People who have “tuned out” of news are less likely to vote, new research has found. CC-licensed photo by Cory Doctorow on Flickr.
The Overspill is going on a break for a week. Next back on Monday October 30.
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It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time. It’s on the topic of LLMs and writing.
A selection of 10 links for you. Early and often!. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Google’s 21-year deal with Apple is the “heart” of monopoly case, judge says • Ars Technica
Ashley Belanger:
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Testimony introduced by the DOJ revealed that Apple was initially hesitant to set a default search engine, and at one point considered creating its own search engine, but only if an appealing revenue-sharing deal couldn’t be struck with Google. The DOJ argued that Apple’s deal with Google prevented one of its biggest rivals in the mobile phone industry from competing against Google in search.
Blocking a major rival from entering the market would seemingly easily be considered an anticompetitive effect of Google’s default contracts, and [the judge, Amit] Mehta has proclaimed that “the heart” of the DOJ’s case rests on whether Google’s 21-year partnership with Apple gave Google monopoly powers over search, Bloomberg reported.
Testimony from Google’s rivals that claimed that Google’s default contracts made it impossible to compete also bolstered the DOJ’s case.
…Raising its defense this week, Google called its first witness to help the search giant rebut the DOJ’s case.
The New York Times dubbed Pandu Nayak, a Google vice president of search, “the face” of Google’s defense, which is that it’s not Google’s access to more data that keeps Google leagues ahead of competitors in search, it’s “brilliant people, working tirelessly to improve its products.”
Nayak joined Google after seven years as a NASA research scientist working on artificial intelligence projects, The Times reported. The AI researcher-turned-Google-search-VP told Mehta that Google “really values” his skills, because at Google “clever software” is allegedly more critical to search innovation than massive quantities of data.
“Bigger is not necessarily better,” Nayak testified, explaining that Google has been improving its search quality by investing in developments in machine learning, deep learning, transformers, and large language models.
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From the sidelines, the obvious question does seem to be “if Google’s so amazing, why pay anything at all to be the default? Why isn’t Apple paying you for the privilege?”
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Threads’ latest growth hack is showing posts on Facebook • TechCrunch
Ivan Mehta:
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While Meta is continuously introducing new features to Threads, the company is also deploying new tricks to ramp up engagement on the platform. In its latest move, the social media giant is showing posts from Threads on Facebook.
In the last 24 hours, multiple users noted that they have been seeing a new “For You on Threads” carousel on the Blue app.
Meta began to show a similar carousel to Instagram users in August. But the company hasn’t mentioned until now if the move has made any difference to Threads’ engagement.
We have asked Meta for a comment and will update the story if we hear back. [They never heard back – Overspill Ed.]
In the last 30 days, Threads has introduced a free edit button and the ability to easily switch between accounts, and is also prepping to launch a “Trending topics” feature. Last month, at TechCrunch Disrupt, Michel Protti, Meta’s chief privacy officer for product, said that the company is aiming to launch separate account deletion for Threads by December. Currently, you can only deactivate your Threads account.
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Makes perfect sense to me: you’ve got a colossal existing social network, and you want to tell people that you’ve got another one (without ads, for now!) that you’re trying to expand? And you can effectively advertise for free? Why wouldn’t you?
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Doctor pleads guilty in dark web murder-for-hire plot • United States Department of Justice
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James Wan, M.D., has pleaded guilty to paying a hitman he found on the dark web to murder his girlfriend.
“Wan used the dark web to conceal his deadly plan,” said U.S. Attorney Ryan K. Buchanan. “Fortunately, his plot was discovered before anyone was killed or injured.”
“Despite his cowardly concealment on the dark web, Wan’s cold hearted murderous plot was averted due to the exceptional work of our team. He will now face the full consequences of the criminal justice system,” said Keri Farley, Special Agent in Charge of FBI Atlanta. “This case shows that the FBI will not tolerate heinous acts of violence and will go to great lengths to protect our citizens.”
According to U.S. Attorney Buchanan, the charges and other information presented in court: On April 18, 2022, while in the Northern District of Georgia, Wan accessed a dark web marketplace from his cellular telephone and submitted an order to have a hitman murder his girlfriend. The order included the victim’s name, address, Facebook account, license plate, and car description. In the order, Wan stated: “Can take wallet phone and car. Shoot and go. Or take car.” Wan then electronically transferred a 50% downpayment of approximately $8,000 worth of Bitcoin to the dark web marketplace.
Two days later, Wan messaged the marketplace’s administrator, stating that the transferred Bitcoin did not show up in his escrow account on the site. The next day, the marketplace administrator asked Wan for the Bitcoin address to which Wan had sent the payment. In response, Wan identified the Bitcoin wallet address and provided a screenshot of the transaction. When the administrator said that the address Wan provided was not in their system, Wan replied, “Damn. I guess I lost $8k. I’m sending $8k to escrow now.” Wan then electronically transferred an additional Bitcoin payment worth approximately $8,000 to the marketplace.
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First, what sort of psychopath are you to want your girlfriend murdered? Second, at least one of such people is a qualified doctor? (Then again, if you want to feel bad about the American medical profession, read Medpage Today’s weekly roundup.)
When the Coen brothers made Fargo, they called it a true tale (it isn’t), but this is absolutely a modern Fargo, crypto and all. (Via Matt Levine’s Bloomberg newsletter.)
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The secret life of Jimmy Zhong, who stole – and lost – more than $3bn in bitcoin • CNBC
Eamon Javers and Paige Tortorelli:
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Athens, Georgia, is home to the University of Georgia, and the police there are used to college town-type crimes: break-ins, bar fights and assorted rowdiness. That kind of thing.
But the 911 call that came in on the night of March 13, 2019, was unlike anything the Athens-Clarke County Police Department had ever encountered.
On the phone was 28-year-old Jimmy Zhong, a local party boy and Georgia alum who frequented Athens’ drinking establishments. He wasn’t like the other town rowdies – Zhong was also a computer expert who had an unusually robust digital home surveillance system.
Now, he was calling to report a crime: hundreds of thousands of dollars in crypto currency that he said had been stolen from his home. Thinking of all that lost money, Zhong was distressed.
“I’m having a panic attack,” Zhong told the dispatcher, according to a recording obtained by CNBC.
Zhong turned down the dispatcher’s offer of an ambulance, and began trying to explain the situation. “I’m an investor in bitcoin, which is like an online thing,” he said.
What happened next would bring an end to a nearly decade long manhunt and solve one of the biggest crimes of the crypto era. And it also would lead to the largest seizure of cryptocurrency from an individual in the history of the Department of Justice.
Zhong’s emergency call that winter evening sent investigators down a long digital trail that led back to the earliest days of bitcoin and revealed a dark truth about the universe of hackers and coders responsible for the creation of cryptocurrencies. It’s a world where heroes and villains traded places and could even be the same people.
None of it would go at all the way Zhong wanted.
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Not ashamed to say I got this from Matt Levine too.
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The Techno-Optimist Manifesto, as edited/redacted by Ben Grosser • Bengrosser
It’s a PDF, so you’ll have to read it. It won’t take you as long as it might have done in the original. Grosser describes himself as an “artist [who] focusses on the cultural, social and political effects of software.” (I spoke to him for parts of Social Warming.)
I guarantee you that an AI would not be able to create this content.
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New York attorney general hits Gemini, Genesis, and Digital Currency Group with lawsuit for defrauding investors of more than $1bn • Fortune Crypto
Leo Schwartz:
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New York Attorney General Letitia James is suing the Winklevoss twin–led exchange Gemini along with the crypto lending firm Genesis and its parent company, Digital Currency Group. The complaint, filed Thursday, alleges that the crypto firms defrauded more than 230,000 investors, including at least 29,000 New Yorkers, of more than $1bn.
Gemini and Genesis have been locked in a cycle of lawsuits over an investment product called Gemini Earn, with litigation also levied by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The accusations from New York’s attorney general are just the latest in a series of legal woes for the crypto empires belonging to the Winklevoss twins and DCG head Barry Silbert.
“These cryptocurrency companies lied to investors and tried to hide more than a billion dollars in losses, and it was middle-class investors who suffered as a result,” James said in a statement shared with Fortune. “This fraud is yet another example of bad actors causing harm throughout the under-regulated cryptocurrency industry.”
…As the lawsuit details, Sam Bankman-Fried’s Alameda was at one time the borrower of nearly 60% of all outstanding loans from Genesis to outside parties. Bankman-Fried is currently in the middle of a criminal trial at a federal court in New York related to the collapse of FTX and Alameda.
While Gemini revised its estimate of Genesis’s credit rating from investment grade to junk in February 2022, it did not publicly reveal the update to investors, the lawsuit alleges. In July 2022, Gemini’s board of managers discussed ending Gemini Earn because of risks associated with Genesis, with some of Gemini’s risk personnel allegedly withdrawing their own investments from the program.
As crypto prices soared in 2021 and early 2022, Gemini Earn drew over 230,000 investors, with enough hailing from New York to catch the attorney general’s attention. The lawsuit details one victim, a retired 73-year-old grandmother who invested her life savings of $199,000 in Gemini Earn, allegedly spurred by its “marketing statements.”
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I don’t know how to feel about someone who reached the age of 73 and had $199,000 saved up who would believe the hype around crypto. By that time haven’t you seen enough naked emperors?
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FBI: thousands of remote IT workers sent wages to North Korea • AP News
Jim Salter:
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Thousands of information technology workers contracting with US companies have for years secretly sent millions of dollars of their wages to North Korea for use in its ballistic missile program, FBI and Department of Justice officials said.
The Justice Department said Wednesday that IT workers dispatched and contracted by North Korea to work remotely with companies in St. Louis and elsewhere in the U.S. have been using false identities to get the jobs. The money they earned was funneled to the North Korean weapons program, FBI leaders said at a news conference in St. Louis.
Federal authorities announced the seizure of $1.5m and 17 domain names as part of the investigation, which is ongoing.
Jay Greenberg, special agent in charge of the St. Louis FBI office, said any company that hired freelance IT workers “more than likely” hired someone participating in the scheme.
…Officials didn’t name the companies that unknowingly hired North Korean workers, or say when the practice began.
Court documents allege that the government of North Korea dispatched thousands of skilled IT workers to live primarily in China and Russia with the goal of deceiving businesses from the US and elsewhere into hiring them as freelance remote employees.
The IT workers generated millions of dollars a year in their wages to benefit North Korea’s weapons programs. In some instances, the North Korean workers also infiltrated computer networks and stole information from the companies that hired them, the Justice Department said.
…Greenberg said the workers used various techniques to make it look like they were working in the US, including paying Americans to use their home Wi-Fi connections.
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I’m going to guess cryptocurrency is involved somewhere? That last detail, about the home Wi-Fi, is pretty remarkable, though. How are people recruited for that? Do they do so knowingly, or are they fooled into it somehow?
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Default “No” to AI training on your stories • The Medium Blog
Tony Stubblebine is the CEO at Medium:
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To give a blunt summary of the status quo: AI companies have leached value from writers in order to spam Internet readers.
In response, we’ve already made clear that Medium is a home for human writing. Then, we built a human-led recommendation system to protect our readers from purely AI-generated text (human curators spot it easily).
Now, we’re adding one more dimension to our response. Medium is changing our policy on AI training. The default answer is now: No.
We are doing what we can to block AI companies from training on stories that you publish on Medium and we won’t change that stance until AI companies can address this issue of fairness. If you are such an AI company, and we aren’t already talking, contact us.
This is such a deep issue. That’s why I want to explain it. In particular, our end game is to get concessions in terms of credit, compensation, and consent from AI companies on behalf of Medium writers. But the question of how much of each is unclear, so it’s crucial that we hear from some of our writers. When we surveyed our authors, 92.2% of you said that you want us to take active measures against AI companies until these issues of fairness can be sorted out.
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Medium is also offering two questions: what if you get a 10% boost on your earnings from Medium if you opt in to letting AI spider your work? And: would you let a search engine be trained on your writing in order to generate AI-summarised answers that credit you – and would your answer be the same if that halved the traffic from the search engine?
I’ve written stuff on Medium and get a coffee’s worth of money from it each month, but don’t recall seeing the survey. Anyway, my answers would be 1) absolutely! 2) trickier, but probably yes on the basis that reputation has value, and someone else will take the opportunity if you don’t, and getting your name in lights increases the chance someone will seek out the rest of your writing.
Weirdly, this was published on September 28, but I’ve only just received the email from Medium pointing to it.
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People experiencing news fatigue are less likely to be voters • The Conversation
Paul Whiteley is a professor at the University of Essex’s department of government:
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The percentage of survey respondents who said that they were “extremely” or “very” interested in news in Britain fell from 70% in 2015 to 43% in 2023. A similar problem has occurred in the US, although it is not as bad as Britain. In the US 67% of respondents were “extremely” or “very” interested in the news in 2015, but this had fallen to 49% by 2023. Both represent huge changes in media consumption of news over this eight-year period.
As a result, large numbers of people are simply disassociating themselves from news about politics and current affairs. They have become disconnected citizens.
…There is a strong relationship between voting turnout and media usage. Only 49% of people who spent no time at all on news gathering turned out to vote while 33% of them did not vote. In fairness, 19% of this group were not eligible to vote, since the survey picked up people who are not on the electoral register. Even so, if we look at the group who spent one to two hours looking for news about politics, 91% of them voted and only 6% failed to do so. It is clear that media usage and participating in elections are closely related.
Further analysis shows that a similar pattern is evident in relation to other forms of democratic participation. It is people who are engaging with the news that are turning up to exercise their right to protest, for example.
Media malaise damages political participation in general and given the massive changes highlighted in the Reuter’s report it could indicate that a lower turnout should be expected in the next general election. If we examine all 21 general elections in Britain since 1945, there is a strong correlation between turnout and the Conservative vote. The more people vote, the better the Conservative party does in the election.
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That last sentence surprised me. I thought the Conservatives (in the UK) would have a bedrock of older voters, who would get swamped by younger left-leaning voters who are less likely to vote, so higher turnout would favour Labour.
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Airlines hit out over Dutch plan to phase out EU fossil fuel subsidies • FT
Alice Hancock and Philip Georgiadis:
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Airline bosses have criticised a Dutch plan for an EU-wide phaseout of fossil fuel subsidies, saying such a move will be fanciful until there are affordable greener travel alternatives.
Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary and Lufthansa chief executive Carsten Spohr were among European airline executives who said at a briefing last week that train fares remained too expensive to replace air travel, and policymakers’ plans to make aviation more sustainable by cutting support would backfire.
The Dutch government announced last month that it spent up to €46.4bn in 2023 supporting the use of fossil fuels, either through direct subsidies or tax schemes that indirectly led to more polluting energies being used. More than €3.6bn went to airlines, as fuel supplied for use in aviation is currently fully exempt from taxation in the EU.
Rob Jetten, the Dutch climate minister, told the Financial Times that reforming the tax system and cutting subsidies was “crucial” to delivering the clean transition, and that governments should “redesign the rules of the market”.
He added, however, that fossil fuel subsidies, particularly ones that resulted from international agreements such as for airlines and shipping, “need to be tackled from the EU level”.
But O’Leary, the Ryanair boss, said: “Until you have some affordable alternative that you can offer to voters and to consumers across Europe, it’s all just pie in the sky.”
…Fuel is one of the single biggest expenses for airlines, and accounts for about 25% of their operating costs. Aviation is also among the toughest sectors to decarbonise, with alternatives to jet fuels still at an embryonic stage.
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What we don’t know – and the story doesn’t say – is what proportion of airlines’ fuel bills that €3.6bn subsidy is. But it seems like an absolutely obvious move, if the EU is serious about climate change, to stop subsidising airlines. I’m sure Mr O’Leary would let us know if train operators were getting help with their energy bills. Yet he thinks the subsidies he gets are part of the natural order of things.
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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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