European open source database service provider Aiven says it has saved 80 percent of its AI token costs internally by moving to open-weight models and is building a gateway to help devs swap models in and out as required.

The Finland-based company built its business on hosting and providing open-source databases as a service, and in the last couple of years has moved into machine learning.

Speaking to The Register, Ville Lehto, Aiven's VP of strategy, said that when dealing with open source AI infrastructure, it's not trivial to make something that can run across the different clouds. However, in giving its developers access to LLMs, the company wanted to manage its own token costs and control its "own destiny when it comes to AI usage."

After a wave of debate around so-called token-maxxing, developers have generally become more interested in reducing their costs by using a mix of models, including cheaper Chinese alternatives to the Western frontier models, and open-weight models which come at a lower cost.

Open-weight models have publicly released learned parameters, principally their weights and biases, and can be run locally or hosted at lower cost than the frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic. Examples include the Llama Family from Meta, Qwen Family from Alibaba Cloud, China's DeepSeek, Mistral AI's Medium 3.5 and Devstral and, Google's Gemma.

"When it comes to this token use, as we witnessed early on this year, there are a fraction of users that are absolutely heavy users, and when it comes to their spend, a lot of it could be saved by actually using open-weight models," Lehto said.

He said Aiven faced a choice to either have strict token budgets or try to find a more efficient way of using tokens.

Opting for the latter, it implemented an internal gateway to help developers work with open-weight models more easily, Lehto said.

"We wanted to make it as frictionless as possible. We can offer our employees different open-weight models, be it Western models or the ones from Asia, and take on the frontier models. We've been focusing on the heavy users, and with them we see roughly 80 percent decline in spend."

However, since the performance of open-weight and frontier models varies, it was also important to use other metrics, such as the cost per task, he said.

Aiven built its gateway around the open source framework called LiteLLM, which it hosted. It added new features such as budgeting, access management, and added other open-source components. It runs the models on rented GPUs and self-hosts the models as well.

Lehto said Aiven continued to use frontier models but only to help plan work. "When it comes to actually doing things, we use a lot of open-weight models. The majority of the work is actually done with open-weight, but the most critical bits of the work are planned with frontier models. That's how we see most success at the moment."

Aiven plans to offer the gateway as a service to customers to help them manage token costs by making it easier to swap open-weight models in and out of their workflows.

"Since our heritage is in open source, it's something that we feel very natural… offering as a service for people in the sense that it also fits the enterprise needs."

Aiven's customers include German ecommerce company Conrad, UK payment processing company Dojo, cyber security vendor Sophos, and communications firm Avaya. It is set to be just one of the vendors positioning themselves to try to help organizations reduce the costs when using AI. ®

The technical details of web server stacks are worth learning about. Preferably not from the TV news. Last week, knowing about PHP was a niche professional interest. This week, cab drivers have opinions.

PHP is not the story; it's the illustration. There are good reasons that it has this most unfortunate of spotlights. It's very old, and it shows. Growing from roots in the mid-1990s, it has never suffered from the straitjacket of a specification, and while it has seen a lot of refactoring and modernization, it retains design elements from more than 20 years ago.

PHP is emphatically not the only project where urgent demands for better performance, reliability, and features consume the resources needed to tidy up ugly internals that appear to work just fine. Until, one day, that technical debt falls due. There will be many more days like this.

PHP's significance is that it isn't unique. The details don't matter that much, although this annotated comic book version is both fun and granular if you want to learn about it. Now the dynamics of AI-assisted cybersecurity are becoming clearer, defenders can use the tools to uncover dangerous flaws, but motivated and inventive attackers can use them too. Neither side has a monopoly on resources or ingenuity. The pace and scale of the conflict are growing so quickly that we have to look at how actual global warfare works to reconfigure.

The most pertinent aspect of PHP2Shell is the people, not the machines. We know how the LLMs identified the mix of problems and their exploitation over a few days in August, and we know how quickly any public information about such things can be weaponized. It took days, not months, to find, and hours rather than days to exploit. The correct protocol is to disclose patches privately to major, trusted organizations, and then when core services are protected, go public and go hard.

But PHP2Shell didn't work out like that, because it was too tasty a treat to keep secret. The first attacks were seen days before the anonymous Hacker News post that announced the presence and severity of the problems. That post had the correct CVE numbers. It came from someone in the loop.

The devastating effect of leaked intelligence and the tensions between keeping valuable data secret and being able to use it were abundantly apparent in the Second World War. This led to the system of clearances, classification, and trained liaison officers by which the output of places like Bletchley Park could be filtered, guided, and protected on its way to the people who needed it, and kept away from the eyeballs of those who didn't. It wasn't perfect, and security researchers don't need to work in huts while pretending to be supply clerks, but the lessons learned have proved good to this day.

Disclosure needs to be a discipline, not a protocol. It's no good telling an entire IT sec team ahead of time - the absolute minimum number of people should hold the secret for as long as possible. They have to be trained and trusted by the patch developers and their own organizations. If your organization can't field someone with the highest of standards, you'll go down the pecking order of when you're entrusted with the secrets.

Patch liaison has to become a hirable position with its place in career structures and qualification requirements. It needs to be part of an industry-wide structure where information can flow both ways.The presence and quality of the person in that role will define where you sit in the classified sequence of deployment. It's a way of managing risk in a very messy, very fast moving, and very consequential part of the IT machine. We need focus, intelligence, and skills just as much as we expect them elsewhere.

For all this to work, someone has to manage the whole thing across the industry. Tools and processes need to be developed with the explicit purpose of deploying without disclosure. Hand in hand with that must be a formalized system of identifying, analyzing, and setting in place expeditious factions for the most dangerous infrastructure components, both by deployed base and design nature.

There will be a lot of arguments whether PHP can and should be Rusted, for example, but no forum where the debate can be run to a high standard and appropriate resources provided to make the decision happen quickly. Expensive by some standards, staggeringly cheap by others.

We've never had to think formally about this as a discipline to be built to professional standards, but we've never had such a combination of complex, powerful attack vectors in a hostile and richly equipped environment. It's serious. It's war. ®

Ahead of an appearance at Deep Time, the Irish experimentalist gives Alastair Shuttleworth 10 entry points into a back catalogue which includes an opera with Barbie dolls, 12 fictional aliases and a board game for them to play

Jennifer Walshe by Blackie Bouffant

Flann O'Brien, one of Jennifer Walshe's favourite Irish writers, once wrote of speaking Irish "when it was neither profitable nor popular." Walshe has been ahead of the curve herself in speaking about the rise of AI, which brought her career-spanning questions about art, truth and technology into focus. A prolific improviser, composer and researcher, she is one of the most celebrated figures working in contemporary classical music today - but the scope of her catalogue may baffle newcomers. She...

The post The Strange World Of… Jennifer Walshe appeared first on The Quietus.

Oliver Leith

Doom and the Dooms

Based on transcriptions direct from tapes found at a jumble sale, the latest from Oliver Leith may be the ideal entry point to the British composer's oeuvre

Steady pulse, parallel melodies. Strings undulating with opulent vibrato. Percussive garnish that, clinking and clattering, sounds just like a five-year-old breaking a piggy bank. Endless vacillation between hope and despair. Endless vacillation between stately ceremony and soft frolicking. All processed as if through a stereo-widening plug-in. This is Oliver Leith's signature style, and it's easy to start taking it for granted - mostly because of how effortless he makes it sound.

Commissioned by Wigmore Hall, where it received its debonair premiere in June 2024, Doom and the Dooms offers a half-hour...

The post Oliver Leith - Doom and the Dooms appeared first on The Quietus.

Chancellor is in favour of North Sea project, but energy secretary has said she is leaning towards rejecting it

A cabinet split has emerged over whether to approve drilling at the Rosebank oilfield, with the chancellor, John Healey, in favour of the controversial North Sea project.

The energy secretary, Miatta Fahnbulleh, is ultimately in charge of the decision, and the Guardian reported last week that she was leaning towards rejecting it after granting permission for the smaller Jackdaw gasfield.

Eldwick Crag, West Yorkshire: In the low light and the high wind, these corvids are preparing to roost for the night. And they seem to be enjoying themselves

Jackdaws like blustery weather the same way dolphins love choppy seas. There are faster flyers and more graceful flyers, but I can't think of a bird that just enjoys flying as much as a jackdaw does. They bob and bank and yaw and wheel. And right now it's roosting time in the copse above the quarry.

A jackdaw roost - or rather the prelude to the roost, the bedtime gathering, the swirl of small, clacking crows above and about the trees, like particles about to be drawn into a plughole - isn't a murmuration. It's neither as spectacular nor as enigmatic as the twilight displays of starlings; it's a flock, plain and simple (plain as the jackdaw's call of its own name, "jack"). But like everything jackdaws do, it's full of bustling, garrulous life.

No matter what the cause, airports are ruthless in issuing PCNs if a car stops in a red zone. But there is a get-out clause

I had to stop my car for 18 seconds in a red zone at Leeds Bradford airport to deal with a wasp. It was buzzing in front of my face and making safe-driving impossible.

The result was a £100 parking charge notice (PCN) sent to my wife (the registered keeper) by Vehicle Control Services (VCS).

IT people are asked to cram a lot into a working week, which is why The Register tries to ease readers into Monday with a new instalment of "Who, Me?" - our reader-contributed column that shares your stories of office mistakes and escapes.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Robert," who told us he worked for an outfit that scours newspapers and websites to find stories mentioning their clients.

"We found key words in articles that customers were paying us to monitor for. We would then cut out the articles and send them to the customer," Robert explained.

Sadly, business wasn't great. By the time Robert left it was almost bankrupt, and he gathers a fire sale ensued.

That strained financial situation meant the company was very keen on keeping legacy hardware alive.

"We had this one 2U pizza box server, and one of the three internal fans wore out," Robert explained. The server was so old no replacement was available.

"So, we took the lid off and put a bigger fan on top of the component that needed the airflow," Robert confessed. The server couldn't tell the difference and kept working.

Six months later, another internal fan broke.

"The logical thing to do was to put another ill-fitted fan in/on the server to ensure that the airflow was good," Robert said. Again, the server didn't have a problem with that.

The server, which was an integral part of the company's daily operations, was now operating with one original fan, no lid, and two non-standard fans precariously balanced over its exposed components.

This rig mostly worked.

"We had to be careful when working near the server, because too much shaking would cause the fans to fall over," Robert confessed.

When the third internal fan died, management finally decided to buy a new box.

Have you rigged risky hardware and gotten away with it? If so, share your story by clicking here to send email to Who, Me? We're pretty sure The Register's hardware will hold together long enough for us to tell your tale on some future Monday. ®

UK retail giant Tesco appears to have decided to replace VMware with Proxmox in its stores.

A job ad for a new Head of Software Engineering: Edge Platform role says the gig involves leading "two major, interconnected engineering priorities: modernising Tesco's edge virtualisation estate through the migration from VMware to Proxmox, and building a robust, scalable software-driven Edge Management Platform to provision, manage, monitor and maintain the retail edge estate throughout its lifecycle."

The stakes are high because the job ad says Tesco's Edge Platform "provides the underlying computing environment and software capabilities that enable applications to run across our stores."

"Store technology must remain dependable despite connectivity disruptions, constrained local resources and the complexity of managing software and infrastructure changes across thousands of locations. Failures or poorly executed changes can directly affect store operations, colleague productivity and customer experience."

Whoever scores the job will "own the engineering strategy and execution of Tesco's migration from VMware to Proxmox across the edge estate, delivering a secure, reliable and cost-effective alternative virtualisation platform" - and do it from Bengaluru, India.

One KPI is "Safe and predictable migration from VMware to Proxmox, successful validation of required store configurations, reduced legacy dependencies and effective operational handover."

In case you came in late, Proxmox is an open-source virtualization platform offered by an Austrian company. The product has gained considerable interest as a VMware alternative for edge, hyperconverged, and basic server virtualization scenarios. Proxmox is trying to grow into a full software-defined datacenter contender, too.

Independent analyst Michael Warrilow rates [PDF] Proxmox as technically strong but warns would-be users will need to find a support partner because until recently the company only offered support during business hours in Austria. That changed in September when Proxmox announced 24/7 support for enterprise customers.

In an email to The Register, Warrilow said "Modernisation is the key to reducing the dependence on VMware: reduce legacy whilst adding incremental value to a new initiative."

"Supermarkets and general merchandise are ripe for this, more so given they are a location where VMware had more competition and less differentiation."

"The Tesco job spec has many of the ingredients for a next-gen, cloud-inspired instore experience," he added. "API-driven, 'programmable' infrastructure that allows rapid deployment and a better experience for customers."

Tesco operates over 5,000 stores around the world. We've asked the retail giant to enumerate the extent of its planned Proxmox rollout.

Scuttlebutt suggests Tesco will adopt Microsoft's Hyper-V for its core workloads. VMware, however, has indicated to The Register it does not consider Tesco a lost cause.

Tesco is making the move after suing VMware over a contract dispute. The retailer claims VMware is bound to support software it acquired under a perpetual license, and to upgrade some software. The virtualization giant retorted that it no longer makes the software Tesco wants to upgrade to. Tesco says that during negotiations, VMware made an offer that represented a 175 percent price increase.

The matter remains before the courts, with hearings likely in 2027.

VMware's dispute with several Siemens companies also continues. In that case, VMware alleged Siemens abused copyright by using more software than its licenses permitted.

Siemens' parent company, Siemens AG, appears to have recently exited the case, an important change as it is Germany-based and the case is being heard in the USA. The remaining defendants last week filed a defence that denies VMware's claims.

In better news for VMware, it last week announced a ten-year agreement with Japanese carrier NTT Docomo and a continued engagement at transport giant FedEx. Both companies will use VMware's flagship Cloud Foundation private cloud bundle to power their operations. ®

Internet governance bodies are likely to accelerate work to prepare the domain name system (DNS) so it can remain secure once quantum computers can challenge conventional encryption.

John Crain, ICANN's chief technology officer, last week told The Register that he is aware of efforts within the organization, and at other internet governance bodies, to consider what happens once commercially available quantum computers become capable of easily deciphering encrypted information.

Those machines theoretically pose a risk to DNSSEC, the Domain Name System Security Extensions that adapt PKI to the job of verifying the veracity of DNS records.

The CTO said he's aware of predictions that such computers could come online "at the turn of the decade" and that he has therefore changed his view of when the DNS needs to be made quantum safe.

"If you asked me years ago, I would have said we probably need to be ready in ten years," Crain said. "Now, maybe it's less than that. I don't know if it's three years or five, but it's probably not ten".

One way to quantum-proof DNSSEC is to use larger keys that even a quantum computer will struggle to crack. Doing so, however, runs into message size limits in the DNS.

"If we go for larger key sizes, that means larger zones, larger packets, larger responses," Crain said. It can also mean traffic being carried by multiple TCP packets, instead of the single UDP messages DNS prefers.

Crain said ICANN, the IETF, and other internet governance bodies are aware of this challenge and have begun preliminary work to address it.

"Being prepared to go from UDP to TCP is going to take a few years," he told The Register at ICANN's annual meeting in Bali last week. "We're probably a few years away from being able to deploy in a predictable manner."

The internet community has, however, seen that the problem is becoming more acute.

"We're going to ramp up the speed of development," Crain said.

At ICANN's Bali conference, The Register also met Jia-Rong Low, in his capacity as chair of the Number Resource Organization, the peak body for the world's five regional internet registries (RIRs), AFRINIC, APNIC, ARIN, LACNIC, and RIPE NCC.

The topic of that conversation was Internet Coordination Policy 2 (ICP-2), the document that governs RIRs. In its current form, ICP-2 describes the formation of a new RIR but no other part of its operations.

After strife at AFRINIC raised the possibility of the African registry failing, the NRO decided to update ICP-2 so it covered the entire lifecycle of an RIR, from formation through to possible derecognition.

Work on ICP-2 has moved through several rounds of public consultation. It has reached the status of a recommended draft. Low told The Register work on the document has proven "very challenging" to develop entirely with remote work. Last week's ICANN meeting, he said, offered a venue for in-person collaboration that he hopes will result in work accelerating.

The revised document defines four stages in the life of an RIR: recognition, audit, emergency continuity operations, and derecognition. The last three are additions to ICP-2 and give ICANN a major role as an independent overseer of RIRs.

Low is hopeful a final document will be ready for review by the end of 2026, and ready for implementation not long afterwards.

Phisherfolk and other scammy scum strive to register authoritative-sounding domains as part of their efforts to trick victims.

ICANN defines some global top level domains (GTLDs) as "Category 1" strings, because they pertain to regulated sectors - such as .bank, .doctor, and .university - or are felt to need special safeguards because like .sucks they create the potential for bullying.

In a session at the ICANN meeting, Siôn Lloyd, ICANN's principal security, stability and resiliency scientist, said the organization has investigated whether certain top level domains attract more abuse.

He found that Category 1 GTLDs are more likely to be targeted by DNS abusers and therefore have a 45 percent higher chance of abuse than other domains. Happily, Category 1 domains are also less likely to have high abuse volumes.

ICANN is currently working on a policy (PDP1) that will require domain registrars to take extra action against owners of domains that facilitate abuse, and another (PDP2) that will regulate automated domain registration.

The Register heard plenty of chat at the meeting about ICANN's new round of applications for GTLDs, which seems to be progressing well. Across various panels and sessions, we also heard references to ICANN's past statements that new GTLD application rounds should be more frequent and take place at a predictable cadence, along with some suggestions that this round of applications is the template for future rounds. ®

September scaled up a row between the US data analytics company Palantir and the non-profit political campaign organisation the Good Law Project. Also involved is the Department of Health and Social Care, which took exception to the Good Law Project's publicity on copyright and trademark grounds.

The Good Law Project (GLP) had distributed anti-Palantir flyers inside an NHS hospital, and made a video of this feat. The fliers had mimicked NHS material, using the NHS logo, and that was the cause of trouble. The Department objected to this appropriation of the logo, and asked GLP to take the video down.

GLP, being lawyers, replied with a lengthy letter giving reasons in law why they weren't going to do this - notably that their fliers were an obvious parody and were certain not to be mistaken for anything produced by the NHS itself. The video's still up, at the time of writing. You can see it on GLP's Instagram page - despite the Department's similar request to Instagram's owner Meta.

Clive Lewis will be familiar to readers of East Anglia Bylines. He's a Labour MP for a constituency on our patch (Norwich South) and has contributed on a number of occasions. Speaking to journalist Carole Cadwalladr after addressing a fringe meeting at the Labour Party conference, he summarised a letter he'd received from Palantir's senior vice president UK, Tom Watson, in the words "We are watching you. We are monitoring you. And that's what we do. Your card is marked".

Those words are Clive Lewis's own. You don't find them in Watson's letter, which is reproduced in full in Cadwalladr's account. But it's hard not to sense them as the subtext to Watson's itemising of Lewis' words and actions. If you present somebody with a list of things they've done, this is usually the prelude to announcing what that person has earned by them.

Lewis felt such a threat was implicit in the level of detail Watson brought to the listing of Lewis's anti-Palantir statements. And Clara Maguire, director of the organisation behind the fringe meeting, told Cadwalladr she shared that perception. "Palantir is a data surveillance company. That's its business model. And yet here's their latest hire, a Labour lord, [inferring to] his former colleague that they are actively surveilling his activities." Watson is a former deputy leader of the Labour Party, and has taken long-term leave of absence from the House of Lords in order to serve his Palantir role.

Palantir has been a target of campaigning by organisations across the UK for some years. They are the British manifestation of an internationally coordinated movement. 'People vs Palantir' days of action culminated on 1 October in some 40 protests across England against Palantir's role in the NHS.

The demonstrations in Cambridge and Ely included activists from the groups Keep our NHS Public (KONP), Global Justice Now, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, and Ely for Peace and Freedom. Nationwide, the protests involved groups like Amnesty International, Medact, Just Treatment, and Pull the Plug. Overseas, Palantir in 2024 was the subject of a divestment decision by the Norwegian financial services company Storebrand.

What have so many organisations got against Palantir? Key British players in the day of action were the medical anti-war campaign Medact, the human rights group Amnesty International, and the anti-poverty movement Global Justice Now. A focus of their campaigns is Palantir's Federated Data Platform (FDP), which aims to sit across NHS bodies in order to connect and analyse data. A scan of the campaigners' publications distils their concerns about the firm into three broad areas:

All of the groups are troubled by Palantir's involvement with Israel's activities in occupied Gaza and with ICE, the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. The groups point to the many human rights violations that have been alleged in connection with those current flashpoints. Additionally, Medact notes Palantir's provision of software to America for questionable adventures in earlier decades:

"The US-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan had devastating public health consequences (a 2006 Lancet study estimated over 600,000 Iraqi deaths) and were widely condemned as illegal wars of aggression," writes Medact in its online briefing 'Concerns regarding Palantir technologies and NHS data systems. For Global Justice Now, some public utterances by Palantir co-founder and chairman Peter Thiel have been provoking. The movement's briefing 'Kick Palantir out: why the UK must end its relationship with the militarised tech firm notes: "Thiel once wrote that he considered votes for women detrimental to his vision of American capitalism, and that he no longer believed 'freedom and democracy are compatible'."

The briefing Concerns regarding Palantir technologies and NHS data systems lists a number of instances where Palantir's contracts are associated with intensive lobbying by the firm. The 'revolving door' between official appointments and senior posts in Palantir is discussed with many examples. There we meet that Tom Watson whose letter Clive Lewis quoted. Watson's name is buried in mid-paragraph, one example among many. Medact's conclusion of this discussion finds "significant concerns around [Palantir's] unfair procurement practices, revolving doors and intense lobbying, calling into question the FDP [Palantir's Federated Data Platform] tendering process and making the legitimacy of the contract vulnerable to public mistrust, as well as potentially open to legal challenge."

Medact's concerns here are with the interoperability of code between Palantir's FDP software and the firm's military applications. "Pseudonymisation of data within the FDP may be insufficient to protect patient data … Palantir's services to other governments, including its contract with ICE, have involved significant cross-department data compiling and analysis, which can be used to enable data-driven abuses of state power."

The day of action called for some specific goals. Different organisations had different focuses, but the overarching aim was to end Palantir's NHS involvement. The initial term of the contract with NHS England ends early in 2027, when NHS England must decide whether to extend it.

Readers wishing to know more about the campaign should follow the links under the names of the organisations above. East Anglia Bylines has approached Palantir for comments on the day of action and the concerns raised in this article. No response had been received at the time of publication.

DISCLOSURE. Aidan Baker is an active member of Global Justice Now.

Nominate an organisation that needs scrutiny

The post ⁠Palantir under fire: the battle over its NHS role first appeared on East Anglia Bylines.

By Mat Oxley:

Welcome to the race that wasn't. It seems Philip Island knew that MotoGP was done with her, and the lady decided that those bastards didn't deserve her anyway. Through the power of being wetter and windier than ever before, she forced the riders to return back to their trailers and sit this one out. And so it ends, "not with a bang but a wimper". 

Or did it? Because while the main event was canceled, the true spectacle took place on every day preceding the race. From amazing qualifying times to that memorable sprint on Saturday, when Marquez and Martin finally went head to head as leaders of the pack. This was it, folks: a last grand hurrah through all those memorable and always tricky corners, until only one contender was left standing. 

Unorthodox, unassuming, unpredictable and ultimately deceivingly decisive. Could there have been any greater goodbye to good ol' Philip Island? 

So here we are. Marquez is in the lead, Martin is injured and the title is now Marc's to lose. But the biggest battle perhaps remains to come, and this time it won't pit rider against rider. No, this time we might be headed for a showdown where all those maniacs and daredevils will have to team up against a greater threat: the unfair demands of show business. 

A few weeks ago, Marc Marquez didn't want to risk another injury in a promotional go kart event. Seems reasonable, but the Powers That Be disagreed. Now there is a new rule on the books, prescribing penalties to any rider not showing up to a booked promotional event. And those penalties aren't just monetary, but go all the way up to track penalties.

Race results determined by a rider not showing up to sign autographs? Absolute bloody madness! But don't take it from me…take it from your ever-charming hosts Mat and Peter. 

So, lots of things to discuss and some very fun surprises to boot! Fancy a listen? 

• LISTEN TO THE PODCAST HERE!

—

Want more? Visit our website or support us on Patreon. With big thanks as always to Brad Baloo from The Next Men and Gentleman's Dub Club for writing our theme song. Check out The Nextmen for more great music! 

Oh, and a quick word in regards to sponsors: 
If you're interested in connecting with a really unique MotoGP audience — we're working with Smash Brand Group out of Sydney to manage partnerships. Curious? Just head to smashbrandgroup.com.au and get in touch!

The post Oxley Bom MotoGP Podcast: Philip Island 2026 appeared first on Roadracing World Magazine | Motorcycle Riding, Racing & Tech News.

China has proposed to restrict export of some AI technologies but quickly moved to allow some of its champion companies to continue shipping their wares abroad.

Beijing's Ministry of Commerce announced the restrictions in mid-October by revising its Catalogue of Technologies Prohibited and Restricted from Export in China. The restrictions mean that Chinese companies must apply for a license to export their tech.

New entrants on the list included "23 technologies related to large-scale models, intelligent agents, computing clusters, and information processing." Tech issued under open source licenses is exempt from the restrictions.

Last Friday, Chinese state media reported that two companies - named elsewhere as DeepSeek and MiniMax - received authorization to continue exports.

Both companies are credible challengers to American AI vendors, so letting them sell their wares abroad meets China's goals of creating export industries and enhancing its tech sector.

The expanded Catalogue also gives Beijing the ability to stop exports of any AI it feels represents important sovereign capacity, such as tools that are potent bug-finders or have military uses.

China is not alone in restricting exports of AI technology: the USA has imposed on-again, off-again, bans on sales of advanced GPUs to China.

If the AI datacenter building bubble bursts, two recent Australian incidents may prove instructive.

The first took place on October 9, when a company called Firmus called off its initial public offering.

Firmus already operates four datacenters, two in Australia and a pair in Singapore. It plans several more, plus expansions of its existing bit barns. Meta has committed to spend over $700 million with the company. Private investors had already ploughed over $2 billion into the company.

The float would have been Australia's largest for 20 years and aimed to raise around $5 billion, giving Firmus a valuation over $40 billion.

In the days before the float, investor sentiment suddenly soured. Would-be buyers reportedly asked Firmus to lower its share price and therefore valuation by perhaps a quarter, as they feared the company's prospectus made very optimistic revenue predictions.

Not helping matters was that one of Firmus' founders did time after being convicted of insider trading.

The company eventually cancelled its IPO.

The other incident took place on Wednesday, when established datacenter operator NEXTDC announced [PDF] reduced revenue forecasts because its chosen power supplier suspended work "because of community and stakeholder opposition."

That opposition related to installation of poles and wires needed to bring juice to an existing datacenter NEXTDC intends to expand. Protestors have blocked access to the site, and the local council has decided not to allow the power company to use relevant roads while community consultation continues.

NEXTDC, which readers may recall designed one of its datacenters to resemble sets from Sean Connery flick The Hunt For Red October, slashed its revenue forecast and then saw its share price slump almost 40 percent. The company told investors it will be at least February before its power supplier can resume work.

Hyperscalers mostly use third party datacenters in Australia. The nation's government wants to get a slice of the investment on offer during the AI boom but has also set rules requiring new builds to bring their own renewable energy supply and pay for any grid enhancement costs.

Canberra hopes that approach attracts sufficient interest that Australia ends up with onshore AI capacity that, even if it won't be sovereign, will at least be local.

Singapore-based Grab, whose "super-app" offers rideshare, e-commerce, financial services, and more, has suggested the data it collects could help to detect outbreaks of disease.

"Retail purchases can supplement clinical surveillance because changes in demand for some over-the-counter products may appear before confirmed case reports," the company wrote in a recent abstract, which raises the idea of tracking "changes in demand for products associated with symptoms, such as fever remedies or cough medicines."

The company's idea is to analyze customer behavior on its GrabMart grocery app, in the hope that doing so yields "an additional signal when demand changes across groups of symptom-related products."

Grab is at pains to point out that it does not believe its data can detect disease alone, and that it has not deployed such a system. The company also calls for use of the smallest possible datasets.

"The analysis should use only eligible product categories, coarse geographic areas, and aggregate time windows approved for the stated public health purpose. It should not expose raw transactions or personally identifiable information," the company suggested. Grab also says such monitoring must be government-approved, targeted to particular health concerns, and time-limited. It also acknowledges that the idea is a thought bubble that public health experts should assess before deployment.

"These applications should use aggregate trends only," the company suggested. "The signal should not drive personalised medical advice, individual targeting, insurance decisions, or automatic changes to medicine search rankings."

What could possibly go wrong?

South Korea's science minister Bae Kyung-hoon has promised to accelerate development of regulation governing smart glasses, to address unauthorized filming and the potential for the devices to be misused in other settings such as during academic exams.

Speaking at a parliamentary forum, Bae said the government is already working on guidelines but plans to accelerate that effort, and that president Lee Jae Myung recently mentioned the need for regulation during a cabinet meeting.

The minister added that the guidelines will be developed at a "pan-ministerial level," suggesting the effort will attempt to create comprehensive regulations.

Jio Platforms is India's top telco, having won over half a billion customers since its 2015 launch, helped by low price subscriptions and own-brand handsets, plus clever content bundling.

The company will float this week by selling around a three percent stake in the company, and the IPO is likely to be rather successful as investors have expressed an interest to acquire 22 times more shares than the company will sell. Institutional investors are 70x oversubscribed.

The IPO values the telco at just over $100 billion and aims to raise around $3 billion. ®

MotoAmerica Superbike Cup Racer Danilo Lewis Returns to Brazil with Honda Repsol CB Racing. Two-time Brazilian champion and 2022 MotoAmerica Superbike Cup champion will compete in the November 6-8 MOTO1000GP round in Cascavel.

MotoAmerica Superbike Cup racer Danilo Lewis will return to Brazil to compete with Honda Repsol CB Racing / César Barros Racing Team in the GP1000 class of MOTO1000GP, November 6-8 at Autódromo Internacional Zilmar Beux in Cascavel, Paraná.

Lewis will step in for an injured rider aboard a Honda CBR1000RR-R Fireblade, extending his 2026 season after closing the MotoAmerica championship with consecutive Superbike Cup victories at New Jersey Motorsports Park.

Those wins capped a strong finish to the year and helped Lewis secure third in the 2026 MotoAmerica Superbike Cup standings with 254 points.

"I'm really excited to have the opportunity to go back to Brazil and keep racing," Lewis said. "We ended the MotoAmerica season with two wins and a lot of momentum, so being able to continue racing this year is really special. I'm grateful to César and the entire team for trusting me to step in, and I'm looking forward to being back on track in Brazil."

• Returning to Brazilian National Competition

Lewis built the early part of his career in Brazil, where he became a two-time Brazilian national road racing champion in the premier 1000cc category before moving his racing career to the United States.

He later added another major title in 2022, winning the MotoAmerica Superbike Cup Championship with four victories and 14 podium finishes.

Lewis now returns to Brazilian national competition with several additional years of MotoAmerica experience, including racing within the full Superbike field against some of the top riders and teams in American road racing.

At Cascavel, he will compete in GP1000 by Motul, the premier class of the MOTO1000GP Brazilian National Road Racing Championship, aboard the Honda CBR1000RR-R Fireblade.

• Race Weekend

Event: MOTO1000GP Round 7

Dates: November 6-8, 2026

Track: Autódromo Internacional Zilmar Beux

Location: Cascavel, Paraná, Brazil

Class: GP1000 by Motul

Team: Honda Repsol CB Racing / César Barros Racing Team

Motorcycle: Honda CBR1000RR-R Fireblade

Race: Sunday, November 8 at 2:00 p.m. Brazil time

• How to Watch

Fans in Brazil and internationally can follow Lewis in the GP1000 race on Sunday, November 8 at 2:00 p.m. Brazil time.

MOTO1000GP races are streamed live through the official MOTO1000GP YouTube channel, giving international viewers a free way to follow the event.

Coverage is also available through BandSports, New Brasil, Racer Network Brasil, and selected TV Gazeta and Gazeta Esportiva platforms.

Thank You to the Partners Who Made It Possible.

Lewis thanks All Transmission, Onex USA, MotoHub Miami and Sampaio Na Estrada for their support in helping make the opportunity possible.

He also extends his appreciation to César Barros and the Honda Repsol CB Racing team for the opportunity to join the program in Cascavel.

About Danilo Lewis: 

Danilo Lewis is a Brazilian professional motorcycle racer competing in the MotoAmerica Superbike Cup. He is a two-time Brazilian national road racing champion and the 2022 MotoAmerica Superbike Cup Champion, 2024 Superbike Cup Runner up and 2026 Superbike Cup 3rd place finisher.

Lewis finished third in the 2026 MotoAmerica Superbike Cup standings after earning consecutive victories at the season finale at New Jersey Motorsports Park.

The post Danilo Lewis Extends 2026 Season in Brazil with Honda CB Racing appeared first on Roadracing World Magazine | Motorcycle Riding, Racing & Tech News.

Among many

One more way the US defeats itself.

A briefing

Inside Anthropic.

Click here to book for The Gentle Author's Tours

Roger Clarke tells the tale of Georgiana Eagle, Wizard Queen and Mesmerist, and Curse of Vicky's Ticker

Once I held it in my hand, I was aware of the weight of it. I was standing in a small downstairs room at Bonhams in South Kensington holding a Victorian gold pocket watch. Yet the weight I felt was not that of the precious metal or the intricate mechanics of its system, but of the significance of those whose hands through which the watch had passed: Queen Victoria, two celebrated psychics, a newspaper editor who went down in the Titanic and the thief who stole it fifty years ago.

Here is the entry in Bonham's catalogue:

LOT 19: AN 18K GOLD KEY WIND OPEN FACE POCKET WATCH, Circa 1840 (£500-700)

Two engraved inscriptions: 'Presented by Her Majesty to Miss Georgiana Eagle for her Meritorious & Extraordinary Clairvoyance produced at Osborn House, Isle of Wight, July 15th 1846′ and 'Presented by W.T Stead to Mrs Etta Wriedt through whose mediumship Queen Victoria's direct voice was heard in London in July 1911.'

I first came across the name of Georgiana Eagle, Wizard Queen & Mesmerist, while researching my book A Natural History of Ghosts - and as a Shoreditch resident myself - I was naturally intrigued by her. Dalston was a Victorian nexus of young female psychics, including the infamous Florence Cook in the eighteen seventies, and there was a very famous Dalston spiritualist group at the time many of whose members worked on the railways - two recently-built spurs (now the overground) had opened up the area and were instrumental  in making Dalston popular for séances.  It was a new territory, opening new doors into the other world. However it seems an even younger East London psychic proceeded Miss Cook by several decades amongst the furniture-making factories and leather-working rooms of Shoreditch.

Georgiana Eagle was born on November 28th 1834 and baptised at St Leonard's Church. Her grandfather owned a pub in the parish and the family were of Huguenot descent. She lived with her father Barnardo Eagle in Holywell Place. He was a professional stage magician and the family led a nomadic existence as travelling players. In 1839, he was describing himself as 'The Royal Wizard of the South' and in the Birmingham Journal of November 23rd of that year claimed he had performed for 'His late Majesty and Queen Adelaide, Duchess of Saxe-Weimar, Her Majesty Queen Victoria, The Duchess of Kent and numbers of the nobility.'

After the death of her mother, eight-year-old Georgiana stayed with her father while the rest of her siblings were packed off to live with their grandparents in 36 Coleman St. She was a willing participant in her father's stage act of 'Hundred feats of mighty magic'. He was a sceptic who revealed deception and his show, The Mysterious Lady, which was devoted to exposing the clairvoyance claims of mesmerists - proved immensely popular. Little Georgiana was the star and she performed for Queen Victoria at Osborne House when Prince Albert was still alive, receiving the gift of the gold watch from the monarch. Victoria's journals show she gave similar watches to other children of Georgiana's age and I believe Georgiana had it engraved after that event at Osborne House in 1846. This is the ill-fated watch that was subsequently stolen from the College of Psychic Studies in September 1962.

One morning last year, I received a call from a relative in the antiques business who was monitoring sales of objects connected to the Isle of Wight where we both grew up. He had learnt about the sale of a watch. I went in one day in January for a viewing and sat in a small windowless, fortified room as a young man brought it in. There was absolutely no doubt about it. This was Vicky's Ticker - the watch given to Georgiana by Queen Victoria which has not been seen or heard of since 1962. It had been discovered among the effects of a jeweller from Manchester at his decease by his relatives, who had no idea of its tainted provenance.

There is a contemporary mention of Victoria's gift of the watch to Georgiana in the Northampton Mercury in 1849. 'On Monday last, a theatre suddenly upreared its tawdry head in the market square, decorated with pictures representing Miss Georgiana Eagle in trunk hose and flesh tights, in the act of receiving a splendid gold watch from Her Majesty Queen Victoria.'

A remarkable thing happened. In 1850, Barnardo Eagle advertised private clairvoyance sessions  'to the nobility and gentry' in Brighton. At a meeting in Edinburgh in November 1852, around sixty people were invited to experience Georgiana's powers of mediumship and mesmerism. Whether this conversion was heartfelt or genuine, we will probably never know.  It could have been simply that Barnardo was commercially savvy and he saw the wind was blowing in favour of psychics. Yet his journey from sceptic to believer is the reason that the watch is so precious to the College of Psychic Studies.

Those who were shocked by Barnardo's apparent betrayal of his rational beliefs blamed him for dragging his eighteen year-old daughter along with him. It did not go well for either of them. By 1853, he had abandoned the profession and reverted to the family occupation, buying the licence to the Brown Bear Tavern near the British Museum. His infant daughter Rosabel died and was buried in a public grave, indicating the family's reduced state at this time. Yet by 1855 they were back on the road, offering clairvoyance once again.

There was a late resurgence in their fame. The hiatus appears to have restored their public reputation now belief in psychic phenomena had became widespread. Then tragedy struck when Barnardo died onstage during his act. A few weeks later - while her father was barely cold in the ground - Georgiana married a Drury Lane scene-painter.  She was now performing as Madame Card, Wizard Queen and Mesmerist and living happily with her husband in Cheltenham, until he was committed to a lunatic asylum in Sussex where he died seven months later.

She married a music professor from Islington and they toured together. He accompanying her act with musical numbers and they were reviewed quite favourably by the Evening Standard. Georgiana was by now an accomplished hypnotist and 'performed with a dexterity that is scarcely surpassed by any other male conjurer' Unfortunately, the music professor - a volatile character who got in trouble with the law over his temper - also died young and Georgiana was widowed for a second time by the age of forty-seven. She married a draper twenty-five years her junior, and eventually died in Muswell Hill of 'senile decay' in March 1911.

Within months of Georgiana's death, the watch fell into the hands of the newspaper editor W.T. Stead who gave it to Etta Wriedt, a medium who used it to channel the spirit and voice of Queen Victoria in London in July 1911. When Stead drowned on the Titanic, Wriedt presented the watch to the London College of Psychic Studies.

The colourful history of this little timepiece might tempt the credulous to believe it has a curse attached to it - though why that should be, I have no explanation. I attended the ceremony marking the return of the watch at the College of Psychic Studies and afterwards talked with a throng of interested parties.  'We think you were guided,' suggested a couple of mediums but naturally I could not say.  Yet it is very strange that I should write on the subject for Spitalfields Life and then find it.

I do not feel my business with Georgiana Eagle has quite finished yet.

Georgiana Eagle, Wizard Queen & Mersmerist of Shoreditch

Inscription of July 1846

Inscription of July 1911

St Leonard's Church where Georgiana Eagle, Wizard Queen & Clairvoyant Mesmerist, was baptised

Dalston became a nexus for female psychics in the eighteen seventies due to improved transport links

Barnardo Eagle, the Royal Wizard of the South (Courtesy of Senate House Library)

Advertisement for a performance by Barnardo and Georgiana Eagle in Plymouth

Georgiana Eagle commonly performed under the stage name of Madame Gilliland Card (Poster courtesy of British Museum)

Etta Wriedt used Vicky's Ticker to channel the spirit and voice of Queen Victoria in London in 1911

Journal of Spiritualism, Psychical, Occult & Mystical Research (Courtesy London College of Psychic Studies)

Roger Clarke wishes to thank Vivienne Roberts, College Curator & Archivist at the London College of Psychic Studies for her research

Volkswagen Group is desperate to cut costs. As recently as 2023, the company had an operating profit of €22.6 billion, but by 2025, that number had been slashed to €8.9 billion. 2026 may be half of that. In today's market, it has more factory capacity in Germany that it needs, ... [continued]

The post Volkswagen Negotiations With IG Metall To Begin November 24, Audi Factory In US Rumored appeared first on CleanTechnica.

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment about the Canadian YouTuber who was visited by the cops after building a Flock-like camera to track cop cars:

If the cops are doing nothing wrong, then they have nothing to hide.

In second place, it's a comment about Malcolm Gladwell's strange strawman assertion that people say the bad behavior of police is caused by there being too many of them:

No, the police are badly behaved because they rarely face repercussions.

For editor's choice on the insightful side, we start out with Kinetic Gothic and another comment about the Canadian YouTuber:

I was particularly amused by their concerns this could be used to locate their homes, since unlike most of us, cops do have the option to -not- drive home in the vehicles they patrol the town in.

Next, it's an anonymous comment about the impossibility of perfect content moderation:

I dunno, I've also done and overseen moderation work on that kind of scale, and I would be deeply hesitant to say we always get things correct. I've dealt with enough community blowback over the years — sometimes stuff I thought was justified; sometimes stuff I thought was exaggerated; sometimes stuff I thought was invented out of whole cloth — to know not only do errors happen but that people can have very different opinions over what those errors were and what 'the right way' to do things would have been.

Facebook is a titanic entity with enormous resources to throw at the problem, but the problem with moderation of any sort is that the need for it scales faster than the supply. The flood of output from slop engines is only making the issue worse, especially if you're somebody like YT or FB, where there's lots of perceived value in shouting over everyone else.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is an anonymous comment about Trump hiding the IRS report on his Big Beautiful Bill:

Hey now, be fair to the IRS, they might actually be having trouble figuring this shit out. I mean haven't they been cut down to like six guys and a beat-up old Tandy 1000 at this point?

In second place, it's MrWilson with an idea for the Canadian YouTuber and his camera:

Just tell the cops that you're setting up a service to track all the Canadian girlfriends that Americans have claimed existed. I bet even Canadian cops think tracking girlfriends, fictional or otherwise, with mass surveillance camera networks is fine.

For editor's choice on the funny side, we start out with an anonymous comment about Brendan Carr threatening journalists for covering polls Trump doesn't like:

I'm sure Mr. Carr has security footage of Antifa vandals cutting a 350-foot long slice in the polls with a box cutter and then pouring fertilizer into them. He's just not releasing it yet.

Finally, it's another anonymous comment about Malcolm Gladwell, this time with a simple retort to the description of him as "one of America's foremost thinkers":

[Citation Needed]

That's all for this week, folks!

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The post Stop letting trackers get comfy — 5 years of AdGuard DNS protection is just $23 through today appeared first on Boing Boing.

A note on who I am: I'm an investigative journalist who's spent a decade reporting on the collision of technology and democracy including exposing the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal for the Guardian and the New York Times. I'm now a co-founder of The Nerve, set up a year ago by five women journalists from the Guardian and Observer. This is my personal newsletter.

How to Survive the Broligarchy is a reader-supported publication. Please sign up for free or if you can afford to, pay to support my work. With thanks, Carole

I'm going to start with a list of a few headlines of the last two weeks:

• October 12: Prime Minister Andy Burnham acknowledges that there is "clear" evidence that showed Russia interfered in the Brexit vote.

• October 16: Elon Musk asked Donald Trump to slow down Ukraine's connection to Starlink. This resulted in the Ukrainian army's ability to warn civilians of incoming missile strikes.

• October 16: Facebook employees reveal the company boosted social media posts of Flavio Bolsonaro ahead of this week's election.

• October 21: Facebook is fined $25bn over the Cambridge Analytica data breach and deceiving users over data privacy.

Spot the connection?

All of these headlines directly map onto a series of events that first came under scrutiny almost exactly a decade ago. Next month marks the ten-year anniversary of Donald Trump's election to the US presidency but also the first detectable rumblings of the tectonic plates that underpin our world: plates which like the San Andreas fault, run deep through the heart of Silicon Valley.

Ten years on, it's all out in the open: credible evidence of one US social media platform attempting to tip an election in one of the world's most important economies while another US tech mogul joins forces with Donald Trump to help Vladimir Putin kill Ukrainian civilians, while the UK prime minister admits that Putin was also behind an attack on the referendum that took Britain out of Europe and made both weaker.

All of which connects back to the original tech scandal, one that some people - Mark Zuckerberg, of course, among them - still like to characterise as a conspiracy theory. Kudos to the New Mexico attorney general for insisting on trying to simply uphold the law.

It's my own ten year anniversary too. Because it was the election of Donald Trump and the phenomenon that had just been christened "fake news" that kicked off that investigation. The Cambridge Analytica data scandal has always been a misleading name in some ways because it encompassed all of the above: abuse of personal data, tech platforms enabling invisible political manipulation and hostile state actors taking advantage of it all.

To be clear, this isn't an "I told you so" moment. It's an "I'm still telling you so." And, the reason for that is another date and news story that has to be added to the list:

• October 22: The UK government issues "preparedness advice" warning citizens to stockpile essentials in the event of cyber attacks or supply chain disruption.

British citizens are being told to invest in wind-up radios and power banks and to keep water and food in stock.

All of these headlines have caught me by surprise to some degree. I've been surprised that the authorities are actually acting. That after a decade of official government denials and gaslighting, Andy Burnham casually admitted on a podcast the words that no UK government minister has ever said. Chatting away on the Rest of Politics, he mentioned that he'd asked officials about Russian interference in Brexit and had been informed in no uncertain terms that there was.

He just came right out and said it! As if the then-Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, hadn't personally buried parliament's intelligence committee's Russia Report right before the crucial 2019 general election that gave him his hard Brexit mandate. As if, Johnson's first act on winning wasn't to attend a party thrown his honour by the son of a former FSB spy. As if, Nigel Farage's close friend and political ally, Nathan Gill, wasn't sentenced to ten and a half years for accepting Russian bribes earlier this year.

Russian interference has been the elephant in a room for a decade and anyone who investigated it - a tiny handful of journalists - were conspiracy-loving nuts. Even in America, where the state did step up and act, the "Russia hoax" had traction on both the right and the mainstream. The FBI and Congress spent years uncovering Russia's systematic attack on the 2016 election, but journalists covering Trump's relationship with Putin were treated with suspicion. Even the extensive and painstaking reports by the FBI and Senate Intelligence Committee were brushed under the carpet by the normie editors of normie publications who found it too James Bond for their taste.

Burnham's words were a surprise, then. As was the New Mexico court that fined Meta $25bn. I've seen Facebook pay billions to settle every case that's come its way and there have been many. I've watched its senior executives evade scrutiny and consequences for a decade so it's genuinely a shock when something actually lands.

It's a record-breaking fine and the judgment details systematic deception at the company over years, citing internal emails that involved the likes of Sheryl Sandberg and Nick Clegg in a consistent pattern of behaviour in which users - and journalists and investors - were repeatedly lied to.

It's important not just because it's the original sin - the harvesting of our personal data underpins Silicon Valley's surveillance economy and therefore its power - but because everything we are witnessing today with AI is a direct descendant of this scandal, or more precisely, the lack of consequences these tech executives faced in the wake of this scandal. It created an environment of impunity that infects everything we see happening today, a playbook that Sam Altman, to name just one out-of-control tech bro, has taken to his heart.

But perhaps most surprisingly of all, the British government has finally woken from its slumber and issued the same warning to its citizens that the governments of Scandinavia, the Baltics, Germany, The Netherlands, Ireland, Poland, Belgium and the EU did to theirs several years ago.

A confession: I've been a covert prepper since a conversation with an Irish open-source researcher, Gavin Sheridan, two years ago. It was at the time Russian spy ships that were circling Britain and Ireland and the anchor of a shadow fleet tanker had "accidentally" severed a cable between Finland and Estonia.

What's the worst thing that could happen if they did succeed in cutting the cables between Britain and America, I asked Gavin. He thought for a moment "Well, I guess the first thing would happen would be the total collapse of the global economy," he said cheerfully. I told him I was thinking of buying a wind-up radio. I'd contemplated the idea of not knowing what was happening but at the same time I didn't want to become one of those people US cable networks make documentaries about.

"I've got two!" Gavin said. "One for me and one for my parents." When I saw him this summer he told me that he'd now got a Starlink antenna stashed away in his cupboard. Another of my friends, a world-renowned European tech expert, told me a year and a half ago that she keeps cash in the house and the tank of her car full. I would never have admitted publicly that I followed suit with the cash or that after European intelligence chiefs warned of an imminent attack by Russia this September, I got some water containers in too. It would have been much too embarrassing. And yet here we are with an extensive list the UK government has just put out - blankets, torches, three days' supply of food, a power bank - it makes my own efforts look frankly pathetic.

But how to process that? The actual UK government is now more alarmist than me, a noted conspiracy theorist/truth-telling Cassandra/delete as applicable. What the actual…?

And yet. There's still not a joining of the dots. And that's why I put that list at the top of this newsletter. There's still a widespread failure to understand how interconnected this all is. How it's not a coincidence that both Trump and Elon Musk have joined forces with Putin to facilitate his attacks on Ukraine. How Meta, in the week a record-breaking Cambridge Analytica-related fine is handed down, is accused of trying to tip the election in Bolsonaro's favour (the Brazilian courts - after the European Union - have been one of the most effective checks on Silicon Valley's power. )

This is all the same story.

Britain believes it's physically and psychically apart from Europe, that Russia is a long way away and that although Elon Musk has incited riots in the UK and backed the efforts of our most right-wing political party, Restore, we're somehow immune from his influence.

It's why it's always something of a relief to visit countries that understand these threats more viscerally than we in Britain do. This week, I was in Germany to speak at Munich Media Days, a convention for publishers grappling with the many questions that AI has thrown up for them. In Bavaria, Russia feels that much closer than it does in Britain - because it is. And yet it also feels safer: because people's understanding of the issues seems so much keener, the subject so much more urgent. This is a nation that understands a genocidal dictator. Hitler's Eagles Nest retreat, less than 100 miles from Munich, was torched a day after I left (no connection).

Two Turkish citizens were arrested in Germany this month for allegedly setting fire to a Starlink station in Poland. It's yet another act of presumed sabotage by Russia on the European mainland but, in the week that Musk asked Trump to slow down Starlink and he complied, it's a stark reminder of how we cannot depend on US technology.

That's what this month must now bring home to us all. That we simply cannot trust US technology companies. It's absurd to put any aspect of national security in Elon Musk's hands. The UK government has a $40m contract with Starlink as do Poland, Germany and Estonia.

In Europe, we have to rapidly prioritise alternatives. And in Britain, we have to accept that joining a European technology and security union is our best and only bet. And to do that, we have to finally operate in a reality-based news environment in which we acknowledge the Brexit elephants, something which Andy Burnham, kudos to him, seems determined to do.

But we also have to reckon with the fact that all those stories about Trump and Putin from a decade ago? They didn't go far enough. Trump is a Russian asset. The how and why of that no longer matters. You know the saying: if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck. Trump acts like a Russian asset and talks like a Russian asset. He is a Russian asset. Putin is one of the only world leaders he's never fallen out with.

If there were any justice in the world, there'd be a Truth and Reality Commission that would oversee a series of apologies. I hereby nominate Hillary Clinton to be its first recipient: she was bang on the money from the start only no-one believed her because: misogyny. (Rocketfuelled by Russia's Internet Research Agency and my old friends: Cambridge Analytica.) What goes around comes around.

There's another elephant in the room: Vlad's friends in the UK. But I'm going to leave it here with one of the worst example of journalistic malpractice I've ever seen. BBC Newsnight used BBC News's flagship late-night news programme. It's now a glorified podcast show with a revolving roster of rent-a-pundits. Even so, this is a new low. On the day after the news of Burnham's pronouncement on Russian interference in Brexit broke, it opted to invite "Former Putin spokesperson Sergei Markov" to throw light on the subject. I'm screenshotting rather than posting the video because it's simply too dumb to bear re-watching.

It was an absurd booking not least because Markov never was Putin's spokesman. But he's still a proven liar who's made a career of defending a genocidal dictator. And, that, in a nutshell is part of the reason that it's taken ten years to get us to a point where a UK prime minister is finally prepared to acknowledge the bleedingly obvious.

Take care. And buy a wind-up radio.

Thank you, as ever, for reading & especially to those who pay to support my work xx

I was going to headline this piece, "Hillary was right" but I'll save that for another day. Here instead is a snap of us chitchatting about Putin and other mutual acquaintances at the world's weirdest event. Also: congrats to Maria Ressa, on the right, on the publication of her essential new book, The Fight Back: A Citizen's Guide to Standing up to Dictators. Maria knows. The first dictator of the title - Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippines' former president - is heading to The Hague next month to stand trial for crimes against humanity, an incredible feat in which she played no small part. We've yet to get the second dictator, Zuck, but there's still time. Read all about that in our conversation with historian Yuval Noah Hariri in the Nerve here.)

The key premise of Recomendo is that everything we have suggested weekly in the past 10 years has been a personal recommendation based on our own experiences. It is something we have seen, heard, visited, or used ourselves. For this Christmas, we'd like to deviate from that principle slightly (and temporarily) to provide you with a dozen of recommendations from our subscribers. That is you. For our brand new Annual Christmas Reader Recommendations issue we will select the best personal recommendations submitted within the next 2 weeks by October 25. To keep it sane, just one recommendation per subscriber. Keep it short and personal. Suggest a product, tool, app, place, book, documentary, podcast, follow—anything—that you genuinely love, and few know about. No self-promotion. Beyond the dozen we share in the newsletter, we will post all of the vetted submissions on our website.

I needed a new bedside clock, so I got this Hotmoon Cocoon Pro 3 sound machine. Besides the dimmable clock display, it has 117 sounds, including 3 kinds of brown noise, my favorite. If you don't like brown noise, try white, pink, green, blue, red, or gray. Once you set it up with the phone app, you don't need the app unless you want to stream some of its regularly updated sounds. No subscription is required. It also has a night-light ring with adjustable color and brightness, works as a Bluetooth speaker, and has clearly labeled buttons on top. — MF

Recreate the entire ritual of online shopping on Dopamine Shop, or on Food Never Comes: You search for products, compare reviews, add items to your cart, enter a shipping address, place an order, and even track your delivery. That was fun! Then … nothing happens. No package arrives. No money changes hands. The food never comes. Nothing to return or clean up. You consumed nothing, yet you are an ace shopper. If shopping is your comfort scroll, this is very satisfying late at night. (This trend is big in Korea.) — KK

I recently attended an in-person event with visionary Alana Fairchild, where she led us through a guided imagery meditation to meet Great Mother archetypes like the Black Madonna and Kuan Yin. I was especially moved by her chanting and singing. I own many of her oracle decks, but this recommendation is for her voice. You can experience her meditations and sacred music for free on Spotify. — CD

Gossip Goblin is an Instagram channel of short AI-generated films set in a world that looks like a combination of Terry Gilliam's Brazil and Mad Max. It explores themes of artificial intelligence, biohacking, and the merging of humans and machines. The artwork is incredible, as are the acting, stories, and characters. It's the first time I've watched an AI video without thinking "this is AI slop. The Hollywood Reporter interviewed the creator, Zack London. His feature-length film, Gods Don't Give Gifts, opens in US theaters October 30. — MF

Kids Trends is a directory of more than 100 million children's drawings and paintings that you can search by any keyword. Exploring how children picture the world opens up imaginal portals in my mind. — CD

AI-musicals are becoming memes - and the new way to debate ideas. Not a normal debate highlights the debate about whether AI is a "normal technology" which has been spun into overdrive with AI-generated musicals defending each side. One musical refutes two academics scholarly paper arguing that AI is a normal technology, and the other AI musical by the two scholars refutes the first musical. Both music

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Li Auto's new i6 electric vehicle has a very interesting look. It makes me think of something out of some futuristic movie or The Jetsons. It certainly has an MPV (multipurpose vehicle) design that is current in China but not really anywhere else. Anyway, aside from the futuristic, cool styling, ... [continued]

The post New Li Auto i6 Goes 811 km (504 Miles) appeared first on CleanTechnica.