A confluence of events, including the El Niño ocean current, are warming Earth dramatically. CC-licensed photo by NOAA ESRL on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Currently. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads • Semafor
Max Tani:
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a lawyer for Twitter, Alex Spiro, sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg accusing the company of engaging in “systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.”
“Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights, and demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information,” Spiro wrote in a letter obtained exclusively by Semafor. “Twitter reserves all rights, including, but not limited to, the right to seek both civil remedies and injunctive relief without further notice to prevent any further retention, disclosure, or use of its intellectual property by Meta.”
Spiro accused Meta of hiring dozens of former Twitter employees who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information.”
He also alleged that Meta assigned those employees to develop “Meta’s copycat ‘Threads’ app with the specific intent that they use Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property in order to accelerate the development of Meta’s competing app, in violation of both state and federal law as well as those employees’ ongoing obligations to Twitter.”
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Absolutely hilarious. Twitter fired a ton of employees and acts surprised that the competent ones got hired somewhere? Is Musk trying to make it impossible for them to get work? Meta has been running social networks for a little while now, and if Twitter really wants to start something it might find Meta holding a lot of nasty patents that cover exactly what it does.
Meanwhile, Meta says it had more than 30 million signups within less than 24 hours, though it’s not yet available in Europe due to GDPR considerations.
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Twitter refuses to pay for arbitration it forced on 891 ex-employees, suit says • Ars Technica
Ashley Belanger:
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Twitter started this year with a legal victory that forced thousands of laid-off employees into arbitration. These employees had been suing over grievances like unpaid severance and discrimination, and the win spared Twitter from facing a class-action lawsuit. Now, hundreds of ex-employees have sued again, this time alleging in a class-action claim that “Twitter has refused to engage in arbitration—despite having compelled employees to arbitrate their claims.”
According to the complaint, filed Monday in a San Francisco federal court, Twitter won’t come to the table simply because the company doesn’t want to pay for arbitration. Its arbitration agreements require ex-employees to pay a nominal filing fee to launch claims with the Judicial Arbitration and Mediation Services (JAMS), but after that, Twitter has to pay “all other arbitration fees.”
Faced with paying perhaps millions in fees for approximately 2,000 laid-off employees, Twitter allegedly sent a letter to JAMS in early June, requesting that the fees instead be split between parties.
However, granting that request would be a breach of JAMS’s rules. Thus, JAMS responded by telling Twitter that it would not proceed with any arbitration that did not meet JAMS’s standards, the complaint said. After that, Twitter allegedly told JAMS that it “would refuse to proceed with arbitrations in most states outside California,” attaching “a list of 891 arbitrations in which it was refusing to proceed.”
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It’s just astonishingly miserly. When you treat the people you used to employ like this, how would you expect the people you want to employ, and the people you do employ, to react? What message does it send to them?
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Instagram Threads: why Meta is competing with Twitter • The Verge
Alex Heath:
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Threads is strikingly similar to Twitter in key ways. The app’s main feed shows posts (or, as Mosseri calls them, “threads”) from accounts you follow, along with accounts recommended by Instagram’s algorithm. You can repost something with your own commentary, and replies are featured prominently in the main feed. There is no feed of only people you follow, though that could be added later.
Posts on Threads can be up to 500 characters long and include photos or videos that are up to five minutes long. There are no ads, at least for now — adding those will be a “champagne problem” if Threads achieves enough scale, per Mosseri.
There also isn’t a paid verification scheme that unlocks additional functionality, though Instagram’s blue checks will port over to Threads accounts. With some exceptions for extreme cases like the sharing of child exploitation imagery, moderation actions Meta takes against a Threads account will not impact its associated Instagram account, according to internal documents I’ve seen.
Thanks to the deep ties between Threads and Instagram, you can quickly share posts from Threads to your Instagram story or feed. There’s also the ability to share links to Threads posts in other apps, which Mosseri predicts will be helpful as “we try to bootstrap it out from nothing.”
Meta has been busy this week onboarding a bunch of celebrities from the worlds of Hollywood, music, professional sports, business, and the like to Threads ahead of its public release. Celebs already spotted on the app include Karlie Kloss, Tony Robbins, Dana White, Gordon Ramsay, Ellie Goulding, Jack Black, Russell Wilson, and the Brazilian pop star Anitta.
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Very clever, and hustled along by Musk screwing up Twitter over the weekend.
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Smuggler caught with 420 M.2 SSDs strapped to his stomach • Tom’s Hardware
Zhiye Liu:
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In the latest instalment of hardware smuggling busts by Chinese customs, the authorities have arrested a hardware trafficker who tried to sneak 420 M.2 SSDs into China. Customs estimated the seized SSDs are worth around HK$258,000 or $32,984.94. Perhaps some of those drives are among the best SSDs.
Chinese news outlet HKEPC first spotted the story and reported that the smuggler tried to slip the illicit goods from Macau to Zhuhai through the Gongbei Port. Given the proximity between Macau and Zhuhai, the passage is one of the most popular trafficking routes for mules. It wasn’t long ago that a woman hid more than 200 Alder Lake chips inside her fake silicone belly, or another man tried to stroll into China with 160 Intel processors taped to his body.
Normally, traffickers try to smuggle high-value goods, such as processors or graphics cards. A recent attempt to conceal 70 graphics cards among 617 pounds of live lobster comes to mind. On the contrary, this SSD smuggler opted to sneak in lower-value hardware instead. It isn’t the first time we’ve seen M.2 SSDs transported into China. A recent bust from this year detained a man that hid 84 SSDs inside his scooter. M.2 SSDs still contain metallic parts, so it’s close to impossible to get past metal detectors without raising the alarm with the metal detectors.
Instead of hiding the SSDs inside a package, the perpetrator opted to tape the drives around his body for a bigger haul.
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They do it to avoid the customs duty, and one has to suppose that the penalties are less dramatic than smuggling drugs. Although why would you strap them around your stomach, given that they’re metal and would set off metal detectors?
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Heat records fall around the globe as Earth warms, fast • The New York Times
Brad Plumer and Elena Shao:
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The past three days were quite likely the hottest in Earth’s modern history, scientists said on Thursday, as an astonishing surge of heat across the globe continued to shatter temperature records from North America to Antarctica.
The spike comes as forecasters warn that the Earth could be entering a multiyear period of exceptional warmth driven by two main factors: continued emissions of heat-trapping gases, mainly caused by humans burning oil, gas and coal; and the return of El Niño, a cyclical weather pattern.
Already, the surge has been striking. The planet just experienced its warmest June ever recorded, researchers said, with deadly heat waves scorching Texas, Mexico and India. Off the coasts of Antarctica, sea ice levels this year have plummeted to record lows.
And in the North Atlantic, the ocean has been off-the-charts hot. Surface temperatures in May were 2.9 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1.6 degrees Celsius, warmer than typical for this time of year, breaking previous records by an unusually large margin.
The sharp jump in temperatures has unsettled even those scientists who have been tracking climate change.
“It’s so far out of line of what’s been observed that it’s hard to wrap your head around,” said Brian McNoldy, a senior research scientist at the University of Miami. “It doesn’t seem real.”
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Lessons learned from first genetically-modified pig heart into human patient • ScienceDaily
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the research team performed extensive testing on the limited available tissues in the patient. They carefully mapped out the sequence of events that led to the heart failure demonstrating that the heart functioned well on imaging tests like echocardiography until day 47 after surgery.
The new study [published in The Lancet] confirms that no signs of acute rejection occurred during the first several weeks after the transplant. Likely, several overlapping factors led to heart failure in Mr. Bennett, including his poor state of health prior to the transplant that led him to become severely immunocompromised. This limited the use of an effective anti-rejection regimen used in preclinical studies for xenotransplantation. As a result, the researchers found, the patient was likely more vulnerable to rejection of the organ from antibodies made by the immune system. The researchers found indirect evidence of antibody-mediated rejection based on histology, immunohistochemical staining and single cell RNA analysis.
The use of an intravenous immunoglobulin, IVIG, a drug that contains antibodies, may also have contributed to damage to the heart muscle cells. It was given to the patient twice during the second month after the transplant to help prevent infection, likely also triggering an anti-pig immune response. The research team found evidence of immunoglobulin antibodies targeting the pig vascular endothelium layer of the heart.
Lastly, the new study investigated the presence of a latent virus, called porcine cytomegalovirus (PCMV), in the pig heart, which may have contributed to the dysfunction of the transplant. Activation of the virus may have occurred after the patient’s anti-viral treatment regimen was reduced to address other health issues. This may have initiated an inflammatory response causing cell damage. However, there is no evidence that the virus infected the patient or spread to organs beyond the heart.
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Just in case you’d forgotten: this dates back to January 2022, when David Bennett received a pig heart transplant. He died within two months. There hasn’t been another as far as I can tell.
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The Broke Ape Yacht Crash: lessons for Justin Bieber and other NFT collectors • Coindesk
David Morris:
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Bitter finger-pointing and recrimination are swirling among and around investors in Bored Ape Yacht Club, the “profile pic” (PFP) NFT collection that skyrocketed to immense values in early 2022. The market for Apes has been brutally hammered by a lull in NFT interest, with floor prices – the lowest price for which an Ape can be purchased – declining to 27.4 ETH, from a high of 153.7 ETH in April of 2022.
Floor price is a proxy for the overall value of an NFT collection, so that 82% floor decline can translate into even bigger drops in the value of individual Bored Apes and related assets. In one notable example, Justin Bieber owns an Ape that was supposedly worth $1.3m at one point, and now the highest bid for it is just over $58,000 – a 95% decline.
It should be noted that early Ape holders are still in decent shape, and Bored Apes are still very highly valued and traded relative to other NFT collections. They were also far from the only crypto-asset to experience a wild runup and crash over the last few years. And they are slumping roughly in line with the broader NFT market, which by some measures is at its lowest point in two years.
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A “lull” in NFT interest? More like a complete becalming, though a 95% decline is still, to my mind, about 5% less than it should be. The uselessness of NFTs has been made crystal clear; and even those who believe in them keep finding themselves being hacked. It’s dead, Jim.
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Amazon’s iRobot deal in EU antitrust crosshairs • Reuters
Foo Yun Chee:
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Amazon’s $1.7bn acquisition of robot vacuum cleaner maker iRobot may reduce competition and strengthen Amazon’s position as online marketplace provider, EU antitrust regulators warned on Thursday.
The European Commission opened a full-scale investigation and will decide by November 15 whether to clear or block the deal.
“We continue to work through the process with the European Commission and are focused on addressing its questions and any identified concerns at this stage,” an Amazon spokesperson told Reuters.
Antitrust enforcers around the world have stepped up scrutiny of Big Tech acquiring smaller rivals, concerned about the accumulation of troves of data by a few companies, and big players leveraging their dominance into new markets.
The acquisition announced in August last year would add iRobot’s Roomba robot vacuum to Amazon’s portfolio of smart devices, which include the Alexa voice assistant, smart thermostats, security devices and wall-mounted smart displays.
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Noticeable how much more closely big tech acquisitions are being examined now. It’s taken the EU a hell of a long time to decide to investigate, though.
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As businesses clamour for workplace AI, tech companies rush to provide it • The New York Times
Yiwen Lu:
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For the most part, tech companies are now rolling out four kinds of generative A.I. products for businesses: features and services that generate code for software engineers, create new content such as sales emails and product descriptions for marketing teams, search company data to answer employee questions, and summarize meeting notes and lengthy documents.
“It is going to be a tool that is used by people to accomplish what they are already doing,” said Bern Elliot, a vice president and analyst at the I.T. research and consulting firm Gartner.
But using generative A.I. in workplaces has risks. Chatbots can produce inaccuracies and misinformation, provide inappropriate responses and leak data. A.I. remains largely unregulated.
In response to these issues, tech companies have taken some steps. To prevent data leakage and to enhance security, some have engineered generative A.I. products so they do not keep a customer’s data.When Salesforce last month introduced AI Cloud, a service with nine generative A.I.-powered products for businesses, the company included a “trust layer” to help mask sensitive corporate information to stop leaks and promised that what users typed into these products would not be used to retrain the underlying A.I. model.
Similarly, Oracle said that customer data would be kept in a secure environment while training its A.I. model and added that it would not be able to see the information.
Salesforce offers AI Cloud starting at $360,000 annually, with the cost rising depending on the amount of usage. Microsoft charges for Azure OpenAI Service based on the version of OpenAI technology that a customer chooses, as well as the amount of usage.
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$360k as the starting price? Yikes. It really is a goldrush out there.
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Amazon Studios: big swings hampered by confusion and frustration • The Hollywood Reporter
Kim Masters:
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When it comes to movies, where Amazon’s footprint is expanding following the $8.5nb acquisition of MGM a year ago, a veteran producer says that, in recent years, “there has been no sense of what the philosophy is.”
On the series side, numerous sources say they cannot discern what kind of material Salke and head of television Vernon Sanders want to make. A showrunner with ample experience at the studio says, “There’s no vision for what an Amazon Prime show is. You can’t say, ‘They stand for this kind of storytelling.’ It’s completely random what they make and how they make it.” Another showrunner with multiple series at Amazon finds it baffling that the streamer hasn’t had more success: Amazon has “more money than God,” this person says. “If they wanted to produce unbelievable television, they certainly have the resources to do it.”
But Salke believes the studio’s approach fits Amazon’s broad remit. “I have never been one to say [to the creative community] ‘We need five action franchise shows and three workplace situation comedies.’ That’s the kiss of death,” she says. “You don’t reverse-engineer true creative vision. We are programming for over 250 million households across the entire globe. We would say we have a big, broad audience, and we are looking for content that entertains the four quadrants.” (That is, male and female, under 35 and over 35).
The question that makes many in Hollywood nervous is whether the Amazon Studios overlords in Seattle believe they are getting enough bang for their megabucks. The last thing the industry wants at a time of belt-tightening is a cutback in spending from a deep-pocketed buyer. According to Salke, that concern is misguided. “The proof exists that the giant tentpole shows are driving people to subscribe to Prime,” she says. “Do we pressure ourselves to be more disciplined, more strategic? Of course. We consistently examine if we’re producing the right amount of content at the right value to drive the most engagement across our service.”
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It is a puzzle: now Amazon has MGM, what’s its plan for it? Personally, I watch Prime Video principally for the sport. Citadel, the incredibly expensive thriller, just couldn’t sustain interest – for me and apparently lots of people.
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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. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 