Why, exactly, do dogs wag their tails, given that their common ancestors, wolves, don’t? CC-licensed photo by Bill McChesney on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Extremely good. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Inside a global phone spy tool monitoring billions • 404 Media
Joseph Cox:
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Hundreds of thousands of ordinary apps, including popular ones such as 9gag, Kik, and a series of caller ID apps, are part of a global surveillance capability that starts with ads inside each app, and ends with the apps’ users being swept up into a powerful mass monitoring tool advertised to national security agencies that can track the physical location, hobbies, and family members of people to build billions of profiles, according to a 404 Media investigation.
404 Media’s investigation, based on now deleted marketing materials and videos, technical forensic analysis, and research from privacy activists, provides one of the clearest examinations yet of how advertisements in ordinary mobile apps can ultimately lead to surveillance by spy firms and their government clients through the real time bidding data supply chain. The pipeline involves smaller, obscure advertising firms and advertising industry giants like Google. In response to queries from 404 Media, Google and PubMatic, another ad firm, have already cut-off a company linked to the surveillance firm.
“The pervasive surveillance machine that has been developed for digital advertising now directly enables government mass surveillance. Many businesses, from app publishers to advertisers to big tech, are acting completely irresponsibly. This must end,” Wolfie Christl, the principal of Cracked Labs, an Austrian research institute and co-author of a paper published last year that researched the surveillance tool, told 404 Media.
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Google promised to delete location data on abortion clinic visits. It didn’t, study says • The Guardian
Johana Bhuiyan:
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Google’s original promise, made in July 2022, came shortly after the supreme court’s decision to end federal abortion protections. The tech giant said it would delete entries for locations deemed “personal” or sensitive, including “medical facilities like counseling centers, domestic violence shelters, and abortion clinics”. It did not provide a timeline for when the company would implement the new policy. Five months after that pledge, research first reported by the Guardian and conducted by tech advocacy group Accountable Tech in November 2022 showed that Google was still not masking that location data in all cases.
At the time, Google said it prioritized user privacy and that it had implemented the changes to its location retention policies in early 2022 “as promised” but that the system must not have detected that the user had visited a Planned Parenthood clinic in some of the cases.
In its newest study, which the Guardian reviewed exclusively, Accountable Tech found that the company still wasn’t deleting location history in all cases as promised, though Google’s rate of retention improved slightly. The rate of retention of location information decreased from 60% of tested cases, a measurement taken five months after Google’s pledge, to 50% of tested cases in the most recent experiment. The director of product of Google Maps, Marlo McGriff, disputed the findings of the study.
“We are upholding our promise to delete particularly personal places from Location History if these places are identified by our systems – any claims that we’re not doing so are patently false or misguided,” McGriff said in a statement.
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Bizarre state of affairs where people can be prosecuted for the places their phone says they’ve been. The US has descended into a circle of hell without entirely noticing.
Gene therapy allows an 11-year-old boy to hear for the first time • The New York Times
Gina Kolata:
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The studies, researchers said, mark a new frontier for gene therapy which, until now, had steered clear of hearing loss. “There has never been a biological or medical or surgical way to correct the underlying biological changes that cause the inner ear to not function,” Dr. [Dylan] Chan [a paediatric ear/nose/mouth specialist] said.
Although otoferlin mutations are not the most common cause of congenital deafness, there is a reason so many researchers started with it. That form of congenital deafness, said Dr. John A. Germiller, an otolaryngologist who is leading the CHOP study, is “low hanging fruit.”
The mutated otoferlin gene destroys a protein in the inner ear’s hair cells necessary to transmit sound to the brain. With many of the other mutations that cause deafness, hair cells die during infancy or even at the fetal stage. But with otoferlin deafness, hair cells can survive for years, allowing time for the defective gene to be replaced with gene therapy.
There’s an advantage in using gene therapy to allow children to hear. Most of the mutations that affect hearing — there are approximately 150 — do not affect any other part of the body. Some genes are actually unique to the ear.
The inner ear is a small closed compartment, so gene therapy delivered there would not affect cells in other parts of the body, said Manny Simons, chief executive and co-founder of Akouos and senior vice president of gene therapy at Lilly.
But getting the genes to the cochlea, a spiral-shaped cavity close to the center of the skull, is challenging. The cochlea is filled with fluid, is lined with 3,500 hair cells and is encased in a dense dome of bone with a tiny, round membrane. Sound sets off a wave of fluid in the cochlea and stimulates the hair cells to transmit signals to the brain. Each hair responds to a different frequency, enabling a person to hear the richness of sound.
The gene therapy consists of a harmless virus carrying new otoferlin genes in two drops of liquid that are delicately injected down the length of the cochlea, delivering the genes to each hair cell.
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Remarkable: gene therapy starting to make a difference. The 11-year-old subject’s comment: “There’s no sound I don’t like”.
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Scientists will test a cancer-hunting mRNA treatment • WIRED
Condé Nast:
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As the first vaccines for Covid-19 rolled out at the end of 2020, messenger RNA catapulted into public awareness. Now, a few years later, interest in mRNA has exploded. Clinical trials are underway for dozens of mRNA vaccines, including ones for flu and herpes. And scientists are hoping to use mRNA to treat disease, not just prevent it. One of the biggest targets is cancer.
But a major obstacle is how to deliver the molecule to the place in the body that needs to be treated. Fatty bubbles called lipid nanoparticles can carry RNA into cells, and they can ferry it to a wide range of tissues but not to anywhere specific. That’s a problem for cancer, says Jake Becraft, cofounder and CEO of Boston-based Strand Therapeutics, because many cancer treatments “can be incredibly toxic in off-target tissues.” But his company may have found a solution.
Strand has figured out how to “program” mRNA much like computer code, allowing it to perform certain functions—such as turning on only in specific cell types, at specific times, and in specific amounts. Today, the biotech company announced that the US Food and Drug Administration has greenlit a clinical trial testing the approach in cancer patients with solid tumors. Strand plans to begin enrolling patients this spring. It will be the first time a programmable mRNA therapy will be tested in people.
…Tumor cells notoriously evade the immune system, going undetected. But synthetic mRNA can direct cancerous cells to make certain proteins that alert the immune system to the tumor’s presence.
Strand’s therapy uses mRNA to make an inflammatory protein called interleukin-12, or IL-12, that causes immune cells to spring into action and unleash a cascade of events that kill cancer cells when and where they detect the protein.
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Mugger take your phone? Cash apps too easily let thieves drain accounts, DA says • Ars Technica
Ashley Belanger:
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Popular apps like Venmo, Zelle, and Cash App aren’t doing enough to protect consumers from fraud that occurs when unauthorized users gain access to unlocked devices, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg warned.
“Thousands or even tens of thousands can be drained from financial accounts in a matter of seconds with just a few taps,” Bragg said in letters to app makers. “Without additional protections, customers’ financial and physical safety is being put at risk.”
According to Bragg, his office and the New York Police Department have been increasingly prosecuting crimes where phones are commandeered by bad actors to quickly steal large amounts of money through financial apps.
This can happen to unwitting victims when fraudsters ask “to use an individual’s smartphone for personal use” or to transfer funds to initiate a donation for a specific cause. Or “in the most disturbing cases,” Bragg said, “offenders have violently assaulted or drugged victims, and either compelled them to provide a password for a device or used biometric ID to open the victim’s phone before transferring money once the individual is incapacitated.”
But prosecuting crimes alone won’t solve this problem, Bragg suggested. Prevention is necessary. That’s why the DA is requesting meetings with executives managing widely used financial apps to discuss “commonsense” security measures that Bragg said can be taken to “combat this growing concern.”
Bragg appears particularly interested in Apple’s recently developed “Stolen Device Protection,” which he said is “making it harder for perpetrators to use a phone’s passcode to steal funds when the user’s phone is not at home or at work.”
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Seems to me the obvious thing is not to let those apps unlock with biometrics. Passcodes or passwords not stored in the keychain. A little inconvenient, but not as inconvenient as having your money stolen.
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Mirror publisher’s boss warns print titles could become loss-making in five years • The Guardian
Mark Sweney:
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The boss of the publisher of the Mirror, Express and Star newspapers has warned staff they have to face the “inconvenient truth” that its print titles will become loss-making in as soon as five years.
The chief executive of Reach, which also owns scores of regional titles including the Manchester Evening News, the Birmingham Mail and the Liverpool Echo, also maintained that the publisher has “significant resources” despite cutting almost 800 roles in the biggest annual cull of jobs in the newspaper industry in decades.
Jim Mullen, who has run Reach since 2019, told staff in the meeting that they had to face the ramifications of the fact its traditional print operations have declined by 17% annually over the past four years.
“Our biggest revenue stream is newsprint and the papers,” said Mullen, in an internal town hall video meeting with staff. “When I started I said there is at least 10 years of profitable business in newspapers and probably more. I have been in the business for five years so half of that is gone. There is probably five to seven years that we can look at. We have to face into this inconvenient truth.”
Mullen said the Mirror, which now sells about 230,000 copies daily, would be “pushing” 100,000 copy sales in five years at the current rate of decline.
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There’s a longer analysis of Reach’s woes from last week, and this was discussed on the latest Private Eye podcast. The problem is that adverts shown to Reach’s readers tend to be cheap; and they won’t be willing to pay subscriptions. There are no good answers.
Noted in passing (from the podcast): Mullen, the man in charge in Reach, previously worked at.. gambling company Ladbroke’s.
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Netflix is going to take away its cheapest ad-free plan • The Verge
Emma Roth:
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Although Netflix no longer allows new or returning members to sign up for the ad-free Basic subscription that costs $11.99 per month, company executives told investors while reporting its earnings results today that it’s retiring the plan in some countries where ad-supported plans are available. It’s starting with Canada and the UK in the second quarter of this year.
That leaves subscribers with Netflix’s $15.49 per month option as Netflix’s cheapest ad-free plan. Going from $11.99 to $15.49 per month is a pretty big jump, and means there’s really no middle ground for ad-free plans. Otherwise, subscribers will have to pay $6.99 per month for its ad-supported basic plan or $22.99 per month for the Premium tier.
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The turning of the screw continues. The obvious app for someone to build: one which subscribes you to/unsubscribes you from each streaming service in order. The obvious chart for someone to compile: the rising prices of each of the streaming services over time.
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Why do dogs wag their tails? • Royal Society Biology Letters
Silvia Leonetti, Giulia Cimarelli, Taylor Hersh and Andrew Ravignani:
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Tail wagging is a conspicuous behaviour in domestic dogs (Canis familiaris). Despite how much meaning humans attribute to this display, its quantitative description and evolutionary history are rarely studied. We summarize what is known about the mechanism, ontogeny, function and evolution of this behaviour. We suggest two hypotheses to explain its increased occurrence and frequency in dogs compared to other canids.
During the domestication process, enhanced rhythmic tail wagging behaviour could have (i) arisen as a by-product of selection for other traits, such as docility and tameness, or (ii) been directly selected by humans, due to our proclivity for rhythmic stimuli. We invite testing of these hypotheses through neurobiological and ethological experiments, which will shed light on one of the most readily observed yet understudied animal behaviours. Targeted tail wagging research can be a window into both canine ethology and the evolutionary history of characteristic human traits, such as our ability to perceive and produce rhythmic behaviours.
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Not examined: whether it’s because they are good doggos. (But seriously, it is a puzzle: wolves don’t, but domesticated wolves show an inclination to do so.)
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Why China has lost interest in Hollywood movies • The New York Times
Claire Fu, Brooks Barnes and Daisuke Wakabayashi:
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Chinese moviegoers who once flocked to Hollywood films have been steadily disappearing. China is, by far, the biggest movie market outside the United States, and a place that American studios rely on for growth and profitability as the film industry struggles.
“The days when a Hollywood film would make hundreds of millions of US dollars in China — that’s gone,” said Stanley Rosen, a professor at the University of Southern California who studies Chinese politics and the film industry.
China’s film industry is producing more high-quality movies that resonate with domestic audiences. The country’s top two films last year highlight the diversity of offerings: “Full River Red,” a dialogue-rich suspense thriller, and “The Wandering Earth II,” a science-fiction blockbuster heavy with special effects.
Against the backdrop of growing tensions with the United States, Beijing has advanced its ambitions to become a cultural influence, supporting efforts by local filmmakers to create films that are in line with the ruling Communist Party’s doctrines.
In recent years, some of the highest-grossing films have played up themes of a stronger and more assertive China. The top-grossing Chinese films of all time are “The Battle at Lake Changjin,” a 2021 film that depicts an against-all-odds defeat of the United States during the Korean War; and “Wolf Warrior 2,” a 2017 nationalist action flick in which a Chinese Jason Bourne-like character takes on an American soldier of fortune.
Shi Chuan, vice chairman of the Shanghai Film Association, said many American studios once viewed China as a market where they could always make money. That is no longer the case. Wary Chinese consumers are spending less, and box office sales have not returned to prepandemic levels.
“Now I am telling American film companies that this mentality is no longer viable,” Mr. Shi said. “You must study deeply to understand the Chinese market, Chinese audiences and Chinese pop culture.”
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Maybe this means that Hollywood won’t try to make films with budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars?
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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: are you wondering why there aren’t any “40 years of the Macintosh” links? It’s because “anniversary journalism” has no place here. Sure, celebrate birthdays and weddings by the calendar, but don’t use it as a peg for stories.
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 