Plans by the UK government to impose a per-mile tax on electric vehicles would exempt vans, leaks suggest. CC-licensed photo by Climate Group 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. Charged up. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
[Apple is c…
Plans by the UK government to impose a per-mile tax on electric vehicles would exempt vans, leaks suggest. CC-licensed photo by Climate Group 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. Charged up. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line • Ken Segall
Ken Segall worked at Chiat Day, the advertising agency for Apple, on its account for 12 years:
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Recent reports say that we will soon be seeing ads in Apple Maps. Just as we saw ads appear in the App Store in 2015 and get amped up in 2021. I’ll go out on a limb and say that uninvited advertising is not normally equated with a better customer experience. Why would Apple do such a thing?
Shocker—it’s about money. One can only imagine how eyes lit up in the Apple boardroom as they celebrated a new revenue stream. Who knows how, or even if, these ads register with Apple users as they become more visible. After all, ads are all around us today, everywhere we go. Still, many will shake their heads in disappointment that Apple—one of the richest companies on earth—is selling a piece of its soul for a bit of easy money.
What would Steve Jobs do?
I usually dodge that question on the grounds that it’s pure speculation. However, in this case, it is not speculation at all. I was in the room when Steve was presented with an eerily similar “opportunity.” Here’s what happened.
Some time ago (1999-ish), agency chief Lee Clow and I were invited to a hastily scheduled meeting with Steve and his top lieutenants. The topic was building advertising into the Mac system software.
At that time, customers paid $125 for the annual upgrade to the Mac OS. It was proposed that Apple offer two flavors—an ad-free version for $125 and a free version subsidized by ads. Something for everyone! Free choice!
A number of ways to integrate ads were discussed. One was to show a cool video from a respected company (such as Nike) every time the Mac starts up. Another was to place ads in the OS contextually. For example, an “out of ink” notification might contain an ad for an ink supplier.
After spirited debate, there was no immediate decision. But days later, Steve told me he had killed the idea. His bottom line was that it degraded the pure, elegant, clean interface that Mac users love. It didn’t matter that customers would be free to choose a version with or without ads. He didn’t want any user to see the OS polluted in this way.
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And that was in the days when Apple was struggling, quite badly, for money. unique link to this extract
Elon Musk wins $1 trillion pay package tying him to Tesla for a decade • The Washington Post
Faiz Siddiqui and Rachel Lerman:
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The pay package would be awarded in 12 tranches, most requiring Musk to grow Tesla’s valuation in $500 billion increments and hit certain operational goals, such as delivering Tesla’s 20 millionth vehicle. It allows the board discretion on certain terms of the stock awards, leading critics to argue the milestones are suggestions rather than mandates.
The package comes as Tesla’s profits have declined and the company has faced business challenges stemming, in part, from unprecedented backlash to Musk’s involvement in the Trump administration. A Yale University study estimated that Musk’s political activity cost Tesla more than 1 million vehicle sales.
Tesla and Musk did not respond to a request for comment.
Tech company chiefs can command salaries in the tens of millions. Their wealth is often built off stock holdings derived from shares accumulated before the companies have matured and secured massive valuations.
The offer to Musk, meanwhile, has the potential to balloon his net worth to around the entirety of Tesla’s current market capitalization of nearly $1.5 trillion.
“That’s just the craziest thing,” said Ross Gerber, a Tesla investor who has become a prominent Musk critic in recent years. “It’s so absurd. … You’re giving him a hundred% of the value of the company today.”
…The deal doesn’t guarantee Musk becomes a trillionaire; it relies on Musk hitting the set of performance milestones launching Tesla’s valuation to $8.5 trillion. In most cases, for each $500bn added to Tesla’s valuation, along with certain operational goals, Musk would unlock an additional 1% of Tesla shares — growing a stake that is already more than 15% of Tesla, exceeding $200 billion in value. The board retains some discretion to award the tranches, a setup that has caused some concern.
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Tesla’s current valuation: $1.54 trillion. Has since inception sold 8.5m vehicles; currently selling about 1.8m vehicles per year, but 2025 is down on 2024. The 20 millionth delivery is perhaps a decade away, if things go well, and there’s no guarantee the stock market will stay happy with Tesla or anyone else. When the AI enthusiasm wanes, there will be a downturn.
All this to say: if someone tells you Elon Musk is now being paid a trillion dollars, either correct them or ignore everything else they say. unique link to this extract
Vans to swerve EV pay-per-mile tax raid but other vehicles to be hit • The Times
Oliver Gill:
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Van drivers are to avoid the government’s electric vehicle pay-per-mile tax — but plug-in hybrid cars will be included.
Electric vans are not “in scope” for a planned 3p-per-mile levy under proposals that are expected to be confirmed by Rachel Reeves in the budget this month.
Drivers of plug-in hybrid vehicles (PHEVs), powered by a combination of a conventional combustion engine and an electric motor, will be included in the scheme at a discounted rate. This means that drivers of PHEVs will pay both fuel duty on petrol and the per-mile levy.
The revelations will come as a partial relief to some of the biggest companies in the UK automotive sector, including Ford, the company behind the Transit, a favourite of the “White Van Man”.
But carmakers have, nevertheless, been left fuming, with the boss of one of the country’s biggest dealerships saying the pay-per-mile scheme will be a “bureaucratic nightmare”.
Carmakers were shocked last week when it emerged that the chancellor had resolved to roll out the new tax for electric vehicles starting in 2028. Government officials are understood to have later held briefings with major UK vehicle manufacturers to confirm the plans.
The Treasury has opted for the scheme to make up for a future shortfall in fuel duty revenue as drivers switch from petrol to electric vehicles. It is estimated that up to six million people will be driving EVs by the time the new levy comes into effect. It will cost electric car drivers an estimated £250 a year. Sources were tight-lipped on the level of discount offered to PHEV drivers.
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I did some lengthy calculations back in 2021 about what happens when every vehicle is electric. Those calculations found that to make up for all the lost petrol duty, the government would have to charge just over 9p per mile.
Unexplained (so far): how the government will extract the payment. Presumably, as a lump sum based on MOT figures. unique link to this extract
FBI orders domain registrar to reveal who runs mysterious Archive.is site • Ars Technica
Jon Brodkin:
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The Federal Bureau of Investigation is trying to unmask the operator of Archive.is, also known as Archive.today, a website that saves snapshots of webpages and is commonly used to bypass news paywalls.
The FBI sent a subpoena to domain registrar Tucows, seeking “subscriber information on [the] customer behind archive.today” in connection with “a federal criminal investigation being conducted by the FBI.” The subpoena tells Tucows that “your company is required to furnish this information.”
The subpoena is supposed to be secret, but the Archive.today X account posted the document on October 30, the same day the subpoena was issued. The X post contained a link to the PDF and the word “canary.”
“If you refuse to obey this subpoena, the United States Attorney General may invoke the aid of a United States District Court to compel compliance. Your failure to obey the resulting court order may be punished as contempt,” the document said. It gave a deadline of November 29.
…While copyright infringement would be a likely area of investigation for the FBI with Archive.today, the subpoena doesn’t provide specific information on the probe. The subpoena seeks the Archive.today customer or subscriber name, addresses, length of service, records of phone calls or texts, payment information, records of session times and duration of Internet connectivity, mobile device identification codes, IP addresses or other numbers used to identify the subscriber, and the types of services provided.
In contrast with the nonprofit Internet Archive, the operator or operators of Archive.today have remained mysterious. It has used various domains (archive.ph, archive.is, etc.), and its registrant “Denis Petrov” may be an alias.
An FAQ that apparently hasn’t been updated in over a decade says that Archive.today, which was started in 2012, uses data centers in Europe and is “privately funded.” It also accepts donations. There are several indications that the founder is from Russia.
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If the reason really is – as seems possible – that news publishers are annoyed by a site that bypasses their paywalls, it seems quite a sledgehammer to crack a nut. And also, how did they persuade the FBI (which won’t explain it) to act? unique link to this extract
The algorithm failed music • The Verge
Terrence O’Brien:
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Spotify is the most popular music streaming service in the world. While its algorithmic recommendations aren’t necessarily the reason, its reach has meant that hundreds of millions of people are being fed a steady diet of music curated by a machine. Spotify’s goal is to keep you listening no matter what. In her book Mood Machine, journalist Liz Pelly recounts a story told to her by a former Spotify employee in which Daniel Ek said, “our only competitor is silence.”
According to this employee, Spotify leadership didn’t see themselves as a music company, but as a time filler. The employee explained that, “the vast majority of music listeners, they’re not really interested in listening to music per se. They just need a soundtrack to a moment in their day.”
Simply providing a soundtrack to your day might seem innocent enough, but it informs how Spotify’s algorithm works. Its goal isn’t to help you discover new music, its goal is simply to keep you listening for as long as possible. It serves up the safest songs possible to keep you from pressing stop.
The company even went so far as to partner with music library services and production companies under a program called Perfect Fit Content, or PFC. This saw the creation of fake or “ghost” artists that flooded Spotify with songs that were specifically designed to be pleasant and ignorable. It’s music as content, not art.
…Artists, especially new ones trying to break through, actually started changing how they composed to play better in the algorithmically driven streaming era. Songs got shorter, albums got longer, and intros went away. The hook got pushed to the front of the song to try to grab listeners’ attention immediately, and things like guitar solos all but disappeared from pop music. The palette of sounds artists pulled from got smaller, arrangements became more simplified, pop music flattened.
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Algorithmic choice was hard to escape even before Spotify (which absolutely needs people to be using it) and Apple Music (which sort of does). Radio stations were being programmed by algorithms for years: it began with FM radio in the US in the late 1970s. (Steely Dan got it right.) unique link to this extract
Why Solarpunk is already happening in Africa • Climate Drift
Skander Garroum:
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What’s happening across Sub-Saharan Africa right now is the most ambitious infrastructure project in human history, except it’s not being built by governments or utilities or World Bank consortiums. It’s being built by startups selling solar panels to farmers on payment plans. And it’s working.
Over 30 million solar products sold in 2024. 400,000 new solar installations every month across Africa. 50% market share captured by companies that didn’t exist 15 years ago. Carbon credits subsidizing the cost. IoT chips in every device. 90%+ repayment rates on loans to people earning $2/day.
And if you understand what’s happening in Africa, you understand the template for how infrastructure will get built everywhere else for the next 50 years.
Today we are looking into:
• Why the grid will never come (and why that’s actually good news) • How it takes three converging miracles (cheap hardware, zero-cost payments, and pay-as-you-go) • Twi case studies on how it works on the ground • Whether this template works beyond Africa (spoiler: it already is).
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It’s an entirely different place, different model from what we’re used to in the US and UK. unique link to this extract
A rollercoaster of emotions • De Programmatica Ipsum
Adrian Kosmaczewski:
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ON November 1988, Byte Magazine published two separate editions; first, the standard monthly issue, focused on the newly introduced NeXT computer; and the “Fifth Annual Extra All-IBM Issue” focused on the IBM PC, both of which are thankfully available on the Internet Archive at the time of this writing. Both of these magazines feature the same expensive advertising on pages 2 to 5, showcasing products from a company called Borland.
The name “Borland” should not, a priori, ring a bell in any Millennial, let alone any Gen Z reading this article. But for a lot of software developers self-identifying as Gen X (like this author) or as Boomer, “Borland” immediately evokes memories of a time long gone; a company that could have been more, but which consciously decided to crash and burn.
And there is nobody to blame about this state of affairs other than Borland themselves. After rising to absolute stardom from 1982 to 1991, seemingly able to kick the mighty Microsoft from its own throne, a series of mishaps and bad decisions brought the company to its knees… and then to oblivion.
Markets are a bitch, and then you die.
It is not the role of this article to tell the story of Borland. There is plenty of material around, starting with a quite complete Wikipedia entry definitely worth checking out. (TL;DR: they were the kings of developer tools.)
Instead, we are going to focus on three major chapters of the Borland story, that can serve as a vantage point for other software businesses that would be interested in leaving hubris aside for a moment.
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Once upon a time Borland hoped it could rival Microsoft for the office software space. But those days are far, far away. unique link to this extract
Danish authorities in rush to close security loophole in Chinese electric buses • The Guardian
Miranda Bryant:
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Authorities in Denmark are urgently studying how to close an apparent security loophole in hundreds of Chinese-made electric buses that enables them to be remotely deactivated.
The investigation comes after transport authorities in Norway, where the Yutong buses are also in service, found that the Chinese supplier had remote access for software updates and diagnostics to the vehicles’ control systems – which could be exploited to affect buses while in transit.
Amid concerns over potential security risks, the Norwegian public transport authority Ruter decided to test two electric buses in an isolated environment.
Bernt Reitan Jenssen, Ruter’s chief executive, said: “The testing revealed risks that we are now taking measures against. National and local authorities have been informed and must assist with additional measures at a national level.”
Their investigations found that remote deactivation could be prevented by removing the buses’ sim cards, but they decided against this because it would also disconnect the bus from other systems.
Ruter said it planned to bring in stricter security requirements for future procurements. Jenssen said it must act before the arrival of the next generation of buses, which could be even “more integrated and harder to secure”.
Movia, Denmark’s largest public transport company, has 469 Chinese electric buses in operation – 262 of which were manufactured by Yutong.
Jeppe Gaard, Movia’s chief operating officer, said he was last week made aware that “electric buses – like electric cars – can be remotely deactivated if their software systems have web access”. He added: “This is not a Chinese bus problem. It is a problem for all types of vehicles and devices with Chinese electronics built in.”
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One suspects that a lot of this is just the usual shonky Chinese electronics; if it were discovered that the CCP ordered companies to build in backdoors, that would be one thing, but it’s indistinguishable from the laziness that pervaded US-made electronic hardware for years, where “admin/password” combinations were literally “admin/password”. (Thanks Gregory B for the pointer.) unique link to this extract
First Americans may have sailed from north-east Asia, new research suggests • The Art Newspaper
Garry Shaw:
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The first people to migrate to North America may have sailed from north-east Asia around 20,000 years ago. Experts have argued that prehistoric people in Hokkaido, Japan, used similar stone tools to those later found in North America, and suggest that seafarers may have travelled to the continent during the last ice age, bringing this stone technology with them. This adds weight to the theory that the first Americans arrived much earlier than previously thought.
“We can now explain not only that the first Americans came from north-east Asia, but also how they travelled, what they carried and what ideas they brought with them,” Loren Davis, a professor of anthropology at Oregon State University, said in a statement. “It’s a powerful reminder that migration, innovation and cultural sharing have always been part of what it means to be human.”
Archaeologists have long debated when the first humans arrived in North America. Previously, the main theory was that people travelled by foot, around 13,500 years ago, crossing a now-submerged land bridge from eastern Russia, and then moving south along an ice-free corridor between the massive ice sheets that covered Alaska and Canada.
But in recent decades, experts have uncovered increasing evidence for earlier migration. The most dramatic finds come from White Sands, New Mexico, where 61 human footprints preserved on the edge of a dried-up prehistoric lake have been dated to between 16,000 and 20,000 years ago. Not all scholars agree with this dating, however, and some remain unconvinced by the other evidence for earlier migration.
To look deeper into this problem, Davis and his colleagues studied stone tools—mainly sharp projectile points used for hunting—excavated at prehistoric sites across the United States, primarily in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Texas and Idaho. After studying the tools’ production methods and appearance—factors that can help experts differentiate between cultural groups and time periods—the team searched for similar examples from outside the Americas.
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They also used genetic data to make the link to Hokkaido; the paper was published in Science Advances. unique link to this extract
Genetically engineered babies are banned. Tech titans are trying to make one anyway • WSJ
Emily Glazer, Katherine Long and Amy Dockser Marcus:
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For months, a small company in San Francisco has been pursuing a secretive project: the birth of a genetically engineered baby.
Backed by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and his husband, along with Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong, the startup—called Preventive—has been quietly preparing what would amount to a biological first. They are working toward creating a child born from an embryo edited to prevent a hereditary disease. In recent months, executives at the company privately said a couple with a genetic disease had been identified who was interested in participating, according to people familiar with the conversations.
Gene-editing technologies now in use for treatment after birth allow scientists to cut, edit and insert DNA, but using the process in sperm, eggs or embryos is far more controversial and has prompted calls by scientists for a global moratorium until the ethical and scientific questions get resolved. Editing genes in embryos with the intention of creating babies from them is banned in the U.S. and many countries.
Preventive has been searching for places to experiment where embryo editing is allowed, including the United Arab Emirates, according to correspondence reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Many experts worry that the science is too unpredictable to be safe and could usher in a new era of human experimentation by private companies without public or government input or debate. Some also raise the specter of eugenics.
There is only one known instance of children being born from edited embryos. In 2018, Chinese scientist He Jiankui shocked the world with news that he had produced three children genetically altered as embryos to be immune to HIV. He was sentenced to prison in China for three years for the illegal practice of medicine. He hasn’t publicly shared the children’s identities but says they are healthy.
…They say their ultimate goal is to produce babies who are free of genetic disease and resilient against illnesses.
Some say they can also give parents the ability to choose embryos that will have higher IQs and preferred traits such as height and eye color.
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GATTACA wasn’t meant to be an instruction manual. Also: why do they always think they know better? unique link to this extract
• Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it?• Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016?
Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified