The Download: UK's tobacco ban and Elizabeth Bear's new story

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. As the parent of two little girls, I often think about how their childhood is different from mine. The seven-year-old is learning about AI at school.

The five-year-old is given internet-based homework every week. And they are both absolutely repulsed by the idea of smoking. That was not the prevailing sentiment when I was young.

Smoking was a central part of our culture. Which is why the UK's recent passing of a generational sales ban on tobacco products feels like such a big deal. This is what's described as an "endgame" approach.

While many tobacco control strategies—such as taxation or gory imagery—aim to reduce consumption, policies like the UK's are designed to eliminate it entirely. It's a new approach, and no one knows whether it will work. But it's an enticing prospect—and it's starting to look a lot less radical.

Find out why generational tobacco bans are gaining support. This story is from The Checkup, our weekly biotech newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.

—You do your own time is a short story by Elizabeth Bear, an award-winning speculative fiction author. There we were, a regular murderers' row of librarians. Turning around in the nave of our library to greet the sound of footsteps, pistols leveled in case whoever was coming in didn't respect sanctuary.

I pulled down a solid-state drive full of biographies and case studies of people who had spent time—and sometimes their whole lives—in labor camps or chattelhood. It was illegal to possess, and the feds used smart agents to track down and obliterate any copies. Which was why we were sending one to the stars.

What's left behind when a name is erased from the system? No legacy, no memory—that is the point of media and narrative control. So that was our plan: to preserve it, for later generations, or just as a silent record of our existence.

Read the rest of this short story in full. This story is from the latest edition of our magazine, which is all about engineering. Subscribe now to get a copy, plus all our other issues and a range of subscriber-only content.

I've combed the internet to find you today's most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 An EU lawmaker investigating spyware was hacked by that spyware Citizen Lab found Pegasus spyware on Stelios Kouloglou's phone. ( Wired $) + It said the EU "looks the other way" on spyware abuses.