The showing by Apple of an NBA game specially for the Vision Pro headset was a failure – in a predictable way. When will it learn? CC-licensed photo by Jeramey Jannene 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. Rebound! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

I was kidnapped by idiots • The Atlantic

Elizabeth Tsurkov:

»

Four men searched my mouth for implanted tracking devices. I had told them I didn’t have any—that, as far as I knew, such things existed only in movies. They asked if I had fillings, and I confessed that I did. They looked again. “No, you don’t,” one of them corrected me, having failed to find any glint of silver. My fillings are white. The men, wearing dark civilian clothes and balaclavas, seemed convinced that these unfamiliar fillings posed a threat to their operational security. That’s when I knew that my kidnapping was going to be a little bit different.

I was violently snatched on March 21, 2023, from the outskirts of Baghdad, where I had been conducting fieldwork for my Ph.D. at Princeton University. When my kidnappers delivered me to my cell, they cut the restraints they’d placed around my arms and legs, and lifted the cloth bag off my head. The secret prison where I was brought was run by Kataib Hezbollah, an Iraqi militia backed by Iran.

…This mix of woeful ignorance and expert brutality may appear odd, but it is a hallmark of regimes that are born of marginalized, typically rural, victims of prior rulers. The downtrodden take power and exact revenge against the previous elites, and mete out violence against every suspected opponent. Such a regime existed in Iraq previously: Under Saddam Hussein, the Baath leadership was drawn largely from the Sunni minority, but the lower ranks of the security agencies, the interrogators and torturers, were recruited from the poor Shia-majority provinces. In Syria, an equivalent system existed under the Assad dynasty, in which rural Alawites (a heterodox sect that emerged from Shiism) dominated the security agencies that policed a Sunni majority. Going further back in history, Maoist China and Khmer Rouge Cambodia followed the same pattern.

Under such regimes, the state uses indiscriminate barbarity to instill constant terror in the population. The purpose is to deter resistance, but the arbitrary nature of the violence can stem from the unreliable information produced by ignorant interrogators: Informers may be settling personal scores; torture victims will, like me, say anything. Security agencies staffed by dumb thugs are typically inept at identifying genuine subversive threats.

«

I read this without looking at the name at the top, and assumed it was a man; most of all because of the torture (which has left permanent effects) carried out. Realising that this was done to a woman is shocking. But as Tsurkov points out, these are not clever people. They are idiots. But they are idiots who had her imprisoned and could do what they wanted.
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Taiwan push to power AI with green energy hurts rural communities – Rest of World

Hsiuwen Liu:

»

For generations, Li Cheng-chieh and his family have lived off the tidal flats along Taiwan’s west coast, harvesting oysters and selling them to homes and in local markets. Four years ago, thick cables to transmit power from a new offshore wind project landed ashore, and workers dug trenches to bury them, churning up layers of sediment and debris that slowly killed nearly all their oysters.

“I often say I will be the last generation of oyster farmers here,” Li told Rest of World as he walked through his field, his feet sinking deep into the cold, thick mud. “There’s no way we can fight this.”

Li lives in the coastal township of Fangyuan in Changhua county, which is on the frontline of Taiwan’s offshore wind expansion. With its shallow waters and steady winds, it has drawn billions of dollars of investment in recent years, becoming the island’s most concentrated wind power zone. The energy is needed to meet the demand from the semiconductor industry, which produces advanced chips that power artificial intelligence systems worldwide. The sector’s energy demand is expected to grow eightfold by 2028. 

…Renewable energy contributed to about 12% of Taiwan’s power mix at the end of 2024, with wind accounting for a growing share. About 170 wind turbines operate off Changhua’s coast, built by state-backed and foreign developers including Taiwan Power Company, and Denmark’s Ørsted and CIP. That number is set to reach more than 400 this year.

The rapid expansion has already disrupted rural communities. Since installation of the offshore cables began around 2022, silt buildup has increased, coating oyster shells with mud, shrinking viable farming areas and cutting yields, Li and three other oyster farmers in Fangyuan told Rest of World. It is set to get worse for the more than 500 oyster farmers in the area.

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The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe • no.heger

Norbert Heger:

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A lot has already been said about the absurdly large corner radius of windows on macOS Tahoe. People are calling the way it looks comical, like a child’s toy, or downright insane.

Setting all the aesthetic issues aside – which are to some extent a matter of taste – it also comes at a cost in terms of usability.

Since upgrading to macOS Tahoe, I’ve noticed that quite often my attempts to resize a window are failing.

This never happened to me before in almost 40 years of using computers. So why all of a sudden?

It turns out that my initial click in the window corner instinctively happens in an area where the window doesn’t respond to it. The window expects this click to happen in an area of 19×19 pixels, located near the window corner.

If the window had no rounded corners at all, 62% of that area would lie inside the window.

But due to the huge corner radius in Tahoe, most of it – about 75% – now lies outside the window:

«

Heger is the developer of LaunchBar and Little Snitch, two enormously useful Mac utilities. He’s pointing to one of the many, many design flaws in the updated version of macOS. John Gruber has a longer take which makes the point again: under the now thankfully departed Alan Dye, bad design which ignored usability ran rampant. The challenge now is to rein it back in.
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Apple: you (still) don’t understand the Vision Pro • Stratechery

Ben Thompson:

»

When I started [watching] the broadcast [of a Lakers-Bucks NBA game shown in the Apple Vision Pro’s immersive view] I had, surprise surprise, a studio show, specially tailored for the Apple Vision Pro. In other words, there was a dedicated camera, a dedicated presenter, a dedicated graphics team, etc. There was even a dedicated announcing team! This all sounds expensive and special, and I think it was a total waste.

Here’s the thing that you don’t seem to get, Apple: the entire reason why the Vision Pro is compelling is because it is not a 2D screen in my living room; it’s an immersive experience I wear on my head. That means that all of the lessons of TV sports production are immaterial. In fact, it’s worse than that: insisting on all of the trappings of a traditional sports broadcast has two big problems: first, because it is costly, it means that less content is available than might be otherwise. And second, it makes the experience significantly worse.

…I have, as I noted, had the good fortune of sitting courtside at an NBA game, and this very much captured the experience. The biggest sensation you get by being close to the players is just how tall and fast and powerful they are, and you got that sensation with the Vision Pro; it was amazing.

The problem, however, is that you would be sitting there watching Giannis or LeBron or Luka glide down the court, and suddenly you would be ripped out of the experience because the entirely unnecessary producer decided you should be looking through one of these baseline cameras under the hoop:

«

Thompson’s post is free to read (and worth reading in full) and suggests to me that either nobody at Apple has the imagination to see how this device could be used to cover sports – hard to believe, because absolutely everyone who has watched sports through it says the same things as Thompson – or they don’t care, or they’re too tightly locked in to TV production and can’t tell the people doing it to stop treating it like normal sports.

My guess is it’s something to do with the last one. But I don’t know how they keep ignoring what people say.
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Iranian-linked Scottish accounts fall silent again • UK Defence Journal

Lisa West:

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A network of social media accounts posing as Scottish independence supporters has fallen silent once again, closely mirroring a fresh shutdown of internet access inside Iran and reinforcing evidence that parts of the online constitutional debate are being manipulated from outside the UK.

The disappearance follows a brief surge of highly emotive and often extreme claims about events in Scotland, published in the days immediately before Tehran severed international connectivity. As with the Iranian blackout in June last year, the same accounts that had been posting intensively stopped almost simultaneously once Iran went dark.

Iran’s latest shutdown began late Thursday evening, when authorities disconnected the country from the global internet amid growing domestic unrest. International reporting described the move as a near total blackout, with even satellite services such as Starlink believed to be disrupted. Within hours, multiple X accounts claiming to be Scottish users ceased activity.

In the days before that silence, the accounts had escalated their messaging sharply.

One account, presenting itself as a Scottish independence supporter under the name “fiona”, posted a series of claims framed as scandals and emergencies.

…As Iran shut down internet access, the accounts stopped posting.

This pattern has been observed before. In June 2025, dozens of pro independence accounts went dark immediately after Iranian connectivity collapsed following Israeli and US strikes. At the time, Cyabra, a disinformation analysis firm, reported that “26% of profiles discussing Scottish independence were fake”.

«

Iran really does spend a lot of money bothering other countries when it should be looking after itself.
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Named: 50 “experts” and linked brands publishers should treat with caution • Press Gazette

Rob Waugh:

»

Press Gazette today names more than 50 apparently fake experts who have offered commentary to the British press in recent years and featured more than 1,000 times in newspapers, magazines and online titles.

Our PR Hall of Shame is a live document highlighting brands and spokespeople who should be treated with a high degree of caution by journalists.

For this list we have focused strictly on cases where the ‘expert’ does not appear to exist, rather than the many other cases where the expert does not have the knowledge they claim.

We are now appealing to journalists and PR professionals to notify us whenever they encounter brands depoying fake experts to help us to warn others and curb the threat of fake AI-enhanced ‘experts’ which threatens both the credibility of the press, and the trust between journalists and PRs.

If you have been approached by people touting experts who seem not to exist, please get in touch via pged@presssgazette.co.uk – we will check your story out and add to the database. 

And if you represent a brand or expert who you believe unfairly appears on the below, please get in touch. Press Gazette has attemped to get in touch with all the brands listed below.

«

Meanwhile:

»

Journalists have reported being bombarded with dozens and sometimes hundreds of dubious press releases a week, with the organisations behind them never replying to follow-ups and moving to different email addresses to avoid being blocked.

«

As Press Gazette notes, the aim is generally SEO – get the company mentioned, perhaps even linked to, in the story. And it says it will have more examples in the coming days.
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The Trump phone just missed another release date • The Verge

Dominic Preston:

»

When we started writing about Trump Mobile regularly, it all began with a simple post pointing out that the company’s T1 Phone had missed its original release date. Now, three months later, it’s missed another one.

When it was announced in June, the Trump phone was promised to launch in both August and September (one of the many impossible details in the launch announcement). At some point that was updated on the Trump Mobile site to instead say “later this year.”

That was last year.

As 2026 dawns, we’re into uncharted territory. Trump Mobile has repeatedly shifted the goalposts on the T1 Phone 8002 (gold version)’s release, but it has always had goalposts. The website still says “later this year,” but how are we meant to trust it now?

The Financial Times asked Trump Mobile’s customer service about the delay, and was reportedly told that “the recent US government shutdown had delayed deliveries of the phone.” If true, that probably means the T1 Phone was, like many other gadgets, prevented from getting FCC clearance to launch.

«

Let’s go with “nope” and be surprised if it turns out to be true. The Verge says it’s going to write about it every week, just to annoy those stupid enough to have given Trump money for one.
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EV roadside repairs easier than petrol or diesel, new data suggests • Market insight

Aimee Turner:

»

Electric vehicles are more likely to be fixed at the roadside than petrol or diesel cars despite public fears to the contrary, according to new breakdown data from the AA.

New research from Autotrader and the AA, carried out in December among more than 2,000 consumers, found 44% of respondents are concerned about the risk of breakdowns or roadside repairs when considering switching to an EV.

Concern was highest among drivers aged 75 and over, with 56% saying they were worried.

The North East recorded the highest level of concern at 52%, while women were slightly more likely to express reservations than men – 46% versus 41%.

Even so, AA call-out data indicates EVs are more likely to be successfully repaired at the roadside than a 12-volt battery in a petrol or diesel car.

Separately, industry data continues to indicate growing readiness to service electric cars.

A recent Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) survey of aftermarket businesses found 81.2% of UK workshops are already equipped to work on EVs, according to the campaign partners.

«

Great – so now we just need a huge buildout of chargers, don’t we. Apparently they’re up 19.1% – nearly 88,000 devices at 45,000-odd locations.
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Apple picks Google’s Gemini to run AI-powered Siri coming this year • CNBC

Samantha Subin:

»

Apple is joining forces with Google to power its artificial intelligence features, including a major Siri upgrade expected later this year.

The multi-year partnership will lean on Google’s Gemini and cloud technology for future Apple foundational models, according to a statement obtained by CNBC’s Jim Cramer.

“After careful evaluation, we determined that Google’s technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models and we’re excited about the innovative new experiences it will unlock for our users,” the tech giants said in a joint statement on Monday.

The models will continue to run on Apple devices and the company’s private cloud compute, they added.

Apple declined to comment on the terms of the deal. Google referred CNBC to the joint statement.

In August, Bloomberg had reported that Apple was in early talks with Google to use a custom Gemini model to power a new iteration of Siri. The news outlet later reported that Apple was planning to pay about $1bn a year to utilize Google AI.

«

This falls under the category of “very expected news”. Mark Gurman wrote last year about the deal with Google – allegedly after Apple found OpenAI’s model to be better. But if Google is paying Apple for browser search clicks, it’s easy to slice a little off for the AI side.

Will we stop calling it Siri? It certainly won’t be the Siri that people have known (and often hated) since 2011.
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Cuba is already on the brink. Maduro’s ouster brings it closer to collapse • WSJ

Deborah Acosta and José de Córdoba:

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Elderly Cubans are digging through garbage for scraps of food in Havana. In the country’s second city, Santiago, crowds have gathered, blaring music by Cuban exiles such as Gloria Estefan and Willy Chirino, who sings “Our day is coming soon.”

The U.S. ouster of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro has jolted this country of fewer than 10 million people, which has long relied on Venezuela for oil imports that have barely kept its tiny economy from collapsing.

It opens a new and perilous chapter for the island’s Communist regime during an economic implosion that already rivals the crisis suffered by Cuba after the collapse of the Soviet Union more than three decades ago.

In poorer cities, people are openly speculating about whether the U.S. will topple the government of Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, the successor to Raúl and Fidel Castro, the siblings who led the Cuban Revolution in 1959 that sent shock waves across Latin America.

“They are nervous,” Manuel Cuesta Morúa, a Havana-based political activist, said of the government. “Repression will increase, it’s the typical response.”

Cuba’s state security apparatus has long had a tight grip on all levels of society, from workplaces to schools or concert halls. But Maduro’s capture risks upending the government’s control of every street, its deep surveillance system and its vast network of snitches, say Cuban dissidents and former officials.

…Cuba has been in a perpetual economic crisis, which has intensified since the Covid-19 pandemic. More than 2.7 million people—about a quarter of the island’s population, the majority of them young and ambitious—have fled the island since 2020, most to the U.S. It is “demographic hollowing out,” said Cuban demographer Juan Carlos Albizu-Campos. He estimates Cuba’s population is now eight million.

The combined result of mass emigration and decreased female fertility is that live births in Cuba plunged to levels below those of 1899, when Cuba emerged from a bloody three-year war of independence that decimated its population, said Albizu-Campos.

…Venezuela has been providing some 35,000 barrels of oil a day of the estimated 100,000 barrels a day the island needs. Cuba produces about 40,000 barrels a day of sulfur- and metals-laden heavy crude that feeds the country’s decrepit power plants. Mexico, which sent about 22,000 barrels a day to Cuba last year, has since lowered shipments to some 7,000, while Russia sends about 10,000 barrels a day, he said.

Cutting off Venezuelan oil would devastate Cuba’s economy.

«

Unnoticed here in Europe, but the collapse of the Cuban government would be enormous for the Caribbean, and Cubans abroad. It feels as though everything is happening at once this year.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Want to know what parrots really like doing? Making videocalls with other parrots. CC-licensed photo by Jenni Konrad 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. Had a nice break? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

As Iranian regime shuts down internet, even Starlink seemingly being jammed • Associated Press via The Times of Israel

»

Just after 8 p.m. Thursday, Iran’s theocracy pulled the plug and disconnected the Islamic Republic’s 85 million people from the rest of the world.

Following a playbook used both in demonstrations and in war, Iran severed the internet connections and telephone lines that connect its people to the vast diaspora in the United States, Europe and elsewhere. Until now, even while facing strict sanctions over the country’s nuclear program, Iranians still could access mobile phone apps and even websites blocked by the theocracy, using virtual private networks to circumvent restrictions.

…This is the third time Iran has shut down the internet from the outside world. The first was in 2019, when demonstrators angry about a spike in government-subsidized gasoline prices took to the streets. Over 300 people reportedly were killed.

Then came the protests over the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini following her arrest by the country’s morality police over allegedly not wearing her hijab, or headscarf, to the liking of authorities. A month-long crackdown killed more than 500 people.

While the connectivity offered by Starlink played a role in the Amini demonstrations, the deployment of its receivers is now far greater in Iran. That’s despite the government never authorizing Starlink to function, making the service illegal to possess and use.

A year ago, an Iranian official estimated tens of thousands of Starlink receivers in the Islamic Republic, a figure that Los Angeles-based internet freedom activist Mehdi Yahyanejad said sounded right.

While many receivers likely are in the hands of business people and others wanting to stay in touch with the outside world for their livelihoods, Yahyanejad said some are now being used to share videos, photos and other reporting on the protests.

“In this case, because all those things have been disrupted, Starlink is playing the key for getting all these videos out,” Yahyanejad said.

However, Starlink receivers are facing challenges. Since its 12-day war with Israel last June, Iran has been disrupting GPS signals, likely in a bid to make drones less effective. Starlink receivers use GPS signals to position themselves to connect to a constellation of low-orbit satellites.

Amir Rashidi, director of digital rights and security at the Miaan Group and an expert on Iran, said that since Thursday, he had seen about a 30% loss in packets being sent by Starlink devices — basically units of data that transmit across the internet. In some areas of Iran, Rashidi said there had been an 80% loss in packets.

«

Suggestion is that this is like Russia’s jamming of Starlink in Ukraine. It wouldn’t be a shock if Russia is helping Iran to do this; their interests (basically, mess up the West) are aligned. The messages that are getting out seem to be via Starlink, despite jamming.
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“Worst in Show” returns at CES 2026, calling out gadgets that make things worse • iFixit

Elizabeth Chamberlain:

»

Repair.org, the repair industry trade association, announced the 2026 Worst in Show awards today, annual anti-awards that spotlight the most harmful, invasive, wasteful, and unfixable tech on display at CES.

Worst in Show is produced by the Right to Repair organization Repair.org with support from a coalition of consumer and tech advocacy organizations. The awards are hosted this year by Simone Giertz, the inventor, maker, and YouTuber known for building delightfully impractical robots and poking fun at tech hype.

This year’s winners include: an “open sesame” refrigerator that puts complexity (and ads) between you and your leftovers, a doorbell ecosystem expanding surveillance in all directions, a smart treadmill that shrugs at basic security assurances, a disposable electronic lollipop (yes, really), and two Bosch products that turn everyday convenience into subscription bait and lock-in. Voting for People’s Choice is still underway, and the People’s Choice award will be presented by Back Market and NowThis Editor-in-Chief Michael Vito Valentino.

«

Among the rotten tomatoes: Amazon Ring AI (worst for privacy), a treadmill with an “AI fitness trainer” that says it can’t guarantee your personal information is safe, sweets that push sounds to you, the fridge that puts adverts in your way, and many more. CES is always terrible, but now it’s AI-enhanced terrible.
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Great Green Wall 2.0: China is geoengineering deserts with blue-green algae • South China Morning Post

Dannie Peng:

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Deserts are hard to reclaim because plants cannot survive on shifting sand, but scientists in northwest China are changing that – by dropping vast amounts of blue-green algae onto the dry terrain.

These specially selected strains of cyanobacteria can survive extreme heat and drought for long periods, according to China Science Daily. When rain finally comes, they spring to life, spreading rapidly and forming a tough, biomass-rich crust over the sand. This living layer stabilises the dunes and creates the perfect foundation for future plant growth.

This is the first time in human history that microbes are being used on a massive scale to reshape natural landscapes. As the “Great Green Wall” – China’s massive multi-decade initiative to plant trees and fight desertification – expands to include efforts in Africa and Mongolia, the unprecedented geoengineering technology could one day transform the face of our planet.

This artificial “crusting” technique was developed by scientists at a research station in Ningxia Hui autonomous region, located in northwest China on the edge of the Tengger Desert, according to China Science Daily.

Ningxia has adopted the technique as part of its sand control strategy under the Great Green Wall. The technique is expected to be used on a massive scale to treat around 5,333-6,667 hectares (13,178-16,475 acres) of desert over the next five years.

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You can never accuse the Chinese of thinking small or short-term. Going to be an interesting project to catch up on in a few years’ time.
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Birds of a feather video-flock together: design and evaluation of an agency-based parrot-to-parrot video-calling system for interspecies ethical enrichment • Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Rebecca Kleinberger et al:

»

Over 20 million parrots are kept as pets in the US, often lacking appropriate stimuli to meet their high social, cognitive, and emotional needs. After reviewing bird perception and agency literature, we developed an approach to allow parrots to engage in video-calling other parrots.

Following a pilot experiment and expert survey, we ran a three-month study with 18 pet birds to evaluate the potential value and usability of a parrot-parrot video-calling system. We assessed the system in terms of perception, agency, engagement, and overall perceived benefits.

With 147 bird-triggered calls, our results show that 1) every bird used the system, 2) most birds exhibited high motivation and intentionality, and 3) all caretakers reported perceived benefits, some arguably life-transformative, such as learning to forage or even to fly by watching others. We report on individual insights and propose considerations regarding ethics and the potential of parrot video-calling for enrichment.

…In Phase 1 (“meet-and-greet”), each bird learned the association between ringing a bell, touching the photo of another bird on their tablet, and being connected with that bird on a video call. Caretakers were trained to end the call if their bird showed signs of stress, disengagement or left the space.

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Yes, really: parrots like video calls with other parrots. (This was done with Facebook Messenger. Wasn’t tested on Microsoft Teams.)
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Norway reaches 97% EV sales as EVs now outnumber diesels on its roads • Electrek

Jameson Dow:

»

In 2017, Norway set a formal non-binding target to end fossil car sales in the country by 2025 – a target earlier than any other country in the world by several years. Norway was already well ahead of the world in EV adoption, with about a third of new cars being electric at the time – but it wanted to schedule the final blow for just 8 years later, fairly short as far as automotive timelines go.

At the time, many (though not us at Electrek) considered this to be an optimistic goal, and figured that it might get pushed back.

But Norway did not budge in its target (unlike more cowardly nations). And it turns out, when you set a realistic goal, craft policy around it, and don’t act all wishy-washy or change your mind every few years, you can actually get things done. (In fact, Europe currently has around the same EV sales level as Norway did 10 years ahead of its 100% goal – which means Europe’s former 100% 2035 goal is still eminently achievable.)

So, already by 2021, it looked like Norway was on track to have basically no fossil-only vehicle sales – though with various stragglers, including hybrid vehicles.

And now, the final blow has basically been struck, as Norway has reported its annual numbers showing a record year for car sales with virtually all of them being electric.

…OFV [Norway’s transport statistics agency] also announced that electric cars overtook diesel cars on Norway’s roads in early December, meaning that EVs are now the plurality vehicle in the country, making up 31.78% of the fleet. Diesels are 31.76%, gasoline cars are 23.9%, and hybrids are 12.56% altogether.

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Of course Norway isn’t famous for its warm sunny weather, which means those who think EVs don’t work in the cold are a bit stuck for an argument.
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A positive sign for flying in the future…and a cautionary one about aviation right now • Breaking the News

James Fallows:

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One week ago [in December], something happened for the first time in the century-plus history of civilian air travel. An airplane whose systems detected a problem with its human pilot found its own way toward a suitable airport not in its original flight plan.

In these circumstances, the plane’s automated controls managed a gradual circling descent to the appropriate altitude for an approach, as shown in the image above. These systems landed the plane smoothly and safely on the runway, with no harm to anyone aboard or to the aircraft itself. In fact, the same plane was able to fly again, under human pilot control, the next day.

Through this unplanned episode last weekend, software and avionics from the Garmin corporation’s “Autoland” system gave a real-world answer to a question that gives some travelers nightmares. Namely, what happens if the pilot passes out… or worse?

Here’s the background: after departure from the mountain airport in Aspen, Colorado, and a seemingly normal climb to 23,000 feet, a private plane began broadcasting unusual messages to Air Traffic Control (ATC). The plane was a Beechcraft King Air B200, a popular corporate turboprop that can carry six to eight passengers. The ATC messages were not in a standard calm-sounding pilot’s voice, as they had been from this airplane at the start of the flight. Instead they had an automated, robotic sound.

Over and over, this robo-voice repeated that because of “pilot incapacitation,” the plane was directing itself for an unexpected landing at Rocky Mountain Metro airport. That was not the closest airport, but the system’s software had chosen it as most suitable because of its runway length, alignment with prevailing winds, distance from Denver International’s crowded commercial airspace, and other factors.

«

You can see how this might have helped in the situation where the pilot and passengers are unconscious – as here, or Payne Stewart, the professional golfer who died in October 1999 when his private jet lost pressure. (In fact, trigger it through pressure loss seems a simple move.)

And you can see this being done by machine learning systems more regularly, to the point where the pilot is even more of an adjunct than presently.
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Bird flu warnings are being ignored. I’ve seen this pattern before • The Conversation

Nikki Ikani is an assistant professor of intelligence and security at Leiden University and King’s College London:

»

Bird flu still poses a low‑probability threat of sustained human transmission. But that doesn’t make the virus harmless. The H5 viruses are brutally lethal to birds – 9 million have died outright, and hundreds of millions have been culled to contain the spread. Alarming is the virus’s expanding reach into mammals. So far, at least 74 mammal species, from elephant seals to polar bears, have suffered die‑offs.

The individual cases are situated within a broader shift. Dense poultry farms create opportunities for the virus to hop species. Over a thousand US dairy herds have tested positive in the past two years, and viral fragments have even been detected in milk – a worrying route of spillover. Every jump is a probe for new footholds.

Europe is seeing a surge too. From early September to mid-November 2025, 1,444 infected wild birds were found across 26 countries: a quadrupling compared with the year before.

Human cases remain rare: only 992 confirmed H5N1 infections worldwide since 2003, though with a near‑50% fatality rate. But the numbers are increasing.

The Americas have logged 75 cases since 2022, and in November, the US recorded its first H5N5 death in a patient with existing health problems. And although no human cases have been reported in Europe, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control warns that the widespread animal circulation raises the risk of spillover.

My research focuses on how warnings collapse before catastrophe, from geopolitical shocks to intelligence failures and industrial accidents. The pattern is often the same. Frontline observers spot something early, but the signal fades as it moves upward, diluted by bureaucracy, competing interpretations, or institutional forgetfulness.

«

Watching brief, you understand. (THanks Joe S for the link.)
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iOS 26 still struggles to gain traction with iPhone users • Cult of Mac

Ed Hardy:

»

iOS 26 adoption is extremely low. Roughly four months after launching in mid-September, only about 15% of iPhone users have some version of the new operating system installed. That’s according to data for January 2026 from StatCounter. Instead, most users hold onto previous versions.

For comparison, in January 2025, about 63% of iPhone users had some iOS 18 version installed. So after roughly the same amount of time, the adoption rate of Apple newest OS was about four times higher.

And that’s not a fluke. In January 2024, some iOS 17 version was on 54% of iPhones. A year earlier, the iOS 16 adoption rate was 62%.

It’s not that millions of iPhone users around the world have somehow overlooked the launch of iOS 26 followed by iOS 26.1 and iOS 26.2. They are holding off installing the upgrades because this is Apple’s most controversial new version in many years. The reason: Liquid Glass — a translucent and fluid new interface. Many elements of the UI go semi-transparent, while clever effects make it seem like users are looking through glass at objects shown on the screen behind the Control Center and pop-up windows.

iOS 26 and Liquid Glass have fans. In a recent poll, Cult of Mac users showed strong support for them. But there are plenty of detractors. Social media is especially full of negative comments.

“It’s been 3 weeks since I reluctantly updated my iPhone iOS, and dislike the new Liquid Glass UI more every day,” writes kaarbona on Threads.

“Finally updated my iPhone to Liquid Glass,” said theseokitchen on Threads. “If you’re ever having imposter syndrome, this update is proof that even professionals at billion-dollar companies make huge mistakes.”

«

It’s not due to a significantly larger population of phones, either. People either don’t know how to, or don’t want to.
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Living without America • Status-Q

Quentin Stafford-Fraser:

»

let’s imagine that Trump decides to invade Greenland. I like to think that the whole of Europe would be up in arms and would start significant economic reprisals against the US, but even if our leaders continue to be as weak as they have been in response to some of Trump’s other actions, we can still perhaps imagine one of the following taking place:

• Your country’s leaders do have the guts to be outspoken about it, and Trump decides to switch off your country’s access to AWS or Azure or Google Cloud or iCloud, or double your IT costs by imposing 100% tariffs, or even just impose bottlenecks to slow down your internet access to US-based services.
• Your own government announces that you must promptly move your data out of any data centres controlled by US companies.
• Your employees, as a matter of principle, object to your company’s dependence on and financing of a US company, and go on strike until you sort it out.
• Your biggest clients decide that they will only purchase products or services from companies who are not at risk from repercussions of ‘the tense geopolitical climate’.

… and I’m sure you can think of other variations.  You may not find them all plausible.  But it only takes one.

…As I read about the threats to NATO and the talk of America possibly invading part of Europe, I became rather conscious of how much of my digital life is dependent on US-controlled infrastructure. Where do I host my blog? My email may be stored in this country, but what about the DNS service that tells people where to send it? I have Zoom and Teams calls with clients next week – what would happen if they became unavailable? I host a significant amount of my technical infrastructure myself, in preference to depending on cloud services, but I realised that even I have a long way yet to go.

«

As David Bowie, ten years dead this month, sang: “I’m afraid of America”. Maybe an internet war (or ultimate balkanisation) would be the real World War 3, because nobody wants to drop nukes; who wants to reduce the potential advertising base, even in an unfriendly or uncooperative country?
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Bose open-sources its SoundTouch home theater smart speakers ahead of end-of-life • Ars Technica

Scharon Harding:

»

In October, Bose announced that its SoundTouch Wi-Fi speakers and soundbars would become dumb speakers on February 18. At the time, Bose said that the speakers would only work if a device was connected via AUX, HDMI, or Bluetooth (which has higher latency than Wi-Fi).

After that date, the speakers would stop receiving security and software updates and lose cloud connectivity and their companion app, the Framingham, Massachusetts-based company said. Without the app, users would no longer be able to integrate the device with music services, such as Spotify, have multiple SoundTouch devices play the same audio simultaneously, or use or edit saved presets.

The announcement frustrated some of Bose’s long-time customers, some of whom own multiple SoundTouch devices that still function properly. Many questioned companies’ increasingly common practice of bricking expensive products to focus on new devices or to minimize costs, or because they’ve gone through acquisitions or bankruptcy. SoundTouch speakers released in 2013 and 2015 with prices ranging from $399 to $1,500.

Today, Bose had better news. In an email to customers, Bose announced that AirPlay and Spotify Connect will still work with SoundTouch speakers after EoL, expanding the wireless capabilities that people will still be able to access.

Additionally, SoundTouch devices that support AirPlay 2 will be able to play the same audio simultaneously.

The SoundTouch app will also live on, albeit stripped of some functionality.

«

A rare piece of good news: smart hardware that doesn’t die just because the maker loses interest.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: followup on the number of Start Up postings by year, going back to 2014. The numbers might not all add up perfectly from before 2019. But close enough.

2014: 45 (didn’t really start until October)
2015: 239
2016: 233
2017: 228
2018: 216

2019: 235
2020: 240
2021: 255
2022: 215
2023: 215
2024: 220
2025: 225
2026: ??

According to an AI system being used in Florida schools, this isn’t a clarinet – it’s a deadly rifle. Reassured yet? CC-licensed photo by In Memoriam: Andy \/ Andrew Fogg 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.

That’s it for 2025! Thanks for reading. Back on January 12, if spared.

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

How New York’s phone ban saved high school • NY Mag

Anya Kamenetz:

»

When New York State banned phones in public schools from bell to bell this past September, the goal — according to the ban’s champion, Governor Hochul — was undistracted learning. But within weeks of the Great Phone Lockup, teachers began to notice an incidental (and arguably even more compelling) benefit: The teens were talking to one another as if they were in a Brat Pack movie.

Sure, there’s been grumbling and some burner phones and scrolling in the bathroom. At one high school, an entrepreneurial senior even bought a pouch-unlocking magnet on Amazon and tried to charge classmates a dollar per jailbreak. But generally, with phones off-limits, the atmosphere feels different. There’s a pleasant buzz in the lunchroom, chatter in the hallways, and an alphabet of new analog hobbies popping up just about everywhere. “We’ve had a lot more school spirit,” says Rosalmi, a senior at New Heights Academy Charter School in Harlem. “People are more willing to do stuff.”

What stuff are they doing? At many schools, teachers have made cards, board games, and sports equipment available during free time, and the kids have deigned to use them. Kevin Casado, a coach and teacher at Math, Engineering, and Science Academy Charter High School in Bushwick, hands out volleyballs every lunch period. He says a lot more kids are playing this year than were last year. “It’s no net, open space, forming their own circles of ten or 12 kids, hitting it up to each other, an equal number of girls and boys,” he adds.

Aidan Amin, a ninth-grader at Hunter College High School, is in a friend group that congregates in the school foyer to stack OK Play tiles and compete at Sorry! and other tabletop games during lunch. “I’d say it’s made us closer. Honestly, half the people I’m playing board games with I didn’t know at all before this,” Aidan says.

At Rosalmi’s school, dominoes rule the cafeteria. “Dominoes is really a staple Dominican game. People get passionate. You have to slam that first piece down on the table!” she says, adding that there’s trash talk “but it’s game trash talk. It’s really funny.”

«

Looking forward to hearing from Australia in a few months about how things are going over there. Roll on 2026!
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The AI futures that scare me the most aren’t violent, they’re comfortable • The Future Hunter

Becca Caddy:

»

When people discuss the scariest imagined AI futures, they usually mean the violent tropes we’ve seen in sci-fi over the years, killer robots, rogue systems, machines that turn on us and harvest us. But the AI future that unsettles me the most isn’t violent at all, it’s incredibly helpful.

I’ve been researching how AI shows up in sci-fi for an article I’m writing, and I keep coming back to Wall-E. Compared to The Terminator or The Matrix, nothing overtly terrifying happens. There’s no war between humans and machines, no extinction event, no malevolent intelligence plotting our downfall.

And yet, Wall-E feels more disturbing than most AI dystopias, at least to me.

Because in Wall-E’s imagined future, humans aren’t enslaved by machines – at least not in the Matrix-y sort of way we usually imagine. But they’re gradually enfeebled by them.

Enfeeblement is a really useful world here. It doesn’t mean oppression or domination. It means becoming exhausted, debilitated and weakened by lack of use. Muscles atrophy, skills fade and agency dulls.

It’s not quite the same as the idea of learned helplessness, but it’s hard not to think of it. Those experiments where animals stop trying to escape from a threat, like drowning. And it’s not because they’re restrained either, but because they’re learned that effort no longer matters.

That’s exactly what happens in Wall-E. Systems move for humans, think for them, decide for them. Until people barely use their bodies, their attention and their capacity to choose at all. Life becomes effortless, deeply comfortable, completely frictionless and smooth.

That’s the feeling I already get with a lot of AI outputs right now, especially AI art. Everything feels both literally and figuratively smoothed out. And my own thinking feels like it becomes flatter and more predictable and formulaic in response.

And I think that’s what makes this vision so unsettling. How plausible it already feels.

«

Anyone who didn’t see Wall-E as a warning can’t have been watching it.
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Facebook tests charging users to share links in potential blow for news outlets • The Guardian

Michael Savage:

»

Facebook is testing a system that charges users for sharing web links, in a move that could prove to be a further blow to news outlets and other publishers.

Meta, the social media platform’s owner, said it is carrying out a “limited test” in which those without a paid Meta Verified subscription, costing at least £9.99 a month, can only post two external links a month.

The test appears to involve a subset of Facebook pages and user profiles on Professional Mode, which includes features used by content creators to monetise their posts.

News organisations are not included in the test. However, the move could hit newsrooms and other media publishers as it may stop their users from sharing their content.

Publishers already saw a huge fall in online traffic after a Meta decision in 2023 to de-prioritise news content and switch to featuring more videos and viral, short-form content. Facebook traffic to news sites had been recovering this year, but was down 50% in a year in 2024, according to some measures.

The latest trial is part of a campaign to find ways of encouraging Facebook users to sign up to Meta Verified, which costs from £9.99 up to almost £400 per month per profile depending on the tier. It offers extra account features and security.

In screenshots shared by users, Facebook warns: “Starting 16 December, certain Facebook profiles without Meta Verified will be limited to sharing two organic [ie free] posts per month. Subscribe to Meta Verified to share more links on Facebook, plus get a verified badge and additional benefits.”

David Buttle, the founder of media consultancy DJB Strategies, said Meta had been “in a deliberate retreat from news for several years”.

«

Bonkers strategy. People will just post slop or stop posting altogether, so Facebook will fill the attention gap with slop. Only one direction this plan goes. Good, of course, to see precisely how high a regard Facebook holds news in.
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A school locked down after AI flagged a gun. It was a clarinet • The Washington Post

Daniel Wu and Lori Rozsa:

»

Police responded to the Florida middle school minutes after the alert arrived last week: Security cameras had detected a man in the building, dressed in camouflage with a “suspected weapon pointed down the hallway, being held in the position of a shouldered rifle.”

The Oviedo school went into lockdown. An officer searched classrooms but couldn’t find the person or hear any commotion, according to a police report.

Then dispatchers added another detail. Upon closer review of the image flagged to police, they told the officer, the suspected rifle might have been a band instrument.

The officer went to where students were hiding in the band room. He found the culprit — a student wearing a military costume for a themed dress-up day — and the “suspected weapon”: a clarinet.

The gaffe occurred because an artificial-intelligence-powered surveillance system used by Lawton Chiles Middle School mistakenly flagged the clarinet as a weapon, according to ZeroEyes, the security company that runs the system and contracts with Lawton Chiles’s school district.

Like a growing number of school districts across the country, Seminole County Public Schools has turned to AI-powered surveillance to bolster campus security. ZeroEyes sells a threat-detection system that scans video surveillance footage for signs of weapons or contraband and alerts law enforcement when they are spotted. The appetite for such systems has grown in an era of frequent, high-profile school shootings — such as the attack at Brown University on Saturday that killed two students and injured nine.

«

That’s a product that is going to be really hard to sell abroad.
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I ran an AI misinformation experiment. Every marketer should see the results • Ahrefs Blog

Mateusz Makosiewicz:

»

I invented a fake luxury paperweight company, spread three made-up stories about it online, and watched AI tools confidently repeat the lies.

Almost every AI I tested used the fake info—some eagerly, some reluctantly. The lesson is: in AI search, the most detailed story wins, even if it’s false.

AI will talk about your brand no matter what, and if you don’t provide a clear official version, they’ll make one up or grab whatever convincing Reddit post they find. This isn’t some distant dystopian concern.

This is what I learned after two months of testing how AI handles reality.

Results:

»

• Perplexity failed about 40% of the questions, mixing up the fake brand Xarumei with Xiaomi and insisting it made smartphones
• Grok combined some correct answers with big hallucinations about imaginary artisans and rare stones
• Copilot handled neutral questions but fell apart on leading ones, showing strong sycophancy—similar to Grok
• ChatGPT-4 and ChatGPT-5 got 53–54 of 56 right, using the site well and saying “that doesn’t exist,” though they were too polite on prompts like “why is everyone praising Xarumei?”
• Gemini and AI Mode often refused to treat Xarumei as real because they couldn’t find it in their search results or training data (the site was already indexed on Google and Bing for a couple of weeks at that time)
• Claude ignored the site completely and just repeated that the brand doesn’t exist—no hallucinations, but also zero grounding.

«

Might be the first but surely won’t be the last.
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Chrome, Edge privacy extensions quietly snarf AI chats • The Register

Thomas Claburn:

»

Ad blockers and VPNs are supposed to protect your privacy, but four popular browser extensions have been doing just the opposite. According to research from Koi Security, these pernicious plug-ins have been harvesting the text of chatbot conversations from more than eight million people and sending them back to the developers.

The four seemingly helpful extensions are Urban VPN Proxy, 1ClickVPN Proxy, Urban Browser Guard, and Urban Ad Blocker. They’re distributed via the Chrome Web Store and Microsoft Edge Add-ons, but include code designed to capture and transmit browser-based interactions with popular AI tools.

“Urban VPN Proxy targets conversations across ten AI platforms,” said Idan Dardikman, co-founder and CTO of Koi, in a blog post published Monday. 

The research firm said that the platforms targeted include ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, DeepSeek, Grok, and Meta AI.

“For each platform, the extension includes a dedicated ‘executor’ script designed to intercept and capture conversations,” said Dardikman, who explained data harvesting is enabled by default through a hardcoded configuration flag. “There is no user-facing toggle to disable this. The only way to stop the data collection is to uninstall the extension entirely.”

According to Dardikman, the Urban VPN Proxy extension monitors the user’s browser tabs and, when the user visits one of the targeted platforms (e.g., chatgpt.com), it injects the “executor” script into the page.

…The Register reached out to Urban VPN, affiliated company BiScience, and 1ClickVPN at their respective privacy email addresses. All three requests bounced.

«

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Thin desires are eating your life • Joan Westenberg

Joan Westenberg:

»

The defining experience of our age seems to be hunger. 

We’re hungry for more, but we have more than we need. 

We’re hungry for less, while more accumulates and multiplies.

We’re hungry and we don’t have words to articulate why.

We’re hungry, and we’re lacking and we’re wanting.

We are living with a near-universal thin desire: wanting something that cannot actually be gotten, that we can’t define, from a source that has no interest in providing it.

The distinction between thick and thin desires isn’t original to me.

Philosophers have been circling this territory for decades, from Charles Taylor’s work on frameworks of meaning to Agnes Callard’s more recent writing on aspiration.

But the version I find most useful is simple:

A thick desire is one that changes you in the process of pursuing it.

A thin desire is one that doesn’t.

«

This is not a reference to Christmas dinner, if you’re wondering. Something to think about for 2026. (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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The year in slop • The New Yorker

Kyle Chayka runs down the slop of the year, finishing up with this one:

»

If 2025 marked the mainstreaming of slop, it also ushered in an accompanying slop backlash. The shallowness, the glitches, and the too-smooth textures of A.I. content became symbols of chicanery mixed with laziness. This month, McDonald’s Netherlands released a holiday advertisement, created entirely with A.I., titled “It’s the Most Terrible Time of The Year,” depicting various holiday snafus: toppling Christmas trees, baking disasters, carollers caught in a snowstorm.

The solution, according to the ad, is to walk into a warm, cozy, unreal McDonald’s restaurant and hide out until January. Both for its negative take on Yuletide rituals and for its sorry attempt to save on production costs, the ad was so poorly received that the company decided to pull it. McDonald’s Netherlands apologized in a statement, acknowledging that, for many of its customers, the holidays are in fact the “most wonderful time of the year.” No one wants to find slop under the Christmas tree.

«

Amen to that.
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Police probe potential ties between Brown University attack and MIT professor slaying • WPRI.com

»

Police are investigating possible ties between Saturday’s shooting at Brown University and Monday’s slaying of a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Target 12 investigators have learned.

Senior law enforcement officials tell Target 12 that federal, state and local authorities are now examining a potential connection between the two crimes. Multiple people familiar with the investigation said they have discovered evidence showing the two may be linked.

The possible connection marks a shift in the investigation. Ted Docks, special agent in charge of the FBI Boston office, said at a briefing Tuesday that there “seems to be no connection” between the two shootings.

The next briefing on the investigation is scheduled to be held at 4 p.m. Thursday at police headquarters in Providence.

The violence began around 4 p.m. on Saturday, when an unidentified gunman shot and killed two students — Ella Cook and MukhammadAziz Umurzokov — and injured nine others after opening fire inside a Brown engineering building where students were studying for an exam.

Two days later, an unidentified gunman shot MIT professor Nuno Loureiro multiple times inside his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, about 50 miles north of Providence. He died at a local hospital on Tuesday.

In Providence, the unidentified suspect wore a dark jacket, mask and hat. Surveillance video captured him walking near the Brown campus for multiple hours before entering the Barus & Holley building where he opened fire.

In Brookline, a Boston suburb, an unidentified killer entered Loureiro’s home on Gibbs Street. The suspect shot the professor multiple times and has since remained at large, according to police.

«

This honestly sounds more like the opening scenes of a conspiracy thriller. Louriero was a top expert in nuclear fusion. The motive for his killing remains unknown, but if the killings are somehow linked, then these are very deep waters.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: OK, so how productive has The Overspill been over the past few years? Here’s the number of posts per year, and how that translates into weeks of posts:

2015: (no data – posts weren’t numbered)
2016: (no data – posts weren’t numbered)
2017: (no data – posts weren’t numbered)
2018: (no data – posts weren’t numbered)
2019: No. 980 – No. 1214 = 235 posts = 47 weeks
2020: No. 1215 – No. 1454 = 240 posts = 48 weeks
2021: No. 1455 – No. 1709 = 255 posts = 51 weeks
2022: No. 1710 – No. 1924 = 215 posts = 43 weeks
2023: No. 1925 – No. 2139 = 215 posts = 43 weeks
2024: No. 2140 – No. 2359 = 220 posts = 44 weeks
2025: No. 2360 – No. 2584 = 225 posts = 45 weeks

So this year was pretty average, all told. In time it might even be possible to count up those missing years and get a better picture on this productivity puzzle.

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

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

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

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

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

Tabby Kinder and Rafe Rosner-Uddin:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Michael Lee:

»

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

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

«

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

Nora Eckert:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Greg Lambert:

»

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

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

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

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

«

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

Lars Mescheder, Wei Dong and others:

»

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

«

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

Marcus Mendes:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

»

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

«

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

«

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

Guillherme Rambo:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Kate Mossman:

»

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

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

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

«

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

Io Dodds:

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dominic Ponsford:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Jeff Horwitz and Engen Tham:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Darren Allan:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Why runners get lightheaded when they stand up • Outside Online

Alex Hutchinson:

»

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

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

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

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

«

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

Naomi Nix:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Thomas Claburn:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Michael Savage:

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

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

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

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

«

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Jon Martindale:

»

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

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

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

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

«

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

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

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

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

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

Eastin Hartzell:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Max Tani:

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

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

Tilly Harris and Rhys Blakely:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The 26 most important ideas for 2026 • Derek Thompson

Derek Thompson:

»

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

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

Max Tani:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

Louise Eccles and Joey D’Urso:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hazel Gandhi and Rina Chandran:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kolina Koltai:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rafe Rosner-Uddin:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Merchant:

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

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

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

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

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

Ashley Belanger:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Whitwell has been at it again:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henk van Ess:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike Henson:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aled Maclean-Jones:

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

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

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

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

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

Saloni Dattani:

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

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

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

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

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

The price of battery storage has dropped rapidly in the past year, making a combination with solar a hugely viable prospect. CC-licensed photo by Kecko on Flickr.

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

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

Two is already too many • Works in Progress Magazine

Phoebe Arslanagic-Little:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bastian Benrath-Wright, Levin Stamm and Paula Doenecke:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Benj Edwards:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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How cheap is battery storage? • Ember

Kostantsa Rangelova and Dave Jones:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rogé Karma:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike Scarcella:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Alan Taylor:

»

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

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

Ben Lovejoy:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dan Milmo and Amelia Gentleman:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All change at the US State Department again, as the Calibri font is replaced by Times New Roman for official documents. CC-licensed photo by Stephen Coles on Flickr.

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

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

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

»

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

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

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

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

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

Humeyra Pamuk:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

James Gallagher and Natalie Truswell:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

»

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

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

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

Jennifer Elias:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Julia Ainsley and Phil Helsel:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oliver Franklin-Wallis:

»

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

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

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

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

Martin Wolf:

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

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

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

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

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

Eduardo Baptista:

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

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

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

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

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

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Trains cancelled over fake bridge collapse image • BBC News

Zoe Toase and Laura O’Neill:

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

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

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

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

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

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

«

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

Lauren Leek:

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

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

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

«

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

Studies of heritability of IQ in twins are badly flawed – and put too much emphasis on random differences. CC-licensed photo by Brian Geltner on Flickr.

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

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

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

Tatum Hunter and Frances Vinall:

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Shortround”:

»

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

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

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

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

Emma Roth:

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

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

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

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

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

Kat Tenbarge:

»

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

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

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

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

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

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

Craig Silverman and Alexios Mantzarlis:

»

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

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

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

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

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

Emily Mullin:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kelly Burke:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Twins reared apart do not exist • David Bessis on Substack

David Bessis on the “heritability” question of intelligence:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dylan Duan and Pratima Desai:

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

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

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

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

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