If, like Philips, you use NFC tags in your electric toothbrush heads, expect hackers to investigate what they could do to it. CC-licensed photo by Electric Teeth on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Eating disorder helpline to replace human staff with AI chatbot • Gizmodo
Lauren Leffer:
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NEDA has fired the small group of human staff that coordinated and ran the helpline, effective June 1. In lieu, the nonprofit plans to offer people seeking help access to an AI-powered chatbot named “Tessa” next month, as reported by NPR on Wednesday and confirmed by NEDA to Gizmodo over phone and email.
Staff were informed of the change, and of their firing, just four days after they successfully unionized, according to a blog post written by helpline associate and union member Abbie Harper earlier this month. Members of Helpline Associates United say that—by firing them—NEDA is retaliating against the union. The workers’ organization has repeatedly called the move union busting on the its official Twitter account and elsewhere.
“NEDA claims this was a long-anticipated change and that AI can better serve those with eating disorders,” Harper wrote in the blog. “But do not be fooled—this isn’t really about a chatbot. This is about union busting, plain and simple.”
Helpline workers say they felt under-resourced and understaffed to manage what was being asked of them. Through unionization, they hoped to gain more support. “We asked for adequate staffing and ongoing training to keep up with our changing and growing Helpline, and opportunities for promotion to grow within NEDA,” wrote Harper. “We didn’t even ask for more money.” They’ve filed unfair labor practices charges with the National Labor Relations Board, according to that May 4 blog.
In response to questions about those accusations, NEDA declined to comment.
…NEDA claims the chatbot, is “NOT a replacement for the Helpline.” That’s despite the fact that it is, literally replacing the helpline—which again, won’t exist in any form as of June 1. Tessa is “simply a different program,” emphasized [NEDA’s spokeswoman] over the phone. At one point she also claimed that Tessa isn’t even an AI, despite NEDA’s own press materials repeatedly describing the chatbot as such. In a clarification she wrote, “the simulation chat is assisted, but it’s running a program and isn’t learning as it goes.”
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Once again: the chatbots aren’t (yet) taking the high-paying jobs. They’re going to eat the call centre jobs, the low-paid, high-drudgery ones.
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Hacking my “smart” toothbrush • The Twenty Percent
Cyrill Künzi:
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After buying a new Philips Sonicare toothbrush I was surprised to see that it reacts to the insertion of a brush head by blinking an LED. A quick online search reveals that the head communicates with the toothbrush handle to remind you when it’s time to buy a new one.
From the Philips product page: seems to be REALLY smart! Reverse Engineering Looking at the base of the head shows that it contains an antenna and a tiny black box that is presumably an IC. The next hint can be found in the manual where it says that: “Radio Equipment in this product operates at 13.56 MHz”, which would indicate that it is an NFC tag.
And indeed when holding the brush head to my phone it opens a link to a product page: https://www.usa.philips.com/c-m-pe/toothbrush-heads.
Using the NFC Tools app we can learn a lot about this tag.
…You might have noticed the color of the brush head changing throughout this post. This is because I had to run out and buy a new one after getting locked out of the first one. When having a close look at the contents of address 0x2A which is 43:00:00:00 and page 18 of the datasheet, we can see that the tag is configured to permanently disable all write access after three wrong password attempts. (Which I promptly exceeded when playing around) This means that not even the toothbrush handle itself can write to this head again. Unfortunately, the password of every brush head is unique.
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“I got locked out of my toothbrush head after getting the password wrong three times” is a sentence that would have a lot of people perplexed and a bit worried if you’d said it 20 years ago.
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New horror revealed in sargassum blob • Cayman Islands Headline News
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Scientists have discovered that a flesh-eating bacteria is interacting with sargassum and decaying plastic in the ocean, creating the perfect “pathogen” storm that has implications for both marine life and public health. Researchers at Florida Atlantic University have found that the bacteria might be adapting to plastic and living in sargassum, washing up on beaches in a new environmental horror.
The seaweed has already been washing up on local shores over the last few weeks. Given the current size of the Atlantic sargassum belt, dubbed the “great blob”, as it has grown to reach some 5,500 miles across and is currently moving through our region, we can expect to see much more in the coming months.
It is already a major problem for the tourism sector, as visitors complain about the smell and efforts to get rid of it cause beach erosion. The mass of seaweed doubled every month between November and January, according to the University of South Florida’s Optical Oceanography Lab, which tracks the mass, and a new record for sargassum was set in the Caribbean Sea in April.
The Vibrio bacteria, which is now colonising the blob, is found in the ocean the world over and already poses a significant threat, but little is known about the ecological relationship of vibrios with the seaweed and the degrading plastic.
“Plastic is a new element that’s been introduced into marine environments and has only been around for about 50 years,” said Tracy Mincer, PhD, corresponding lead author and an assistant professor of biology at FAU. “Our lab work showed that these Vibrio are extremely aggressive and can seek out and stick to plastic within minutes. We also found that there are attachment factors that microbes use to stick to plastics, and it is the same kind of mechanism that pathogens use.”
The study, published in the journal Water Research, illustrates that open ocean vibrios represent an up-to-now undescribed group of microbes, some representing potential new species, possessing a blend of pathogenic and low nutrient acquisition genes, reflecting their pelagic habitat and the substrates and hosts they colonise.
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Fungi yesterday, a bizarre alliance between seaweed, bacteria and plastic today.
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Delta Air Lines sued over carbon neutrality claims • Associated Press via Time
Ed Davey:
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A consumer class action lawsuit filed Tuesday claims Delta Air Lines inaccurately billed itself as the world’s “first carbon-neutral airline” and should pay damages. The complaint in federal court in California alleges the airline relied on carbon offsets that were largely bogus.
Polluting companies around the world buy carbon credits to cancel out their emissions with projects that promise to absorb carbon dioxide out of the air or prevent pollution. But they’ve been the spotlight in recent months with claims their benefits are exaggerated. Delta is a big customer, purchasing credits from projects including wind and solar projects in India and an Indonesian swamp forest, the lawsuit says.
The airline did not respond to a request for comment.
The case, filed by Glendale, California resident Mayanna Berrin, claims to act on behalf of anyone who flew Delta while living in the state since March 2020. It says benefits from the offsets are likely to be temporary and would have happened even without the firm’s investment. For a carbon credit to be valid, it must provide a benefit that would not have happened otherwise.
Berrin argues this enabled the firm to gain market share and charge higher prices. She argues through her attorneys, Haderlein and Kouyoumdjian LLP, that she wouldn’t have bought the tickets — or would have paid less — had she known the nature of the offsets.
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Berrin says that she believed flying with Delta (which is “Air Lines”, not Airlines) was “more ecologically conscious”, which feels like hairsplitting of sorts. But it would be good to see this lawsuit progress and force Delta to confront the question of what the hell carbon offsets really mean.
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Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes turns herself in for 11-year prison term • The Guardian
Kari Paul:
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The Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes has turned herself in for an 11-year prison sentence, marking a final chapter in a years-long fraud saga that riveted Silicon Valley.
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Great. Let’s not speak again of her before 2033, or 2028 with good behaviour.
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Notes on losing • The New Yorker
Jay Caspian Kang is a (very) amateur tennis player in his 40s:
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In the past nine months, I have played around a hundred tennis matches and lost roughly ninety of them. The tally is far more brutal than just the win-loss record. Each week, I spend about ten hours on the court, and at least three hours watching YouTube tutorials that cheerily tell me how I can fix my serve with the aid of a towel or a set of small plastic cones. Then I take a few more hours to browse Instagram ads for racquets, shoes, or polarized sunglasses that promise to be the last tennis sunglasses I will ever need to buy. Despite these commitments, I lose to all skill levels and styles—U.S.T.A. 2.0s, U.S.T.A. 3.5s, pushers, serve machines, young and old—at the same rate.
When I’m losing, I try to meditate, channel my rage, and take it one point at a time. I talk to my right arm, coaxing it through the proper forehand motions: palm down on the backswing, hips rotate, full extension, explode through the ball on the front foot. Nothing works. If I’m up 5–2 in a set, I almost always melt down and lose. On the rare occasion that I actually win a set, I lose the next one 6–1, and then put up an uninspired fight in the third, like an exhausted child arguing for a later bedtime. Then I succumb to fate: usually a 6–3 loss, and a racquet tossed against the ground, net, or fence—not enough of a slam to cause real damage, but hard enough to show that I’m actually mad that it happened again.
The other regulars have never expressed any displeasure with my streams of self-directed profanity, but I’m sure they have their thoughts, all of which are justified. I am not proud of my behavior, but I also find that I can’t quite control myself when I inexplicably whack a sitter into the bottom of the net, or when I stupidly try for a slice shot while my opponent is standing right at the net.
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Obviously the other regulars never express any displeasure, because he keeps losing to them. Who doesn’t love playing an opponent who does all the hard work for you? On Twitter, people are recommending (as do I) that he read Timothy Gallwey’s book The Inner Game Of Tennis. It would certainly save him having to remember all those instructions when he went to hit a shot.
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Multiplying solar and battery factories put net zero in closer reach • Bloomberg via The Malaysian Reserve
Nathaniel Bullard:
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A new analysis from the International Energy Agency shows the current industrial picture for clean energy. It updates the agency’s latest report on energy technology after only a few months, and for good reason: Clean-tech manufacturing is expanding so fast that solar and battery manufacturing capacity are now on track to meet the 2030 milestones set out in the IEA’s scenario for net zero CO2 emissions by 2050.
The report details the industrial characteristics of different technologies. You might group them according to two variables. The first is their relative scale in 2021. Two years ago, the existing capacity for making solar, wind and heat-pump technology could have provided about a quarter of the equipment needed to be on track for net zero, per the IEA. But that same year, the capacity for making batteries and hydrogen electrolyzers was far below what a net zero pathway would require.
The second variable is the speed with which capacity has expanded since 2021. Solar has grown the most. It was already up to levels consistent with net zero by the end of 2022; add in this year’s announcements, and solar capacity “would comfortably exceed the deployment needs” of the IEA’s model in 2030. Battery-making ability grows from 6% to 97% of net zero levels (inclusive of first-quarter announcements); electrolyzers from 4% to nearly 60%.
On the other hand, heat pumps and wind have not grown their 2021 capacity very much yet. Our ability to make heat pumps today would only meet about two-fifths of the net zero goal. Wind only gets to 29% of what a net-zero pathway would require at the end of the decade.
Put the variables together and we have three different technology profiles in the 2020s so far. Solar has scaled both significantly and fast. Battery and electrolyzer capacity are much further from the scale needed, but growing quickly. Wind and heat pumps, finally, are closer to net zero scale but growing more slowly.
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Which is all good! But making the products available is only half – maybe not even half – the struggle. As the next link shows…
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Texas Senate moves to shut down renewable energy permanently • Reform Austin
Jef Rouner:
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House Bill 1500, the review and reauthorization of the Public Utilities Commission …must pass to allow the PUC to operate, and is often a graveyard for other measures that couldn’t get passed under normal review. There are three of these zombie bills latching onto HB 1500.
The first is from Charles Schwertner (R-Bryan). His amendment would require all electricity providers to have a minimum energy quota with penalties for falling under that number. This affects renewable energy more than fossil fuels because the sources are less consistent. The requirement would force wind and solar to pay when they aren’t producing, making them far less profitable.
Phil King (R-Weatherford) has another amendment, This one would spread the cost of transmission lines more evenly across customers’ electric bills. This affects wind and solar more because their sources tend to be in more remote areas and cost more to run lines. The amendment would impact the low cost of renewable energy, making it less attractive to customers.
Finally, there is Lois Kolkhorst (R-Brenham). Her amendment prohibits wind and solar generators from being within a few miles of a historic site, river, natural area, state park or wildlife management area. It’s based off a targeted campaign of misinformation about the environmental dangers of renewable energy, most of which is inaccurate, overblown, and far exceeded by the continued reliance on fossil fuels.
It’s unsurprising considering that much of the Republican Party in Texas is guided by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, itself funded by two Texas oil and gas moguls. The TPPF has repeatedly lobbied against accountability for fossil fuel generators and overstated the dangers of renewable power.
These amendments, if passed, will make renewable energy much more expensive to produce, as well as making new facilities almost impossible to build.
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Brain–spine interface allows paralysed man to walk using his thoughts • Nature
Dyani Lewis:
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Twelve years ago, a cycling accident left Gert-Jan Oskam, now 40, with paralysed legs and partially paralysed arms, after his spinal cord was damaged in his neck. But these days, Oskam is back on his feet and walking, thanks to a device that creates a ‘digital bridge’ between his brain and the nerves below his injury.
The implant has been life-changing, says Oskam. “Last week, there was something that needed to be painted and there was nobody to help me. So I took the walker and the paint, and I did it myself while I was standing,” he says.
The device — called a brain–spine interface — builds on previous work2 by Grégoire Courtine, a neuroscientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and his colleagues. In 2018, they demonstrated that, when combined with intensive training, technology that stimulates the lower spine with electrical pulses can help people with spinal-cord injuries to walk again.
Oskam was one of the participants in that trial, but after three years, his improvements had plateaued. The new system makes use of the spinal implant that Oskam already has, and pairs it with two disc-shaped implants inserted into his skull so that two 64-electrode grids rest against the membrane covering the brain.
When Oskam thinks about walking, the skull implants detect electrical activity in the cortex, the outer layer of the brain. This signal is wirelessly transmitted and decoded by a computer that Oskam wears in a backpack, which then transmits the information to the spinal pulse generator.
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This is a few days old, but still worth noting: a remarkable advance for people with spinal cord injuries. Though not without complications: one of the skull implants he received had to be removed because of infection.
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AI poses ‘risk of extinction,’ industry leaders warn • The New York Times
Kevin Roose:
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A group of industry leaders warned on Tuesday that the artificial intelligence technology they were building might one day pose an existential threat to humanity and should be considered a societal risk on a par with pandemics and nuclear wars.
“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war,” reads a one-sentence statement released by the Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit organization. The open letter was signed by more than 350 executives, researchers and engineers working in AI.
The signatories included top executives from three of the leading AI companies: Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI; Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google DeepMind; and Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic.
Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, two of the three researchers who won a Turing Award for their pioneering work on neural networks and are often considered “godfathers” of the modern AI movement, signed the statement, as did other prominent researchers in the field. (The third Turing Award winner, Yann LeCun, who leads Meta’s AI research efforts, had not signed as of Tuesday.)
The statement comes at a time of growing concern about the potential harms of artificial intelligence.
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The best comment on this came from former Facebook and Google staffer Rob Leathern: “cool, cool, now do climate change please.” Because we can be absolutely certain that climate change is here, and is a thing, and needs to be mentioned alongside pandemics and nuclear war as a current, huge threat.
Instead: this.
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| • 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
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 