Google ignores privacy opt-out signals 87% of the time, a research ship accidentally found an unmapped island, and the telegraph played a direct role in wiping out 5 billion passenger pigeons. Plus GPS physics, Pepsi's accidental navy, and Argentina's economic collapse. [DVYio Newsletter](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/Hww6zXHc) Tech [A sticker reading "WE RESPECT YOUR Privacy!" on a wall with red graffiti, next to an Eye of Providence symbol.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/bMkfaQuK) [Opt-out means nothing: audit finds Google ignores the signal 87% of the time](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/bMkfaQuK) Your browser has a way to tell websites "please don't track me." It's called Global Privacy Control (GPC), a standard signal built into some browsers and extensions. When you visit a site, your browser sends a small flag that says, in effect, "this user has opted out of tracking." Under California's privacy law (the CCPA), companies are legally required to honour it. An independent audit by webXray checked traffic across more than 7,000 popular websites in California and found that most major tech companies are ignoring it. Google failed to respect the opt-out 87% of the time. The mechanism is straightforward: your browser sends a code (sec-gpc: 1) telling Google's servers you don't want to be tracked. Google's servers respond by setting an advertising cookie anyway. It's not subtle. The audit describes it as "hiding in plain sight." Microsoft and Meta had similar findings. All three companies pushed back on the research. Google called it a "fundamental misunderstanding" of how its products work. The CCPA allows fines per violation, and webXray estimates the non-compliance could add up to billions. Whether regulators actually pursue that is a separate question, but the audit makes the technical case pretty hard to dismiss. [A modular satellite station in Earth orbit featuring rows of server racks and large cooling radiators against a black sky.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/v6Usi2VN) [What would it actually take to move data centers into orbit?](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/v6Usi2VN) Data centres generate a lot of heat. On the ground, you usually deal with it using water-cooled systems and giant fans. The pitch for space is that you can just... radiate it away into the cold vacuum. Which sounds obvious until you remember that vacuum is also a perfect insulator. There's no air to carry heat away from the hardware. The only escape route is radiation, which is slow and requires large surface areas to work at scale. So "no cooling problem" turns out to be more like "a different, weirder cooling problem." That's just one of four engineering puzzles MIT Technology Review lays out. The others: getting hardware up there cheaply enough to make the maths work (a million data centres is a lot of launches, even with Starship), beaming data back to Earth fast enough to actually be useful, and maintaining the hardware once it's there (no engineer is popping up to swap a failed drive). SpaceX, Google, Amazon, and a startup called Starcloud are all circling the idea anyway. Starcloud already tested an Nvidia H100 chip in orbit last November, which is a real milestone. But "we got a chip to survive up there" and "we have a working, economically viable orbital data centre" are separated by a fairly large gap. [An abstract, soft-focus composition of hazy green and light blue shapes with diffuse lighting.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/9XFBKEY6) [OpenAI is giving cybersecurity defenders early access to a more capable, less restricted model](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/9XFBKEY6) Imagine your organisation's security team is the only thing standing between your users' data and a well-funded attacker who now has their own AI tools. That's the threat model OpenAI is designing around. The Trusted Access for Cyber program gives verified security professionals access to a version of GPT-5.4 specifically tuned for defensive work: finding vulnerabilities, understanding attack patterns, and fixing problems in code before anyone exploits them. The program is now open to thousands of individual defenders and hundreds of teams responsible for protecting critical infrastructure. The practical tool in the mix is Codex Security, which scans codebases for security flaws and suggests fixes. Think of it like a spell-checker for dangerous code, running at a scale no human review team could match. OpenAI is explicitly trying to avoid becoming a free upgrade for attackers, so access is gated on confirming you're working on the defensive side. It's an imperfect filter, but it's a real one. This Week I Learnt [Steve Jobs stands on stage in front of a white Apple logo, holding up the original iPhone.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/JiHFNbqd) [Steve Jobs spotted a scratch on his iPhone prototype and redesigned it six weeks before launch](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/JiHFNbqd) [The original iPhone was announced with a plastic screen. Then Jobs noticed his prototype was already scratched in his pocket, weeks before it shipped. So he changed it. He rang Corning, a glass manufacturer, and told them he needed millions of ultra-tough glass screens delivered in a matter of months. Corning had actually developed a chemically-strengthened glass back in the 1960s (they called it "Muscular Glass" internally, later rebranded as Gorilla Glass) but never found a market for it. It had been sitting on the shelf for 40 years. Jobs convinced them to convert a whole factory and restart production essentially from scratch. Corning's CEO later said he told Jobs it was impossible on that timeline. Jobs told him he'd figure it out. They did. The glass shipped in time. The iPhone launched with it. Gorilla Glass is now on billions of devices. A scratched pocket prototype six weeks before launch changed one of the most consequential materials decisions in consumer electronics. A tiny, mundane detail cascading into an entire industry.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/JiHFNbqd) [A long, curved stainless steel coffee counter in Joe Blake's, set against warm backlit amber wall panels.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/HdQs7BEN) [Neon orange Joe Blake's sign glows above a counter of fresh croissants in a minimalist, dimly lit shop.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/HdQs7BEN) [A person stands behind a translucent, amber-toned glass partition that glows with warm, diffused light.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/HdQs7BEN) [A minimalist coffee shop interior featuring a curved metallic counter and small pink cups on wall-mounted shelves.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/HdQs7BEN) [Pedestrians blur as they walk past a minimalist coffee shop entrance next to an Underground station on High Holborn.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/HdQs7BEN) [Joe Blake's Coffee Shop](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/HdQs7BEN) [London, UK](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/HdQs7BEN) Poll When a website asks for your privacy/cookie preferences, what do you actually do? Click "Accept All" and move on Click "Reject All" if it's easy Dig into the settings Use a browser that decides for me Last Week's Poll Free seat on a loop around the Moon. Do you take it? Yes, without hesitation 43% Yes, but I'd be terrified 31% Maybe, if the safety record was solid 17% No, too risky 3% No, space doesn't interest me 6% [Three chrome coffee bags with 7 A.M. embossed, featuring heat-treated iridescent gradients on the bottom.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/ZyNfd85u) [7 A.M Coffee](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/ZyNfd85u) [omsky studio](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/ZyNfd85u) Science [Aerial view of a small, dark rock island surrounded by white waves in a vast, greyish-blue Arctic ocean.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/rofhtAwM) [We just found an island that wasn't on any maps](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/rofhtAwM) [The Polarstern was sheltering from bad weather in the Weddell Sea when someone on the bridge noticed what looked like a dirty iceberg. On closer inspection: rock. An island. But… it wasn't on any nautical chart. It had been marked as a vague "danger zone" on existing maps, but nobody knew what the hazard actually was. Turns out it was land. About 130 metres long, 50 metres wide (roughly the same length as the Polarstern itself). The crew carefully circled it, mapped the seabed underneath with sonar, and sent up a drone to photograph it. This was the first time it had ever been properly surveyed. The fact that this happened in 2026 is a little mind-blowing. We think of exploration as something that ended a century ago, but there are still corners of the planet where the charts say "something's here, we're not sure what." Polar waters are poorly mapped, remote coastlines are still being corrected, and we've genuinely charted more of the Moon's surface than the ocean floor. The island will now be formally recorded and added to nautical charts. It'll get coordinates, a name eventually. It'll officially exist. Which raises the obvious question: how many more danger zones on old maps are hiding something nobody's looked at closely yet?](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/rofhtAwM) [Diagram showing the Lunar Pathfinder satellite relaying signals between Earth and users on the Moon’s surface and orbit.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/KW5zTnk9) [A relay satellite could end the Moon's 40-minute comms blackout for good](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/KW5zTnk9) When the Artemis II crew passed behind the Moon last week, Houston went quiet for 40 minutes. No comms, no telemetry, nothing. It's been that way since Apollo: the Moon is just in the way, and radio waves travel in straight lines. A company called Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL), based in Guildford, UK, is trying to fix that with a spacecraft called Lunar Pathfinder. The idea is straightforward: park a relay satellite in an orbit where it can see both the far side of the Moon and the Earth at the same time, so signals have somewhere to bounce off. If your rover or crewed spacecraft can see Lunar Pathfinder, and Lunar Pathfinder can see Earth, you've got a connection. Launch is planned for spring 2027. The timing makes sense given Artemis is putting humans back in lunar orbit and eventually on the surface, including the far side, where the blackout problem is permanent rather than temporary. [A chimpanzee with its mouth wide open, baring teeth and screaming, surrounded by several others in dense green foliage.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/QaXHrX59) [Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in vicious 'civil war'](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/QaXHrX59) The Ngogo chimpanzees in Uganda's Kibale National Park were, until recently, the world's largest known wild chimpanzee community: nearly 200 individuals living together across two loose subgroups, Western and Central. For decades, they got along. Then, around 2015, something shifted. By 2018, the groups had fractured entirely. Since then, researchers have recorded 24 targeted killings, 17 of them infants, as Western chimps systematically attack the Central group. No single cause explains it. The study (published in Science) points to a cluster of disruptions between 2014 and 2017: key social figures died, the alpha leadership changed, and a respiratory epidemic tore through the population. Individually, maybe manageable. Together, they seem to have unravelled whatever held the group's social fabric together. What makes this unsettling isn't just the violence. It's the before-and-after. These weren't strangers. The lead researcher describes chimps that used to hold hands and groom each other now hunting each other down. The question researchers have is whether this tells us something about how lethal conflict actually starts, in chimps and possibly in early humans too. Not ancient rivalry, but a tipping point reached after enough social bonds quietly broke. [Diagram showing how four satellites (A, B, C, and D) project intersecting signal rings on Earth to determine a GPS location.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/YcyyjGhU) [Time, geometry, and a bit of Einstein. The Physics of GPS.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/YcyyjGhU) Your phone knows where you are because of some very precise timekeeping happening 20,000 kilometres above your head. Every GPS satellite broadcasts a radio signal at the speed of light. Your phone catches that signal and measures how long the trip took. Light travels at roughly 300,000 kilometres per second, so even a billionth of a second of delay translates to about 30 centimetres of distance. That tiny measurement is the whole foundation of GPS. But knowing your distance from one satellite only tells you so much. You could be anywhere on a ring around that satellite's position, like standing somewhere on the edge of a bullseye without knowing which part of the edge you're on. Add a second satellite and you get a second ring. Two rings can only intersect in two places. Add a third, and those three rings cross at exactly one spot on Earth's surface. That's you. There's a catch, though. That whole system only works if the timing is perfect, and your phone's clock isn't anywhere near as precise as the atomic clocks on the satellites. Even a tiny error throws the calculated distances off, making all three rings fail to meet at a clean point. So GPS uses a fourth satellite as a kind of error-correction tool. With four distance measurements, the maths can figure out both your position and how far out your phone's clock is. On top of that, the article covers a few other things the system has to account for: relativistic effects (time actually runs slightly faster in orbit than on the ground, which Einstein predicted and which GPS engineers have to correct for), satellite geometry (a cluster of satellites all bunched up in the same patch of sky gives worse accuracy than ones spread apart), and various atmospheric delays. Worth a look if you've ever wondered why your satnav occasionally puts you in a river. Data [Line chart comparing GDP per capita from 1820 to 2022. Argentina leads Spain until the 1970s, after which Spain grows rapidly to over $30,000, while Argentina plateaus and fluctuates below $20,000.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/ohHicYRk) [Argentina went from richer than Spain to poorer than Colombia in two generations](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/ohHicYRk) [In 1816, Argentina broke from Spain as an equal in economic terms, give or take. Then it pulled ahead. By the late 1800s it was one of the richest countries in the world, richer than its former colonial ruler, and it held that lead well into the 20th century. Then things diverged. Spain had a burst of rapid growth in the 1960s and caught up by the mid-70s. After that it kept climbing but Argentina didn't. A series of economic crises interrupted whatever growth there was, and the gap widened. Argentina's GDP per capita today is closer to Colombia's than to Spain's. Two countries that started from the same point, 200 years later on completely different trajectories. It's a useful reminder that "wealthy country" isn't a permanent status. It's the output of choices, institutions, and compounding effects over generations.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/ohHicYRk) History [A passenger pigeon perched on a wooden telegraph pole, overlooking a vintage steam train on tracks through an autumn forest.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/a3Hp3FoN) [How the telegraph helped wipe out 5 billion birds](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/a3Hp3FoN) Passenger pigeons were once the most abundant bird in North America, possibly on Earth. Estimates put their numbers at 3 to 5 billion. Flocks were so dense they'd darken the sky for hours as they passed overhead. They were gone by 1914. The proximate cause was hunting. But what made the hunting so devastating wasn't just appetite or weaponry, it was coordination. The telegraph let hunters share real-time information about where the flocks were roosting. The railways got hunters there quickly, and shipped the birds back to city markets just as fast. Two relatively new technologies, combined, turned a population of billions into nothing in a few decades. What's interesting is that the pigeons' sheer abundance may have made them more vulnerable, not less. Because there were so many of them, they were commercially viable to hunt at industrial scale. A smaller population wouldn't have been worth the logistics. The genomics research linked here digs into what the passenger pigeon's DNA can tell us about how it lived and died. Specifically, whether the species had underlying genetic fragility, or whether it was simply overwhelmed by external pressure. The answer, broadly, is the latter. This wasn't a species on the edge. It was a species that got hit faster than any natural system could absorb. [Nikita Khrushchev drinks from a Pepsi cup while Richard Nixon looks on during the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/wGXLXRrP) [Pepsi briefly had a bigger navy than most countries. Here's how that happened.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/wGXLXRrP) In 1959, Richard Nixon turned up in Moscow for a trade exhibition and ended up in a televised argument with Khrushchev about which system, capitalism or communism, actually made life better. The argument happened in a model American kitchen (hence "the Kitchen Debate"), surrounded by washing machines and colour TVs. There was also a Pepsi stand. Khrushchev tried one, liked it, and that moment got photographed and broadcast everywhere. That single cup of Pepsi did more for the brand than most ad campaigns could. Pepsi's man at the exhibition, Donald Kendall, had engineered the photo opportunity deliberately, and it paid off: Khrushchev's endorsement made Pepsi the first Western consumer product to be sold inside the Soviet Union, eventually manufactured there using local water and distributed at scale. The catch was that the Soviets had no hard currency to pay with. So in 1989 they literally traded warships for syrup, handing over a fleet of submarines and frigates in exchange for continued Pepsi supply rights. Pepsi briefly held more naval hardware than most countries. They sold it for scrap. Design [Unfolder app on a Mac showing a 3D Moai statue model alongside its flattened, printable papercraft template parts.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/dYBb8yoU) [Unfolder (Mac app) turns any 3D model into a printable papercraft template in seconds](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/dYBb8yoU) [Papercraft is one of those hobbies that sounds relaxing right up until you're manually tracing a 3D shape onto flat paper and nothing lines up. Unfolder handles the hard part: give it a 3D model and it works out how to flatten it into a printable template, with fold and cut lines already marked. The auto-unfolding is smart enough that you often don't need to touch much. But if a part lands awkwardly, you can click edges directly in the 2D or 3D view to split and rejoin pieces however you like. Flaps (the little tabs that hold everything together when you fold it up) can be added, removed, reshaped, or auto-optimised so they don't overlap each other. Export options cover printing, editing in other apps, or sending straight to a CNC cutter. Free trial available, with a one-off purchase or Mac App Store option if you want to keep it.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/dYBb8yoU) [A blue grid-based interface displays a cluster of various Braille patterns arranged on white and blue tiles.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/otqE2Cno) [Charcuterie: A Visual Unicode Explorer](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/otqE2Cno) Unicode contains over 150,000 characters. Most of us have seen maybe 500 of them. Charcuterie is a browser-based tool that lets you wander the rest of it visually. The interesting bit is how it finds related glyphs. It doesn't just group by category or script name. It renders each character as an image, runs it through SigLIP 2 (a model that turns images into vectors based on what they look like), then finds neighbours in that vector space. So a Latin "o", a Greek "ο", and a Cyrillic "о" end up close together because they're visually similar, even though they're technically different characters in different scripts. Useful if you're a designer hunting for obscure symbols, or just curious what's living in the far corners of Unicode. [A grid of logo cards showing Apple, Google, Nike, OpenAI, and more over transparent checkerboard backgrounds with PNG download buttons.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/bQbm4FZt) [Transparent PNGs for 1,000+ brand logos](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/bQbm4FZt) Paste in a list of brand names, pick a size (64px up to 1024px), and download a ZIP of transparent-background PNGs in one go. No sign-up required. The free tier covers 20 logos a day, which is plenty for most one-off jobs. Paid plans exist if you need higher volume or API access. Random [A collage of gritty mockups featuring peeling posters, weather-worn billboards, and litter, all displaying the word Fockups.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/sD7S7ruq) [Mockups where the billboard is peeling and the poster got rained on](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/sD7S7ruq) [Most mockups show your design floating in perfect light, next to a flawless cappuccino, on a wall that's never seen rain. Fockups does the opposite. Created by designer Wytze Hoogslag, it's a set of Photoshop mockups where things have gone wrong: posters peeling, billboards weathered, smartphones cracked, business cards bent. The kind of conditions your design will actually face. There are two sets. The original has 8 mockups (smartphone, flags, billboard, posters, business card). Fockups 2 adds 10 more, including poster holders, a bottle label, and a presentation. Both are free to download. It's a useful reality check. If your design still looks good when it's rained on, maybe it's a good design.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/sD7S7ruq) [A dashboard shows the UK's wealth distribution in 2023. The bottom 50% of the population holds only 4.6% of the national wealth, while the top 10% holds 57.1% combined (across the Top 10-1%, Top 1-0.1%, and ultra-wealthy categories). The middle 40% holds 38.3%. Progress bars illustrate the disparity between population size and wealth share for each group.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/dqJtJmo8) [Where you actually sit in your country's wealth distribution](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/dqJtJmo8) Type in your net worth and this site tells you exactly where you sit in your country's wealth distribution, then shows how many working lifetimes a median earner would need to reach the top 1%. (Answer for the US: 351 years.) The gap between mean wealth ($511k per adult in the US) and median ($81k) tells the real story before you even enter a number. 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