A Russian submarine commander has been shot dead on a run. Did Strava show where he’d be found? CC-licensed photo by Richard Masoner \/ Cyclelicious 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 9 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Microsoft-Activision deal moves closer as judge denies FTC injunction • CNBC
Jordan Novet:
»
A federal judge in San Francisco has denied the Federal Trade Commission’s motion for a preliminary injunction to stop Microsoft from completing its $68.7bn acquisition of video game publisher Activision Blizzard.
The deal isn’t completely in the clear, though. The FTC can now bring the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, and the two companies must find a way forward to resolve opposition from the Competition and Markets Authority in the United Kingdom.
“This Court’s responsibility in this case is narrow. It is to decide if, notwithstanding these current circumstances, the merger should be halted—perhaps even terminated—pending resolution of the FTC administrative action,” Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley wrote in her decision, published Tuesday. “For the reasons explained, the Court finds the FTC has not shown a likelihood it will prevail on its claim this particular vertical merger in this specific industry may substantially lessen competition. To the contrary, the record evidence points to more consumer access to Call of Duty and other Activision content. The motion for a preliminary injunction is therefore DENIED.”
…“We’re optimistic that today’s ruling signals a path to full regulatory approval elsewhere around the globe, and we stand ready to work with UK regulators to address any remaining concerns so our merger can quickly close,” Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick wrote in a memo to employees.
«
Only took five days of hearings, which doesn’t seem like a lot. Now all eyes are on the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, which has blocked the deal in the UK.
Samsung was so impressed with Apple Vision Pro it delayed its new headset • Android Central
Nicholas Sutrich:
»
The Apple Vision Pro isn’t expected to make its way into the hands of consumers until sometime in early 2024; now, it looks like Android fans will have to wait even longer to give Samsung’s version a try. While it was planned to launch later this year, Samsung has reportedly delayed its XR headset until sometime close to mid-2024.
A report from SBS Biz states that Samsung sent memos to display panel partners saying to expect delays in the Samsung XR headset project which was originally announced in February 2023. According to the report, an internal memo reads, “we decided to review all internal specifications and performance, such as the design and panel of the new XR product.” For note, XR is a term used to encompass AR and VR under one umbrella.
If the report is true, Samsung’s XR headset is going to see a design change and potentially faster performance and higher-resolution displays to better compete with the $3,500 Apple Vision Pro. If that’s true, then it’s clear that Samsung is more interested in competing against Apple’s “laptop for your face” form factor rather than challenging the upcoming Quest 3 for the crown of best VR gaming console.
«
Samsung is going to make something as close as it can to Apple’s product? Shocker.
unique link to this extract
Sarah Silverman sues OpenAI, Meta for being “industrial-strength plagiarists” • Ars Technica
Ashley Belanger:
»
Last Friday, the Joseph Saveri Law Firm filed US federal class-action lawsuits on behalf of Sarah Silverman and other authors against OpenAI and Meta, accusing the companies of illegally using copyrighted material to train AI language models such as ChatGPT and LLaMA.
Other authors represented include Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey, and an earlier class-action lawsuit filed by the same firm on June 28 included authors Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad. Each lawsuit alleges violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, unfair competition laws, and negligence.
The Joseph Saveri Law Firm is no stranger to press-friendly legal action against generative AI. In November 2022, the same firm filed suit over GitHub Copilot for alleged copyright violations. In January 2023, the same legal group repeated that formula with a class-action lawsuit against Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt over AI image generators. The GitHub lawsuit is currently on path to trial, according to lawyer Matthew Butterick. Procedural maneuvering in the Stable Diffusion lawsuit is still underway with no clear outcome yet.
In a press release last month, the law firm described ChatGPT and LLaMA as “industrial-strength plagiarists that violate the rights of book authors.” Authors and publishers have been reaching out to the law firm since March 2023, lawyers Joseph Saveri and Butterick wrote, because authors “are concerned” about these AI tools’ “uncanny ability to generate text similar to that found in copyrighted textual materials, including thousands of books.”
The most recent lawsuits from Silverman, Golden, and Kadrey were filed in a US district court in San Francisco. Authors have demanded jury trials in each case and are seeking permanent injunctive relief that could force Meta and OpenAI to make changes to their AI tools.
«
This has the potential to grind on and on and on. Are there any instances where a case like this has led to a change in practice of something that’s already in widespread use, as AI is going to be without a few months.
unique link to this extract
Did Ukraine use Strava to assassinate a Russian submarine captain? • Task And Purpose
Matt White:
»
Stanislav Rzhitsky was a dedicated mountain biker and runner, who went on rides in nearby mountains and kept a regular running route through the city he lived in, Krasnodar, Russia.
He was also, according to Ukrainian defense officials, a submarine captain who ordered a notorious attack on civilians in 2022 and was shot dead by an assassin while out for a jog on Monday.
And some online sleuths think Ukrainian intelligence operatives might have set up the ambush using Rzhitsky’s account on Strava, a fitness tracker app.
One hint: an otherwise dormant account tagged Rzhitsky with a “kudos” (the Strava version of a “Like”) to one of the dead sailor’s last entries that showed a run on what appears to be his favorite route. That dormant account is named “Кирилл Буданов,” the Cyrillic spelling of Kyrylo Budanov — the name of Ukraine’s shadowy spymaster who runs the nation’s intelligence services.
Budanov, a Ukrainian major general who heads Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence within its military, is widely credited with a long string of intelligence coups before and during the Russian invasion. In 2016, two years after Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine, Budanov led a raid into Crimea that destroyed several Russian helicopters and went toe to toe in a gunfight with elite Russian FSB troops.
Since Russia’s latest invasion in February 2022, Ukrainian intelligence coups include a string of early deaths of Russian Generals, the assassination of a Russian banker and a car bomb attack in Moscow on an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Budanov’s intelligence arms have also been linked to a string of damaging fires in Russian cities and a long string of tactical victories in the field in which Ukrainian forces appeared to be one-step ahead of Russian strategies.
«
Strava considered harmful?
unique link to this extract
Nebraska mom pleads guilty to giving abortion pills to her teen daughter • Jezebel
Susan Rinkunas:
»
Jessica Burgess, 42, admitted to helping her daughter end her pregnancy in the spring of 2022—before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Madison County prosecutors claim that, in April 2022, Burgess gave abortion pills to her then-17-year-old daughter, Celeste, who gave birth to a stillborn fetus estimated to be at about 29 weeks’ gestation. The pair then burned and buried the remains with the help of another person; a 21-year-old man who only got probation.
Someone tipped off the police that Celeste had a stillbirth and buried the remains, and then cops obtained a warrant for Facebook messages between her and her mother. Facebook parent company Meta complied and provided the messages, in which the pair allegedly discussed ending Celeste’s pregnancy with pills. A friend of Celeste’s also told the police she was there when Celeste took the first abortion pill. (Most people charged for self-managed abortion were reported by health care workers or friends and acquaintances.) Celeste was charged as an adult and plead guilty in May; she faces a two-year prison sentence.
«
A lot of anger directed at Facebook for handing over the messages. Were the same people who are angry about this also angry when Facebook handed over messages that had passed between January 6 insurrectionists? You can’t have one without the other. One has to wonder who the “someone” who tipped off the police was, since they’re proximately much more responsible for all this.
unique link to this extract
The trouble with content moderation in the Fediverse • Alex Stamos on Threads
Alex Stamos, who used to be the top security guy at Facebook:
»
Some thoughts on the challenge of @threadsapp integrating ActivityPub support while living up to their normal obligations.
1) Enforcing actor and behavior-based content moderation will be hard.
All content moderation is either against the actor, behavior, or content (ABC model). With Federation, the metadata that big platforms use to tie accounts to a single actor or detect abusive behavior at scale aren’t available (IPs, cookies, JS proof-of-life, TLS signatures, etc).
This is going to make stopping spammers, troll farms, and economically driven abusers much harder. I expect Threads will end up with some kind of soft downranking enforcement on fediverse servers with large numbers of abusive accounts, and hard enforcement when they allow things like CSAM [child sexual abuse material].
Oh, BTW, the CSAM problem in the fediverse is very real. More on that soon, but Meta’s NCMEC reports are going to start including content they get on ActivityPub and that’s going to be dramatic.
«
There’s more to the thread (on Threads). Note too that there’s now a web interface to Threads which is visible to anyone. Stamos, like Eugene Wei, is obligatory reading.
unique link to this extract
You’re so vain, you probably think this app is about you: on Meta and Mastodon • Coyote Cartography
Watts Martin:
»
Threads is not an attack on Mastodon to subvert it for nefarious purposes.
How can I say that so confidently? Because Threads is not a Mastodon instance. It is its own self-contained, centralized social network with plans to let its users follow Mastodon accounts and vice versa.
The difference is not mere semantics. Mastodon doesn’t care what client software you use—or even what server software you use. Threads does. Threads needs you to use their app. It’s baked into the business model. Facebook and Instagram never killed their robust third-party client ecosystem the way Twitter and Reddit recently did, because they never had one. They understood their business model from the get-go.
When push comes to shove, Threads is Instagram. That’s how, as of this writing, it already has over 100M accounts created. If you have an Instagram account, you have a Threads account. If you get a Threads account, you get an Instagram account. Threads has zero-effort access to over one and a half billion users who, by definition, tolerate Meta’s privacy policies and Instagram’s monetization strategies.
By contrast, Mastodon is maybe two and a half million users on a network explicitly positioned as “social networking that’s not for sale”. The users are much less receptive to monetization strategies. And as Mastodon founder Eugen “Gargron” Rothko notes, the design of the network makes it effectively impossible for Threads to collect personally identifiable information on Mastodon users merely interacting with Threads users.
«
This is all a bit “As a Linux user, I’m going to tell you 500 ways that Windows is inferior to Linux”. Mastodon’s problem is that its users are much less receptive to monetization strategies. And it’s harder to use or get into.
I’ve been on Threads for a week; I’ve been on Mastodon for about nine months. I’ve got about a third as many users on Threads as Mastodon. (Neither compares to the raw number on Twitter, but I’ve been on that – and amplified by working at a national news organisation – for about 15 years.)
unique link to this extract
Security researchers latest to blast UK’s Online Safety Bill as encryption risk • TechCrunch
Natasha Lomas:
»
Nearly 70 IT security and privacy academics have added to the clamour of alarm over the damage the UK’s Online Safety Bill could wreak to, er, online safety unless it’s amended to ensure it does not undermine strong encryption.
Writing in an open letter, 68 UK-affiliated security and privacy researchers have warned the draft legislation poses a stark risk to essential security technologies that are routinely used to keep digital communications safe.
“As independent information security and cryptography researchers, we build technologies that keep people safe online. It is in this capacity that we see the need to stress that the safety provided by these essential technologies is now under threat in the Online Safety Bill,” the academics warn, echoing concerns already expressed by end-to-end encrypted comms services such as WhatsApp, Signal and Element — which have said they would opt to withdraw services from the market or be blocked by UK authorities rather than compromise the level of security provided to their users.
«
There’s a long summer recess coming, and the government is in trouble, and it’s going to start running out of Parliamentary time, especially if the (ruling) Tories decide to go for a spring 2024 election – winter 2023 is very unlikely, as is autumn 2023. It’s just possible that the Online Safety Bill will bounce around a bit more and eventually die with this Parliament. Well, we can hope.
unique link to this extract
The Rise of the AI Engineer • Latent Space
“swyx”:
»
I think software engineering will spawn a new subdiscipline, specializing in applications of AI and wielding the emerging stack effectively, just as “site reliability engineer”, “devops engineer”, “data engineer” and “analytics engineer” emerged.
The emerging (and least cringe)1 version of this role seems to be: AI Engineer.
Every startup I know of has some kind of #discuss-ai Slack channel. Those channels will turn from informal groups into formal teams, as Amplitude, Replit and Notion have done. The thousands of Software Engineers working on productionizing AI APIs and OSS models, whether on company time or on nights and weekends, in corporate Slacks or indie Discords, will professionalize and converge on a title – the AI Engineer. This will likely be the highest-demand engineering job of the decade.
AI Engineers can be found everywhere from the largest companies like Microsoft and Google, to leading edge startups like Figma (via Diagram acquisition), Vercel (eg Hassan El Mghari’s viral RoomGPT) and Notion (eg Ivan Zhao and Simon Last with Notion AI) to independent hackers like Simon Willison, Pieter Levels (of Photo/InteriorAI) and Riley Goodside (now at Scale AI). They are making $300k/yr doing prompt engineering at Anthropic and $900k building software at OpenAI. They are spending free weekends hacking on ideas at AGI House and sharing tips on /r/LocalLLaMA2. What is common among them all is they are taking AI advancements and shaping them into real products used by millions, virtually overnight.
Not a single PhD in sight. When it comes to shipping AI products, you want engineers, not researchers.
«
| • 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 