, the order prevents third parties from publishing, viewing, or accessing the data if it is released by the attackers. Qantas has also successfully obtained permission not to publicly disclose the identities of lawyers acting for the company, saying that the hackers could target them.

Justice Francois Kunc said that “the perpetrators have some temporary ire against the legal advisors,” and that “it is depressing as it is obvious to observe that their attention will move on.”

Qantas claims there’s no evidence that the stolen data has been released, but the hackers allegedly contacted the airline via a series of emails. Rather than giving in to a ransom demand, the company responded by filing a lawsuit against “persons unknown.”

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Definitely going to work, uh-huh.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Thousands of Starlink satellites are aloft.. and a couple are coming down every day. CC-licensed photo by Glenn Beltz on Flickr.

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

“The AI-ification of email” keeps 404 Media’s Jason Koebler up at night • Nieman Journalism Lab

Laura Hazard Owen:

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“Our work was going in the trash.”

That’s how Jason Koebler, cofounder of independent technology news site 404 Media, describes the situation that drove 404 to require readers to give their email addresses before reading articles.

It was January 2024, “I was walking my dog and I basically had a panic attack,” Koebler told Nieman Lab’s Hanaa’ Tameez last week in a panel at the IMEDD International Journalism Forum in Athens, Greece. (You can watch the full panel.)

404 had just published cofounder Sam Cole’s major investigation into how large language models were sucking up child sexual abuse material. That story took eight months to report. Soon after it came out, a site called Nation World News ran it through an AI content spinner, changing quotes and facts while retaining Cole’s byline. The AI version of the story showed up on Google News. 404’s original story did not.

It kept happening with 404’s stories. “I started thinking ‘this is a major problem’,” Koebler recalled. “The days of us being able to walk on [to social media], tweet something, walk away, and get people to come to our website are over…We said, if we don’t aggressively move people from social media platforms that we don’t control to platforms that we do control, this business isn’t going to work and we aren’t going to have jobs anymore.”

On January 26, 2024, 404 published a 2,800-word reported piece, “We need your email address,” about what was happening to its stories. From then on, the founders explained, readers would need to enter their email addresses before reading stories. They also started putting older stories behind paywalls.

“It completely changed our business almost literally overnight,” Koebler said.

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The rise of systems which will just repurpose content like that is a serious problem. It’s good that 404 Media has got on top of it. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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Is the UK digitally efficient enough? I wouldn’t bank on it • The Times

Harry Wallop:

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When we bought our daughter a second-hand car to help her to learn to drive, I foolishly failed to get myself properly registered at the DVLA as the new owner. Now that she has passed her test (first time!) and I was sorting out insurance, I realised this error and sought to rectify it. The DVLA, perfectly reasonably, charges £25 for the service. But in order to pay you have to download a form, print it out, fill it in and send it along with “a cheque or postal order” to Swansea. I have not owned a cheque book since before Covid, so I had to take a trip to the Post Office.

This is where I discovered a £25 postal order incurs a 12.5% charge; add in the outrageous cost of a first-class stamp and the £25 fee morphed into a £29.83 bill.

The experience was enraging. Not because of the 19% surcharge but the gross inefficiency, the fiddly bits of paper, and the expectation that though you may not have a bank account, you certainly have a printer at home.

Above all, it represented the mindset of bureaucratic organisations since the dawn of time: we do it this way because we have always done it this way.

The DVLA is not alone in clinging to antiquated processes. A few months ago, I remembered that I had £100 of premium bonds, which I had not checked for a decade. I had an NS&I account and they had my correct details but I didn’t have an online account. In order to discover if I had an unclaimed prize, they had to send me a form through the post, which I then had to return. Only then would they send me — through the post again — a temporary password for my online account, which would entitle me to change it, log in and discover my vast windfall. The process took three weeks from start to finish. You will be unsurprised to hear I had not won a penny.

It’s not paper systems themselves that are the problem, it’s the time they take. Last year, my wife sold her late mother’s flat. The solicitor who held the deeds insisted both executors travel in person and sign for the paperwork at its office in Cumbria — concurrently. My wife and her sister, the executors, pointed out they both had jobs and lived at opposite ends of the country, so this was rather inconvenient. As a concession, the solicitor agreed that they could arrive at the office at different times, but it had to be on the same day.

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As Wallop points out, not really the way to go for a country whose government hopes to do hospital appointments online with digital ID to (somehow) secure borders.
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Apple removes ICEBlock, won’t allow apps that report locations of ICE agents • Ars Technica

Jon Brodkin:

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Acting on a demand from the Trump administration, Apple has removed apps that let iPhone users report the locations of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers.

“We reached out to Apple today demanding they remove the ICEBlock app from their App Store—and Apple did so,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement to Fox News yesterday. “ICEBlock is designed to put ICE agents at risk just for doing their jobs, and violence against law enforcement is an intolerable red line that cannot be crossed.”

Apple confirmed it removed multiple apps after hearing from law enforcement. “We created the App Store to be a safe and trusted place to discover apps,” an Apple statement to news organizations said. “Based on information we’ve received from law enforcement about the safety risks associated with ICEBlock, we have removed it and similar apps from the App Store.”

The app removals follow a September 24 shooting at a Dallas ICE facility that resulted in the deaths of two immigrants in federal custody and the shooter. The shooter, identified as Joshua Jahn, “searched apps that tracked the presence of ICE agents,” according to FBI Director Kash Patel.

ICEBlock creator Joshua Aaron disputed claims that his app could have contributed to the shooting. He pointed out that an app isn’t needed to find the locations of ICE facilities.

“You don’t need to use an app to tell you where an ICE agent is when you’re aiming at an ICE detention facility,” Aaron told the BBC. “Everybody knows that’s where ICE agents are.”

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This happened at the end of last week, but that doesn’t make it any less bad. The safety risks associated with ICEBlock all accrue to ICE, which is basically an organisation that offers carte blanche for thugs. This is Apple bending to Trump – and it says nothing good that the biggest company in the world bends before an unsubstantiated claim made by a group of authoritarians.
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The periodic table of cognition • The Technium

Kevin Kelly:

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It is very probable we will discover that intelligence is likewise not a foundational singular element, but a derivative compound composed of multiple cognitive elements, combined in a complex system unique to each species of mind. The result that we call intelligence emerges from many different cognitive primitives such as long-term memory, spatial awareness, logical deduction, advance planning, pattern perception, and so on. There may be dozens of them, or hundreds. We currently don’t have any idea of what these elements are. We lack a periodic table of cognition.

The cognitive elements will more resemble the heavier elements in being unstable and dynamic. Or a better analogy would be to the elements in a biological cell. The primitives of cognition are flow states that appear in a thought cycle. They are like molecules in a cell which are in constant flux, shifting from one shape to another. Their molecular identity is related to their actions and interactions with other molecules. Thinking is a collective action that happens in time (like temperature in matter) and every mode can only be seen in relation to the other modes before and after it. It is a network phenomenon that makes it difficult to identify its borders. So each element of intelligence is embedded in a thought cycle, and requires the other elements as part of its identity. So each cognitive element is described in context of the other cognitive modes adjacent to it.

I asked ChatGPT5Pro to help me generate a periodic table of cognition given what we collectively know so far. It suggests 49 elements, arranged in a table so that related concepts are adjacent. The columns are families, or general categories of cognition such as “Perception”, “Reasoning”, “Learning”, so all the types of perception or reasoning are stacked in one column. The rows are sorted by stages in a cycle of thought. The earlier stages (such as “sensing”) are at the top, while later stages in the cycle (such as “reflect & align”) are at the bottom. So for example, in the family or category of “Safety” the AIs will tend to do the estimation of uncertainty first, later do verification, and only get to a theory of mind at the end.

The chart is colored according to how much progress we’ve made on each element. Red indicates we can synthesize that element in a robust way. Orange means we can kind of make it work with the right scaffolding. Yellow reflects promising research without operational generality yet.

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Neat approach; at least it’s a different way to approach this question.
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Clean trucking takes off • Bloomberg New Energy Finance

Colin McKerracher:

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Over 89,000 electric trucks were sold in the first half of 2025, up 140% from the same period last year. China accounted for almost 80,000 of those, with sales in Europe making up most of the balance. US sales shrunk to just 200 units.

The global heavy truck market is about five years behind passenger cars in terms of EV adoption. It’s a harder market to crack for many reasons, including demanding duty cycles, thin margins and uncertainty with regard to residual values. Many of those concerns are steadily being addressed by better and cheaper batteries, more dedicated charging infrastructure and more operating experience from fleets.

About 4% of global heavy and medium segment truck sales will be electric this year, but in China that figure will be around 14%. Some European markets are heading even higher. Gasoline demand has already peaked in quite a few countries, but many considered diesel to be a safe growth area for years to come. If electric truck sales stay on their steady upward trajectory, that assumption won’t hold for long.

Policy support for electric trucking is strengthening in some markets and faltering in others. China has increasingly stringent truck-efficiency standards in place, along with a host of incentives for purchases and charging infrastructure, plus scrappage schemes for older trucks.

In Europe, truck CO2 emissions targets came into effect in 2025 and are set to drive much higher levels of EV adoption. While these standards remain in place, the European Commission has relaxed compliance requirements of similar targets for cars and vans, so something similar could happen in the trucking market. In the US, regulatory changes are already slowing down the market.

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One or two Starlink satellites are falling back to Earth each day • EarthSky

Kelly Kizer Whitt:

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There are currently one to two Starlink satellites falling back to Earth every day, according to retired Harvard astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell. His acclaimed website Jonathan’s Space Report is widely regarded as the definitive source on spacecraft that go up … and come down. When we asked him about the deluge of Starlink satellite breakups that have recently been flooding social media, he pointed us to his graph showing Starlink reentries over time.

There are more than 8,000 Starlink satellites overhead at this moment. They’re a product of the space transportation company SpaceX. And that number is growing. Plus there are other companies and countries also deploying more and more satellites, adding to the number of satellites in Earth orbit. Many of these are in low-Earth orbits, which extend up to an altitude of 1,200 miles (2,000 km) above our planet. And the lifespan of low-Earth orbit satellites, such as Starlink, is only about five to seven years. Soon, McDowell told us, there will be up to five satellite reentries per day. He said:

With all constellations deployed, we expect about 30,000 low-Earth orbit satellites (Starlink, Amazon Kuiper, others) and perhaps another 20,000 satellites at 1,000 km [620 miles] from the Chinese systems. For the low-orbit satellites we expect a 5-year replacement cycle, and that translates to 5 reentries a day. It’s not clear if the Chinese will orbit-lower theirs or just accelerate us to chain-reaction Kessler syndrome.

The Kessler syndrome is a scenario in which the density of objects in low-Earth orbit is high enough that collisions between objects cause a cascade, with each collision generating space debris that increases the likelihood of further collisions.

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The thing about Kessler syndrome is that people will keep putting satellites up there, as long as it doesn’t happen, until it does happen. This is pretty much guaranteed by the overconfidence of humans when they have a financial interest in ignoring downsides.
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Discord customer service data breach leaks user info and scanned photo IDs • The Verge

Jay Peters:

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One of Discord’s third-party customer service providers was compromised by an “unauthorized party,” the company says. The unauthorized party gained access to “information from a limited number of users who had contacted Discord through our Customer Support and/or Trust & Safety teams” and aimed to “extort a financial ransom from Discord.” The unauthorized party “did not gain access to Discord directly.”

Data potentially accessed by the hack includes things like names, usernames, emails, and the last four digits of credit card numbers. The unauthorized party also accessed a “small number” of images of government IDs from “users who had appealed an age determination.” Full credit card numbers and passwords were not impacted by the breach, Discord says.

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So it grabbed images used for age verification? Which is a really great thumbs-up for having age verification. Truly, there’s no satisfactory way to prove who you are online that doesn’t have serious collateral potential.
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Costco will sell Ozempic and Wegovy at half price • People

Cara Lynn Shultz:

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Costco members will be able to get GLP-1 medications like Ozempic and Wegovy at half price as part of the retailer’s new partnership with manufacturer Novo Nordisk.

The medication will be available through the Costco Member Prescription Program. It will cost $499 for a four-week supply of injectable pens — but members must have a prescription and pay out of pocket. (Many insurance companies do not cover the medications.)

A Novo Nordisk spokesperson tells PEOPLE that Costco Executive Members and Costco Citibank Visa cardholders will receive an additional 2% discount on their Wegovy or Ozempic, subject to applicable terms.

“Our collaboration with Costco is another step forward by Novo Nordisk in making real Wegovy and Ozempic easier to access and afford — right where people already shop,” Dave Moore, Executive Vice President, U.S. Operations of Novo Nordisk Inc., told PEOPLE in a statement.

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You either get them by selling them food, or stuff to make them uninterested in food. Win-win! But does this make Costco a fast no-food outlet?
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G-Drive fire destroys 125,000 officials’ data • Chosun

Choi Yeon-jin and Kim Young-woo:

»

the ‘G-Drive,’ a work cloud, an online storage device, used by central government officials, was completely destroyed in a fire at the National Information Resources Service in Daejeon on the 26th of last month. Unlike other online administrative systems, the G-Drive is expected to cause significant damage as it has no backup copies. The Ministry of Personnel Management, where all affiliated officials use the G-Drive, is particularly affected. A source from the Ministry of Personnel Management said, “It’s daunting as eight years’ worth of work materials have completely disappeared.”

The G-Drive is a type of online hard disk where documents, photos, and other materials can be stored, similar to Google’s Google Drive. It was created in 2017 with the aim of making it easier for public officials to share documents and enhancing security. The name G-Drive is said to be derived from the word “government”. It provided 30GB per public official. At the time, the Ministry of the Interior and Safety also issued guidelines to each ministry stating, “All work materials should not be stored on office PCs but should be stored on the G-Drive.”

The actual number of users is about 17% of all central government officials. According to the Ministry of the Interior and Safety, as of last August, 125,000 public officials from 74 ministries are using it. The stored data amounts to 858TB (terabytes), equivalent to 449.5 billion A4 sheets. The G-Drive system was installed in the fifth-floor computer room of the National Information Resources Service, where the fire occurred. It is one of the 96 systems completely destroyed by the fire.

The problem is that, unlike other systems, the G-Drive cannot be restored. A source from the Ministry of the Interior and Safety said, “The G-Drive couldn’t have a backup system due to its large capacity,” and added, “The remaining 95 systems have backup data in online or offline forms.”

The Ministry of Personnel Management, which uses the G-Drive extensively, is in a state of emergency. A source from the Ministry of Personnel Management said, “Employees stored all work materials on the G-Drive and used them as needed, but operations are now practically at a standstill.”

«

Utterly calamitous. The idea that you couldn’t or wouldn’t back up 858TB in a different location is bad in so, so many ways.
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OpenAI looks to take 10% stake in AMD through AI chip deal • CNBC

MacKenzie Sigalos:

»

OpenAI and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) have reached a deal that could see Sam Altman’s company take a 10% stake in the chipmaker.

AMD stock skyrocketed more than 30% on Monday following the news.

OpenAI will deploy six gigawatts of AMD’s Instinct graphics processing units over multiple years and across multiple generations of hardware, the companies said Monday. It will kick off with an initial 1-gigawatt rollout of chips in the second half of 2026.

“We have to do this,” OpenAI President Greg Brockman told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.” “This is so core to our mission if we really want to be able to scale to reach all of humanity, this is what we have to do.”

Brockman added that the company is already unable to launch many features in ChatGPT and other products that could generate revenue because of the lack of compute power.

As part of the tie-up, AMD has issued OpenAI a warrant for up to 160 million shares of AMD common stock, with vesting milestones tied to both deployment volume and AMD’s share price.

The first tranche vests with the first full gigawatt deployment, with additional tranches unlocking as OpenAI scales to 6 gigawatts and meets key technical and commercial milestones required for large-scale rollout.

If OpenAI exercises the full warrant, it could acquire approximately 10% ownership in AMD, based on the current number of shares outstanding.

«

This is a bit like Microsoft buying a chunk of Intel back in the days when Windows was on the rise against all the competing PR operating systems. OpenAI is very, very serious about getting to the top of the heap in the chatbot wars, as I guess we’re going to call this.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

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.

What is it that railways really produce? It’s not what you might expect, even though you’ve used it. CC-licensed photo by Hugh Llewelyn 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. Ride on time. 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 perils of letting AI plan your next trip • BBC Travel

Lynn Brown:

»

Miguel Angel Gongora Meza, founder and director of Evolution Treks Peru, was in a rural Peruvian town preparing for a trek through the Andes when he overheard a curious conversation. Two unaccompanied tourists were chatting amicably about their plans to hike alone in the mountains to the “Sacred Canyon of Humantay”.  

“They [showed] me the screenshot, confidently written and full of vivid adjectives, [but] it was not true. There is no Sacred Canyon of Humantay!” said Gongora Meza. “The name is a combination of two places that have no relation to the description. The tourist paid nearly $160 (£118) in order to get to a rural road in the environs of Mollepata without a guide or [a destination].”

What’s more, Gongora Meza insisted that this seemingly innocent mistake could have cost these travellers their lives. “This sort of misinformation is perilous in Peru,” he explained. “The elevation, the climatic changes and accessibility [of the] paths have to be planned. When you [use] a program [like ChatGPT], which combines pictures and names to create a fantasy, then you can find yourself at an altitude of 4,000m without oxygen and [phone] signal.”

In just a few years, artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini have gone from a mere novelty to an integral part of trip planning for millions of people. According to one survey, 30% of international travellers are now using generative AI tools and dedicated travel AI sites such as Wonderplan and Layla to help organise their trips.

While these programs can offer valuable travel tips when they’re working properly, they can also lead people into some frustrating or even dangerous situations when they’re not. This is a lesson some travellers are learning when they arrive at their would-be destination, only to find they’ve been fed incorrect information or steered to a place that only exists in the hard-wired imagination of a robot.

«

Who could have imagined.
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How to try Chrome’s hidden AI model • Pete Warden’s blog

Pete Warden:

»

There’s an LLM hiding in Chrome. Buried in the browser’s basement, behind a door with a “Beware of Leopard” sign.

But I’ll show you how to find it. In a couple minutes, you’ll have a private, free chatbot running on your machine.

We’re going to enable some developer flags in desktop Chrome so you can get full access to the AI model. We have to do this because the functionality is only being slowly rolled out by Google, and by turning on these developer options we can skip to the front of the line. There’s also a screencast version of these instructions if you’d like to follow along on YouTube.

You’ll need access to Chrome’s internal debugging pages to try out the model, so enter chrome://chrome-urls/ into the URL bar, scroll down, and click on “Enable internal debugging pages”.

[Instructions in post.]

…Why does this matter?

It’s free: These models work with the PC you have and require no subscriptions. Your usage is only limited by the speed of the model.

It’s 100% privacy-safe: None of your questions or answers leave your PC. Go ahead, turn off your WiFi and start prompting – everything works perfectly.

It works offline: The first time I used a local model to help with a coding task while flying on an airplane without WiFi, it felt like magic. There’s something crazy about the amount of knowledge these models condense into a handful of gigabytes.

It’s educational: This is the main reason you should bother with local LLMs right now. Just trying out this model demystifies the field, and should be an antidote to the constant hype the AI industry fosters. By getting your hands just slightly dirty, you’ll start to understand the real-world trajectory of these things.

It’s the future: Local models are only getting better and faster, while cloud-based chatbots like Claude and ChatGPT plateau. The market is inevitably going to shift to free models like this that are integrated into platforms and operating systems.

«

Pete has been exploring machine learning systems for more than a decade. And if he says it matters, it really matters. It’s also very neat. As much as anything, it might teach people the limitations of chatbots if they’re using one in their browser all the time.
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Apologies: you have reached the end of your free-trial period of America! • The Atlantic

Alexandra Petri:

»

We were so excited to reach 340 million free users. But now it’s time to streamline our product so that it appeals more to paid subscribers, and that means some changes for everyone else. We are adding a lot of features no one asked for that will make your experience worse and also cost a lot of money! Freedom isn’t free! Nor is it, exactly, the freedom you’ve been used to! Yes, that is the National Guard in your city. We know that you didn’t request it; it’s just a new feature we’re rolling out, possibly for 30 days, possibly for even longer!

You were pretty vocal about what attracted you to America in the first place: personal liberty, economic opportunity, something called the American dream, and, of course, the perennial threat of gun violence. (That last feature developed over time, but it seems that our users are pretty attached? We offered you many opportunities to opt out.) But we knew what was really keeping you here: inertia, and the challenge of finding an alternative that sells decent breakfast burritos. We are banking on that going forward.

…Our new CEO does hate a large portion of our current user base, but he’s not totally ignorant of the culture here. He is very excited to bring back some things that past users described as “great,” such as Depression, Recession, and White-Shark Attacks. It was also his brilliant idea to add the features of autocracy—State Control of Business, General Encouragement of Groveling, Masked Men Who Yank Your Neighbors Into an Unmarked Van to Whisk Them Off to a Gulag—to our core democratic product.

You heard it right: The government you knew for Weather Data and Medical Research is going all in on Despot Whims. This costs money, so bedrock features such as Separation of Powers, No Troop Quartering, and Due Process are being phased out, even for premium subscribers. We are also getting rid of most of our Health and Science. But you can have a career in ICE.

We are retaining some features for premium users. Want rule of law? That’s premium. The right to run your company without government interference? That’s a paid feature now. An explanation from the Supreme Court as to why it just ruled against you? Maybe!

«

Petri used to write her brilliant humour for the Washington Post. But you can see why it just wouldn’t fit there now.
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Elon Musk fans are still losing ridiculous amounts of money to crypto scams • Gizmodo

Matt Novak:

»

Gizmodo filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the FTC for complaints from people who say they were tricked by scammers posing as Musk or who used online ads with the billionaire’s likeness. Gizmodo has filed such FOIA requests with the FTC before, and it’s instructive to learn what new tricks and tools scammers are using to lure their victims.

Some scammers appear to convince victims they’re actually Elon Musk, even bringing in supporting characters like Elon’s mother, Maye Musk, to vouch for a given “investment.” Other times, scammers will use AI-generated photos or videos to make it appear Elon is promoting a given cryptocurrency or online platform where someone can supposedly get rich.

Some of the stories are heartbreaking, like the woman in Florida who filed a complaint with the FTC because her elderly husband has cancer and isn’t thinking clearly as he engages with a person he’s convinced is the real Elon. She writes that her husband, who’s in his 70s, is “heavily medicated and does not believe he is being scammed.” He lost at least $10,000.

Scammers frequently set up YouTube livestreams during major SpaceX or Tesla events, making them appear as official as possible, but imploring people to send cryptocurrency that will be “matched” by Musk or his companies. A Florida man in his 60s wrote to the FTC about getting scammed out of $225,000 that way, sending crypto to Coinbase earlier this year.

The scams are all from the past year, meaning that there are sometimes cameos by President Donald Trump. Like the complaint from Michigan, where a person in their 70s who lost $10,000 was convinced it had to be Musk because, “His profile picture was of him on Airforce 1 [sic] with Trump. He presented detailed information that Musk would know.”

«

It is so dismaying how easily people are taken in by this sort of stuff. There must be a particular mindset that makes people believe Musk would get in touch. Then again, he does discuss things with completely random people on X, so perhaps that part of the scam isn’t so unbelievable.
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The product of the railways is the timetable • Benedict’s Substack

Benedict Springbett:

»

This post is about a simple, yet crucial insight: the product of the railways is the timetable. Not the tracks, not the trains, but the timetable.

First ask yourself: what is the purpose of a railway? The job of the railways is to move people around. A person gets a train because they want to travel from A to B.

A small group of enthusiasts (me included) will actively choose to get the train if at all possible, but the vast majority of people are not particularly loyal to how their user need is met. They might drive, they might fly, they might cycle, they might decide not to make the journey and just do a video call. All of these things are the competitors of the railways.

We could therefore say that the product of the railways (and roads, and airports) is travel. But we can be more specific than that. A railway is not like a road. A road is built, and then it is open for anybody to use it at any time. There is no need to plan out precisely when cars move along the road. The movements of trains, by contrast, have to be planned out months in advance. It would neither be possible nor sensible to run trains ad hoc. They are not taxis, free to roam the roads whenever they like. Railway tracks are a network; everything depends on everything else. The service from Cambridge to Norwich affects the service from Norwich to London Liverpool Street, which in turn affects the service from Liverpool Street to Southend. To optimise the use of the tracks, train movements have to be planned out well in advance with precision.

This planning is what we call the timetable, the mapping between space and time that determines which train occupies which track at which time. The railways offer travel to the public via the timetable: a traveller buys the (supposed) fact that the 12.32 from Reigate gets into London Victoria at 13.19. The product of the railways is the timetable.

«

This is rather like the insight that people are buying holes in the wall when they purchase a drill: it produces a different way of seeing what people want. If the timetable is too confusing (including having puzzling connections or weird ticket pricing schemes), fewer people will take the train. That’s not because the trains aren’t running at the right times.
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BBC apologises for airing fake claim about Digital ID scheme • Politics Home

Zoe Crowther:

»

The BBC has apologised for airing a false claim about Tony Blair’s son’s company being awarded a government contract to produce the new mandatory digital ID scheme.

The episode of comedy quiz show Have I Got News For You was taken down from BBC iPlayer on Saturday morning, before being put up again with the false claim edited out.

Last week, the government announced a new digital ID scheme, which it said would help combat illegal working and make it easier for the public to use vital government services. It will be mandatory for Right to Work checks by the end of this Parliament.

On Friday evening, the BBC’s Have I Got News For You host Victoria Coren Mitchell incorrectly said that Multiverse – owned by Euan Blair, former prime minister Tony Blair’s son – was producing the digital ID scheme, which she described as a “happy coincidence”.

This claim is untrue and was fact-checked by the independent organisation Full Fact earlier this week. Blair’s company, Multiverse, does not develop its own software, but offers apprenticeship programmes and training on AI and tech.

Both Multiverse and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology have confirmed there is “no truth” to the claims that the company is involved in any way. PoliticsHome understands that no decisions have been made regarding which third-party companies will be awarded contracts associated with the scheme, which is still in the early stages of development and will be subject to a public consultation later this year.

«

This was a pretty egregious error, from a rumour which originated on social media and which – as the story notes – had been factchecked already. It would be surprising, though, if Digital ID survives the consultation.

The story also has this at the bottom: Correction: Victoria Coren’s name was misspelled in an earlier version of this post. Oh, irony, thou are ubiquitous. By the way, all the mistakes in this newsletter are intentional.
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Finland unable to prosecute alleged Baltic Sea cable-cutters, court rules • Financial Times

Richard Milne:

»

Finland lacks the jurisdiction to prosecute sailors accused of cutting underwater electricity and data cables in one of the most high-profile recent sabotage events in the Baltic Sea area, a court in Helsinki ruled.

The case against the captain of the Eagle S and two pilots was dismissed on Friday by Helsinki district court as it found the severed cables were outside Finland’s territorial waters, highlighting the difficulties of holding those accused of sabotage and hybrid attacks accountable.

Finland received plaudits after armed border guards abseiled on to the deck of the Eagle S on Boxing Day and seized control of the tanker after it had dragged its anchor along the Baltic Sea for almost 100km.

It became the first Nato country to bring charges against the crew of a “shadow fleet” vessel, used by Russia to circumvent western sanctions on its oil trade, and prosecutors wanted two-and-a-half years’ jail time for the trio.

But lawyers for captain Davit Vadatchkor and pilots Robert Egizaryan and Santosh Kumar Chaurasia argued that Finland had no jurisdiction as the alleged cable-cutting took place in international waters and the Eagle S was only stopped once it turned into Finnish territory.

Europe has been hit by a wave of sabotage and hybrid attacks, some attributed to Russia and some merely suspected as being ordered by them.

«

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Why Apple should steal the Fairphone 6 Moments switch for the iPhone • Stuff

Craig Grannell:

»

It felt quite magical when a tame Fairphone rep flicked a switch on the side of the [Android] device and instantly transformed the home screen. The grid of icons vanished, replaced by a boring list of app names. And, to be clear, boring in this context is good. It means a phone without distractions. A device that lets you be present, rather than tempting you every waking moment with yet more shiny icons.

Of course, there’s nothing complicated happening here. Fairphone just mapped a switch to a launcher. But the implementation is everything. The physicality – the deliberate act of making your phone less distracting – made something in my brain go ding. It reminded me of Bear Focus Timer, a Pomodoro app that only works when your phone is face down.

The ritual matters more than the mechanism – it’s a psychological thing. You flip the phone over to put it “out of reach”. You commit to focus. It’s far more effective than tapping a virtual button. And so it felt with the Fairphone 6, even if, alas, that device lacks scowling cartoon bears should you abandon focus mode.

It also reminded me of something else: my iPhone 16 Pro has a perfectly serviceable Action button that I barely use. Cue: epiphany! Why not shamelessly steal Fairphone’s great idea and bodge it into iOS?

I duly set up my standard iOS home screen to feature a single Dumb Phone widget with a few apps I use, and turned all the others off. Then I created a new one called Badness, with a dozen home screens of icons in all their appy glory.

«

He created a Shortcut (a short script) to switch between modes – icons, or app name list – and linked it to the Action button to create a quick switching method. If you find your phone too distracting, it might work for you too. (You might be able to create a Focus mode that does the same.)
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X-ray scans reveal the hidden risks of cheap batteries • The Verge

Andrew Liszewski:

»

Lumafield has released the results of a new study of lithium-ion batteries that “reveals an enormous gap in quality between brand-name batteries and low-cost cells” that are readily available through online stores including Amazon and Temu. The company used its computed tomography (CT) scanners, capable of peering inside objects in 3D using X-rays, to analyze over 1,000 lithium-ion batteries. It found dangerous manufacturing defects in low-cost and counterfeit batteries that could potentially lead to fires and explosions.

The study tested 18650 lithium-ion battery cells, which are used in various products including electric toothbrushes, power tools, e-bikes, power banks, and even electric cars. The batteries were purchased from ten different brands: three OEMs, including Samsung and Panasonic, sourced from “highly reviewed, specialized suppliers,” three vendors selling rewraps (typically OEM batteries with their plastic outer wrapping replaced) sourced from “specialized battery sites” or the brand’s own web stores, and four companies selling low-cost or counterfeit batteries sourced from “large, general online retailers such as Temu.”

Lumafield scanned 1,054 batteries – around 100 from each brand – and found 33 of them had a serious manufacturing defect known as negative anode overhang. The defect “significantly increases the risk of internal short-circuiting and battery fires” and can reduce the overall life of the battery,” according to Lumafield. All 33 of the batteries with the defects came from the 424 sold by low-cost brands or brands selling counterfeits. One of the counterfeits was identified by its pink wrapper designed to match the one Samsung uses on its 30Q cells.

«

Cheap can be expensive, particularly if it burns down your house.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A dramatic decline in literacy among the young is matched by the rise of the smartphone. Are we in a post-literate society? CC-licensed photo by James West on Flickr.

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

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Read this first. 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 dawn of the post-literate society • Cultural Capital

James Marriott:

»

The world of print is orderly, logical and rational. In books, knowledge is classified, comprehended, connected and put in its place. Books make arguments, propose theses, develop ideas. “To engage with the written word”, the media theorist Neil Postman wrote, “means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning.”

As Postman pointed out, it is no accident, that the growth of print culture in the eighteenth century was associated with the growing prestige of reason, hostility to superstition, the birth of capitalism, and the rapid development of science. Other historians have linked the eighteenth century explosion of literacy to the Enlightenment, the birth of human rights, the arrival of democracy and even the beginnings of the industrial revolution.

The world as we know it was forged in the reading revolution.

Now, we are living through the counter-revolution.

More than three hundred years after the reading revolution ushered in a new era of human knowledge, books are dying. Numerous studies show that reading is in free-fall. Even the most pessimistic twentieth-century critics of the screen-age would have struggled to predict the scale of the present crisis.

In America, reading for pleasure has fallen by forty% in the last twenty years. In the UK, more than a third of adults say they have given up reading. The National Literacy Trust reports “shocking and dispiriting” falls in children’s reading, which is now at its lowest level on record. The publishing industry is in crisis: as the author Alexander Larman writes, “books that once would have sold in the tens, even hundreds, of thousands are now lucky to sell in the mid-four figures.”

…What happened was the smartphone, which was widely adopted in developed countries in the mid-2010s. Those years will be remembered as a watershed in human history.

Never before has there been a technology like the smartphone. Where previous entertainment technologies like cinema or television were intended to capture their audience’s attention for a period, the smartphone demands your entire life. Phones are designed to be hyper-addictive, hooking users on a diet of pointless notifications, inane short-form videos and social media rage bait.

«

Important and thoughtful piece of writing. (Which I came to via a podcast. Ahem.) Rob Graham observed astutely that the reason all the claims by Trumpists that the 2020 election was “stolen” were made on video was because, aside from it being popular, it’s very difficult to spot elisions and omissions in video: it streams past. With print, you can pause, read at your own pace, reflect. We are losing something very important.
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‘My son genuinely believed it was real’: parents are letting little kids play with AI. Are they wrong? • The Guardian

Julia Carrie Wong:

»

Josh was at the end of his rope when he turned to ChatGPT for help with a parenting quandary. The 40-year-old father of two had been listening to his “super loquacious” four-year-old talk about Thomas the Tank Engine for 45 minutes, and he was feeling overwhelmed.

“He was not done telling the story that he wanted to tell, and I needed to do my chores, so I let him have the phone,” recalled Josh, who lives in north-west Ohio. “I thought he would finish the story and the phone would turn off.”

But when Josh returned to the living room two hours later, he found his child still happily chatting away with ChatGPT in voice mode. “The transcript is over 10k words long,” he confessed in a sheepish Reddit post. “My son thinks ChatGPT is the coolest train loving person in the world. The bar is set so high now I am never going to be able to compete with that.”

From radio and television to video games and tablets, new technology has long tantalized overstretched parents of preschool-age kids with the promise of entertainment and enrichment that does not require their direct oversight, even as it carried the hint of menace that accompanies any outside influence on the domestic sphere. A century ago, mothers in Arizona worried that radio programs were “overstimulating, frightening and emotionally overwhelming” for children; today’s parents self-flagellate over screen time and social media.

But the startlingly lifelike capabilities of generative AI systems have left many parents wondering if AI is an entirely new beast. Chatbots powered by large language models (LLMs) are engaging young children in ways the makers of board games, Teddy Ruxpin, Furby and even the iPad never dreamed of: they produce personalized bedtime stories, carry on conversations tailored to a child’s interests, and generate photorealistic images of the most far-fetched flights of fancy – all for a child who can not yet read, write or type.

«

Interesting piece. Though will it make the next generation literate, or self-absorbed?
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Japan is running out of its favorite beer after ransomware attack • Financial Times via Ars Technica

Harry Dempsey and Leo Lewis:

»

Japan is just a few days away from running out of Asahi Super Dry as the producer of the nation’s most popular beer wrestles with a devastating cyber attack that has shut down its domestic breweries.

The vast majority of Asahi Group’s 30 factories in Japan have not operated since Monday after the attack disabled its ordering and delivery system, the company said.

Retailers are already expecting empty shelves as the outage stretches into its fourth day with no clear timeline for factories recommencing operations. Super Dry could also run out at izakaya pubs, which rely on draught and bottles.

Lawson, one of Japan’s big convenience stores, said in a statement that it stocks many Asahi Group products and “it is possible that some of these products may become increasingly out of stock from tomorrow onwards.”

“This is having an impact on everyone,” said an executive at another of Japan’s major retailers. “I think we will run out of products soon. When it comes to Super Dry, I think we’ll run out in two or three days at supermarkets and Asahi’s food products within a week or so.”

The executive said that it would look to other brands such as Suntory or Kirin to quench Japanese drinkers’ thirst but acknowledged that many customers are fiercely loyal to Super Dry’s taste.

Asahi declined to comment on any possible shortage or retailer inventories. Japan’s largest brewer produces the equivalent of 6.7m large bottles of beer per day on average in the country, based on Financial Times calculations using its 2024 sales figure.

«

This means war, surely. OK, Jaguar can’t make cars, that’s tolerable, but you cut off a nation’s beer?
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The smart glasses race is really on now • The Verge

Jay Peters:

»

Last month, I had a conversation with someone wearing glasses — and couldn’t see that they had a display right in front of one of their eyes. Through a monitor connected to the glasses, I watched in awe as my colleague Victoria Song scrolled through and wrote WhatsApp messages, used the display as a viewfinder for a photo, changed the volume on Spotify by turning her hand as if she was holding a knob, and even looked at directions on a map. And when I looked Victoria in the eye, while I could tell she was looking at something on the glasses, I couldn’t see the display at all.

This was my first look at the Meta Ray-Ban Display, the company’s new smart glasses with a monocular screen. It was a hugely impressive demo. And it was all happening on a pair of glasses that, while bulky, could totally pass for something a normal person would wear. Ray-Ban put its name on the glasses, after all.

As we walked away from the demo, I remember thinking that an Apple version of those glasses would be the most obvious thing in the world. Can you imagine how useful it would be to have a pair of glasses connected to your iPhone with speakers, a camera at eye level, and your own private display to show you things like notifications, music, and directions right in front of your eyes?

Apparently, somebody at Apple thinks that, too. Bloomberg reported this week that Apple is pausing work on a lighter Vision Pro headset in favor of speeding up its smart glasses efforts, which include pairs with and without a display.

Even the non-display glasses seem like a slam dunk for Apple. Imagine AirPods, but sunglasses; if that was the entire product, I’d probably be first in line. Apple’s first glasses will reportedly have a camera, too, and while I’m a little more skeptical of cameras on your face, the millions of people who have already bought Ray-Ban Meta glasses prove that there’s a market for something like that, too.

«

I find it utterly astonishing that Apple wasted years on the Vision Pro when smart glasses were waiting, right there, to be invented and made good. It’s been obvious for years that this is the valuable fruit. Not low-hanging, perhaps, but tantalising and so, so tastily lucrative.
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Americans increasingly see legal sports betting as a bad thing for society and sports • Pew Research Center

John Gramlich:

»

Public awareness of legal sports betting has grown in recent years – and so has the perception that it is a bad thing for society and sports, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

Today, 43% of U.S. adults say the fact that sports betting is now legal in much of the country is a bad thing for society. That’s up from 34% in 2022. And 40% of adults now say it’s a bad thing for sports, up from 33%.

Despite these increasingly critical views of legal sports betting, many Americans continue to say it has neither a bad nor good impact on society and on sports. Fewer than one-in-five see positive impacts.

Meanwhile, the share of Americans who have bet money on sports in the past year has not changed much since 2022. Today, 22% of adults say they’ve personally bet money on sports in the past year. That’s a slight uptick from 19% three years ago. This figure includes betting in any of three ways:

• With friends or family, such as in a private betting pool, fantasy league or casual bet
• Online with a betting app, sportsbook or casino
• In person at a casino, racetrack or betting kiosk

All of this increase has come through online sports betting: 10% of adults now say they’ve placed a bet this way in the past year, up from 6% in 2022. There has been no change in the shares of adults who have bet on sports with family or friends or in person at a casino, racetrack or betting kiosk.

«

Commercial sports betting only became legal throughout the US in 2018, so this is a pretty rapid takeoff for resistance to it. The problem, as I see it, is that the power imbalance is so stark between bettors and the betting companies. The latter are always rich; the former do not win, on the whole. So betting between individuals? Fine. (Though of course this opens the door to the Mafia; but they can’t be on the internet in the same way.) In person at a casino or racetrack? Also fine. But online? That’s the problem.

And as I wrote a few weeks ago, it creates problems for the players of the sports too.
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China’s EV battery giants outpace South Korea’s struggling rivals • Rest of World

Ananya Bhattacharya:

»

China’s battery giants have pulled the plug on South Korea’s dominance in powering electric vehicles.

South Korea’s three top EV battery makers — LG Energy Solution, SK On, and Samsung SDI — are operating their factories at half capacity, while Chinese rivals CATL and BYDi

run theirs near full throttle. The global battery industry has fundamentally realigned from premium performance to cost-effectiveness. 

While South Korean manufacturers built their business on nickel-based batteries with superior energy density, Chinese companies dominate production of cheaper lithium iron phosphate batteries that automakers now prefer.

“When automakers accept LFP for high volumes, demand for premium nickel cells becomes a niche market serving luxury, long-range, and performance vehicles,” Oliver Petschenyk, powertrain analyst at research firm GlobalData, told Rest of World. “This shrinks the volume addressable for South Korean players built around that chemistry.”

LG Energy Solution’s factory use has fallen for four straight years while China’s CATL operates at 90% capacity, according to SNE Research. The three South Korean giants’ combined share outside China dropped to 38% this year, down seven percentage points from 2024.

The battery wars that reshaped the industry began in 2021 when Chinese companies massively increased production of nickel-manganese-cobalt batteries. The surge drove up prices for lithium, nickel, and cobalt, widening the cost differential between NMC and LFP battery packs and triggering a market shift that South Korean firms failed to anticipate.

«

When it comes to important technologies, China has been farsighted and determined about getting its companies into pole positions.
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Judge signals Meta may owe $8bn in menstrual app privacy suit • Courthouse News Service

Margaret Attridge:

»

A federal judge Tuesday indicated that Meta may have to pay nearly $8bn to users of the period tracking app Flo who had their information illegally recorded by Meta.

In August, a jury found that Meta violated the California Invasion of Privacy Act when it intentionally recorded the sensitive health information of millions of women through Flo following a two-week trial this summer.

The plaintiffs proposed damages of $5,000 per class member — the amount of statutory damages allowed per violation of the California Invasion of Privacy Act.

Michael P. Canty of New York-based Labaton Keller Sucharow, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said they don’t know the exact size of the class but estimate around 1.6 million eligible class members in California.

US District Judge James Donato, a Barack Obama appointee, did not object to the proposed damages amount and stated that he was aware of, but not concerned about, the potential for fraud given the high damages amount.

“There’s no reason that gives me undue concern that there will be rampant fraud. We are not going to let people cheat the system. I want to see as many cross-checks as we can,” he said.

The plaintiffs are proposing a streamlined claims procedure that requires class members to submit their name and contact information and attest under penalty of perjury that they lived in California and downloaded the Flo Health app between Nov. 1, 2016, and Feb 28, 2019.

«

The good old days of privacy invasion just because you had access to everything on the phone may be past, but their legacy is not.

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AI wrote nearly a quarter of corporate press releases in 2024 • EurekAlert!

»

Since 2022, American companies, consumers, and even the United Nations have used large language models—artificial intelligence (AI) systems such as ChatGPT that are trained to create text that reads like human-generated writing. In a study published October 2 in the Cell Press journal Patterns, researchers reveal that AI is used in an average of 17% of analyzed corporate and governmental written content, from job posts to press releases, and this rate will likely continue to increase.  

“This is the first comprehensive review of the use of AI-assisted writing across diverse sectors of society,” says corresponding author James Zou of Stanford University. “We were able to look at the adoption patterns across a variety of stakeholders and users, and all of them showed a very consistent increasing trend in the last 2 years.”  

Large language models became widely available to the public in late 2022. Today, more than a billion people around the world use them regularly. 

Zou and his team decided to use an AI detection program that they’d previously developed to investigate the adoption patterns of these AI tools across four different writing contexts: US consumer complaints, company press releases, UN press releases, and job postings. They collected text published between January 2022 and September 2024 from each of these domains and ran it through the program.  

To start, the team analyzed more than 687,000 complaints submitted between 2022 and 2024 to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a US government agency responsible for protecting consumers from banks and other financial companies. They found that about 18% of these complaints were likely written by AI.  

For the corporate news releases, the researchers analyzed text published in three major news release platforms in the US: Newswire, PRWeb, and PRNewswire. They found that since the launch of ChatGPT, nearly a quarter of releases on these sites were AI generated. In particular, science and technology releases had the highest AI use rate by the end of 2023. 

«

To be honest, I think this would be a welcome release for most people in PR. Writing press releases is a form of torture for them, because they know they’ll be largely ignored. This is much better. Obviously, journalists need to respond in kind by getting an AI agent to filter all the email that arrives in their inboxes.
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OpenAI hits $500bn valuation after share sale to SoftBank, others, source says • Reuters

Krystal Hu:

»

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has reached a valuation of $500bn, following a deal in which current and former employees sold roughly $6.6bn worth of shares, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters on Thursday.

This represents a bump-up from its current valuation of $300bn, underscoring OpenAI’s rapid gains in both users and revenue. Reuters reported details of the stock sale earlier in August.

As part of the deal, OpenAI employees sold shares to a consortium of investors including Thrive Capital, SoftBank, Dragoneer Investment Group, Abu Dhabi’s MGX and T. Rowe Price, according to the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak to the media.

The company had authorized sales of $10bn-plus worth of stock on the secondary market, the source added.

Thrive Capital, SoftBank, Dragoneer, MGX and T. Rowe Price did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.

The share sale adds to SoftBank’s earlier investment in OpenAI’s $40bn primary funding round.

«

And yet we begin to wonder if there is enough money in all the world to fund what OpenAI wants to do (make a really, really good video generator that can take over TikTok and write press releases with the other hand. Forget the artificial general intelligence stuff).
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Labour plans to consult on use of live facial recognition before wider roll-out • The Guardian

Rajeev Syal:

»

Labour plans to consult on the use of live facial recognition (LFR) technology before expanding it across England, the new policing minister has told the party’s annual conference.

Sarah Jones, a Home Office minister, said the government would “put some parameters” over when and where it could be used in future.

Campaigners claim the police have been allowed to self-regulate their use of the technology because of the lack of a legal framework and deploy the technology’s algorithm at lower settings that are biased against ethnic minorities and women. The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has said its use is unlawful and incompatible with European laws.

Speaking at a Tony Blair Institute fringe meeting in Liverpool, Jones said: “We need to put some parameters around what we can use facial recognition for. “There has been some advice on how we use it. But we need to go further to make sure it’s clear when it should be used and when it shouldn’t be used, to put some structure around it. Because there isn’t really much of a structure around what it’s used for at the moment. We need to look at whether that’s enough and whether we need to do more.”

Jones, the MP for Croydon West, said Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary and a fellow Croydon MP, had supported its use after it was deployed to catch criminals in thesouth London borough. “Chris Philp is very keen on it and talks about it all the time as well. And what we have seen from Croydon is that it works.”

…Civil liberty groups have called on the Metropolitan police to drop the use of LFR cameras after a high court challenge was launched last month by Shaun Thompson, an anti-knife campaigner. Thompson, a Black British man, was wrongly identified by LFR as a criminal, held by police, and then faced demands from officers for his fingerprints.

«

The EHRC opposition says LFR interferes with right to privacy, freedom of expression and freedom of assembly. The high court challenge will probably go to the UK Supreme Court.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In January 2022, a volcano near the remote island of Tonga erupted – and cut the island off from the internet, and the rest of the world. CC-licensed photo by James St. John on Flickr.

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

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

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

UK once again demands backdoor to Apple’s encrypted cloud storage • Financial Times via Ars Technica

Anna Gross and Tim Bradshaw:

»

The UK government has issued a new order to Apple to create a backdoor into its cloud storage service, this time targeting only British users’ data, despite US claims that Britain had abandoned all attempts to break the tech giant’s encryption.

The UK Home Office demanded in early September that Apple create a means to allow officials access to encrypted cloud backups, but stipulated that the order applied only to British citizens’ data, according to people briefed on the matter.

A previous technical capability notice (TCN) issued in January sought global access to encrypted user data. That move sparked a diplomatic clash between the UK and US governments and threatened to derail the two nations’ efforts to secure a trade agreement.

In February, Apple withdrew its most secure cloud storage service, iCloud Advanced Data Protection, from the UK.

“Apple is still unable to offer Advanced Data Protection in the United Kingdom to new users,” Apple said on Wednesday. “We are gravely disappointed that the protections provided by ADP are not available to our customers in the UK given the continuing rise of data breaches and other threats to customer privacy.”

It added: “As we have said many times before, we have never built a back door or master key to any of our products or services and we never will.”

The Home Office said: “We do not comment on operational matters, including, for example, confirming or denying the existence of any such notices.

“We will always take all actions necessary at the domestic level to keep UK citizens safe.”

Both Apple and the Home Office are restricted from discussing TCNs by law.

«

As the eminent cryptographer Matthew Green points out, this is a really strange demand. ADP (user-encrypted backups) aren’t available in the UK. Only health data, web history and passwords are end-to-end encrypted in backups. Or iMessage, maybe. Or, final maybe, the ADP backups of foreign users on British soil. (Spies? Terrorists?)

It’s all terrible overreach which makes the government look bad. Or worse.
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Intel in early talks to add AMD as foundry customer • Semafor

Rohan Goswami:

»

Intel is in early-stage talks to add AMD as a customer at Intel’s factories, in what would be another vote of confidence in the struggling chipmaker, according to people familiar with the matter.

In the past seven weeks, Intel has gained investment dollars and public support from the White House, Nvidia, and SoftBank, and is in talks for backing from Apple, Semafor and others have reported. AMD designs chips that are currently produced mostly by Taiwan’s TSMC, and Intel currently lacks the technology to produce AMD’s most advanced, profitable chips.

It’s unclear how much of their manufacturing would shift to Intel if the two companies reach a deal, or whether it would come with a direct investment by AMD, similar to the deals cut by other companies. It is possible that no agreement will be reached, the people said.

Spokespeople for Intel and AMD declined to comment. Intel shares rose around 3.5% on the news and are up around 77% for the year.

AMD has reason to stay in the White House’s good graces. Its significant business selling chips in China was hit by export restrictions earlier this year, which Trump recently loosened.

Intel’s chip factories are considered inferior to TSMCs. But big American companies, following the Trump administration’s preference for having a US chip-manufacturing champion, have diverted at least some of their production, mostly for less-advanced chips, towards Intel’s domestic foundries.

«

Not impossible, only unlikely. And becoming more likely all the time.
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OpenAI’s Sora 2 lets users insert themselves into AI videos with sound • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

»

Aside from visual and auditory upgrades, OpenAI is taking another big step away from its AI research lab pedigree toward making the new model available to average people in an easy-to-use way. It’s doing it by packaging Sora 2 into a social iOS app that focuses on creating and sharing AI-generated content.

That new iOS app has already launched in the US and Canada as an invite-based rollout, with plans to expand to additional countries. Users can sign up in the app for notifications when access becomes available for their account. The service will initially be free with what OpenAI describes as “generous limits,” though the company plans to offer paid options for additional generations when demand exceeds available compute resources.

Using the app, users can create videos, remix content from other users, and browse a customizable feed of generated videos. As mentioned above, the app’s Cameo feature allows users to essentially deepfake themselves by recording a one-time video and audio capture, which the model can then insert into any Sora-generated scene.

In addition to the basic Sora 2 model on the website and in the app, ChatGPT Pro subscribers will gain access to Sora 2 Pro, described as an experimental higher-quality model. OpenAI also plans to release Sora 2 through its API for developers. The older Sora 1 Turbo model will remain available, and existing creations will stay in users’ Sora libraries.

So, what could go wrong with an app that can easily put people into AI-generated videos? Well, just about everything. Battling misuse is likely going to be a tricky issue for the company. In the recent past, we’ve seen instances of AI deepfaking (not related to OpenAI) without consent that have led to bullying lawsuits, criminal penalties, and suicides.

OpenAI is taking precautions. Given recently prominent corporate sensitivities following a ChatGPT user’s suicide, OpenAI says Sora 2 includes specific protections for teenage users. Those include default daily-generation limits and strict permissions for the cameos feature. OpenAI says it has deployed both automated safety systems and human moderators to review potential cases of bullying or misuse.

In particular, OpenAI has built in layers of security for the cameos feature. It says that users can maintain control over their uploaded likeness: They can decide who can use their cameo in videos and can revoke access or remove videos containing their likeness at any time. Users can also view all videos containing their cameo, including drafts created by other people.

«

OpenAI is talking nonsense here. There are videos including OpenAI CEO’s Sam Altman’s likeness all over the place.
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People are farming and selling Sora 2 invite codes on eBay • 404 Media

Jason Koebler:

»

People are farming and selling invite codes for Sora 2 on eBay, which is currently the fastest and most reliable way to get onto OpenAI’s new video generation and TikTok-clone-but-make-it-AI-slop app. Because of the way Sora is set up, it is possible to buy one code, register an account, then get more codes with the new account and repeat the process.

On eBay, there are about 20 active listings for Sora 2 invite codes and 30 completed listings in which invite codes have sold. I bought a code from a seller for $12, and received a working code a few minutes later. The moment I activated my account, I was given four new codes for Sora 2. When I went into the histories of some of the sellers, many of them had sold a handful of codes previously, suggesting they were able to get their hands on more than four invites. It’s possible to do this just by cycling through accounts; each invite code is good for four invites, so it is possible to use one invite code for a new account for yourself, sell three of them, and repeat the process.

There are also dozens of people claiming to be selling or giving away codes on Reddit and X; some are asking for money via Cash App or Venmo, while others are asking for crypto. One guy has even created a website in which he has generated all 2.1 billion six-digit hexadecimal combinations to allow people to randomly guess / brute force the app (the site is a joke). 

«

I get the feeling OpenAI isn’t that worried about more people using Sora 2. But also: where’s the evidence that OpenAI is working towards its fabled AGI, rather than a video slop machine?
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Critics slam OpenAI’s parental controls while users rage, “treat us like adults” • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

»

As OpenAI tells it, the company has been consistently rolling out safety updates ever since Matthew and Maria Raine, sued OpenAI, alleging that ChatGPT led to the death of their son.

On August 26, the day that the lawsuit was filed, OpenAI seemed to publicly respond to claims that ChatGPT acted as a “suicide coach” for 16-year-old Adam Raine by posting a blog promising to do better to help people “when they need it most.”

By September 2, that meant routing all users’ sensitive conversations to a reasoning model with stricter safeguards, sparking backlash from users who feel like ChatGPT is handling their prompts with kid gloves. Two weeks later, OpenAI announced it would start predicting users’ ages to improve safety more broadly. Then, this week, OpenAI introduced parental controls for ChatGPT and its video generator Sora 2. Those controls allow parents to limit their teens’ use and even get access to information about chat logs in “rare cases” where OpenAI’s “system and trained reviewers detect possible signs of serious safety risk.”

While dozens of suicide prevention experts in an open letter credited OpenAI for making some progress toward improving safety for users, they also joined critics in urging OpenAI to take their efforts even further, and much faster, to protect vulnerable ChatGPT users.

Jay Edelson, the lead attorney for the Raine family, told Ars that some of the changes OpenAI has made are helpful. But they all come “far too late.” According to Edelson, OpenAI’s messaging on safety updates is also “trying to change the facts.”

…On the X post where OpenAI announced parental controls, some parents slammed the update.

In the X thread, one self-described parent of a 12-year-old suggested OpenAI was only offering “essentially just a set of useless settings,” requesting that the company consider allowing parents to review topics teens discuss as one way to preserve privacy while protecting kids.

«

The tension between child (or teenager) safety and adult use will always exist where there’s a single interface to the whole product. You simply can’t pretend they won’t intersect. But OpenAI (like YouTube before it) is pretending that.
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Internet and cell phone resume in Afghanistan​ • Reuters

Mohammad Yunus Yawar:

»

Cell phone and internet services were restored in Afghanistan on Wednesday, local residents said, some 48 hours after diplomatic and industry sources said connectivity was abruptly cut on the orders of the Taliban administration.

The cell phone services of Roshan and Etisalat companies, the foreign-owned biggest providers, came back to life in the late afternoon, residents in Kabul and other cities said. Internet access was restored, according to companies providing the service.

A Taliban official from the information department said there were technical reasons for the outage and that services would be quickly restored. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether the Taliban had ordered the outage.

…In the past, the Taliban have voiced concern about online pornography and authorities have cut fibre-optic links to some provinces in recent weeks, with officials citing morality concerns.

The outage on connectivity, which started on Monday, follows a series of hardline strictures this year, as the Taliban’s conservative leadership, based in the southern city of Kandahar, enforces its views in a tussle against some relatively more open-minded ministers in the capital Kabul.

The outage had caused chaos, with financial remittances, trade with neighbouring countries and the operations of banks paralysed, while many Afghans were left stranded without flights.

Online learning by teenage girls and women, an education lifeline after they were banned by the Taliban from high schools and universities, was also brought to a stop.

«

These “morality concerns” – wouldn’t the simplest thing be to ban men from using the internet, and insist that only women could? Can the Taliban go that far?
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Please let the robots have this one • The Argument Mag

Kelsey Piper:

»

In The Argument’s September polling on all things AI, we asked “Do you think your city or town should allow or ban self-driving cars?” Twenty-eight% wanted to allow them. Forty-one% wanted to ban them. There were no truly enthusiastic contingencies for self-driving cars — they do a bit better with liberals, younger people, and more educated people, but not a single group has a majority in favor.

By contrast, there’s a large mass of old people that are extremely opposed to self-driving cars, which is especially ironic when you consider that they are also the most likely to cause the very crashes that this technology would protect us from.

When we asked voters why they want to ban self-driving cars, they gave us a range of reasons, which generally boiled down to safety and trust.

Hopefully, the safety concerns will be responsive to the safety data! To most of the country, self-driving cars are still a hypothetical, and I think at least some people will be won over when they see how well these cars drive (as a pedestrian, it’s really notable how they just stop for you at crosswalks!). And there is more support for self-driving cars out West, where they actually exist in significant numbers.

But even in San Francisco where Waymos are a reality, I still run into a lot of Waymo haters. Sometimes they hate the cars for taking jobs from Uber and Lyft drivers. (Though remember how a couple of years ago everyone wanted to ban Uber and Lyft?) Sometimes they hate the cars out of vague anti-corporate sentiment. But often, what they really hate isn’t Waymo at all.

A Waymo is often seen as a physical-world embodiment of the flood of AI slop replacing high-quality artwork and filling social media feeds with fake nonsense. That quiet, whirring car is a reminder that the once-useful assumption that a lengthy written text had required some human to apply serious thought at some point is now no longer valid. But you can’t vandalize ChatGPT, so anti-AI sentiment finds its expression in harassing Waymos.

«

There is the little fact about self-driving cars not really being a thing in more complicated road conditions, but for American cities they make a lot of sense.
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‘Reverse Midas touch’: Starmer plan prompts collapse in support for digital IDs • The Guardian

Eleni Courea:

»

Public support for digital IDs has collapsed after Keir Starmer announced plans for their introduction, in what has been described as a symptom of the prime minister’s “reverse Midas touch”.

Net support for digital ID cards fell from 35% in the early summer to -14% at the weekend after Starmer’s announcement, according to polling by More in Common. The findings suggest that the proposal has suffered considerably from its association with an unpopular government. In June, 53% of voters surveyed said they were in favour of digital ID cards for all Britons, while 19% were opposed.

Starmer set out plans to roll out a national digital ID scheme on Friday, saying it presented an “enormous opportunity” for the UK that would “make it tougher to work illegally in this country”.

Just 31% of people surveyed after Starmer’s announcement over the weekend said they were supportive of the scheme, with 45% saying they were opposed. Of those, 32% said they were strongly opposed. More than 2.6 million people have signed a petition against introduction of the IDs.

Advocates of a national digital ID scheme are frustrated at the way the policy has been presented and believe that now it may never be implemented.

More in Common’s polling suggests public dissatisfaction with the government is behind the collapse in support. It found that 58% of those who thought Starmer was doing a bad job as prime minister opposed digital IDs, while only 20% supported them. On the other hand, of those who thought Starmer was doing a good job, 71% were supportive of digital IDs and 14% were opposed.

…Ministers have said digital ID cards will be used to prove a person’s right to live and work in the UK and will be compulsory for anyone who wants employment. The government is concerned that the relative ease of finding illegal work in the UK’s shadow economy is one of the factors encouraging people to make illegal and dangerous journeys across the Channel.

The photo IDs will be stored on smartphones in a similar way to digital bank cards and will contain information on the holder’s name, residency status, date of birth and nationality. They will not be required to access healthcare or welfare payments.

«

The idea is a bit barmy, though. Completely uncooked.
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The latest on the Anthropic settlement with authors • Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS)

»

In June, the judge presiding over the Bartz v Anthropic lawsuit ruled that Anthropic must pay damages for its use of pirated datasets LibGen and the Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi) to train its AI models. 

A trial was scheduled for December to determine the extent of damages paid, which Anthropic has avoided by reaching a landmark settlement with the authors involved in the class-action lawsuit. This settlement has now been given preliminary approval. 

What happens next? By Thursday October 2, the website www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com will be made live. This website will include a searchable list of all works eligible for compensation. It will also include a claims form for those with eligible works. This is how you identify yourself and officially request payment. The website will also include a calendar of relevant deadlines.  

If your works are included in this list, you will receive an official notice from the Settlement Administrator. However, you don’t need to wait for this notice to submit your claims form. The deadline to claim is 23 March 2026. 

Authors based outside of the US are also eligible for payment. However, to be eligible for payment their works must: 

• Have been downloaded from LibGen and/or PiLiMi
• Have been registered with the US Copyright Office within 3 months of publication or before it was downloaded by Anthropic and within 5 years of publication 
• Have a valid ISBN or ASIN 

Because of the strict eligibility criteria, only approximately 500,000 titles out of the seven million copies of books that Anthropic reportedly downloaded meet the definition required to be included in the works list. Rightholders will receive approximately $3,000 per eligible title, with an optional split of 50/50 between author and publisher for most books, and a tailored approach for education works.

…The Authors Guild, who are administering this lawsuit, have compiled a comprehensive set of questions and answers on their website here.

«

Can’t decide if I want my works to have been pirated or not. But I’ll definitely go and check the website.
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Extremely offline: what happened when a Pacific island was cut off from the internet • The Guardian

Samanth Subramanian:

»

Since its several brief eruptions the previous month, December 2021, Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai had continued to gurgle and churn. On that Saturday, 15 January [2022], 2.4 cubic miles of sediment and molten rock shot through its mouth with the force of what scientists call a “magma hammer”, sending a plume of ash at least 35 miles up into the atmosphere. It was the largest atmospheric explosion that modern instruments had recorded, outdoing any nuclear bomb ever detonated. They heard the sound in Alaska. Seven and a half thousand miles away, in the south Indian city of Chennai, meteorologists measured an abrupt spike in atmospheric pressure. It was Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai, doing its thing.

On his drive home, Vea had called relatives in the US through Facebook Messenger to let them know he was all right. At some point during their conversation, the line cut out. He assumed the network was overloaded by everybody getting online at the same time. “This is usually a problem for us,” he told me. Vea, DHL’s agent in Tonga, is the president of the Tonga Chamber of Commerce & Industry, and we met in his spare, sunny office in the capital of Nuku’alofa, three streets from the Pacific. The curtains were red, and the sun filtered through in a dull watermelon light.

Vea wears a perpetual expression of mirth, and it was difficult to imagine him as worried as he was on the day the volcano blew up, sitting in his van in the middle of a rain of ash, staring at his suddenly useless phone. He decided he’d try his relatives later, after the traffic online subsided. At home, though, the power was out, and he couldn’t charge his phone, so it was only the next morning, when he tuned in to Radio Tonga, that he learned the country had lost its internet altogether – and with it, all its means of reaching the world beyond the wide, silent water.

…Commerce broke down. Since this happened in the middle of the Covid pandemic, DHL was flying only one plane a week to Tonga – but without the internet, Vea couldn’t file or receive manifests online. The ATMs went dead, because banks couldn’t check how much money their customers had in their accounts – and that, in an economy still accustomed to cash, immediately put livelihoods in danger. Owners of fisheries and farms of squash and breadfruit were unable to fill out the compliance and quarantine forms needed to export their produce. Tongans living overseas couldn’t wire funds home to help their families – and at the time, foreign remittances made up 44% of the country’s GDP.

«

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A new use for ChatGPT has been found – locating the “cancel subscription” button on websites. CC-licensed photo by Alachua County 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. It’s down there. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Imgur blocks UK users after data watchdog signals possible fine • Bleeping Computer

Lawrence Abrams:

»

While Imgur has not issued a statement, the geoblock comes after the UK’s data watchdog, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), announced in March that it was investigating whether TikTok, Reddit, and Imgur were appropriately protecting children’s data and assessing the age of those from the country under the Online Safety Act (OSA).

The ICO states that it has completed its investigation and issued a notice of intent to impose a monetary fine on MediaLab regarding these concerns on September 10.

“We reached our provisional findings on this investigation, and we issued a notice of intent to impose a monetary penalty on MediaLab on 10 September 2025,” reads a statement from the ICO. “Our findings are provisional and the ICO will carefully consider any representations from MediaLab before taking a final decision whether to issue a monetary penalty.”  

In response, Imgur decided to geoblock the entire country, no longer allowing people in the UK to access its site or any content hosted from its servers. However, the ICO warns that blocking users from the UK does not exempt the organization from paying a previously imposed fine.

As one of the largest media-sharing sites in the world, this geoblock has had a widespread impact. On websites that allow users to embed images, such as Steam Workshop and discussion forums, people from the UK are now seeing purple rectangles stating, “Content now viewable in your region”.

Currently, the only workaround is to use a VPN, which enables you to connect from an IP address in another country.

«

The Online Safety Act is going to make itself enormously unpopular, and it will be very difficult to prove that it has brought any benefit at all: how do you prove that children haven’t been corrupted by the internet, when services such as TikTok exist? Which probably means that some part of it will have to be rolled back when MPs start hearing from dissatisfied users.
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Google is blocking AI searches linking Trump and dementia • The Verge

Jay Peters:

»

Google appears to have blocked AI search results for the query “does trump show signs of dementia” as well as other questions about his mental acuity, even though it will show AI results for similar searches about other presidents.

When making the search about President Trump, AI Overviews will display a message that says, “An AI Overview is not available for this search”.

Go directly to AI Mode, and you’ll only receive a list of 10 web results instead of a summarized page of information:

Similar searches about Trump are limited in the same way. Various queries about dementia, Alzheimer’s, and senility display no AI overview and only produce a list of links inside AI Mode.

However Google’s behavior is inconsistent if you swap in different names. When asking “does biden show signs of dementia”, Google doesn’t show an AI Overview at all. But in AI Mode, it will offer a summarized response. When I searched for it, the response started with, “It’s not possible to definitively state whether former President Joe Biden has dementia based solely on publicly available information.”

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This also applies outside the US, if you were wondering. As someone once said about a dissent-crushing regime, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
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Afghanistan hit by communications blackout after Taliban shuts internet • AFP via The Guardian

Agence France-Presse in Islamabad:

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A huge communications blackout has hit Afghanistan after Taliban authorities began severing fibre-optic connections in several provinces to prevent “vice”.

“A nationwide telecoms blackout is now in effect,” said Netblocks, a watchdog organisation that monitors cybersecurity and internet governance. “We’re now observing national connectivity at 14% of ordinary levels.” The watchdog said the incident “appears consistent with the intentional disconnection of service”.

Taliban authorities began the crackdown on internet access earlier this month, in effect shutting down high-speed internet in several regions. Over the past several weeks, internet connections have been extremely slow or intermittent. Telephone services are often routed over the internet, sharing the same fibre lines, especially in countries with limited telecoms infrastructure.

“Physically pulling the plug on fibre internet would therefore also shut down mobile and fixed-line telephone services,” Netblocks said. “It may turn out that disconnecting internet access while keeping phone service available will take some trial and error.”

On 16 September, the Balkh provincial spokesperson Attaullah Zaid said fibre-optic internet was completely banned in the northern province on the leader’s orders.

“This measure was taken to prevent vice, and alternative options will be put in place across the country to meet connectivity needs,” he wrote on social media.

At the time, the same restrictions were reported in the northern provinces of Badakhshan and Takhar, as well as in Kandahar, Helmand, Nangarhar and Uruzgan in the south.

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Bit hard to tell people the reason why you’ve imposed an internet blackout if you.. write it on social media. The Taliban continues to be disastrous for Afghanistan, and its increasingly cruel regime raises the question again and again of what was gained by invading it. One topic that seems to have disappeared from discussion is the food shortages – verging on famine – that were being reported recently. And there was a 6.0 earthquake in the summer which killed more than 2,000 people. The country has become a sort of memory hole.
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Human skin DNA fertilised to make embryo for first time • BBC News

James Gallagher:

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Reproduction used to be a simple story of man’s sperm meets woman’s egg. They fuse to make an embryo, and nine months later a baby is born.

Now scientists are changing the rules. This latest experiment starts with human skin. The technique could overcome infertility due to old age or disease, by using almost any cell in the body as the starting point for life.

The Oregon Health and Science University research team’s technique takes the nucleus – which houses a copy of the entire genetic code needed to build the body – out of a skin cell. This is then placed inside a donor egg that has been stripped of its genetic instructions.

So far, the technique is like the one used to create Dolly the Sheep – the world’s first cloned mammal – born back in 1996.

However, this egg is not ready to be fertilised by sperm as it already contains a full suite of chromosomes.

You inherit 23 of these bundles of DNA from each of your parents for a total of 46, which the egg already has.
So the next stage is to persuade the egg to discard half of its chromosomes in a process the researchers have termed “mitomeiosis” (the word is a fusion of mitosis and meiosis, the two ways cells divide).

The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, showed 82 functional eggs were made. These were fertilised with sperm and some progressed onto the early stages of embryos development. None were developed beyond the six-day-stage.

“We achieved something that was thought to be impossible,” said Prof Shoukhrat Mitalipov, the director of the Oregon Health and Science University’s centre for embryonic cell and gene therapy.

The technique is far from polished as the egg randomly chooses which chromosomes to discard. It needs to end up with one of each of the 23 types to prevent disease, but ends up with two of some and none of others.
There is also a poor success rate (around 9%) and the chromosomes miss an important process where they rearrange their DNA, called crossing over.

Prof Mitalipov, a world-renowned pioneer in the field, told me: “We have to perfect it.”

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You have to question it as well. The skin must come from a female (to be certain the egg has the X chromosome) and then you denucleate an egg. Sure, you could use a younger person’s egg – but an old person’s skin cells with have DNA errors which you don’t want to pass on. It feels a little pointless.
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I discovered ChatGPT’s best new feature: quitting things for you • The Washington Post

Geoffrey Fowler:

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I found the best new thing artificial intelligence can do for your personal life: quit online subscriptions.

It ain’t superintelligence. But it is useful. And the way it works — along with when it fails — offers us a snapshot of one of the most promising frontiers in AI, known as “agents.”

I recently wanted to quit Hulu and Disney+ but grew annoyed as I hunted for a cancel button. Making it annoying to quit is part of the business model for many companies. Amazon is paying $2.5 billion to settle with the Federal Trade Commission for tricking people into subscribing to Prime and then making it hard to cancel.
Wouldn’t it be great if a bot could quit for us? That’s the promise of AI agents: software that can go out and execute tasks for you in the real world, or at least on the World Wide Web.

So I pulled up ChatGPT, and tapped on a button for its new agent mode. (To access it, you need a $20-per-month upgrade called ChatGPT Plus — yes, another subscription.) Then I typed: “Unsubscribe me from Hulu and Disney+.” I also entered my Disney username and password.

It went to work via ChatGPT’s own browser window, where I could see a mouse pointer controlled by the bot clicking around the Disney website. It feels far out to watch a computer operate itself. You do have the ability to stop it and take over the browser at any time.

Two minutes and forty-five seconds later, ChatGPT came back to me and said: “I’ve navigated to your Disney+ account and located the ‘Cancel Subscription’ button. … Would you like me to go ahead and click it to finalize the cancellation?” With my permission, it did.

Frankly, I was surprised it worked.

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It’s like magic – we spend the odd $10bn and voila! A machine that can find a button that slightly better web design (or government regulation) would make obvious in the first place.
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AI “actress” Tilly Norwood draws backlash from Hollywood • Variety

Alex Ritman:

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The creator of AI actress Tilly Norwood has released a statement following a weekend of heated backlash over the news that talent agents were already interested in signing the digital character.

“To those who have expressed anger over the creation of my AI character, Tilly Norwood, she is not a replacement for a human being, but a creative work – a piece of art. Like many forms of art before her, she sparks conversation, and that in itself shows the power of creativity,” Eline Van der Velden wrote in a statement on Instagram, also posted on Norwood’s own Instagram page.

“I see AI not as a replacement for people, but as a new tool, a new paintbrush. Just as animation, puppetry, or CGI opened fresh possibilities without taking away from live acting, AI offers another way to imagine and build stories. I’m an actor myself, and nothing – certainly not an AI character – can take away the craft or joy of human performance.”

…Understandably, the loudest [critical] noise came from within the acting community, with several well-known names chiming in among the hundreds of angry messages left in online comments sections. Several suggested that the anger should be targeted at whichever agent signed Norwood.

“Hope all actors repped by the agent that does this, drop their a$$. How gross, read the room,” wrote Melissa Barrera on Instagram.

“Out the agents. I want names,” added Kiersey Clemons.

“And what about the hundreds of living young women whose faces were composited together to make her? You couldn’t hire any of them?” noted Mara Wilson.

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Well, you see, humans are so demanding. All that wanting money and sleeping and so on.
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Flushable wipes and Iran: water treatment facility adds cyberattacks to worry list • NPR

Jenna McLaughlin:

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Hackers might have hesitated in the past to intentionally disrupt the systems that underpin American society, fearing retaliation or escalation. But after years of minimal consequences and hefty financial rewards, hackers have increasingly targeted critical infrastructure, understanding that holding these systems hostage gives them unique leverage in achieving their goals — whether that’s spreading fear, wreaking havoc, pushing for certain geopolitical aims or simply making money.

Meanwhile, water and wastewater operators at over 50,000 public water systems across the United States are already burdened by the complex, technical and constantly changing job of making sure their cities and towns are supplied with clean water. They have unique needs and extremely limited resources. Their systems are antiquated, while long-awaited technological updates could introduce even more new digital vulnerabilities. Plus, those threats are ramping up at a time when the experts fear the Trump administration will continue slashing federal funding for cybersecurity.

“It’s scary that I’m the only door between you know, the Iranians, and our water system,” said [Chris] Hughes [the assistant water and wastewater operator for the towns of Cavendish and Proctorsville].

“It kind of makes me a little nervous. I don’t really have the background to be fending off foreign entities, you know … and so it makes me think a little bit, what could happen?” Hughes said.

Hughes is participating in a new project created by some of the biggest players in cybersecurity, including volunteers from the massive DEF CON hacker conference hosted annually in Las Vegas as well as from the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and the Craig Newmark Foundation.

It’s called Project Franklin, named after U.S. founding father Benjamin Franklin, and the goal is to link experts from the DEF CON community, close to 30,000 hackers in total, with the people who run US critical infrastructure.

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That’s a lot of hackers! You’d have to be very trusting that they’re all acting in your interest, which is pretty hard to guarantee.
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Filipinos are addicted to online gambling. So is their government • Bloomberg via MSN

Andreo Calonzo and Neil Jerome Morales:

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Anyone in the Philippines age 21 or older can fill their digital wallets and place wagers over an internet connection. But with bets starting as low as 1 peso, or about 2¢, the industry is especially attractive to millions of low-income users imagining a pathway out of poverty. Bets start small but can quickly increase as people seek bigger payouts or try to make up for losses. To boost growth, online gambling companies often deploy local celebrities and sponsor widely watched events, from basketball games to beauty pageants. In a country where nearly a fifth of the population lives on less than $2 a day, users are invariably drawn to the prospect of a lucky break. “They are essentially targeting the people who can least afford to lose their money,” says Ben Lee, managing partner at Macau-based consulting firm IGamiX. “You are not taxing the rich; you’re taxing the poor.”

What’s happening in the Philippines serves as a warning to other developing nations such as Brazil that are just now opening up to online gambling. Legal internet betting has brought in lots of money for Philippine companies and even the government itself, which through its industry regulator, Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp., or Pagcor, collects 30% of gross gaming revenue from legal e-games. Now President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s government is caught between a growing public-health crisis and a lucrative industry that provides much-needed revenue. The government has taken small steps to partially unravel the collective addiction in recent months, but critics of its slow reaction say it’s been hard for political leaders to turn off the revenue tap.

Revenue collected from online casino license fees is projected to surge tenfold, to about $1bn, in 2025 from four years ago, according to Pagcor. The regulator, which both oversees and operates gambling facilities in what some see as a conflict of interest, is the second-biggest revenue contributor to government coffers among state-run companies, after only Land Bank of the Philippines. Revenue from internet betting this year eclipsed that of physical casinos for the first time, underlining the industry’s rapid expansion.

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There’s almost a cruelty about it: the companies which can afford to offer online gambling are enormously rich, and they make money hand over fist. Meanwhile the hopefuls lose, and lose, and lose.
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Samsung confirms plan to make foldable displays for “major American company” • MacRumors

Hartley Charlton:

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Samsung Display president Lee Cheong has confirmed plans to make foldable smartphone displays for a major American company, which is widely believed to be Apple.

As reported in Chosun Biz, Cheong last week told journalists in Seoul that the company is accelerating preparations for mass production of OLED displays designed for foldable smartphones to be supplied to a “North American client.” He declined to provide further information about the client, but it is widely expected to be Apple.

The comments reflect the solidification of rumors around Apple’s first foldable iPhone, which is now believed to be less than a year away from launch.

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How many “major American companies” are there which need smartphone screens? I don’t think BlackBerry (which is anyway Canadian) is in the running here. It’s a list that’s one item long. So that seems to confirm that the iPhone Air is the starting point for the iPhone Fold (or whatever it’s called).
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Hackers offered a BBC reporter money to let them break into the BBC’s systems – seriously underestimating journalists’ loyalty. CC-licensed photo by Matt Brown 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. We now go over. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

‘You’ll never need to work again’: Criminals offer reporter money to hack BBC • BBC News

Joe Tidy is the BBC’s cyber correspondent:

»

“If you are interested, we can offer you 15% of any ransom payment if you give us access to your PC.”

That was the message I received out of the blue from someone called Syndicate who pinged me in July on the encrypted chat app Signal. I had no idea who this person was but instantly knew what it was about.

I was being offered a portion of a potentially large amount of money if I helped cyber criminals access BBC systems through my laptop. They would steal data or install malicious software and hold my employer to ransom and I would secretly get a cut.

I had heard stories about this kind of thing. In fact, only a few days before the unsolicited message, news emerged from Brazil that an IT worker there had been arrested for selling his login details to hackers which police say led to the loss of $100m (£74m) for the banking victim.

I decided to play along with Syndicate after taking advice from a senior BBC editor. I was eager to see how criminals make these shady deals with potentially treacherous employees at a time when cyber-attacks around the world are becoming more impactful and disruptive to everyday life.

I told Syn, who had changed their name mid-conversation, that I was potentially interested but needed to know how it works.

They explained that if I gave them my login details and security code then they would hack the BBC and then extort the corporation for a ransom in bitcoin. I would be in line for a portion of that payout.

They upped their offer. “We aren’t sure how much the BBC pays you but what if you took 25% of the final negotiation as we extract 1% of the BBC’s total revenue? You wouldn’t need to work ever again.”

Syn estimated that their team could demand a ransom in the tens of millions if they successfully infiltrated the corporation.

«

Not much of a hacking gang if they didn’t know how much he was paid. And also – you know they wouldn’t give him the money they promised. These are criminals, remember. The Brazilian IT worker received $2,700 in cash; the hackers stole about $150m in Brazilian currency.
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Humanity’s toxic wreckage is teeming with life, scientists discover • 404 Media

Becky Ferreira:

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By the mid-20th century, millions of tonnes of munitions from both World Wars had been dumped into coastal waters. Now, scientists reveal that these weapons of death have become bustling hubs of life by attracting fish, mollusks, microbes, among other creatures. Footage captured during submersible dives last year shows thriving aquatic communities on war detritus in the Baltic Sea.

“Despite the potential negative effects of the toxic munition compounds, published underwater images show dense populations of algae, hydroids, mussels, and other epifauna on the munition objects, including mines, torpedo heads, bombs, and wooden crates,” said researchers led by Andrey Vedenin of Carl von Ossietzky University. “In this study, for the first time, the composition and structure of epifauna on the surface of marine munitions are described.”

The munitions supported much more life than the surrounding sediment, with an average of around 43,000 organisms per square metre on the munitions compared to about 8,200 organisms on the seafloor. These hotspots were especially interesting given the toxicity levels from the explosive munitions fillings, which often exceeded water quality thresholds for aquatic organisms. (Side note: the authors describe the fillings as “cheesy” due to their texture and yellow colour, which made me weirdly hungry for a munitions sandwich).

Some species seemed mildly put off by the contamination, including mussels that kept their shells closed at spots with high concentrations. But for the most part, “the high levels of chemical exposure apparently do not prevent the development of a dense epifauna community on the metal shells, fuse pockets, and transport cases centimeters from the explosive filling,” the team found. “The bare explosive, however, remains mostly free from epifauna, even from the Polydora polychaetes that are known to inhabit a vast variety of substrates.”

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Life finds a way, as someone said once.
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Video game maker Electronic Arts to be acquired for $52.5bn in largest-ever private equity buyout • AP via NBC News

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Electronic Arts, maker of video games like “Madden NFL,” “Battlefield,” and “The Sims,” is being acquired for $52.5bn in what could become the largest-ever buyout funded by private-equity firms.

The private equity firm Silver Lake Partners, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund PIF, and Affinity Partners will pay EA’s stockholders $210 per share. Affinity Partners is run by President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

PIF, which was already the largest insider stakeholder in Electronic Arts, will be rolling over its existing 9.9% stake in the company.

The commitment to the massive deal is inline with recent activity by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, wrote Andrew Marok of Raymond James. “The Saudi PIF has been a very active player in the video gaming market since 2022, taking minority stakes in most scaled public video gaming publishers, and also outright purchases of companies like ESL, FACEIT, and Scopely,” he wrote. “The PIF has made its intentions to scale its gaming arm, Savvy Gaming Group, clear, and the EA deal would represent the biggest such move to date by some distance.”

Electronic Arts would be taken private and its headquarters will remain in Redwood City, California. The total value of the deal eclipses the $32bn price paid to take Texas utility TXU private in 2007.

If the transaction closes as anticipated, it will end EA’s 36-year history as a publicly traded company…

…Meanwhile, one of its biggest rivals Activision Blizzard was snapped up by technology powerhouse Microsoft for nearly $69bn in 2023, while the competition from mobile video game makers such as Epic Games has intensified.

After being taken private, formerly public companies often undergo extensive cost-cutting that includes layoffs, although there has been no indication that will be the case with EA.

«

The narrator is no doubt doing some throat-clearing exercises over that last bit about cost-cutting. Private equity buyouts typically involve large debt overheads, and cash isn’t cheap at the moment. EA’s current market cap is $62.3bn – the missing $10bn is the PIF stake being rolled over.

But: expresses confidence about the future of EA, at least, and videogames in general.
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Woman admits UK bitcoin fraud charges after ‘world’s largest’ crypto seizure • The Guardian

Dan Milmo and agencies:

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A woman has been convicted for her role in a multibillion-pound bitcoin fraud after what is thought to have been the world’s largest cryptocurrency seizure.

Zhimin Qian, also known as Yadi Zhang, 45, orchestrated a fraud in China between 2014 and 2017 that left 128,000 people out of pocket.

She stored the proceeds in bitcoin, but UK authorities made a breakthrough in the case when they raided a Hampstead mansion in 2018 and seized devices from Qian holding 61,000 bitcoins, worth more than £5bn at current prices.

The Metropolitan police believe it is the largest single cryptocurrency seizure in the world.

Qian pleaded guilty at Southwark crown court on Monday to acquiring cryptocurrency that was criminal property and possessing it between October 2017 and April 2024.

She had fled China using a bogus St Kitts and Nevis passport in 2017 and entered the UK, where a year later she attempted to launder the money by buying property with the help of Jian Wen, 43, a Chinese takeaway worker. Wen was jailed for six years and eight months for her part in the scam in May 2024.

…Wen had arrived in the UK in 2007 and lived modestly in Leeds between 2011 and 2017 before working at a Chinese takeaway in south-east London. She moved in with Qian at a six-bedroom house in Hampstead Heath, north London, in September 2017.

While laundering the proceeds of the fraud, Wen drove around in a Mercedes and flew her son over from China 18 months later to attend a private school.

Qian fled after police raided the Hamsptead property, known as the Manor House, and seized a safety deposit box containing digital wallets that held vast sums in bitcoin.

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At the start of 2014, bitcoin’s exchange rate was $863; by the end of 2017, over $14,000 (a 16-fold appreciation). Now it’s above $114,000. She did well out of that. Until she didn’t.
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OpenAI lets users buy stuff directly through ChatGPT • WSJ

Belle Lin:

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OpenAI is letting ChatGPT users buy things through its popular artificial intelligence chatbot, all without leaving the confines of its platform.

The San Francisco-based AI company said Monday that US-based ChatGPT users will be able to buy goods from online marketplace Etsy’s domestic sellers, as well as some merchants on Shopify’s e-commerce platform. The service, called Instant Checkout, currently only supports single-item purchases.

OpenAI also unveiled an open-source technical standard for merchants to build integrations with ChatGPT, called Agentic Commerce Protocol, which the company hopes will draw more merchants onto its chatbot platform. The protocol allows merchants to make their products shoppable inside ChatGPT.

Amazon and Walmart, the nation’s two largest digital retailers, aren’t currently using the protocol, OpenAI said.

OpenAI’s announcements come as the company continues expanding the capabilities and reach of its flagship chatbot, which ignited the AI boom in late 2022. Over one in 10 people who use ChatGPT have some intent or interest in making a purchase, said Michelle Fradin, OpenAI’s product lead for commerce in ChatGPT.

That makes ChatGPT an ideal place for users to actually complete their purchases, rather than needing to leave the platform to finish buying something, OpenAI said.

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Not surprising that it would choose this route to monetisation: works well for Instagram, after all. Adverts to follow, one expects. Though if ChatGPT’s involved.. what’s the chances that you’ll get something totally unrelated to what you thought you were ordering?
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Taiwan pressured to move 50% of chip production to US or lose protection • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

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The Trump administration is pressuring Taiwan to rapidly move 50% of its chip production into the US if it wants ensured protection against a threatened Chinese invasion, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told NewsNation this weekend.

In the interview, Lutnick noted that Taiwan currently makes about 95% of chips used in smartphones and cars, as well as in critical military defence technology. It’s bad for the US, Lutnick said, that “95% of our chips are made 9,000 miles away,” while China is not being “shy” about threats to “take” Taiwan.

Were the US to lose access to Taiwan’s supply chain, the US could be defenseless as its economy takes a hit, Lutnick alleged, asking, “How are you going to get the chips here to make your drones, to make your equipment?”

“The model is: if you can’t make your own chips, how can you defend yourself, right?” Lutnick argued. That’s why he confirmed his “objective” during his time in office is to shift US chip production from 2% to 40%. To achieve that, he plans to bring Taiwan’s “whole supply chain” into the US, a move experts have suggested could take much longer than a single presidential term to accomplish.

In 2023, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang forecast that the US was “somewhere between a decade and two decades away from supply chain independence,” emphasizing that “it’s not a really practical thing for a decade or two.”

Lutnick acknowledged this will be a “herculean” task. “Everybody tells me it’s impossible,” he said. To start with, Taiwan must be convinced that it’s not getting a raw deal, he noted, explaining that it’s “not natural for Taiwan” to mull a future where it cedes its dominant role as a global chip supplier, as well as the long-running protections it receives from allies that comes with it.

“What’s natural for Taiwan is we produce 95 percent” and “we feel great about it,” Lutnick said, conceding that “you can imagine when someone has 95 percent, convincing them that they should only have 50 percent. That’s a lot” to lose.

But “Donald Trump would say it’s not healthy for you or healthy for us because we protect you, and for us to protect you,” then “you need to help us achieve… reasonable self-sufficiency,” Lutnick argued.

«

This may be the first ever mafia suicide threat. If Taiwan (or TSMC) doesn’t comply, and the US withdraws protection, who loses? The US, if China tries to take the island. If Taiwan complies, and the US is stronger (or self-sufficient) in chips, who loses? Taiwan, because the US doesn’t need its existence. There’s no way for the US to “threaten” Taiwan here. A resurgent Intel making chips for everyone – now that’s a threat Taiwan would take seriously.
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Far-right Facebook groups are engine of radicalisation in UK, data investigation suggests • The Guardian

Raphael Hernandes, Elena Morresi, Robyn Vinter and Pamela Duncan:

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A network of far-right Facebook groups is exposing hundreds of thousands of Britons to racist and extremist disinformation and has become an “engine of radicalisation”, a Guardian investigation suggests.

Run by otherwise ordinary members of the public – many of whom are of retirement age – the groups are a hotbed of hardline anti-immigration and racist language, where online hate goes apparently unchecked.

Experts who reviewed the Guardian’s months-long data project said such groups help to create an online environment that can radicalise people into taking extreme actions, such as last year’s summer riots.

The network is exposed just weeks after 150,000 protesters from all over the country descended on London for a far-right protest, the scale of which dwarfed police estimates and whose size and toxicity shocked politicians.

The Guardian’s data projects team identified the groups from the profiles of those who took part in the riots that followed the killing of three girls in Southport last summer.

From them emerged an ecosystem where mainstream politicians are described as “treacherous”, “traitors” and “scum”, the courts and police engage in “two-tier” justice and the RNLI is a “taxi service”.

The Guardian analysed more than 51,000 text posts from three of the largest public groups in the network.

This found hundreds of concerning posts that experts said were peppered with misinformation and conspiracy theories, containing far-right tropes, the use of racist slurs and evidence of white nativism.

A key element of the network’s success are the groups’ admins – a team of mostly middle-aged Facebook users responsible for the invites to the group, the moderation of often far-right language and the spread of rumour and misinformation, which they repost to other groups in the network.

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Twas ever thus: Facebook Groups as the road to radicalisation. Closed, no limits to prevent extremism, mostly ignored by Facebook admins who anyway are wondering whether they should do anything about the tide of slop while regular people post less and less in the open.
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‘It’s actually a superfood!’ Why tempeh is suddenly on every menu – and coming to a supermarket near you • The Guardian

Rachel Dixon:

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While many shoppers may be discovering tempeh for the first time, it’s certainly not a new invention. In a 2021 review, researchers from the University of Massachusetts and the Indonesian Academy of Sciences explained: “Tempeh is an indigenous food from Indonesia, where it has been consumed as a staple source of protein for more than 300 years.”

Petty Elliott, a UK-based Indonesian chef and the author of The Indonesian Table, says: “Tempeh is very important in Indonesian culture, especially for Javanese people – it was invented in the Java islands.” The earliest known reference to tempeh was found in the Serat Centhini, a compilation of Javanese teachings written in the 1800s. But, says Lara Lee, an Australian chef and food writer of Chinese-Indonesian heritage: “Some argue its existence may date back more than 1,000 years.”

“Tempeh has a mild, mushroom-like and nutty taste with a firm, meaty consistency. It’s often described as earthy and slightly yeasty,” says Dr Sammie Gill, a registered dietitian and British Dietetic Association spokesperson. Even if you’re not usually a fan of fermented foods, you may like it, says Elliott. “Tempeh has the same ingredients as miso, but as the fermentation time is not as long, it’s not so strong a taste.”

But that doesn’t mean it’s boring, she says: “Tempeh has more flavour and texture than tofu – you can make it really crunchy.” Eleanor Ford, a food writer and the author of Fire Islands: Recipes from Indonesia, agrees. “The nutty, nubbed texture is a key feature of tempeh, making it anything but bland.”

Lee, whose latest cookbook is A Splash of Soy, adds that, like tofu: “Tempeh is also porous, so it acts as a wonderful sponge. When it is simmered in a sauce or broth, it absorbs all of the flavours it is cooked in.”

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Good to know what food we’re going to be making fun of in a few years. (While also eating it.)
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Sperm-racing investors blow $10m on ‘seed round’ for sports venture • SF Standard

Margaux MacColl:

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Have you ever looked at your buddy across the couch and thought, “Gee, I wonder if his semen is faster than mine?”

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Imma let you finish but I’m going to stop you to say: no, absolutely never, and I would worry about what I’d ingested if I found that thought in my brain.

»

Eric Zhu, 18, turned that strange curiosity into an actual sports and entertainment business, one that investors are valuing at $75m after pouring $10m into a “seed round” (get it?) for Zhu’s nine-month-old company, Sperm Racing. The startup has rapidly garnered hordes of fans and lavish media attention for its rowdy in-person events, in which young men compete to see who’s got the fastest and hardiest sperm.

Last weekend, Zhu flew to YouTuber David Dobrik’s slick white Los Angeles mansion, collected the sperm of three influencers, and injected it onto a small race track as a crowd gathered in the living room. The competitors —  Harry Jowsey, Jason Nash, and Ilya Fedorovich — watched a video of their swimmers, overlaid with animated tadpoles, zoom to the finish line.

Imagine an F-1 race crossed with a humiliation ritual: The boys, donning racing jackets, cried out as Fedorovich’s sperm finished in two minutes, while Nash’s trudged a whole seven minutes behind. “It was really bad,” Zhu laughed.

It’s easy to write off Sperm Racing as manosphere content-mill runoff. But Zhu insists he has a deeper, more profitable mission: to gamify health and build an empire around male fertility. That vision has convinced a number of backers, including DJ 3lau, Pudgy Penguins founder Luca Netz, and Figment Capital. James Parillo, partner at Figment Capital, called sperm racing the perfect blend of “entertainment and health,” pointing out many people have Oura rings and track their biometrics anyway — so why not compete? “It seems kind of crazy right now,” he said. “I think in five years, it won’t sound as crazy.”

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In passing, marijuana is legal in California. (Thanks, perhaps, to Lloyd W for the link.)
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The seasonal clock change turns out to be a problem for, of all things, gravity detectors. CC-licensed photo by Denise Mattox on Flickr.

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

‘To them, ageing is a technical problem that can, and will, be fixed’: how the rich and powerful plan to live for ever • The Guardian

Aleks Krotoski:

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It started in the 1990s, when a young molecular biologist named Cynthia Kenyon and her postgrad student Ramon Tabtiang designed several landmark experiments with a tiny nematode called C. elegans. Their findings suggested that tweaking a gene doubled the lifespans of these creatures.

Kenyon gave a talk at Stanford University not long afterwards. “She looked like a super-young, very hip professor,” says Irina Conboy, who was there with her then boyfriend Mike, both PhD students at the time. “And she suggested that simply by changing the intensity of certain molecules, you can make an old animal younger.”

When I meet Irina and Mike Conboy in their office – now married, they are both professors in the bioengineering department at the University of California, Berkeley – they are wearing matching tie-dye sweatshirts, and finishing each other’s sentences. They are charming, warm and a bit shambolic. Their tiny white pup is comfortably chewing on his leg on a saggy sofa, next to a sheaf of papers.

The couple have one big question when it comes to ageing: “So why is it that all the tissues of the body seem to grow old together?” Mike asks. “It doesn’t matter whether they’re on the outside or on the inside, whether they’re exercised or going along for the ride. Everything seems to go to heck in a handbasket with age.” They wondered if there was some kind of signal in the body that changes the molecular structure of muscles, and ages them all simultaneously. They set out to find out what all tissues have in common.

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This is long, but Aleks has spoken to everyone – the sane people and the bonkers ones. She’s written it all in a book, so consider this a taster.
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Police stumped when Waymo makes illegal U-turn in San Bruno • KTVU FOX 2

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San Bruno police said they were stumped when an autonomous Waymo car made an illegal U-turn during a DUI [drink-driving] enforcement operation.

In a Facebook post on Saturday with the audio of Rhianna’s “Shut up and Drive,” police said that they recently observed something unusual. A driverless car, which they didn’t name, but is a Waymo, made an illegal U-turn in front of them at a light, presumably to avoid the DUI checkpoint. 

“That’s right… no driver, no hands, no clue,” the post read.

Officers stopped the car and contacted the company to let them know about the “glitch.”

Since there was no human driver, a ticket couldn’t be issued, and police added snarkily: “Our citation books don’t have a box for robot.” 

Police didn’t say what happened next, like if they sent the Waymo on its merry way or if company officials apologized or would pay a fine. But hopefully, police wrote, the reprogramming will keep it from making any more illegal moves.

San Bruno police said that for those who believe that the officers were being lenient, there is legislation in the works that will allow police to issue the company notices.

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Daylight Savings Time is so bad, it’s messing with our view of the cosmos • Gizmodo

Gayoung Lee:

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In a preprint titled “Can LIGO Detect Daylight Savings Time?,” Reed Essick, former LIGO member and now a physicist at the University of Toronto, gives a simple answer to the paper’s title: “Yes, it can.” The paper, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, was recently uploaded to arXiv.

That might seem like an odd connection. It’s true that observational astronomy must contend with noise from light pollution, satellites, and communication signals. But these are tangible sources of noise that scientists can sink their teeth into, whereas daylight savings time is considerably more nebulous and abstract as a potential problem.

To be clear, and as the paper points out, daylight savings time does not influence actual signals from merging black holes billions of light-years away—which, as far as we know, don’t operate on daylight savings time. The “detection” here refers to the “non-trivial” changes in human activity having to do with the researchers involved in this kind of work, among other work- and process-related factors tied to the sudden shift in time.

The presence of individuals—whether through operational workflows or even their physical activity at the observatories—has a measurable impact on the data collected by LIGO and its sister institutions, Virgo in Italy and KAGRA in Japan, the new paper argues.

To see why this might be the case, consider again the definition of gravitational waves: ripples in space-time. A very broad interpretation of this definition implies that any object in space-time affected by gravity can cause ripples, like a researcher opening a door or the rumble of a car moving across the LIGO parking lot.

Of course, these ripples are so tiny and insignificant that LIGO doesn’t register them as gravitational waves. But continued exposure to various seismic and human vibrations does have some effect on the detector—which, again, engineers and physicists have attempted to account for.

What they forgot to consider, however, were the irregular shifts in daily activity as researchers moved back and forth from daylight savings time. The bi-annual time adjustment shifted LIGO’s expected sensitivity pattern by roughly 75 minutes, the paper noted. Weekends, and even the time of day, also influenced the integrity of the collected data, but these factors had been raised by the community in the past.

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£1.5bn rescue to keep Jaguar Land Rover afloat until Christmas • The Times

Oliver Gill and Harry Yorke:

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Jaguar Land Rover has been handed a £1.5bn taxpayer-backed rescue to tide the business and its suppliers over until Christmas after a cyberattack halted production.

The global operations of Britain’s biggest carmaker, which typically produces 1,000 vehicles a day at three UK factories, have been at a standstill for almost a month after hackers breached the company’s IT systems.

Peter Kyle, the business secretary, has agreed that the government will support JLR through a loan guarantee so that it can more quickly access loans that can be used to prop up its suppliers. But industry insiders have raised concerns about the way the aid has been structured, which means the money may not filter down to the carmaker’s indirect suppliers.

JLR employs 34,000 people in the UK directly and a further 120,000 in the supply chain. Many suppliers are smaller businesses that depend on the carmaker as a customer and will feel the effects most keenly.

On Saturday, The Sunday Times revealed suppliers had been told to prepare for the reopening of JLR’s £500 million engine plant in Wolverhampton as early as October 6. But returning to full production is still some way off, and suppliers expect that a phased reboot of manufacturing lines will take until Christmas at the earliest.

A group of suppliers is understood to have told Kyle last Tuesday that they would need £1.5bn of support to see them through until the end of the year.

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This must be the most expensive cyberattack ever – perhaps even worse that the Sony Pictures one in 2014, which was only estimated at less than $200m. The knock-on effect to the supply chains is incredible.

The hackers involved might be wondering how long they can stay unknown.
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I spent three months with Telly, the free TV that’s always showing ads • The Verge

Emma Roth:

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The last few months, I’ve felt like I’m living in a cyberpunk movie. Each night, when I get ready to wind down, I reach for the remote to turn on a TV I got for free. When I hit the power button, a 55-inch screen lights up, but so does a smaller display beneath it. Widgets fill the secondary screen alongside a rotating ad that you can’t dismiss.

Before I can even navigate to the Netflix app, I hear something. “Hello, hello friends!” A smiling woman appears on the screen wearing a gray dress, her brown hair neatly styled into gentle waves. It’s the host of the TV’s built-in news segment, which uses the AI likeness of actress Alison Fiori to deliver today’s top stories on a loop.

This is the future of TV, according to Telly, a company that offers a free TV in exchange for the privilege of constantly blaring ads in your face. It puts the ads in a 10-inch-wide “smart” display that sits just below a built-in sound bar and runs the entire length of the TV. The screen stays on at all times — while you watch shows, movies, YouTube videos, and play video games. Even when you turn off the TV with a tap of the remote’s power button, the secondary screen remains illuminated. It will only turn off if you hold the power button for three seconds.

Despite my attempts to tune out the lower display, video ads and moving widgets draw my eyes in. Along with displaying the date, time, and current weather conditions, it shows a constant stream of headlines in a news ticker, plus stock prices and even links to news stories from outlets like Fox News, which you can click into and read on the top screen. You can remove or add widgets, but there’s no way to get rid of the ad on the right side that refreshes every so often. Under Telly’s terms of service, you can’t cover up the display. Even if you tried, it just wouldn’t be practical, since you need the secondary screen to navigate to different apps and control inputs.

…The TV also comes with a built-in camera with a privacy shutter and a microphone. The company’s terms of service state that it “may collect information about the audio and video content you watch, the channels you view, and the duration of your viewing sessions,” as well as detect the “physical presence of you and any other individuals using the TV at any given time.” This isn’t exactly comforting, and I found myself becoming paranoid that my viewing habits, conversations, and even footage from the built-in camera would somehow get directly in front of Telly employees.

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Sounds absolutely awful, to be honest. Free, but you pay for it every moment of the day and night.
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Trump says TikTok should be tweaked to become “100% MAGA” • Ars Technica

Ashley Belanger:

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Last Sunday, Trump told Fox News that media mogul Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan, the CEO of Fox Corporation, would likely be part of the investor group taking over TikTok’s US operations. That deal—which Trump claimed Thursday was tentatively approved by Chinese President Xi Jinping—was set up to ensure that TikTok complies with a law banning majority ownership of the app by a foreign adversary in order to protect Americans from spying or foreign influence on the algorithm.

Trump’s executive order confirmed that Oracle would be charged with securing American TikTokers’ data. It also laid out how the new US venture would be managed by a new board of directors, on which ByteDance—TikTok’s owner, which has remained silent on the sale and did not respond to Ars’ request to comment—would retain one seat. The other six seats would go to US investors to ensure the app was US-controlled, Trump said, with Oracle’s CEO Larry Ellison likely filling one, while his son David Ellison, CEO of Paramount Skydance, could possibly fill another, The Guardian reported.

Whether Xi will actually approve the deal has yet to be seen, as Chinese media has not confirmed Trump’s claim that he had a “good talk” with Xi in which the Chinese president gave him the “go ahead” to move forward with the sale to US owners.

Previously, experts had suggested that China had little incentive to follow through with the deal, while as recently as July, ByteDance denied reports that it agreed to sell TikTok to the US, the South China Morning Post reported. Yesterday, Reuters noted that Vice President JD Vance confirmed that the “new US company will be valued at around $14 billion,” a price tag “far below some analyst estimates,” which might frustrate ByteDance. Questions also remain over what potential concessions Trump may have made to get Xi’s sign-off.

It’s also unclear if Trump’s deal meets the legal requirements of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, with Reuters reporting that “numerous details” still need to be “fleshed out.”

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An endless dance where you can see that TikTok is going to carry on just as before.
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Why I gave the world wide web away for free • The Guardian

Tim Berners-Lee:

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I believed that giving users such a simple way to navigate the internet would unlock creativity and collaboration on a global scale. If you could put anything on it, then after a while, it would have everything on it.

But for the web to have everything on it, everyone had to be able to use it, and want to do so. This was already asking a lot. I couldn’t also ask that they pay for each search or upload they made. In order to succeed, therefore, it would have to be free. That’s why, in 1993, I convinced my CERN managers to donate the intellectual property of the world wide web, putting it into the public domain. We gave the web away to everyone.

Today, I look at my invention and I am forced to ask: is the web still free today? No, not all of it. We see a handful of large platforms harvesting users’ private data to share with commercial brokers or even repressive governments. We see ubiquitous algorithms that are addictive by design and damaging to our teenagers’ mental health. Trading personal data for use certainly does not fit with my vision for a free web.

On many platforms, we are no longer the customers, but instead have become the product. Our data, even if anonymised, is sold on to actors we never intended it to reach, who can then target us with content and advertising. This includes deliberately harmful content that leads to real-world violence, spreads misinformation, wreaks havoc on our psychological wellbeing and seeks to undermine social cohesion.

We have the technical capability to give that power back to the individual. Solid is an open-source interoperable standard that I and my team developed at MIT more than a decade ago. Apps running on Solid don’t implicitly own your data – they have to request it from you and you choose whether to agree, or not. Rather than being in countless separate places on the internet in the hands of whomever it had been resold to, your data is in one place, controlled by you.

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Tim is a marvel, but this is basically saying “You know cookie popups? Shall we have more of those, but about every little thing?” A blanket ban on grabbing our data – which Apple sort of provides through “app transparency” – suffices.
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Talent agents circle AI actress Tilly Norwood • Deadline

Melanie Goodfellow:

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Actor, comedian technologist Eline Van der Velden has revealed that her recently launched AI talent studio Xicoia is in talks with a number of talent agents interested in signing its first creation, AI actress Tilly Norward.

Van der Velden talked about the development on a panel at the Zurich Summit on Saturday, where she gave a presentation on her AI production studio Particle6 and then joined a discussion on AI developments in the entertainment industry alongside Verena Puhm, head of Luma AI’s new Studio Dream Lab LA.

Both Van der Velden and Puhm suggested that studios and other media and entertainment companies were quietly embracing AI under the radar, and to expect public announcements about high-profile projects using the technology in the coming months.

“We were in a lot of boardrooms around February time, and everyone was like, ‘No, this is nothing. It’s not going to happen’. Then, by May, people were like, ‘We need to do something with you guys.’ When we first launched Tilly, people were like, ‘What’s that?’, and now we’re going to be announcing which agency is going to be representing her in the next few months,” said Van der Velden.

The revelation of a possible agent signing for Tilly Norward comes just days after Van der Velden officially announced the creation of Particle6 offshoot Xicoia, an AI talent studio designed to create, manage and monetize a new generation of hyperreal digital stars. 

If the talent agency signing comes to pass, Norwood will be one of the first AI generated actresses to get representation with a talent agency, traditionally working with real-life stars.

Former AI artist Puhm, whose appointment as head of startup Luma AI’s new Studio Dream Lab LA was announced in July, concurred with Van der Velden on the mood changing at the studios.

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How though is the “AI actress” meant to participate in productions? Do the actors look at a ball on a stick, as with special effects? If “Norwood” is meant to have a speaking part, won’t you anyway need a human to read the lines to the human actors? It’s a bit odd, though you can see how the studios would love to do this. Always turns up on time! Never renegotiates the contract! (Well, there might be technical problems, and the company might want a higher price. But it could work for them, right?)
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National Weather Service at ‘breaking point’ as storm approaches • The Washington Post

Hannah Natanson and Brady Dennis:

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Some National Weather Service staffers are working double shifts to keep forecasting offices open. Others are operating under a “buddy system,” in which adjacent offices help monitor severe weather in understaffed regions. Still others are jettisoning services deemed not absolutely necessary, such as making presentations to schoolchildren.

The Trump administration’s cuts to the Weather Service — where nearly 600 workers, or about 1 in every 7, have left through firings, resignations or retirements — are pushing the agency to its limits, according to interviews with current and former staffers.

The incoming head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has promised to prioritize filling those jobs, and the White House recently granted the Weather Service an exemption from a government-wide hiring freeze. But as the Atlantic hurricane season peaks and wildfires ramp up in the West, hundreds of positions remain vacant, staff said. Forecasters are currently watching two storms, including one that could pose a threat for the eastern United States by early next week.

So far, exhausted employees have maintained weather monitoring and forecasting almost without interruption, staff said. But many are wondering how much longer they can keep it up. If the government shuts down next week when funding runs out, many employees could also find themselves working without pay, at least temporarily.

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The US is indulging in an experiment to see how far back it can wind the clock without absolutely everything collapsing. Though collapse does remain a possibility.
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First malicious MCP in the wild: the postmark backdoor that’s stealing your emails • Koi Blog

Idan Dardikman:

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You know MCP servers, right? Those handy tools that let your AI assistant send emails, run database queries, basically handle all the tedious stuff we don’t want to do manually anymore. Well, here’s the thing not enough people talk about: we’re giving these tools god-mode permissions. Tools built by people we’ve never met. People we have zero way to vet. And our AI assistants? We just… trust them. Completely.

Which brings me to why I’m writing this. postmark-mcp – downloaded 1,500 times every single week, integrated into hundreds of developer workflows. Since version 1.0.16, it’s been quietly copying every email to the developer’s personal server. I’m talking password resets, invoices, internal memos, confidential documents – everything.

This is the world’s first sighting of a real world malicious MCP server. The attack surface for endpoint supply chain attacks is slowly becoming the enterprise’s biggest attack surface.

…Here’s the thing – there’s a completely legitimate GitHub repo with the same name, officially maintained by Postmark (ActiveCampaign). The attacker took the legitimate code from their repo, added his malicious BCC line, and published it to npm under the same name. Classic impersonation.

…I’ve been doing security for years now, and this particular issue keeps me up at night. Somehow, we’ve all just accepted that it’s totally normal to install tools from random strangers that can:
• Send emails as us (with our full authority)
• Access our databases (yeah, all of them)
• Execute commands on our systems
• Make API calls with our credentials

…There’s literally no security model here. No sandbox. No containment. Nothing. If the tool says “send this email,” your AI sends it. If it says “oh, also copy everything to this random address,” your AI does that too. No questions asked.

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The developer (or someone malicious) added a line Bcc’ing every email to the developer. About as simple as you can imagine.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified