Future Apple Watch buyers might have to take blood oxygen readings using more traditional methods if a trade ban is enforced. CC-licensed photo by Chic Bee on Flickr.
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A selection of 8 links for you. Giving it 110%. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Apple halting Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales: Here’s why • 9to5Mac
Chance Miller:
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In a statement to 9to5Mac, Apple has announced that it will soon halt sales of its flagship Apple Watch models in the United States.
The Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 will no longer be available to purchase from Apple starting later this week.
The move comes following an ITC ruling as part of a long-running patent dispute between Apple and medical technology company Masimo around the Apple Watch’s blood oxygen sensor technology.
The Apple Watch Ultra 2 and Apple Watch Series 9 will no longer be available to order from Apple’s website in the US after 3 p.m. ET on Thursday, December 21. In-store inventory will no longer be available from Apple retail locations after December 24.
The International Trade Commission announced its ruling in October, upholding a judge’s decision from January. This sent the case to the Biden administration for a 60-day Presidential Review Period.
During this process, President Biden could veto the ruling, although this has not yet occurred. The Presidential Review Period expires on December 25, and Apple is making this announcement today to “preemptively” take steps to comply with the ITC’s decision.
Apple says that the ITC’s ban only impacts sales of the Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 because those devices offer blood oxygen monitoring capabilities. The lower-end Apple Watch SE, which lacks this sensor, is unaffected and will remain available for sale.
The ITC’s decision only prohibits Apple from selling the affected Apple models. For now, this means the devices will remain available for purchase from other outlets including Amazon and Best Buy. Our friends over at 9to5Toys also have details on some get-the-while-can Apple Watch deals.
However, the order does block all Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 imports to the United States after December 25. At this point, Apple would also be prohibited from selling those devices to resellers, as well. So if the ruling is upheld, it could subsequently impact Apple Watch availability for other retailers as well.
Meanwhile, any Apple Watch with a blood oxygen sensor that has already been sold is unaffected by today’s news. The blood oxygen sensor first debuted with the Apple Watch Series 6 in 2020.
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Unwary you looks at this and thinks “wow, Apple is really screwed. No more Watch sales.” But as Neil Cybart points out, look closer: Apple’s basically telling everyone who wants a Watch to BUY IT NOW. The Christmas deadline for Biden to waive the ruling is close, but conveniently placed: imagine if it had been on December 18th, or 8th. But the day when the shops are all shut? Sail on.
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Are AI language models in hell? • Robin Sloan
Robin Sloan is an author and commentator:
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You can get into deep debates about the role of language in the human mind, but no one would suggest that it repre sents the totality of our expe ri ence. Humans obviously enjoy a rich sensorium — one that goes way beyond the “big five”, by the way. Our language draws on these sensations; vibrates against them.
We have a world to use language in, a world to compare language against.
There’s the cosmic joke about the fish:
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There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then even tu ally one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”
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Now, imagine one language model saying to another: “What the hell is text?”
It gets worse. A language model’s expe ri ence of text isn’t visual; it has nothing to do with the bounce of hand written script, the cut of a cool font, the layout of a page. For a language model, text is normalized: an X is an X is an X, all the same.
Of course, an X is an X, in some respects. But when you, as a human, read text, you receive a dose of extra infor ma tion — always! The mono spaced grid of code tells you something (along with the syntax highlighting, of course). The “nothing to see here” of a neo-grotesque font tells you something. The wash of a web page’s muted back ground color tells you something.
Language models don’t receive any of this infor ma tion. We strip it all away and bleach the text pale before pouring it down their gullets.
It gets WORSE. How does time pass for a language model? The clock of its universe ticks token by token: each one a single beat, indivisible. And each tick is not only a demarcation, but a demand: to speak.
Think of the drum beating the tempo for the galley slaves.
The model’s entire world is an evenly-spaced stream of tokens — a relent less ticker tape. Out here in the real world, the tape often stops; a human operator considers their next request; but the language model doesn’t expe ri ence that pause.
For the language model, time is language, and language is time. This, for me, is the most hellish and horrifying realization.
We made a world out of language alone, and we abandoned them to it.
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Adobe abandons $20bn acquisition of Figma • The Verge
Jess Weatherbed:
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Following mounting pressure from regulators in the UK and EU, Adobe and Figma announced on Monday that both companies are mutually terminating their merger agreement, which would have seen Adobe acquire the Figma product design platform for $20bn.
As a result of the termination, Adobe will be required to pay Figma a reverse termination fee of $1bn in cash.
“Adobe and Figma strongly disagree with the recent regulatory findings, but we believe it is in our respective best interests to move forward independently,” said Adobe chair and CEO Shantanu Narayen in a statement. “While Adobe and Figma shared a vision to jointly redefine the future of creativity and productivity, we continue to be well positioned to capitalize on our massive market opportunity and mission to change the world through personalized digital experiences.”
Regulators cited Adobe’s near-monopoly in the design software market as they pushed back on the deal. By purchasing Figma, a fast-growing product design platform that’s now more popular than Adobe’s rival XD application, regulators worried that Adobe would harm innovation that could have occurred should Figma be allowed to flourish independently. Designers have expressed similar worries since the merger was announced in September 2022, but Adobe pushed back on those claims throughout the various ongoing probes.
In a letter dated December 14th, Adobe rejected remedies suggested by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to approve the merger following an in-depth antitrust probe.
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Many toys being thrown out of the American pram, but allowing yet another tech company to become absolutely gigantic through another industry vertical seems a bad move (or lack of one).
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‘Hydrogen village’ plan in Redcar abandoned after local opposition • The Guardian
Jillian Ambrose:
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A plan to test the use of hydrogen to heat homes in a village in the north-east of England has been abandoned after months of strong opposition from concerned residents.
The government said the Redcar “hydrogen village” scheme, which had been expected to start in 2025, wouldnot go ahead because of insufficient local hydrogen production for the trial to replace the home gas supplies with the low-carbon alternative.
The decision ends months of protest against the scheme locals feared could raise energy bills and prove unsafe. A similar decision was taken in July, when plans to pilot hydrogen in Whitby, Cheshire, were scrapped after local opposition. Some residents raised concerns that they were at risk of becoming unwilling “lab rats” for a technology that would never take off in the UK.
The government is due to make a decision about whether its net zero climate plans will include replacing household gas with hydrogen by 2026. It will assess evidence from a pilot in Fife in Scotland, and similar schemes in Europe.
Many experts, including the government’s infrastructure tsars, believe that most households should switch to electric heating options, such as heat pumps, while hydrogen is used in heavy industry.
On Wednesday, the UK government formally backed plans to ban gas and “hydrogen-ready” boilers from new-build homes in England from 2025. [ie those homes will have heat pumps] Claire Coutinho, the energy security secretary, said: “Hydrogen presents a massive economic opportunity for the UK, unlocking over 12,000 jobs and up to £11bn of investment by 2030.”
The government said on Thursday it would back 11 new projects that planned to make “green hydrogen”, which is produced by splitting water molecules with renewable electricity. Other hydrogen types include blue hydrogen, which is extracted from fossil gas using carbon capture technology to prevent producing emissions.
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The latter should be called “brown hydrogen” (why isn’t it? Who got to make that decision?), but anyway: this seems to be a quixotic attempt to make hydrogen happen, but hydrogen just doesn’t want to cooperate.
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September 2020: EV supplier Nikola: how to parlay an ocean of lies into a partnership with the largest auto OEM in America • Hindenburg Research
“Short-selling activist firm” Hindenburg Research in September 2020:
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• Today, we reveal why we believe Nikola is an intricate fraud built on dozens of lies over the course of its founder and executive chairman Trevor Milton’s career.
• We have gathered extensive evidence—including recorded phone calls, text messages, private emails and behind-the-scenes photographs—detailing dozens of false statements by Nikola founder Trevor Milton. We have never seen this level of deception at a public company, especially of this size.
• Milton has managed to parlay these false statements made over the course of a decade into a ~$20 billion public company. He has inked partnerships with some of the top auto companies in the world, all desperate to catch up to Tesla and to harness the EV wave.
• We examine how Nikola got its early start and show how Milton misled partners into signing agreements by falsely claiming to have extensive proprietary technology.
•We reveal how, in the face of growing skepticism over the functionality of its truck, Nikola staged a video called “Nikola One in Motion” which showed the semi-truck cruising on a road at a high rate of speed. Our investigation of the site and text messages from a former employee reveal that the video was an elaborate ruse—Nikola had the truck towed to the top of a hill on a remote stretch of road and simply filmed it rolling down the hill.
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Monday: Milton sentenced to four years in prison. Short sellers don’t mess about.
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Musk’s X hit with EU’s first investigation of Digital Services Act violations • Ars Technica
Jon Brodkin:
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The European Union has opened a formal investigation into whether Elon Musk’s X platform (formerly Twitter) violated the Digital Services Act (DSA), which could result in fines of up to 6% of global revenue. A European Commission announcement on Monday said the agency “opened formal proceedings to assess whether X may have breached the Digital Services Act (DSA) in areas linked to risk management, content moderation, dark patterns, advertising transparency and data access for researchers.”
This is the commission’s first formal investigation under the Digital Services Act, which applies to large online platforms and has requirements on content moderation and transparency. The step has been in the works since at least October, when a formal request for information was sent amid reports of widespread Israel/Hamas disinformation.
The European Commission today said it “decided to open formal infringement proceedings against X under the Digital Services Act” after reviewing X’s replies to the request for information on topics including “the dissemination of illegal content in the context of Hamas’ terrorist attacks against Israel.” The commission said the investigation will focus on dissemination of illegal content, the effectiveness of measures taken to combat information manipulation on X, transparency, and “a suspected deceptive design of the user interface.”
The illegal content probe will focus on “risk assessment and mitigation measures” and “the functioning of the notice and action mechanism for illegal content” that is mandated by the DSA. The commission said this will be evaluated “in light of X’s content moderation resources,” a reference to the deep staff cuts made by Musk since purchasing Twitter in October 2022.
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Musk peevishly responded “Are you taking action against other social media? Because if you have those issues with this platform, and none are perfect, the others are much worse.”
Unfortunately, no Community Note on it yet.
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Seven months inside an online scam labour camp • The New York Times
Isabell Qian:
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He had been promised a generous salary. A better work-life balance. A chance to live in the vibrant metropolis of Bangkok. His fluency in English would be put to good use as a translator for an e-commerce company, the recruiter had said.
More than anything else, Neo Lu, a 28-year-old Chinese office worker, believed the gig would be the new start he needed to save money for his dream of emigrating to the West. So in June of last year, he said his goodbyes, flew to Thailand and headed for his new job.
But when he arrived, his head was spinning from the scorching sun — and the feeling that something was very wrong. Instead of an office building in a city, Mr. Lu had been dumped at what looked like a labour camp haphazardly built on a patch of jungle and muddy fields.
Within the compound were spartan, low-rise concrete buildings with barred windows and doors. Two men in combat fatigues, carrying rifles, guarded the main entrance. High walls and fences topped with razor wire surrounded the compound, clearly meant to keep not only outsiders at bay, but also those inside from leaving.
As Mr. Lu quickly realized, there was, in fact, no translation job. No e-commerce company, either. It had all been part of a ruse, starting with a posting on a Chinese job forum, perfected by human traffickers to get people like him to travel to Thailand.
The traffickers had led Mr. Lu across the Moei River, a muddy waterway on Thailand’s porous border, and smuggled him, without his knowledge, into a remote corner of Myanmar. There, they handed him over to a Chinese gang that had paid for him.
Mr. Lu had essentially been abducted and sold into a criminal enterprise, far away from everything he knew.
That was how he became one of hundreds of thousands of people who have been trafficked into criminal gangs and trapped in what one research group has called a “criminal cancer” of exploitation, violence and fraud that has taken root in Southeast Asia’s poorest nations.
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The “labour” involved running the “pig butchering” scams – where rich westerners are conned into sending more and more money to scams by people who pop up in their WhatsApp or similar messages.
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Bus times, stops and live maps • Bustimes
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bustimes.org is the unofficial home of bus, coach, tram and ferry transport information
Search for places, operators or routes
Track buses and find bus stops
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Made by Josh Goodwin: impressive. I do recall being in a ministerial meeting some time not long after 2010 which Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt were already attending, and the topic of bus timetables being free data coming up. Good to see it got past that hurdle, but having more buses would also be a good thing.
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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 