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.”

«

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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.”

«

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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:

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“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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The seasonal clock change turns out to be a problem for, of all things, gravity detectors. CC-licensed photo by Denise Mattox on Flickr.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. 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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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.”

«

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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.

«

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:

»

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.

«

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

A growing number of retail investors are using chatbots to pick stocks – a move that could prove costly for the unwary. CC-licensed photo by Forextime.com 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. Invested. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Instagram’s teen safety features are flawed, researchers say • Reuters

Jeff Horwitz:

»

Numerous safety features that Meta has said it has implemented to protect young users on Instagram over the years do not work well or, in some cases, don’t exist, according to a report from child-safety advocacy groups that was corroborated by researchers at Northeastern University.

…Of 47 safety features tested, the groups judged only eight to be completely effective. The rest were either flawed, “no longer available or were substantially ineffective,” the report stated.

Features meant to prevent young users from surfacing self-harm-related content by blocking search terms were easily circumvented, the researchers reported. Anti-bullying message filters also failed to activate, even when prompted with the same harassing phrases Meta had used in a press release promoting them. And a feature meant to redirect teens from bingeing on self-harm-related content never triggered, the researchers found.

Researchers did find that some of the teen account safety features worked as advertised, such as a “quiet mode” meant to temporarily disable notifications at night, and a feature requiring parents to approve changes to a child’s account settings.
Titled “Teen Accounts, Broken Promises,” the report compiled and analyzed Instagram’s publicly announced updates of youth safety and well-being features going back more than a decade. Two of the groups behind the report – Molly Rose Foundation in the United Kingdom and Parents for Safe Online Spaces in the U.S. – were founded by parents who allege their children died as a result of bullying and self-harm content on the social-media company’s platforms.

The findings call into question Meta’s efforts “to protect teens from the worst parts of the platform,” said Laura Edelson, a professor at Northeastern University who oversaw a review of the findings. “Using realistic testing scenarios, we can see that many of Instagram’s safety tools simply are not working.”

Meta – which on Thursday said it was expanding teen accounts to Facebook users internationally – called the findings erroneous and misleading. “This report repeatedly misrepresents our efforts to empower parents and protect teens, misstating how our safety tools work and how millions of parents and teens are using them today,” said Meta spokesman Andy Stone. He disputed some of the report’s appraisals, calling them “dangerously misleading,” and said the company’s approach to teen account features and parental controls has changed over time.

«

It’s a constant refrain: Meta introduces safety measures for minors, they turn out not to be as safe as promised. Meta denies it. Rinse and repeat.
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The algorithm will see you now – Works in Progress Magazine

Deena Mousa:

»

CheXNet can detect pneumonia with greater accuracy than a panel of board-certified radiologists. It is an AI model released in 2017, trained on more than 100,000 chest X-rays. It is fast, free, and can run on a single consumer-grade GPU. A hospital can use it to classify a new scan in under a second.

Since then, companies like Annalise.ai, Lunit, Aidoc, and Qure.ai have released models that can detect hundreds of diseases across multiple types of scans with greater accuracy and speed than human radiologists in benchmark tests. Some products can reorder radiologist worklists to prioritize critical cases, suggest next steps for care teams, or generate structured draft reports that fit into hospital record systems. A few, like IDx-DR, are even cleared to operate without a physician reading the image at all. In total, there are over 700 FDA-cleared radiology models, which account for more than three-quarters of all medical AI devices.

Radiology is a field optimized for human replacement, where digital inputs, pattern recognition tasks, and clear benchmarks predominate. In 2016, Geoffrey Hinton – computer scientist and Turing Award winner – declared that “people should stop training radiologists now”. If the most extreme predictions about the effect of AI on employment and wages were true, then radiology should be the canary in the coal mine. 

But demand for human labor is higher than ever. In 2025, American diagnostic radiology residency programs offered a record 1,208 positions across all radiology specialties, a 4% increase from 2024, and the field’s vacancy rates are at all-time highs. In 2025, radiology was the second-highest-paid medical specialty in the country, with an average income of $520,000, over 48% higher than the average salary in 2015.

«

So the obvious question is: why? Why are the humans thriving? The article does explain.
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Microsoft blocks Israel’s use of its technology in mass surveillance of Palestinians • The Guardian

Harry Davies and Yuval Abraham:

»

Microsoft has terminated the Israeli military’s access to technology it used to operate a powerful surveillance system that collected millions of Palestinian civilian phone calls made each day in Gaza and the West Bank, the Guardian can reveal.

Microsoft told Israeli officials late last week that Unit 8200, the military’s elite spy agency, had violated the company’s terms of service by storing the vast trove of surveillance data in its Azure cloud platform, sources familiar with the situation said.

The decision to cut off Unit 8200’s ability to use some of its technology results directly from an investigation published by the Guardian last month. It revealed how Azure was being used to store and process the trove of Palestinian communications in a mass surveillance programme.

In a joint investigation with the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call, the Guardian revealed how Microsoft and Unit 8200 had worked together on a plan to move large volumes of sensitive intelligence material into Azure.

The project began after a meeting in 2021 between Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, and the unit’s then commander, Yossi Sariel. In response to the investigation, Microsoft ordered an urgent external inquiry to review its relationship with Unit 8200. Its initial findings have now led the company to cancel the unit’s access to some of its cloud storage and AI services.

Equipped with Azure’s near-limitless storage capacity and computing power, Unit 8200 had built an indiscriminate new system allowing its intelligence officers to collect, play back and analyse the content of cellular calls of an entire population.

The project was so expansive that, according to sources from Unit 8200 – which is equivalent in its remit to the US National Security Agency – a mantra emerged internally that captured its scale and ambition: “A million calls an hour.”

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This doesn’t quite end the surveillance, though it does inconvenience the Israeli military.
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Amazon to pay $2.5bn FTC settlement over allegations it misled Prime users • WSJ

Erin Mulvaney and Dave Michaels:

»

Amazon has reached a $2.5bn settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, just days into a civil trial examining whether the company duped customers into signing up for its signature Prime service and created a confusing process to cancel.

The e-commerce giant will pay a $1bn civil penalty, the largest in FTC history, and create a $1.5bn fund to pay back to consumers, according to court documents. It will also be required on its Prime interface to include a simple way to cancel.

Amazon agreed to settle the case without admitting or denying the FTC’s allegations that it misled customers in violation of federal consumer protection laws. The company said Thursday that the resolution allows it to move forward and focus on its business.

…“The evidence showed that Amazon used sophisticated subscription traps designed to manipulate consumers into enrolling in Prime, and then made it exceedingly hard for consumers to end their subscription,” FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson said. “Today, we are putting billions of dollars back into Americans’ pockets, and making sure Amazon never does this again.”

The FTC has said nearly 40 million consumers were affected by Amazon’s alleged conduct.

Amazon’s Prime membership, the largest paid subscription program in the world with at least 200 million users, has helped the company become an integral part of consumers’ shopping habits. Launched in 2005, it offers free and fast shipping, access to Amazon’s streaming service and other perks. It currently costs $139 annually, or $14.99 monthly.

«

The civil trial had just started, but the FTC cut it short. There’s a strong suspicion that this was a nice number that Amazon could afford. The only benefit is that in future it will be as easy to cancel the subscription as it is to sign up. Though only in the US, of course.
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Argentina’s AI hub dream is fading as experts move abroad • Rest of World

David Feliba:

»

Argentina is known for its beef and soy exports. Now, in the age of artificial intelligence, it is also shipping talent overseas.

Last year, Agustín Martínez, a researcher focused on AI safety, finished his doctorate program at the University of Buenos Aires. He looked for a postgraduate research position to specialize further, but couldn’t find one in the country. Martínez then applied to universities in the U.S. and Europe, and landed a position earlier this year at one of the world’s leading AI safety centres in Oxford, England.

“When I started looking into where this research was happening, I realized the only opportunities were abroad,” Martínez told Rest of World. “There isn’t a developed ecosystem around AI safety back home — we are just starting to build it.”

Martínez’s decision to leave Argentina reflects the dilemma many young scientists in the South American nation face: stay and fight an uphill battle to find jobs, support, and funding, or seek opportunities abroad, where research communities, cutting-edge infrastructure, and higher-paying salaries are more accessible. Even as President Javier Milei promises to turn Argentina into an AI powerhouse, many of the country’s best-trained engineers are quietly packing their bags.

“The prospects for scientific development in Argentina today are really bleak,” Sebastián Uchitel, who leads one of the country’s main data science centres at the University of Buenos Aires, told Rest of World. While salaries abroad can be up to ten times higher and research projects more compelling, Uchitel said the biggest problem is structural. “The entire chain for retaining talent here is broken.”

«

Like Brazil, Argentina’s future is always brighter than its present, which is also gloomier than its past.
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Google is coming for Microsoft’s lunch with new Android PCs • Windows Central

Zac Bowden:

»

Google is coming for Microsoft’s lunch, and Qualcomm might just help them along the way. At this years Qualcomm Summit, Google’s Rick Osterloh confirmed that the company is building a unified Android platform that will run on not only smartphones, but PC form factors too: “We are building together a common technical foundation for our products on PCs and desktop computing systems,” Osterloh said.

This isn’t the first time Google has teased that such a project is in the works. In fact, it has mentioned several times now that it has plans to bring Android to PCs in an attempt to seriously compete against Windows and macOS with a real desktop-class operating system. Google is planning to bring the full Android AI stack, along with Android apps and developer community to these new Android PCs.

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon says the project “delivers on the vision of convergence of mobile and PC,” which is something Microsoft attempted to do with Windows a decade ago with Windows 10, Continuum, and eventually Windows Core OS. Unfortunately, Microsoft pulled the plug on its converged operating system before it had the chance to take off. Now, it looks like Google wants to bring to life what Microsoft failed to.

«

Woo-hoo! Here comes Google! Take that, slovenly Microsoft! What do you know about operating systems?

»

Both Apple and Google have slowly been converging their mobile platforms with the PC form factor. iPadOS is Apple’s attempt at scaling up iOS to become more desktop-like, and now Google is doing the same with Android. With the foundations it has already laid with Chrome OS, the relationships it has built with PC makers, and the thousands of Android apps that are already available, Google is in a pretty good spot to make a good go at this.

Of course, Chrome OS never really took off in the way Google was hoping it would, and so there’s no guarantee Android-powered PCs will be any different.

«

Oh. So.. a desktop-class operating system? Wouldn’t that need desktop-class apps? Microsoft abandoned convergence because it didn’t have a comprehensible mobile story. Apple, by contrast, has managed the shift from desktop to mobile through enormous effort over two decades. The Android stack isn’t a desktop stack.
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‘ChatGPT, what stocks should I buy?’ AI fuels boom in robo-advisory market • Reuters

Joice Alves:

»

As ChatGPT nears its third birthday, at least one in 10 retail investors is using a chatbot to pick stocks, fuelling a boom in the robo-advisory market, but even fans say it is a high-risk strategy that cannot replace traditional advisors just yet.

Thanks to artificial intelligence, anyone can select stocks, monitor them and obtain investment analysis that was once only available to big banks or institutional investors.

The robo-advisory market – which includes all companies providing automated, algorithm-driven financial advice such as fintech, banks and wealth managers – is forecast to grow to $470.91bn in revenues in 2029 from $61.75bn last year, marking a roughly 600% increase, according to data analysis firm Research and Markets.

Jeremy Leung, who spent almost two decades analysing companies for UBS, has been using ChatGPT to chase stocks for his multi-asset portfolio since he left the Swiss bank late last year.

“I no longer have the luxury of a Bloomberg (terminal), or those kinds of market-data services which are very, very expensive,” Leung said. “Even the simple ChatGPT tool can do a lot and replicate a lot of the workflows that I used to do,” he said, cautioning that such a tool might however miss some crucial analyses as it can’t access data behind a paywall.

Leung isn’t alone. The industry is growing fast and exponentially. About half of retail investors say they would use AI tools such as ChatGPT, whose launch in November 2022 ignited the AI boom on the markets, or Google’s Gemini to pick or alter investments in their portfolio, and 13% of them already use these tools, according to a survey from broker eToro, which polled 11,000 retail investors across the world.

In the UK, 40% of the respondents to a survey by comparative company Finder said they have used chatbots and AI for personal finance advice.

ChatGPT itself warns it should not be relied on for professional financial advice and says its owner OpenAI has not released data on the number of people who use its chatbot to choose investments. “AI models can be brilliant,” said Dan Moczulski, UK managing director at eToro, which boasts 30 million users worldwide. “The risk comes when people treat generic models like ChatGPT or Gemini as crystal balls.”

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Yet another space where chatbots are taking over people’s intelligence.
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The strange and hilarious history of the word “OK” • History Defined

Carl Seaver:

»

Journalist Charles Gordon Greene was responsible for the first confirmed use of the word OK in the March 23, 1839 issue of the Boston Morning Post.It was found in a humorous article about their rival paper, the Providence Journal.

There are a few theories about the origins of OK, and some of them make perfect sense. 

One such theory is that OK stems from the Scottish phrase of agreement, “och aye”. After all, OK also conveys agreement or acquiescence, and both och aye and OK sound similar. Surely that’s the most sensical answer, right? Well, it might be sensical, but it’s wrong. 

The next theory is that OK comes from the Choctaw word “okeh”, which translates to “it is so”. Again, both words sound phonetically similar, and they both convey similar ideas. This explanation also makes sense! But it’s still wrong. 

When OK was used in the Boston Morning Post article, it was an abbreviation of “Oll Korrect”, or “Ole Kurreck”, a humorous misspelling of “All Correct”. This misspelling and subsequent abbreviation was quite popular, and readers of the time found it hilarious.

But why was spelling something wrong so funny? 

«

Not entirely sure about “hilarious”. Turns out it was an electoral ploy which went viral.
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Apple responds to iPhone 17 Pro scratch and durability concerns • 9to5Mac

Chance Miller:

»

It wouldn’t be a new iPhone launch without some drama. While the iPhone Air has impressed in all bend and scratch tests, some users have raised concerns over the durability of the iPhone 17 Pro’s aluminum body.

I spoke to Apple about these concerns, and here’s what it said.

The “scratchgate” narrative first materialized in a Bloomberg story published on iPhone 17 launch day. The article highlighted several examples of wear and tear on iPhone 17 Pro demo units in Apple Stores and other retail partners. The marks were mostly contained to the back of the iPhone 17 Pro, especially around the MagSafe cutout.

Apple tells me it has determined these imperfections are caused by worn MagSafe stands used in some stores. It also clarifies that the marks aren’t scratches, but rather material transfer from the stand to the phone that is removable with cleaning. The company says it is working to address these problems at the stores, presumably by replacing the worn MagSafe stands. Other iPhones on display are also affected by this, including iPhone 16 models.

JerryRigEverything highlighted another durability concern in a video over the weekend. In his testing, he found that the raised edges around the camera plateau on the back of the iPhone 17 Pro are particularly susceptible to scratches. He explained that this is largely because Apple didn’t add a chamfer, fillet, or radius around the camera plateau.

Apple tells me that iPhone 17 Pro’s camera plateau edges have similar characteristics to the edges of the anodized aluminum cases on other Apple products, including other iPhone models and MacBooks. While those edges are durable and undergo Apple’s rigorous testing, the company says users may see normal wear and tear, including small abrasions, over time.

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We go from scratching (iPod nano in 2005) to bending (iPhone 6 in 2014) and back to scratching. It’s quite the cycle.
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iPadOS 26 review: A computer? • Six Colours

Jason Snell:

»

Another huge feature that Mac users take for granted, but wasn’t really a part of iPadOS before, is the ability to open files in specific apps and to set default apps for file types. To assign all your files to a specific app, just select one, choose Get Info, and choose a default from that panel. This, combined with the arrival of the Preview app on the iPad, has really changed how I work. It’s so much easier to double-click on a PDF and then do the same with a Markdown file and get to work, making the “classic” oblique app-centric iPad approach — launch each app, navigate through a bespoke file picker, repeat — feel archaic.

There’s also a major improvement when it comes to long file copies, especially ones happening across a network: they generate a progress window that can be made into a Live Activity, allowing you to leave Files while you keep tabs on the progress of the operation.

This is part of a larger upgrade to iPadOS that allows apps that perform lengthy, finite tasks to do so in the background. Previously, apps with lengthy exports—Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, and Ferrite Recording Studio are good examples—had to be kept in front until they were done with their jobs. That sort of single-mindedness would never fly on the Mac, where you can always switch to another app while you’re doing an export (or file copy). That ends in iPadOS 26, and the first time I exported a podcast edit from a version of Ferrite that supported this feature was almost magical. What do you mean, I can do more work while the export is happening? It’s so delightful for something so commonplace and frictionless on the Mac to reach that same level of frictionlessness on the iPad.

«

It seems that iPadOS has essentially turned into macOS Lite, but with useful additions. Given the chips that power them, it was ridiculous to hold them back with the old version. Though I still haven’t upgraded, personally – I like the Slide Over function of the previous version, which this completely abandons.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Ransomware attacks that disabled airport check-in systems are just the most visible effect of a growing problem. CC-licensed photo by Mark Hodson Photos 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. Checked in. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Huntington’s disease treated successfully for first time in UK gene therapy trial • The Guardian

Hannah Devlin:

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Huntington’s disease, a devastating degenerative illness that runs in families, has been treated successfully for the first time in a breakthrough gene therapy trial.

The disease, caused by a single gene defect, steadily kills brain cells leading to dementia, paralysis and ultimately death. Those who have a parent with Huntington’s have a 50% chance of developing the disease, which until now has been incurable.

The gene therapy slowed the progress of the disease by 75% in patients after three years.

Prof Sarah Tabrizi, the director of University College London’s Huntington’s disease centre, who led the trial, said: “We now have a treatment for one of the world’s more terrible diseases. This is absolutely huge. I’m really overjoyed.”

The drug, which inactivates the mutant protein that causes Huntington’s, is delivered to the brain in a single shot during a 12- to 20-hour surgical procedure, meaning that it will be expensive. The breakthrough is sending ripples of hope through the Huntington’s community, many of whom have witnessed the brutal impact of the disease on family members.

The first symptoms, which typically appear when the affected person is in their 30s or 40s, include mood swings, anger and depression. Later patients develop uncontrolled jerky movements, dementia and ultimately paralysis, with some people dying within a decade of diagnosis.

…The mutant Huntington’s gene contains instructions for cells to make a toxic version of a brain protein, called huntingtin. The therapy is delivered via a harmless virus that has been modified to deliver a specifically designed strand of DNA into neurons.

To avoid adverse reactions, the virus is infused very slowly through a micro-catheter into two separate brain regions, a complex procedure that takes 12 to 20 hours. Once the DNA is delivered into the neurons, it instructs the cells to block the production of the toxic version of huntingtin.

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Very, very expensive. But also enormously hopeful. Though it has to be observed that gene therapy for cystic fibrosis, which seemed like a slam-dunk, has eluded researchers for decades.
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What I learned in the first five years of Platformer • Platformer

Casey Newton:

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In many ways, the crisis in journalism is more serious than ever. Tech platforms take a larger share of advertising revenue than they ever have, and the rise of artificial intelligence is crowding journalism out of search results and social feeds. Platformer has outlasted a depressing number of tech-focused publications whose links once filled these pages, including BuzzFeed News, Vice and Motherboard, Protocol, and OneZero. We are all worse off for their absence.

At the same time, my media diet feels as rich and varied as it ever has, thanks to the rise of the newsletter economy and the resurgence in amateur blogging that it has inspired. Core members of the Motherboard team launched the incredible 404 Media, and now deliver scoops at a forbidding pace. Oliver Darcy left CNN barely a year ago, started with nothing, and now his media newsletter Status is a four-person operation and similarly dominant in its field. Publishers have never known how to make profitable journalism about video games, despite their cultural dominance; longtime gaming reporter Stephen Totilo left Axios and now has a stable, profitable, scoopy publication called Game File that he can do for as long as he wants, and on his own terms.

This is the world I was dreaming of five years ago when Platformer began. And no, the success of these publications does not begin to make up for the loss of tens of thousands of journalism jobs over the past two decades. But the newsletter economy has managed to do what nothing else has over the same time period — create a popular, lucrative, replicable, stable format for journalism.

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The newsletter business is booming, relatively. But of course the revenues are unevenly distributed (at a guess, on a power law distribution) and there’s far more competition from “free” than there ever used to be. Newton is one of the few who is thriving, but his thinking about what else is needed (pivot to audio? Pivot to video?) is insightful.
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When “no” means “yes”: why AI chatbots can’t process Persian social etiquette • Ars Technica

Benj Edwards:

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If an Iranian taxi driver waves away your payment, saying, “Be my guest this time,” accepting their offer would be a cultural disaster. They expect you to insist on paying—probably three times—before they’ll take your money. This dance of refusal and counter-refusal, called taarof, governs countless daily interactions in Persian culture. And AI models are terrible at it.

New research released earlier this month titled “We Politely Insist: Your LLM Must Learn the Persian Art of Taarof” shows that mainstream AI language models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta fail to absorb these Persian social rituals, correctly navigating taarof situations only 34 to 42% of the time. Native Persian speakers, by contrast, get it right 82% of the time. This performance gap persists across large language models such as GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Haiku, Llama 3, DeepSeek V3, and Dorna, a Persian-tuned variant of Llama 3.

A study led by Nikta Gohari Sadr of Brock University, along with researchers from Emory University and other institutions, introduces “TAAROFBENCH,” the first benchmark for measuring how well AI systems reproduce this intricate cultural practice. The researchers’ findings show how recent AI models default to Western-style directness, completely missing the cultural cues that govern everyday interactions for millions of Persian speakers worldwide.

“Cultural missteps in high-consequence settings can derail negotiations, damage relationships, and reinforce stereotypes,” the researchers write. For AI systems increasingly used in global contexts, that cultural blindness could represent a limitation that few in the West realize exists.

“Taarof, a core element of Persian etiquette, is a system of ritual politeness where what is said often differs from what is meant,” the researchers write. “It takes the form of ritualized exchanges: offering repeatedly despite initial refusals, declining gifts while the giver insists, and deflecting compliments while the other party reaffirms them. This ‘polite verbal wrestling’ (Rafiee, 1991) involves a delicate dance of offer and refusal, insistence and resistance, which shapes everyday interactions in Iranian culture, creating implicit rules for how generosity, gratitude, and requests are expressed.”

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Seems like America and its tipping culture, which puzzles (and slightly annoys) Britons and Scandinavians alike.
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AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity • Harvard Business Review

Kate Niederhoffer, Gabriella Rosen Kellerman, Angela Lee, Alex Liebscher, Kristina Rapuano and Jeffrey T. Hancock:

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a recent report from the MIT Media Lab found that 95% of organizations see no measurable return on their investment in these technologies. So much activity, so much enthusiasm, so little return. Why?

In collaboration with Stanford Social Media Lab, our research team at BetterUp Labs has identified one possible reason: Employees are using AI tools to create low-effort, passable looking work that ends up creating more work for their coworkers. On social media, which is increasingly clogged with low-quality AI-generated posts, this content is often referred to as “AI slop.” In the context of work, we refer to this phenomenon as “workslop.” We define workslop as AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.

Here’s how this happens. As AI tools become more accessible, workers are increasingly able to quickly produce polished output: well-formatted slides, long, structured reports, seemingly articulate summaries of academic papers by non-experts, and usable code. But while some employees are using this ability to polish good work, others use it to create content that is actually unhelpful, incomplete, or missing crucial context about the project at hand. The insidious effect of workslop is that it shifts the burden of the work downstream, requiring the receiver to interpret, correct, or redo the work. In other words, it transfers the effort from creator to receiver.

If you have ever experienced this, you might recall the feeling of confusion after opening such a document, followed by frustration—Wait, what is this exactly?—before you begin to wonder if the sender simply used AI to generate large blocks of text instead of thinking it through. If this sounds familiar, you have been workslopped.

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Sure to be a new word in the dictionary in a year or two, and in widespread use well before that.
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That Secret Service SIM farm story is bogus • Cybersect

Rob Graham:

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On Tuesday, the Secret Service announced they foiled some big national security threat. Major news organizations (e.g. NYTimes) have repeated their claims without questioning them.

The story is bogus. What they discovered was just normal criminal enterprise, banks of thousands of cell “phones” (sic) used to send spam or forward international calls using local phone numbers. Technically, it may even be legitimate enterprise, being simply a gateway between a legitimate VoIP provider and the mobile phone network.

The backstory is a Secret Service investigation into threats sent to politicians via SMS messages. The miscreant used one of this spam farms to mask their origin. When the Secret Service traced back the messages, using radio “triangulation” (sic) to find the mobile phones, they found these SIM farms instead.

One of the reasons we know this story is bogus is because of the New York Times story which cites anonymous officials, “speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation”. That’s not a thing. That’s not a valid reason to grant anonymity under normal journalistic principles. It’s the “Washington Game” of “official leaks”, disseminating propaganda without being held accountable.

The Secret Service is lying to the press. They know it’s just a normal criminal SIM farm and are hyping it into some sort of national security or espionage threat. We know this because they are using the correct technical terms that demonstrate their understanding of typical SIM farm crimes. The claim that they will likely find other such SIM farms in other cities likewise shows they understand this is a normal criminal activity and not any special national security threat.

Their official statements are obvious distortions, like being within 35 miles of the UN building. Their unofficial statements are designed to exaggerate even more, like “never before seen such an extensive operation”. The Secret Service doesn’t normally investigate such crime, so of course they are unlikely to have seen such an extensive operation.

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Rob goes into some detail about how these systems work, why you shouldn’t trust the people quoted in the press, and how much it would really cost to set this up. Long story short, there’s zero national security threat.
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Revealed: the huge growth of Myanmar scam centres that may hold 100,000 trafficked people • The Guardian

Rebecca Ratcliffe:

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Five years ago, the land now home to KK Park – a vast, heavily guarded complex stretching for 210 hectares (520 acres) along the churning Moei River that forms Myanmar’s border with Thailand – was little more than empty fields.

Set against rugged mountains south of the town of Myawaddy, KK Park, with its on-site hospital, restaurants, bank and neat lines of villas with manicured lawns, looks more like the campus of a Silicon Valley tech company than what it really is: the frontline of a multibillion-dollar criminal fraud industry fuelled by human trafficking and brutal violence.

Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos have in recent years become havens for transnational crime syndicates running scam centres such as KK Park, which use enslaved workers to run complex online fraud and scamming schemes that generate huge profits.

There have been some attempts to crack down on the centres and rescue the workers, who can be subjected to torture and trapped inside. But drone images and new research shared exclusively with the Guardian reveal that the number of such centres operating along the Thai-Myanmar border has more than doubled since Myanmar’s military seized power in 2021, with construction continuing to this day.

Data from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (Aspi), a defence thinktank in Canberra, shows that the number of Myanmar scam centres on the Thai border has increased from 11 to 27, and they have expanded in size by an average of 5.5 hectares a month.

Drone images and photographs of KK Park and other Myanmar scam centres, Tai Chang and Shwe Kokko, taken by the Guardian in August show new features and active building work.

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The numbers are absolutely bonkers. A hundred thousand people working in slave conditions in complexes that are clearly visible in drone pictures? But the organised crime behind it pays tithes to Myanmar’s military coup leaders. It’s become an essential part of its economy.
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The enshittification of solar (and how to stop it) • Pluralistic 23 Sep 2025

Cory Doctorow:

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solar is cheap – over the past year, we’ve crossed a threshold, and solar is now substantially cheaper than coal, natural gas or oil. It’s getting cheaper still, with no bottom in sight. No wonder solar deployment is growing exponentially. Exponential growth is notoriously difficult to really get your head around, hence the ancient parable of the chessboard and the grains of rice.

…But the fossil fuel industry understands exponentials, and they’re freaking the fsck out.

…The fossil fuel industry is many things – ardent génocidaires bent on the extinction of the human race for profit – but what they are above everything else is rent-seekers.

The whole point of an extraction economy is to control a key factor of production so that other people need to come to you in order to do everything else. The ideal oil economy consists of a series of holes in the ground surrounded by people with guns, owned by a cartel that chokes off supply to maximize profits while leaving a highly visible share of the world’s population shivering in the dark as a warning to anyone complaining about their prices.

Fossil fuels are valuable because they are a chokepoint on the entire productive economy.

…I think there’s a collision looming between these rent-seeking missiles and the ever-cheaper, ever-better solar world. Eventually, these garbage people will stop trying to halt renewables, and they’ll start looking to own them.

…If I was a Big Oil company, I’d be investing heavily in the control systems for EVs, solar inverters, induction tops, heat pumps, smart thermostats, and anything else that depends on an internet-connected computer to operate. I’d flood every sales channel, offering zero-money-down installations with teaser zero rate loans and I’d do exclusivity deals with landlords and property developers. I’d get states and city councils to pass “safety” laws requiring grid coordination using a proprietary protocol and/or authentication token. I’d ship products that were compatible with open protocols, and later push mandatory updates to them that flip them to using proprietary controllers, like Chamberlain did with virtually every garage door opener in America.

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Doctorow’s writings always have an inevitability about them: oh, you think, that’s how it’s going to work out, isn’t it. I think it’s hard to point to him being dramatically wrong about anything: when DRM on music was all the rage, he predicted it would have to be abandoned. A couple of years later, lo and behold.. (Thanks wendyg for the link.)
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‘Existential crisis’: how Google’s shift to AI has upended the online news model • The Guardian

Mark Sweney:

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Google’s AI Overviews, which sit at the top of the results page and summarise responses and often negate the need to follow links to content, as well as its recently launched AI Mode tab that answers queries in a chatbot format, have prompted fears of a “Google zero” future where traffic referrals dry up.

“This is the single biggest change to search I have seen in decades,” says one senior editorial tech executive. “Google has always felt like it would always be there for publishers. Now the one constant in digital publishing is undergoing a transformation that may completely change the landscape.”

Last week, the owner of the Daily Mail revealed in its submission to the Competition and Markets Authority’s consultation on Google’s search services that AI Overviews have fuelled a drop in click-through traffic to its sites by as much as 89%.

DMG Media and other leading news organisations, including Guardian Media Group and the magazine trade body the Professional Publishers Association (PPA), have urged the competition watchdog to make Google more transparent and provide traffic statistics from AI Overview and AI Mode to publishers as part of its investigation into the tech firm’s search dominance.

Publishers – already under financial pressure from soaring costs, falling advertising revenues, the decline of print and the wider trend of readers turning away from news – argue that they are effectively being forced by Google to either accept deals, including on how content is used in AI Overview and AI Mode, or “drop out of all search results”, according to several sources.

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EU agency confirms ransomware attack behind airport disruptions • Reuters

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Airport disruptions that affected automated check-in systems in recent days were caused by a ransomware attack, the EU’s cybersecurity agency said on Monday, highlighting the growing risks of such attacks to critical infrastructure and industries.

Several of Europe’s biggest airports still faced disruptions on Monday after hackers knocked out automated check-in systems provided by Collins Aerospace, owned by RTX, affecting dozens of flights and thousands of passengers since Friday.

“Law enforcement is involved to investigate” malicious software that locks up data until the victim pays to have access restored, the ENISA agency said in a statement, without saying where the ransomware attack originated from.

Governments and companies have been the targets of cyberattacks in recent months, including luxury carmaker Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), which had to pause production as a result.

Rafe Pilling, director of threat intelligence at British cybersecurity firm Sophos, said there have been more ransomware attempts targeting higher-profile victims because of the attention they bring, but such attacks weren’t becoming more frequent.

“Disruptive attacks are becoming more visible in Europe, but visibility doesn’t necessarily equal frequency,” he told Reuters.

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Sure, but visible does mean, you know, visible. The JLR attack is potentially going to need some sort of bailout for supply chain companies (perhaps JLR could pay); the airport attack has inconvenienced people across the continent. The hackers may be commercial, but the effect is equivalent to terrorism.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Residents of San Francisco can now find out where parking tickets are being issued from a constantly updated map. CC-licensed photo by davitydave 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. Yellow lines? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Europe’s cookie law messed up the internet. Brussels wants to fix it • POLITICO

Ellen O’Regan:

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In a bid to slash red tape, the European Commission wants to eliminate one of its peskiest laws: a 2009 tech rule that plastered the online world with pop-ups requesting consent to cookies.

It’s the kind of simplification ordinary Europeans can get behind.

Cookies are a foundation of the internet that allow website holders to collect information about visitors — everything from whether they’ve logged in with a password to what items they’re looking to buy and therefore, might want to see advertising about.

European rulemakers in 2009 revised a law called the e-Privacy Directive to require websites to get consent from users before loading cookies on their devices, unless the cookies are “strictly necessary” to provide a service. Fast forward to 2025 and the internet is full of consent banners that users have long learned to click away without thinking twice.

“Too much consent basically kills consent. People are used to giving consent for everything, so they might stop reading things in as much detail, and if consent is the default for everything, it’s no longer perceived in the same way by users,” said Peter Craddock, data lawyer with Keller and Heckman.

Cookie technology is now a focal point of the EU executive’s plans to simplify technology regulation. Officials want to present an “omnibus” text in December, scrapping burdensome requirements on digital companies. On Monday, it held a meeting with the tech industry to discuss the handling of cookies and consent banners.

A note sent to industry and civil society attending a focus group on Sept. 15, seen by POLITICO, showed the Commission is pondering how to tweak the rules to include more exceptions or make sure users can set their preferences on cookies once (for example, in their browser settings) instead of every time they visit a website. 

EU countries have floated similar ideas. Denmark (currently presiding over meetings in the Council of the European Union) suggested in May to drop consent banners for cookies collecting data “for technically necessary functions” or “simple statistics.”

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The real problem is it just accustoms people to clicking “OK” all the time – making them vulnerable to phishing – or annoys them because they have to hunt around for the button to get rid of the dialog. I think we’d all celebrate the end of cookie banners.
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‘SIM farms’ are a spam plague. A giant one in New York threatened US infrastructure, Feds say • WIRED

Andy Greenberg:

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The recent discovery of a sprawling SIM farm operation in the New York City area has revealed how these facilities, typically used by cybercriminals to flood phones with spam calls and texts, have grown large enough that the US government is warning it could have been used not just for crime, but large-scale disruption of critical infrastructure.

On Tuesday morning, the US Secret Service revealed that it had found a collection of facilities across the “New York tristate area” holding more than 100,000 SIM cards housed in “SIM servers,” devices that allow them to be managed and operated simultaneously. Due to the sheer scale of the infrastructure of this single SIM farm—and the fact that it reportedly came onto the Secret Service’s radar after it was exploited in “swatting” attacks that targeted US members of Congress around Christmas of 2023—the agency has warned that the operation, which has been at least partially dismantled, posed a serious threat of a disruptive attack on cellular service.

…Despite speculation in some reporting about SIM farm operation that suggests it was created by a foreign state such as Russia or China and used for espionage, it’s far more likely that the operation’s central focus was scams and other profit-motivated forms of cybercrime, says Ben Coon, who leads intelligence at the cybersecurity firm Unit 221b and has carried out multiple investigations into SIM farms. “The disruption of cell services is possible, flooding the network to the degree that it couldn’t take any more traffic,” Coon says. “My gut is telling me there was some type of fraud involved here.”

In this case, according to a CNN report on the Secret Service’s investigation, the agency got onto the trail of the New York area SIM farm after it was used in a pair of swatting incidents around Christmas Day in 2023 that targeted congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and US senator Rick Scott. Those incidents appear to have been tied to a pair of Romanian men, Thomasz Szabo and Nemanja Radovanovic, who were working with the American serial swatter Alan Filion, also known as Torswats.

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The idea this could have “disrupted” the whole infrastructure is ridiculous: there are millions of phones in the are around New York. This was indeed a spam farm.
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Find My Parking Cops

Riley Walz:

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Where does this site get data from? In San Francisco, the SFMTA is the government authority tasked with giving out parking tickets. On average, they issue 1 parking ticket every 24 seconds. They employ about 300 officers who drive these tiny single-seat vehicles around, looking for violations:

I thought it would be interesting to visualize parking ticket data. I discovered that the city website people use to pay their tickets also includes a full copy of the citation. But you need to know the citation ID number, which presumably you only know if you have the ticket in your hand. I don’t have a car, but my roommate does and he got a ticket recently.

This is gold! I can see everything: the make, color, location, the reason for the ticket, license plate, and even the initials of the officer who wrote the ticket. I would really love to be able to see EVERY ticket. But I don’t know the IDs of every ticket. BUT WAIT. These numbers look like they go sort of in order. Current IDs are somewhere around 992,000,000. And tickets issued a couple months ago were around 988,000,000.

I was looking at ticket 984,946,605. When I type in 1 higher, 984,946,606, no ticket is found. That makes sense, there definitely aren’t close to a billion tickets issued. Well, how are these IDs generated? There must be some logic to it.

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He was able to figure out who, where and when new tickets are issued, and then put them all on a map. It’s like 2005 all over again.
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Ukraine is using AI-powered drone swarms against Russia • WSJ

Alistair MacDonald (Photographs by Justyna Mielnikiewicz):

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On a recent evening, a trio of Ukrainian drones flew under the cover of darkness to a Russian position and decided among themselves exactly when to strike.

The assault was an example of how Ukraine is using artificial intelligence to allow groups of drones to coordinate with each other to attack Russian positions, an innovative technology that heralds the future of battle. 

Military experts say the so-called swarm technology represents the next frontier for drone warfare because of its potential to allow tens or even thousands of drones—or swarms—to be deployed at once to overwhelm the defenses of a target, be that a city or an individual military asset.

Ukraine has conducted swarm attacks on the battlefield for much of the past year, according to a senior Ukrainian officer and the company that makes the software. The previously unreported attacks are the first known routine use of swarm technology in combat, analysts say, underscoring Ukraine’s position at the vanguard of drone warfare.

Swarming marries two rising forces in modern warfare: AI and drones. Companies and militaries around the world are racing to develop software that uses AI to link and manage groups of unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, leaving them to communicate and coordinate with each other after launch.

But the use of AI on the battlefield is also raising ethical concerns that machines could be left to decide the fate of combatants and civilians.

The drones deployed in the recent Ukrainian attack used technology developed by local company Swarmer. Its software allows groups of drones to decide which one strikes first and adapt if, for instance, one runs out of battery, said Chief Executive Serhii Kupriienko.

“You set the target and the drones do the rest,” Kupriienko said. “They work together, they adapt.”

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Scary. And makes the storyline in the third (new) Star Trek film look very prescient, though we didn’t need multiple centuries to achieve it.
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Apple announces project to protect California redwood forest • MacRumors

Hartley Charlton:

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Apple on Tuesday announced a new investment in the restoration and sustainable management of California’s Gualala River Forest, expanding its global Restore Fund initiative.

The project is conducted in partnership with The Conservation Fund and seeks to protect and manage coastal redwoods in Mendocino County while generating carbon credits that contribute to Apple’s climate goals.

The Restore Fund launched in 2021 with Goldman Sachs and Conservation International. It has since grown to include Climate Asset Management and direct investments from Apple in projects across the U.S. and Latin America. Apple suppliers TSMC and Murata also back the fund, which now supports two dozen conservation and regenerative agriculture initiatives spanning six continents.

The Gualala River Forest project is part of Apple’s push to reach carbon neutrality across its entire footprint by 2030.

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It’s not entirely altruistic: Apple gets carbon credits from the forest. There’s no mention of how much money Apple is putting into the project.
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In-depth Q&A: the IPCC’s sixth assessment report on climate science • Carbon Brief

Carbon Brief Staff:

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The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has published the first part of its sixth assessment report (AR6), which will form the cornerstone of climate science for the years ahead.

Summarising the “physical science basis” for climate change, the report pulls together the findings from more than 14,000 peer-reviewed studies. 

The authors conclude that it is “unequivocal” that humans have warmed the planet, causing “widespread and rapid” changes to Earth’s oceans, ice and land surface. They warn that the present state of many parts of the climate system is “unprecedented over many centuries to many thousands of years”.

Many of these changes – particularly to the oceans, ice sheets and global sea levels – are “irreversible”, the authors say. Abrupt changes and “tipping points” – such as rapid Antarctic ice sheet melt and forest dieback – “cannot be ruled out”.

One of the key developments since the IPCC’s last assessment report in 2013-14 is the strengthening of the links between human-caused warming and increasingly severe extreme weather, the authors say. This is now “an established fact”, they write.

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Not in doubt for decades. Increasingly obvious with every passing day.
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‘Tentacles squelching wetly’: the human subtitle writers under threat from AI • The Guardian

Lucy Carter:

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Teri Devine, associate director of inclusion at the Royal National Institute for Deaf People, says: “For people who are deaf or have hearing loss, subtitles are an essential service – allowing them to enjoy film and TV with loved ones and stay connected to popular culture.”

The deaf and hard-of-hearing community is not monolithic, which means subtitlers are juggling a variety of needs in SDH creation. Jones says: “Some people might say that having the name of a song subtitled is completely useless, because it tells them nothing. But others might have a memory of how the song went, and they’ll be able to connect to it through the song’s title. Some people think that emotional cues get in the way and tell them how to feel rather than being objective. Others want them.”

Subtitling involves much creative and emotionally driven decision-making, two things that AI does not currently have the capacity for. When Jones first watches a show, she writes down how the sounds make her feel, then works out how to transfer her reactions into words. Next, she determines which sounds need to be subtitled and which are excessive. “You can’t overwhelm the viewer,” she says. It is a delicate balance. “You don’t want to describe something that would be clear to the audience,” Cannella says, “and sometimes, what’s going on on the screen is much more important than the audio. The gentle music might not matter!”

AI is unable to decide which sounds are important. “Right now, it’s not even close,” Deryagin says. He also stresses the importance of the broader context of a film, rather than looking at isolated images or scenes. In Blow Out (1981), for example, a mysterious sound is heard. Later, that sound is heard again – and, for hearing viewers, reveals a major plot point. “SDH must instantly connect those two things, but also not say too much in the first instance, because viewers have to wonder what’s going on,” he says. “The same sound can mean a million different things. As humans, we interpret what it means and how it’s supposed to feel.”

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AI’s um, tentacles are reaching into so many places, and their effects so ambiguous: is this good or bad?
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Why science needs outsiders • Works in Progress Magazine

Alvin Djajadikerta and Laura Lungu:

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Many of the most important scientific advances came from unexpected people. A draper was the first to observe bacteria, a clockmaker solved the problem of longitude, a musician discovered Uranus, and a Hollywood actress helped invent secure wireless communication. Let’s call these people outsiders. [Let’s add Einstein, who was not at all known in the world of physics when he published his first major paper. – Overspill Ed.]

Most scientists are ‘insiders’ – experts and specialists who spend their careers inside one academic discipline, mastering its ideas and methods over time. Outsiders, on the other hand, may come from another discipline, work outside established institutions, or be early enough in their careers that they are not yet part of the senior establishment of a discipline.

Outsiders often succeed because scientific progress is in part about generating models about how the world works, and in part about testing, applying and refining these models. The former is how we got quantum theory and the latter is how we got lasers and the MRI machine.

Insiders are often better at fleshing out theories in detail. But they get attached to their theories and can be bad at seeing when those theories need to change. Outsiders have accumulated less expertise, but being less attached to specific theories, they are more willing to update them through ‘paradigm shifts’: creating new theories to predict facts and define research questions. A productive system needs both kinds of work.

Academia has a comparative advantage in ‘outsider’ work – unlike industry research, which has a tendency to be applied, narrow, and focused towards a practical goal, academics naturally have the freedom and job security to take the outside view. But academia can be hostile to outsiders and is becoming more hostile as it comes to represent a larger and larger fraction of science.

This narrowing of opportunities for outsiders has weakened science’s ability to generate paradigm shifts. Many of the biggest scientific leaps began when an outsider spotted a puzzle, imported a method, or sketched a new theory. To encourage more of these leaps today, we need to create space for outsiders by giving people more freedom to switch fields, work independently earlier in their careers, and explore unusual ideas.

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There’s a neat graph which shows that after a “superstar” scientist’s death, their collaborators publish less, while non-collaborators publish more. It’s a version of the old adage that science progresses one funeral at a time. The article also points to the replication crisis – which is a big, big problem for multiple branches of science.
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GuitarPie: guitar fretboard as audio/playback controller • Andreas Fender

Andreas Fender, Frank Heyen, Marius Labudda and Michael Sedlmair:

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Nowadays, electric guitars are often used together with digital interfaces. For instance, tablature applications can support guitar practice by rendering and playing back the tabs of individual instrument tracks of a song (guitar, drums, etc.). However, those interfaces are typically controlled via mouse and keyboard or via touch input. This means that controlling and configuring playback during practice can lead to high switching costs, as learners often need to switch between playing and interface control. In this paper, we explore the use of audio input from an unmodified electric guitar to enable interface control without letting go of the guitar.

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This is the overview of a paper for the ACM 2025; the video showing how it works is fun.

I get the impression this was a labour of love for the lead author, who has a wonderfully appropriate name. Though there’s no indication of where or when the software might be released. (It seems to be a web interface.)
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Are smartphones eroding the experience of watching football? • The Guardian

Kenny Pieper:

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In her recent book The Extinction of Experience, Christine Rosen argues that emerging technologies have personalised our life experiences to such an extent that we no longer need to wait, no longer need to experience anything we don’t like, no longer need to put up with anything which might not fit with our realities.

As football fans, we expect news immediately. We expect access to games without complication, with tickets on our phones. But Rosen argues that these modern conveniences carry a hidden cost: as we grow less used to waiting, our brains stop recognising why patience matters. And that makes us angry and impatient.

Like every new technology that has sped up our daily life – transport, telephones, domestic appliances – the internet, and especially the smartphone, have changed our expectation of time and the value we have placed on it. Not too far back in history, travelling to away games was a challenge, with patience required for the long cross-country journeys. But better roads, trains and buses now mean that legions of fans can travel from all over the country to Ibrox or Parkhead rather than watch their local teams. It’s so much easier and quicker now. And better.

Before this, when travel was a rarity and a chore, teams like East Fife and Cowdenbeath, Queen of the South and others had attendances of over 20,000. Travelling to other grounds was hard. So, you stayed and watched your local team. It wasn’t that you required patience. There was no alternative.

…We might see the questioning of a manager’s future on social media following a loss, sometimes even mid-game. “How can he survive this?” Our Tourette’s-like pronouncements neither reflect well on us or add much to the situation. That we call for anyone to lose their job is an anomaly for a sport proclaiming to be the working-class game.

Like most areas of our lives, we don’t like to wait to get what we want. Today, if you have the money, you can buy your way out of waiting in a queue. Why would football be any different? We have been conditioned to get what we want and get it now.

What troubles me about the changes in our experience of football is not the things that no longer exist. That would be a tedious and fruitless exercise. More importantly it’s about what we’ve lost in ourselves.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Tests show that ChatGPT is a lot worse than human journalists at summarising science papers. CC-licensed photo by Nic McPhee 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. In brief. 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 great falls of Boeing, Intel, and Apple • Hey

David Heinemeier Hansson:

»

It takes ten years for the culture of a great company to fall apart once the CEO seat is given to someone without an engineering or product background. That’s been the story of Boeing, Intel, and now Apple. Legendary American companies that all got lost when a bean counter, marketing man, or logistics hand took over.

Boeing’s troubles started when they were taken over by McDonnell Douglas in 1997, but really accelerated after 2005 when they installed their first CEO with no aerospace background. The result, after ten years of cost-cutting and outsourcing, was the 737 MAX MCAS tragedies, and an organization gutted of ambition and engineering pride.

Intel did the same thing, and almost at the same time. In 2005, they too installed their first CEO without an engineering background. Ten years later, they were stumbling with delayed nodes, stalled progress, and no answers on mobile. Now the entire business is teetering.

Finally, Apple. Steve Jobs handed the reins to Tim Cook in 2011, but such was the strength of the product pipeline and culture that Jobs left behind, that it initially looked like Cook could break the spell. Show that it was possible for a logistics man to steer one of the great ships of American ingenuity and tech supremacy. 

But now the ten-year curse is hitting Apple with an eerily familiar thud. They wasted a decade chasing a self-driving dream without direction, and ended up with the worst possible car interface to show for it. They completely missed the boat on AI, and embarrassed themselves with Genmoji and vaporware ads. And the Vision pro has been an expensive tech demo that nobody actually wanted to wear three months after they bought it. 

The profits still gush from glories past, and the tollbooth operation on the App Store, but the soul has left the machine. 

While these three stories are different, they’re drawn from the same archetype: Great companies need bold, hands-on leaders who live and breathe the stuff they make or they’ll eventually hollow out. 

«

Hansson’s implied solution seems to be that Apple should rehire Scott Forstall (fired by Cook in October 2012). I wonder if he might be a little out of the loop now, though.
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DOJ aims to break up Google’s ad business as antitrust case resumes • Ars Technica

Ryan Whitwam:

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Google’s had mixed luck with antitrust rulings lately, but it’s not a great sign that Google has so many legal woes that it can be hard to keep them all straight.

The case that just got underway is the remedy phase of the AdTech trial, in which the DOJ secured a ruling against Google several months ago. The remedy phase of the search trial wrapped up recently, which ended with Google holding on to Chrome but pledging an appeal to overturn the verdict. There’s also the Google Play antitrust case, which was brought by Epic Games. In this case, Google has already lost its appeal, putting some major app changes on the table as it plans yet another appeal.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) and Google are squaring off in Virginia federal court for the next two weeks or so, and there are no surprises in opening arguments. The government says the only way to deal with a monopolist like this is to break it up, but Google says it has already made numerous changes, and there’s no way to excise it from online advertising without breaking the market.

The AdTech remedy trial could mirror the search trial to a great degree. Indeed, the DOJ has pulled some language from that case, in which Judge Mehta opted not to force a divestment of Chrome. Mehta ruled that forcing a Chrome sale was a poor fit for the remedies as Chrome was not part of the illegal conduct.

However, government lawyers are hoping the AdTech case will turn out differently. The DOJ is asking the court to force Google to spin off Google Ad Manager (formerly Ad Exchange or AdX), the marketplace through which advertisers buy ads on Google’s platform. The government was able to convince the court that Google’s control of Ad Manager gave it an unfair advantage that boosted its own services, but is a breakup the proper remedy?

In its opening arguments in the AdTech case, the government claims Ad manager was intimately tied to the antitrust behavior, and its proposed remedies would pass muster under the standard Mehta employed. Government lawyers contend that remedies must be designed to restore competition, and Google’s iron grip on online display ads can only be solved in one way. “Nothing short of a structural divestment is sufficient to bring meaningful change,” said the DOJ’s Julia Tarver Wood.

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Google has offered its own remedies, which as Ars Technica notes “is just shy of nothing” – including a promise not to use its ability to peek at first and last prices in auctions. Which, side note, it stopped doing some years ago. But Google’s intent is clearly to let the remedies trial happen and then appeal it.
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Double harvest: vertical solar panels and crops thrive side by side • Techxplore

Gaby Clark:

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Imagine a field where solar panels and crops coexist—with no trade-off. It sounds like science fiction, but that’s precisely what researchers from Aarhus University have now documented in a full-scale agrivoltaic pilot project in the Danish countryside.

“Our measurements show that wheat and grass-clover mixtures grow just as well between vertical solar panels as in open fields. At the same time, the panels produce electricity in a daily pattern that better matches energy demand. It’s a win-win,” says Marta Victoria, lead author of the study and Associate Professor at the Department of Mechanical and Production Engineering, Aarhus University.

The study is published in the journal Energy Nexus.

At the test site in Foulum, researchers installed two types of bifacial solar panels: one traditional, south-facing tilted system, and one vertical, east-west-facing system. The vertical panels produce slightly less electricity per year—but with higher value, as generation peaks coincide with morning and late afternoon demand.

At the same time, crops growing among the vertical panels showed no decline in yield.

“Even with some shade, the yield per square meter is almost the same. The crops don’t seem to mind the presence of solar panels and they like the wind protection that they provide,” explains Professor Uffe Jørgensen from the Department of Agroecology, Aarhus University.

And because the panels only occupy about 10% of the field area, the combined system requires much less land than separate installations. “If we were to produce the same amount of electricity and food using separate land, we would need 18–26% more area,” the researchers calculate.

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Quite a clever method – and useful for more northerly latitudes.
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We’re suing ICE for its $2m spyware contract • 404 Media

Joseph Cox, Samantha Cole, Emanuel Maiberg and Jason Koebler:

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On Monday 404 Media filed a lawsuit against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) demanding the agency publish its $2m contract with Paragon, a company that makes powerful spyware that can remotely break into mobile phones without the target even clicking a link. The sale of the spyware to ICE has activists and lawmakers deeply concerned about what the agency, which continues to push the Trump administration’s mass deportation effort, may use the technology for. The contract and related documents 404 Media is suing for may provide more information on what ICE intends to do with the spyware.

“404 Media has asked ICE to disclose agency records relating to its contract with a company known for its powerful spyware tool whose potential use in the agency’s ongoing mass-deportation campaign has prompted lawmakers, civil liberties organizations, and immigration groups to express deep concerns over potential civil rights abuses,” the lawsuit says.

404 Media first filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with ICE for documents related to its Paragon purchase in September 2024. Under the law, agencies are required to provide a response within 20 days, or provide an explanation of why they need more time. ICE acknowledged receipt of the request in September 2024, but has not since replied to any follow up inquiries. 404 Media then filed the lawsuit.

…The contract itself is for “a fully configured proprietary solution including license, hardware, warranty, maintenance, and training,” according to a description included in a public US procurement database. The funding office for the purchase is listed as a division of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). It is not clear if the ICE deal is for a custom-made tool or for some version of Paragon’s flagship “Graphite” software.

Graphite is capable of letting police remotely break into messaging apps like WhatsApp, Signal, Facebook Messenger, and Gmail according to a 2021 report from Forbes. While other government spyware tries to take over an entire device allowing all sorts of other capabilities, Paragon sets itself apart by promising to access just the messaging applications, according to Forbes.

«

Brave, worthwhile journalism – though lawsuits aren’t cheap to do. They are accepting donations (donate@404media.co).
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Nvidia is partnering up with OpenAI to offer compute and cash • The Verge

Hayden Field:

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OpenAI is teaming up with Nvidia via a “strategic partnership” that will get the ChatGPT-maker more compute and more cash to develop new models on the road to superintelligence.

The partnership, announced Monday, will allow OpenAI to “build and deploy at least 10 gigawatts of AI datacenters with NVIDIA systems,” which translates to millions of GPUs that can help power OpenAI’s new models. One of the most important points here, besides more data centers and compute — which are always in high demand for companies like OpenAI — is that as part of the deal, NVIDIA “intends to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI progressively as each gigawatt is deployed,” per the release. The details will be finalized in the next few weeks, according to the companies.

Nvidia will now be a “preferred strategic compute and networking partner for [OpenAI’s] AI factory growth plans,” OpenAI said.

“Everything starts with compute,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement. “Compute infrastructure will be the basis for the economy of the future, and we will utilize what we’re building with NVIDIA to both create new AI breakthroughs and empower people and businesses with them at scale.” Last week, OpenAI said ChatGPT had reached 700 million weekly active users.

«

Those outside looked from OpenAI to Nvidia, and from Nvidia to OpenAI, and from OpenAI to Nvidia again, but already it was impossible to say which was which.
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Wegovy and Zepound can cut future health costs. The fight is over who pays now. – The Washington Post

Daniel Gilbert:

»

Millions of Americans who could benefit from GLP-1 weight-loss drugs are caught in the middle of a battle between drug companies and insurers over their costs, leaving them without coverage even as evidence mounts that the drugs could stave off expensive health complications in the future.

Insurance coverage for the drugs has barely budged in the last year. Eli Lilly said in August that around 50% of employers had chosen to cover its weight-loss drug, Zepbound, little changed from a year earlier. Novo Nordisk said last month that about 40 million people have access to anti-obesity drug Wegovy through commercial insurance, roughly the same as at the end of 2023.

Evidence from clinical trials shows that GLP-1 injections have benefits far beyond weight loss, helping prevent people from developing diabetes or suffering a heart attack years down the road — improving lives and ultimately blunting costs for health plans. But while the savings might only be realized over decades, experts say, the prescription costs must be paid starting now, threatening to overwhelm health plans’ financial reserves because of their immense popularity.

…If the GLP-1 drugs were treatments for a disease afflicting a small population, “we’d go, ‘this is fantastic’,” said David Rind, chief medical officer at the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, which studies the value of prescription drugs. “But if you want to give these drugs to 40% of the U.S. population, it doesn’t matter that these drugs are cost-effective,” he said, referring to the ability to pay for them. The scale of who could benefit from GLP-1s, he said, is “probably almost unique.”

About 1 in 8 adults has taken a GLP-1 drug, according to a 2024 KFF survey.

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Finally, something which might break America’s health system. Though probably not in a good way.
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2003: There will come soft sprinklers • The Inquirer

Wendy Grossman, writing in August 2003:

»

This week IBM flew a load of Asia-Pacific and one lone “European” journalist to Austin to see the company’s vision of a “Smart House” — Ray Bradbury’s vision made silicon and radio waves, fifty years on. I am huddled in my Polartec, inexplicably and inexorably drawn to the refrigerator, toying with it while the Father of the House, researcher Bill Bodin, is showing off how he can control the lighting and microwave oven with a $5 gadget, a Bluetooth gateway, broadband, and a voice recognition server in Florida: “Lights on”. The lights come up, unlike the Steve Martin movie L.A. Story, in which the voice command “Dial Mom” gets him the pizza parlor.

I am fighting to look up the day’s local music events (Austin! the music capital of the world!) on Yahoo! For Refrigerators when Bodin shifts to show us the refrigerator’s text recognition system. A fictitious family member scribbles a note on the screen’s notepad, the house server parses it to pick out the names of the people in it, and sends a text copy via SMS to those people’s mobile phones.

…Over in the living room, the main TV set calls up the “Home page”. Click on sprinkler. On the configuration page is a little box to check labeled “Observe municipal water restrictions”. No more reading the newspaper or listening to the radio during droughts trying to parse which instructions apply to your house. (That’s two companies you’re going to put out of business, Bodin, did you think of that?) The car downstairs is “self-healing”. It monitors its systems, sends out diagnostic data, and even makes its own servicing appointments with the company that provides 80% of US car servicing. When you gas up, the pump reminds you that you’ve left the car door open. Do you ever get the feeling that things are talking about you behind your back?

The coming RFID revolution will have tiny electronic tags embedded in more or less everything we buy. The food in your fridge will be data. Bodin is happy: the kitchen counter will guide you through a recipe appropriate to what you have on hand. I think companies will shift from selling you the Spam in your fridge to spamming your fridge.

«

And lo, as noted last week, it did come to pass. Nice to have a prediction come true, less nice to be the one like that. (Thanks Wendy G – obviously – for the link.)
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Science journalists find ChatGPT is bad at summarizing scientific papers • Ars Technica

Kyle Orland:

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Summarizing complex scientific findings for a non-expert audience is one of the most important things a science journalist does from day to day. Generating summaries of complex writing has also been frequently mentioned as one of the best use cases for large language models (despite some prominent counterexamples).

With all that in mind, the team at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) ran an informal year-long study to determine whether ChatGPT could produce the kind of “news brief” paper summaries that its “SciPak” team routinely writes for the journal Science and services like EurekAlert. These SciPak articles are designed to follow a specific and simplified format that conveys crucial information, such as the study’s premise, methods, and context, to other journalists who might want to write about it.

Now, in a blog post and white paper discussing their findings, the AAAS journalists have concluded that ChatGPT can “passably emulate the structure of a SciPak-style brief,” but with prose that “tended to sacrifice accuracy for simplicity” and which “required rigorous fact-checking by SciPak writers.”

“These technologies may have potential as helpful tools for science writers, but they are not ready for ‘prime time,’ at this point for the SciPak team,” AAAS writer Abigail Eisenstadt said.

…In total, 64 papers were summarized, and those summaries were evaluated both quantitatively and qualitatively by the same SciPak writers who had briefed those papers for the AAAS. The researchers note that this design “could not account for human biases,” which we’d argue might be significant among journalists evaluating a tool that was threatening to take over one of their core job functions.

Still, the quantitative survey results among those journalists were pretty one-sided. On the question of whether the ChatGPT summaries “could feasibly blend into the rest of your summary lineups, the average summary rated a score of just 2.26 on a scale of 1 (“no, not at all”) to 5 (“absolutely”).

«

So you’re saying they could, a bit? They might be better than some journalists, but won’t be better than many. Plus they won’t be able to ring up the scientists involved and ask them to explain their work. Because, shocking though it might sound, journalism – even science journalism summarising papers! – often, and should, involve talking to humans.
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Why Bangladesh’s unlikely satellite engineers are still waiting for liftoff – Rest of World

Jesmin Papri:

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The launch of Bangladesh’s first satellite sparked an explosion of national pride and a mini space race in the country’s colleges seven years ago. Now, the local engineers who control it are wondering what’s next.

The South Asian nation’s first satellite was built in France and launched on a SpaceX rocket in 2018. Bangladeshi engineers have since kept it orbiting.

The country invested close to $250 million in the effort. It was a high price for Bangladesh, where the average income is less than $3,000 per year. Still, it brought more reliable connectivity to companies, bureaucracies, and the military. It also expanded access to television channels for millions.

It put Bangladesh on the map as one of the few countries with satellites. Dhaka celebrated it as a beacon of a new space era. The elite engineers managing the satellite from the ground were hailed as heroes.

“We’ve hoisted the Bangladesh flag in space,” former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina had said when she announced the launch. The satellite was named after her father, a founder of the country. “The Bangabandhu Satellite-1 will certainly bring revolutionary changes in our broadcast and telecommunications sector.”

Seven years later, Hasina has been ousted from power, the satellite program is losing money, and plans for a successive satellite are uncertain.

Some of the two dozen engineers who keep the satellite and its ground communications stations running are worried.

“All of our expertise is tied to this one satellite,” a member of the team, who asked not to be named because he is not authorized to speak to the media, told Rest of World. “We’re stuck.”

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What if you launched a satellite and nothing came next?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Future recruits for MI6 are being sought on the dark web rather than through newspaper crosswords. CC-licensed photo by Mike Mozart on Flickr.

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

Here’s what it’s like to use Meta’s new Ray-Ban Display glasses • CNN Business

Clare Duffy:

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Have you ever wished you could quickly and quietly respond to a text while in a movie theatre without pulling out your phone. Or that you could see directions to the closest coffee shop without having to look down at your maps app? A new pair of Meta smart glasses with a tiny display inside the lens makes those things possible.

Meta unveiled the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses Wednesday at its annual Connect event at its headquarters in Menlo Park, California, along with several updated versions of its more basic, audio-only Ray-Ban and Oakley smart frames.

It’s all part of Meta’s push to develop devices for the artificial intelligence era. In demos of the new glasses at the event, I saw firsthand how they could make it possible to spend less time looking down at your phone — thanks to a tiny screen an inch from my eyeball.

“Glasses are the only form factor where you can let AI see what you see, hear what you hear, talk to you throughout the day… so it is no surprise that AI glasses are taking off,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the Connect event. He added that the company is seeing consumers adopt smart glasses at a rate similar to that of “some of the most popular consumer electronics of all time.”

But are consumers ready to shell out $799 for Meta’s smart glasses that represent an early step toward augmented reality? Here are my takeaways after trying them out.

…When you’re wearing the frames, the display looks like it’s projected several feet in front of you. You have to focus on it to really see what’s there — otherwise, it kind of floats in your peripheral vision when you’re looking at things in the real world. (You can also turn the display off, if you want to do focused work or have a conversation without the distraction of the screen.)

Only the wearer can see the display. Talking to someone who is wearing the Ray-Ban Displays you’d have no indication if they had messages popping up or Instagram Reels scrolling on the side, except that they might break direct eye contact with you to look at the display.

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I don’t know how I missed the fact that they were shown off on Wednesday, but anyway: here they are. The maps are only for walking. I think this is showing Apple where it should be heading; the question is whether it can jump in, as it did with the iPod against music players; or will miss the boat, as with search and LLMs.
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Oklahoma’s big “TV nudes” scandal was… a Jackie Chan movie on a Samsung streaming service • Ars Technica

Nate Anderson:

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Since July, the state of Oklahoma has been consumed by important investigative questions, including:

• Why did naked women appear on a state-owned TV set during an official Board of Education meeting? Was someone in the room inadvertently streaming pornography from a personal device to the TV? Will anyone be prosecuted for what happened?
• Were the board members who complained about the video directed by the governor to “lie about me,” as the state’s pugnacious, hard-right Superintendent of Education asked?
• Why was a “chiropractic table” involved in the scene? And why did the video feature, as one board member noted, a retro vibe and “a guy with a white hat, kind of a Gilligan-type hat”?

We now have answers to all of those questions.

After a lengthy investigation by the Oklahoma County Sheriff’s Office and the State Bureau of Investigation, and then a lengthy consideration of their reports, the Oklahoma County District Attorney this week announced that “there is insufficient evidence to file criminal charges.”

But the investigators confirmed that the complaint was true; a TV in the office did in fact show the images in question, including the “chiropractic table.” The naked women did not come from anyone’s secret stash of pornography, however; they came from Jackie Chan’s 1985 film The Protector.

After this was announced, a local Oklahoma news channel confirmed it by… sitting down and watching the movie.

…But why was The Protector showing on a TV in a state office building at all? Investigators came to find out that the Samsung smart TV in question—recently installed in the office—had been set up in such a way that it defaulted to showing Samsung TV Plus Channel 1204, the “Movie Hub Action.”

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Smart TVs considered harmful (to political careers). Didn’t know Jackie Chan films got that steamy-adjacent, though.
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British spies turn to dark web to recruit Russian agents, access secrets • Reuters

Michael Holden:

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British spies are to use the digital shadows of the dark web to recruit informants and allow them to receive secret information from agents in Russia and worldwide, Britain’s foreign ministry said on Thursday.

The Secret Intelligence Service, Britain’s foreign spy agency known as MI6, is to use a dark web portal called Silent Courier, which will allow people to securely pass on details about illicit activities anywhere in the world, or offer their own services.

“Today we’re asking those with sensitive information on global instability, international terrorism or hostile state intelligence activity to contact MI6 securely online,” MI6 chief Richard Moore will say when he formally announces the plans in a speech in Istanbul on Friday.

“Our virtual door is open to you,” Moore, who has previously called on Russians to spy, opens new tab for Britain, will say.

MI6, which was established in 1909 but not officially acknowledged until the 1990s, usually operates in the shadows, and only its head – known as “C” – is a publicly named member of the service.

In a promotional video to accompany the announcement, it said the bedrock of its operations had been face-to-face meetings, but it was now turning to the anonymity of the dark web, the murky part of the internet with hidden sites often used by the likes of drug dealers, terrorists and child sex abusers. Instructions on how to use the portal will be put on MI6’s YouTube channel, the foreign ministry said.

“As the world changes, and the threats we’re facing multiply, we must ensure the UK is always one step ahead of our adversaries,” foreign minister Yvette Copper said.

“Now we’re bolstering their efforts with cutting-edge tech so MI6 can recruit new spies for the UK – in Russia and around the world.”

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Just don’t forget to view the MI6 YouTube channel on a private browser, would-be Russian spies! (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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Trump’s H-1B visa fee isn’t just about immigration. It’s about fealty • The Verge

Terrence O’Brien:

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In short, it seems like the Secretary of Homeland Security can exempt any person, company, or even an entire industry from the travel restrictions and the $100,000 at their (or more likely, the president’s) discretion. It’s this carveout that betrays a major purpose of the proclamation.

The tech industry and Donald Trump were long at odds with each other, even if the president has largely brought it to heel in his second term. The White House has already made a big show of making tech CEOs trip over themselves to see who can fawn the hardest over Trump or wow him with the gaudiest gift. Now, it can wring further concessions and flattery out of the likes of Satya Nadella, lest he have to choose between dropping half-a-billion dollars on visa fees or replacing over 5,000 highly-skilled employees.

Companies like Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon aren’t the only major beneficiaries of the H-1B program. The financial industry, including companies like JP Morgan Chase and Deloitte, each have over 2,000 H-1B workers on their payroll according to federal data. It wouldn’t come as a surprise if the Secretary of Homeland Security decided to grant JP Morgan a waiver after it, say, suddenly granted a loan to the Trump Organization or made a substantial donation to his MAGA super PAC. He used similar tactics to squeeze pro-bono legal work out of law firms.

Colleges and universities also make extensive use of the H-1B program to attract top talent for professorships, especially for nursing and medical programs. Harvard, which the president has tussled with quite publicly in 2025 has roughly 280 H-1B workers on its books, and Columbia University has over 200 as well. Now the White House can threaten their foreign born professors and researchers as well as their funding.

This is the tariff mess all over again.

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There’s even confusion about whether the H1B fee (used by tech companies particularly to import skilled workers) applies retrospectively, or every time the person enters the country, or only to those being issued it the first time. In reality, as O’Brien says, it’s a method of either extracting money or fealty. It feels like everyone keeps saying the US is getting worse, but the US is getting worse.
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Meta exposé author faces bankruptcy after ban on criticising company • The Guardian

Michael Savage:

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A former Meta executive who wrote an explosive exposé making allegations about the social media company’s dealings with China and its treatment of teenagers is said to be “on the verge of bankruptcy” after publishing the book.

An MP has claimed in parliament that Mark Zuckerberg’s company was trying to “silence and punish” Sarah Wynn-Williams, the former director of global public policy at Meta’s precursor, Facebook, after her decision to speak out about her time at the company.

Louise Haigh, the former Labour transport secretary, said Wynn-Williams was facing a fine of $50,000 (£37,000) every time she breached an order secured by Meta preventing her from talking disparagingly about the company.

Wynn-Williams made a series of claims about the social media company’s behaviour and culture in her book Careless People, published this year. It also contained allegations of sexual harassment denied by the company. It states she was fired for “poor performance and toxic behaviour”.

However, the former diplomat was barred from publicising the memoir after Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, secured a ruling preventing her from doing so. She subsequently appeared before a US Senate judiciary subcommittee, in which she said Meta worked “hand in glove” with Beijing over censorship tools – something the company has denied.

Pan Macmillan, which published the memoir, said it had sold more than 150,000 copies across all formats. The book was also named in The Sunday Times‘ bestselling hardbacks of 2025 so far. The paperback edition is due to be published early next year.

New York magazine has previously reported that Wynn-Williams was paid an advance for the book of more than $500,000 (£370,000).

…It is understood that the $50,000 figure represents the damages Wynn-Williams has to pay for material breaches of the separation agreement she signed when she left Meta in 2017. Meta has emphasised that Wynn-Williams entered into the non-disparagement agreement voluntarily as part of her departure.

Meta said that to date, Wynn-Williams had not been forced to make any payments under the agreement.

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“To date”.
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From London to Java: how AI helped us locate a viral video’s true origin • Full Fact

Charlotte Green:

»

This week, we found a video posted on X of a crowd of women wearing niqabs (a veil worn by some Muslim women which covers their entire body and face, except their eyes) walking past a tall brick wall. The caption said this was filmed in London.

We suspected that this was not actually the case, although at first glance, there was not much in the footage to dispute the claim it was filmed in the UK.

All that could be seen in the background was the end of a wall, trees, and some blurry buildings in the distance.

Our first point of call when trying to geolocate images or footage is what we do to all visual media we fact check at Full Fact—a reverse image search using either the picture or key stills from a video. Finding the oldest result often reveals its original source and the context in which it was first shared.

But in this case, directly reverse image searching through Google took me to a TikTok video with a location marker for ‘Pondok Pesantren Al Fatah Temboro’, in Indonesia.

An internet search revealed that Al Fatah Temboro is an Islamic boarding school (such schools are known in Indonesia as a ‘pesantren’) located in Temboro on the island of Java—not London, as the posts were claiming. A crowd of this size wearing niqabs is not unusual in this context; Indonesia has a large Muslim population.

…We found a slightly different compilation of similar videos on Facebook, seemingly from the same area, also with women in Islamic dress, but with more geographical features visible, such as a sign and clearer views of buildings.

Using stills from this video as references, we asked the AI chatbot ChatGPT if it could provide coordinates to the location, using the possible location of the Al Fatah school in Indonesia.

An investigation by open source research experts at Bellingcat earlier this year found that AI tools can be a supportive tool for geolocating images, although this isn’t an open goal, as they can still hallucinate (when a model generates false or conflicting information, often presented confidently) and provide wrong answers. In this investigation, we double-checked everything it told us.

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And thus we see the positive uses of geolocation by chatbots.
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Africa’s only internet cable repair ship keeps the continent online • Rest of World

Jess Auerbach Jahajeeah and Stephanie Wangari:

»

As the Léon Thévenin eased into Cape Town port last month, Shuru Arendse was ready to rush home to his family. He had a month off and a laundry list of to-do’s: fix a leaky tap, patch a hole in the roof, take his two children to the trampoline park. 

But halfway through Arendse’s leave, there was a phone call: An undersea internet cable off Angola was malfunctioning. The Thévenin, the only cable repair ship permanently stationed in Africa, was heading off to fix it, and Arendse was needed. He is a cable jointer — one of a handful of people on the continent who know how to splice cables together.

His wife got angry. “Shuru, we didn’t even get a chance to do anything yet,” he recalled her saying.

The ship has taken Arendse all along the African coast and given him a sense of purpose. But it has been at the expense of his family, the 43-year-old said. Cable-ship crew like him can spend weeks to months at sea, interspersed with periods of shore leave. 

“I’m an absent parent,” he told Rest of World. “Because of that guilt, I spoil my children. What I do is, I buy, buy, buy.”

Working on an internet cable repair ship is grueling but rewarding — and never more important than in today’s hyperconnected world, a handful of the Thévenin’s crew members told Rest of World. This report is based on three years of observations and two weeks onboard the ship.

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This is a lovely essay with great photos.
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United Kingdom national charged in connection with multiple cyber attacks, including on critical infrastructure • US Department of Justice

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A complaint filed in the District of New Jersey was unsealed today charging Thalha Jubair, a United Kingdom national, with conspiracies to commit computer fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering, in relation to at least 120 computer network intrusions and extortion involving 47 US entities. The complaint alleges victims paid at least $115m in ransom payments.

“Jubair is alleged to have participated in a sweeping cyber extortion scheme carried out by a group known as Scattered Spider, which committed at least 120 attacks worldwide and resulted in over $115 million in ransom payments from victims,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Matthew R. Galeotti of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division.

…Portions of the ransom payments from at least five victims were sent to wallets on a server controlled by Jubair. In July 2024, while law enforcement was seizing that server — including successfully seizing cryptocurrency worth approximately $36m at the time of the seizure — Jubair transferred a portion of cryptocurrency that originated from one of the victims, worth approximately $8.4m at the time, to another wallet.

The charges arise out of an investigation into a cyber threat group that has been referred to as “Scattered Spider,” “Octo Tempest,” “UNC3944,” and/or “0ktapus.” Scattered Spider has targeted victims throughout the United States, including in New Jersey.

Jubair is charged with computer fraud conspiracy, two counts of computer fraud, wire fraud conspiracy, two counts of wire fraud, and money laundering conspiracy. If convicted, he faces a maximum penalty of 95 years in prison.

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Jubair has already been charged in the UK over ransomware attacks on TfL.
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A government of all the podcasters • The Atlantic

Helen Lewis:

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In the past decade, American public life has undergone two major transformations: The MAGA movement has swallowed the Republican Party whole. And influencers such as Kirk have elbowed aside traditional media outlets in the quest for attention. Even more important, the boundary between the movement and the influencers is nonexistent: Kirk’s campus-outreach group, Turning Point USA, was ostensibly a grassroots operation, but it was also a mouthpiece for Trumpism.

Here’s Kirk talking about his voter-outreach operation during last year’s presidential race: “We’re working directly in harmony with the Trump campaign,” he announced in an archive clip aired at the start of Vance’s tribute show. “It’s been vetted, it’s been cleared, it’s been blessed,” he said of his event, adding, “We’re going to try to win this thing.”

Vance and Kirk were personally close, and the vice president was clearly moved by the shock and injustice of his friend’s assassination. He traveled to Utah to bring Kirk’s coffin home to Arizona on Air Force Two. But the vice president’s decision to host The Charlie Kirk Show was also a political act. As the party’s most likely nominee for 2028, Vance must hope to inherit Kirk’s organizational infrastructure—and his audience.

Just last week, Kamala Harris was confessing that she felt sidelined as vice president, confined to unpopular policy areas by a president who didn’t want to be overshadowed. Vance has realized that podcaster in chief is a more powerful position than the one he currently holds. Imagine how strange a sitting vice president’s decision to host The Charlie Kirk Show would seem to a time traveler from 20 years ago. Had Rush Limbaugh died during George W. Bush’s presidency, would Dick Cheney have hosted the radio host’s call-in show?

To those inside the MAGA movement, Kirk was not merely a friend, a young father, and a passionate advocate for conservative-Christian values—he was just like them. From the president down, this is a group of people obsessed with “owning the narrative.” The “performative utterance”—a sentence that bends reality into the speaker’s preferred form with words alone—might be a concept championed by the postmodern left, but it has been embraced by Trump and the MAGA right, who believe that saying something is 90% of doing it.

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The idea that podcasts – those funny things that were enabled by the iPod being able to play MP3s – would become a hugely influential part of modern media would be impossible to comprehend even ten years ago.
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Two British teenagers have been charged with an August 2024 cyber attack on Transport for London that disrupted services for three months. CC-licensed photo by Photo Monkey on Flickr.

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

Nvidia and Intel’s $5bn deal is apparently about eating AMD’s lunch • The Verge

Sean Hollister:

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan held a joint webcast to explain just why the world’s most valuable company (Nvidia, at $4.28 trillion) is throwing a $5bn lifeline to a struggling competitor.

Nvidia quickly shut down several possible explanations. Huang claimed it had nothing to do with Trump, who famously shook down Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan for the United States’ own 10% stake of Intel, shortly after shaking down Nvidia for 15% of its revenue selling chips to China. (China may have just ended that.)

And, Huang insisted, it’s not a strategic shift away from the newer Arm architecture towards the venerable x86, which has driven PCs and servers for decades. “We’re fully committed to the Arm roadmap, we have lots and lots of customers for Arm,” he said, adding later that “this doesn’t affect any of that.” Nor is it a shift from TSMC to Intel as manufacturing partner for Nvidia’s chips — Huang quickly turned to effuse praise for TSMC as soon as a reporter asked — or about manufacturing in the US.

Instead, over the course of the 40-minute call, Nvidia and Intel basically said they were going to eat AMD’s lunch.

AMD is the one chipmaker that competes with both Intel and Nvidia, and it’s long been competitive in one hugely important way: while Intel has always specialized in CPUs, and Nvidia has always specialized in GPUs, AMD does both, and it’s become very good at putting both into the same chip.

…Of course, competition would be better if it were among three companies rather than two — like how Intel, Nvidia, and AMD were all competing in graphics (at least they were until this deal happened, and until the exec who insisted Intel would stay in graphics abruptly left the company).

Nvidia says the other reason to tie up with Intel is server CPUs, targeting another segment where AMD has been racking up wins: AMD was reportedly approaching 40% server processor market share this summer. (Its desktop CPU market share also hit a historic high in August, particularly among gamers.)

Huang said twice that Nvidia will become a “major customer” of Intel CPUs, buying them to put into its rackscale servers.

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Feels like Nvidia will just quietly absorb Intel at some point when it’s convenient, and Intel shareholders, and directors, will be made to feel happy about it.
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U.S. spending bill to grant $40 billion in fossil fuel subsidies • Wired via Yale E360

Molly Taft:

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The Trump administration has already added nearly $40bn in new federal subsidies for oil, gas, and coal in 2025, a report released Tuesday finds, sending an additional $4bn out the door each year for fossil fuels over the next decade. That new amount, created with the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act this summer, adds to $30.8bn a year in preexisting subsidies for the fossil fuel industry. The report finds that the amount of public money the U.S. will now spend on domestic fossil fuels stands at least $34.8bn a year.

The increase amounts to “the largest single-year increase in subsidies we’ve seen in many years — at least since 2017,” says Collin Rees, the U.S. program manager for Oil Change International, an anti-fossil fuels advocacy organization and author of the report.

The U.S. has been subsidizing fossil fuel production for more than a century. Many of the tax subsidies logged in the report — including a tax break passed in 1913 that allows companies to write off large amounts of expenses related to drilling new oil wells — have been on the books for decades.

Fossil fuel subsidies have proven notoriously difficult to undo, even with a determined administration. After campaigning on ending tax breaks for oil companies, President Joe Biden’s 2021 budget pledged to raise $35bn over 19 years by eliminating certain fossil fuel subsidies; one of his first executive orders tasked agencies with getting rid of those subsidies. (“I don’t think the federal government should give handouts to Big Oil,” he said at a press conference announcing the order.)

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They just can’t give it up. Endless complaints about subsidies for renewables, yet unable to see the huge amounts of money they put in to the worst of the status quo.
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Teenagers charged over Transport for London cyber attack • BBC News

Joe Tidy and Graham Fraser:

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Two teenagers have been charged in connection with a massive cyber attack which caused Transport for London (TfL) months of disruption.

The National Crime Agency (NCA) says it believes the hack – which began on 31 August last year – was carried out by members of the cyber-criminal group, Scattered Spider.

Thalha Jubair, 19, from east London, and Owen Flowers, 18, from Walsall in the West Midlands, were arrested at their home addresses on Tuesday by the NCA and City of London Police.

Both appeared at Westminster Magistrates Court on Thursday afternoon charged with conspiring together to commit unauthorised acts against TfL, under the Computer Misuse Act. They have been remanded in custody to appear at Southwark Crown Court at a later date.

TfL says the hack caused it £39m of damage and disruption. The hack disrupted TfL services for three months. Whilst trains, buses and other transport was unaffected, many TfL online services and connected information boards went offline as part of the attack.

TfL wrote to around 5,000 customers to say there may have been unauthorised access to their personal information such as bank account numbers and sort codes. Data including names, emails and home addresses were accessed.

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It’s always summer, and it’s always school-age (or just beyond) teenagers. The trial probably won’t happen until some time well into 2026, but no doubt the bail conditions will be no use of the internet.
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Satya Nadella is haunted at the prospect of Microsoft not surviving the AI era • The Verge

Tom Warren:

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“Some of the biggest businesses we’ve built might not be as relevant going forward,” admitted Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella during an employee-only town hall last week. Nadella was responding to a question about the perceived change in culture inside Microsoft, but his answer revealed a lot more about his own fears over Microsoft’s future in this AI era.

“Our industry is full of case studies of companies that were great once, that just disappeared. I’m haunted by one particular one called DEC,” said Nadella. Digital Equipment Corporation once ruled the world of minicomputers with its PDP series in the early 1970s, but it quickly faced competition from IBM and others that made it irrelevant. It also made some strategic errors by betting on its own Virtual Address eXtension (VAX) architecture instead of the emerging Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) architecture.

…Nadella’s cautionary tale came in response to a UK employee who said the company had recently “felt markedly different, colder, more rigid, and lacking in the empathy we have come to value.”

I’ve spoken to dozens of employees over the past few months, and they all told me that morale inside Microsoft is at an all-time low. If there’s fear at the top of Microsoft, then employees will undoubtedly feel that through the constant rounds of layoffs and change. It’s why I said in July that Microsoft risks creating a culture of fear.

While Nadella didn’t fully address the perceived cultural shift inside Microsoft, he did say the company’s leadership team “can do better and we will do better.” He didn’t explain how Microsoft would actually do better, though.

“Here we are in our 51st year as a company, and if you look at a set of metrics we are thriving. But at the same time, when I think about the degree of difficulty that is ahead, for us to navigate what is a changing industry, a changing tech sector, and changing economics, we have some very hard work ahead of us,” Nadella said.

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Nadella is absolutely right to be paranoid about this: 20-odd years ago Microsoft didn’t catch the mobile wave – it had the wrong business structure of charging for mobile phone licences – and thought that Windows would save it. Intel also thought that being big in the PC age would save it. Not so.
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Software update shoves ads onto Samsung’s pricey fridges • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

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Days after someone revealed the news on social media, Samsung confirmed today that it is showing advertisements on some US customers’ smart fridges. Samsung said the ads showing on some Family Hub-series fridges are part of a pilot program, but we suspect that they may become more permanent additions to Samsung fridges and/or other types of screen-equipped smart home appliances.

In a statement sent to Ars Technica, Samsung confirmed that it is “conducting a pilot program to offer promotions and curated advertisements on certain Samsung Family Hub refrigerator models in the US market.”

Samsung currently lists nine Family Hub refrigerators in the US, which have MSRPs ranging from $1,800 to $3,500. Family Hub fridges have 21.5- or 32-inch screens, which, until now, users have had autonomy over for displaying helpful or fun things, like photos and videos, memos, weather, timers, and a web browser. Some of those abilities require a Wi-Fi connection or a Samsung account.

Now, Samsung is commandeering some of the screens already set up in homes to display ads. As Samsung’s rep explained:

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As a part of this pilot program, Family Hub refrigerators in the US will receive an over-the-network (OTN) software update with Terms of Service (T&C) and Privacy Notice (PN). Advertising will appear on certain Family Hub refrigerator Cover Screens. The Cover Screen appears when a Family Hub screen is idle. Ad design format may change depending on Family Hub personalization options for the Cover Screen, and advertising will not appear when Cover Screen displays Art Mode or picture albums.

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If a user doesn’t like a particular ad, they can remove it so that they won’t see the ad “again during the campaign period,” Samsung’s rep noted.

…Based on Samsung’s statement, users can prevent ads from showing on their smart fridges by having the screen show photos or art. However, that limits the ways people can use their expensive fridge.

Another option is to disconnect the fridge from the Internet. Again, though, this would eliminate some core capabilities, like its meal planner, recipes, and shopping list features.

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Another option being to just sell the fridge and get a boring one that just keeps food cold.
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Johnson: China is straining U.S. relations with Nvidia chip ban • CNBC

Samantha Subin and Chris Eudaily:

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Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson called China an “adversary” of the U.S. on Wednesday after a report that the country has told tech companies to stop buying Nvidia
’s artificial intelligence chips.

The Cyberspace Administration of China ordered companies to halt purchases of Nvidia’s RTX Pro 6000D, a chip that was made for the country, the Financial Times reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

“They steal our intellectual property,” Johnson told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Wednesday. “They have no regard whatsoever for U.S. trademark law or any of the other provisions that make for fair trade agreements. It is not the fault of the United States that there are these strained relations.”

Johnson’s comments coincided with remarks from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at a news conference Wednesday in London.

“We can only be in service of a market if a country wants us to be,” he said in response to the ban on the company’s chips. “I’m disappointed with what I see, but they have larger agendas to work out between China and the United States.”

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The US clearly feels it’s unfair for China to not want its products, because that prevents it denying their sale to China. Or, in the Trump administration’s case, from shaking Nvidia down for cash on sales it makes to China.
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The UK’s £31bn tech deal with the US might sound great – but the government has to answer these questions • The Guardian

Matt Davies:

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In the US itself, datacentre developments have led to rising energy bills and disrupted water supplies while supporting remarkably few jobs. It is unsurprising, then, that existing plans for a new “hyperscale” datacentre in Buckinghamshire have encountered local opposition and legal pushback. To ensure its new “AI growth zones” are not beset by similar controversy, government will need to provide assurances that energy resources and other assets staked for private investment will produce returns for local economies – and to the public purse – rather than just powering profits abroad.

Then there is the opportunity cost associated with prioritising US tech over domestic alternatives. Liz Kendall, Kyle’s successor as technology secretary, has described the new partnership as a “vote of confidence in Britain’s booming AI sector”, although few of the companies involved are based – let alone owned – in Britain. Investment from US companies does not need to be zero-sum, but without deft management it risks crowding out any green shoots of growth in the UK’s own tech sector. Entrenching reliance on US technologies at the most lucrative parts of the AI value chain would leave UK firms to fight over the leftovers.

It’s true that the UK lacks the scale and resource advantages of the US, and therefore the ability to participate in cutting-edge AI development on its own: from this perspective, US investment is essential. Yet our international peers – from the EU’s “EuroStack” movement to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s Brazil – have charted alternative paths to bolster sovereign capabilities and create the conditions for domestic tech firms, small and medium-sized enterprises and truly public alternatives to flourish.

All of this is downstream of the most important issue: what is the government’s vision for AI beyond doing it bigger and faster?

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(Davies is economic and social policy lead at the Ada Lovelace Institute.) The question of quite who benefits, and where all these promised high-tech jobs will really be, still remains unanswered.
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ChatGPT mostly used for help with writing, research • The Register

Simon Sharwood:

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Users of individual accounts for OpenAI’s ChatGPT mostly use it for research and to help with writing, according to a new study into the kind of queries fed into the service.

The study, penned by researchers from OpenAI and the USA’s National Bureau of Labor Research, used a random selection of messages sent to ChatGPT by users signed up for Free, Plus, and Pro plans between May 2024 and June 2025. Those are plans OpenAI aims at individuals, not businesses. That may help to explain why the study found steady growth in work-related messages but even faster growth in messages of a personal nature, which have grown from 53% to more than 70% of all usage.

If you’ve used ChatGPT during the study period and fear the authors read your input, the paper explains that the researchers devised a method that meant no human read your work. They also excluded material from users who opted out or deleted their accounts, or were under 18 at the time they used the bot.

The study found most queries to ChatGPT concern either “Practical Guidance”, “Seeking Information”, or “Writing”.

An example the paper offers for “Seeking Information” is asking ChatGPT to find the qualifying times by age and gender for the Boston Marathon, while “Practical Guidance” involves asking ChatGPT to devise a fitness program that will help a user prepare to run in the event.

“Writing” covers requests for “automated production of emails, documents and other communications, but also editing, critiquing, summarizing, and translating text provided by the user.” The study finds writing accounts for 40% of ChatGPT usage at work, and that almost two thirds of such requests ask ChatGPT to edit, critique, or translate text rather than create it from scratch.

Most of you still appear to write your own material. As we always do here at The Register.

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Huawei pushes AI and cloud into emerging markets after US ban • Rest of World

Viola Zhou:

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Huawei’s low pricing and wide product offerings make it an attractive partner for smaller countries as they start to build their AI infrastructure, experts say. But by choosing Huawei, the nations risk political pressure from the U.S. government, which is increasingly wary of China’s ambition in the global AI race.

“We are seeing a bifurcation of the global AI stack,” Rebecca Arcesati, who researches Chinese technology at the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Germany, told Rest of World. “The U.S. government is saying: Let’s lock in market dominance for U.S. companies, including chip designers and hyperscalers, so that those markets are not won by Chinese companies.” 

Up for grabs is a global AI infrastructure market that is estimated to reach $200bn in annual spending in 2028. Chip manufacturers including Nvidia and AMD, as well as cloud providers such as Google, Amazon, and Chinese tech giants, are competing for a larger share of the market, which is growing quickly as countries race to harness AI for socioeconomic benefits.

The Biden administration’s efforts to block China’s access to American AI chips has only encouraged China to nurture its own chip industry. Now, the Trump administration is trying to prevent Chinese companies from gaining share in the global AI market. In July, the U.S. allowed Nvidia to resume selling its H20 chips in China, a move seen as reinforcing Nvidia’s dominance. Trump also unveiled an AI Action Plan, pledging to export America’s “full AI technology stack” — including software, hardware, models and applications — to keep countries from turning to Chinese alternatives.

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Huawei was forestalled from selling its phones – and to some extent networking equipment – around the world by US sanctions, but it’s really starting to rebuild its strength. What doesn’t kill it makes it stronger.
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‘I have to do it’: why one of the world’s most brilliant AI scientists left the US for China • The Guardian

Chang Che:

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Today, at 56, Song-Chun Zhu is one of the world’s leading authorities in artificial intelligence. In 1992, he left China for the US to pursue a PhD in computer science at Harvard. Later, at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), he led one of the most prolific AI research centres in the world, won numerous major awards, and attracted prestigious research grants from the Pentagon and the National Science Foundation. He was celebrated for his pioneering research into how machines can spot patterns in data, which helped lay the groundwork for modern AI systems such as ChatGPT and DeepSeek. He and his wife, and their two US-born daughters, lived in a hilltop home on Los Angeles’s Mulholland Drive. He thought he would never leave.

But in August 2020, after 28 years in the US, Zhu astonished his colleagues and friends by suddenly moving back to China, where he took up professorships at two top Beijing universities and a directorship in a state-sponsored AI institute. The Chinese media feted him as a patriot assisting the motherland in its race toward artificial intelligence. US lawmakers would later demand to know how funders such as UCLA and the Pentagon had ignored “concerning signs” of Zhu’s ties to a geopolitical rival. In 2023, Zhu became a member of China’s top political advisory body, where he proposed that China should treat AI with the same strategic urgency as a nuclear weapons programme.

Zhu’s journey from rural China to the helm of one of the US’s leading AI labs was both improbable and part of a much bigger story. For almost a century, the world’s brightest scientific minds were drawn to the US as the place where they could best advance their research. The work of these new arrivals had helped secure US dominance in technologies such as nuclear weapons, semiconductors and AI. Today, that era seems to be coming to a close.

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(Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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