The beaches of Anguilla make money – but .ai internet domains bring in useful cash too. CC-licensed photo by Pete Markham on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Holiday in the sun. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Zuckerberg says sorry for Meta harming kids—but rejects payments to families • Ars Technica
Ashley Belanger:
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During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing weighing child safety solutions on social media, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg stopped to apologize to families of children who committed suicide or experienced mental health issues after using Facebook and Instagram.
“I’m sorry for everything you have all been through,” Zuckerberg told families. “No one should go through the things that your families have suffered, and this is why we invest so much, and we are going to continue doing industry-wide efforts to make sure no one has to go through the things your families have had to suffer.”
This was seemingly the first time that Zuckerberg had personally apologized to families. It happened after Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) asked Zuckerberg if he had ever apologized and suggested that the Meta CEO personally set up a compensation fund to help the families get counseling.
“Internally you know your product is a disaster for teenagers,” Hawley said, inciting applause from the audience.
Zuckerberg did not agree to set up any compensation fund, but he turned to address families in the crowded audience, which committee chair Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) described as the “largest” he’d ever seen at a Senate hearing. Some families in the audience held up photos of children harmed after using social media.
Meta did not immediately respond to Ars’ request to comment.
Zuckerberg was joined at the hearing by CEOs of TikTok, Snap, Discord, and X (formerly Twitter). Each was asked if they supported an array of online child-safety bills that have been introduced to combat harms after years of what senators described in the hearing as insufficient action by social media companies to effectively reduce harms.
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Exhausting: a real dialogue of the deaf, except one side is also playing to the gallery.
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The tiny Caribbean island that’s making a fortune from AI • Forbes
Barry Collins:
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AI has made a lot of people very rich over the past couple of years, but for one small Caribbean Island it’s been transformational. So much so that Anguilla now generates around a third of its government’s revenue from AI—without writing a single line of code.
Back in the 1980s, when the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority was dishing out the geographic two-letter domains, Anguilla had the good fortune to be awarded .ai. That good fortune has turned into an actual fortune, with a huge influx in domain registrations over the past couple of years that have massively boosted the island’s economy.
The boom in .ai domain sales was triggered by the arrival of ChatGPT in November 2022. “In the five months after that, our sales went up by almost a factor of four,” Vince Cate, who manages domain registrations for the Anguillan government, told IEEE Spectrum. “Then they sort of leveled off at this new, much higher level. It’s just wild—we’re already like a third of the government’s budget.”
The island is earning around $3 million a month from .ai registrations, according to Cate, but he predicts that figure will at least double as domains come up for renewal. “We do the domains for two years, and so all of our money now is new domains,” he said.
“And if we just stay at this level of $3 million per month for new domains, when the renewals kick in a year from now, we’ll just jump to $6 million per month.”
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Good thing, since the climate change being helped along by all those AI data centres is going to raise the sea levels, with bad effects on Anguilla.
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The creators of Twitterrific are making an app to read (almost) anything on the web • The Verge
Amrita Khalid:
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After nearly 16 years in operation, Twitterrific was abruptly deactivated last year during Twitter’s unceremonious purging of third-party apps. Now, the app’s developer Iconfactory is raising funds on Kickstarter to create Project Tapestry, a new internet reader for the publicly accessible web. The iOS app will serve as a “universal, chronological timeline,” pulling from federated social media networks like Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as Tumblr, Micro.blog, and any RSS feed. It’ll also be able to access governmental data sources, such as National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellite imagery and US Geological Survey (USGS) earthquake data.
Because Tapestry (which will be the app’s official name) will let anyone create their own data source plug-in, the options are almost endless: “We started experimenting with ways to accommodate all these new sources of information and landed on API that is based on JavaScript. It can work with anything that has an IP address and data that’s accessible with HTTP,” wrote lead developer Craig Hockenberry in an email to The Verge. Project Tapestry has also created tools that let developers make their own plug-ins, and Hockenberry says the team is confident the app can work for a number of different purposes.
It might not always look pretty, he noted. “The hard part is to put it all into a product that’s intuitive and beautiful where the plumbing isn’t a focus.”
But there is one big part of the internet that Tapestry won’t be able to access, and this is the locked-in world of centralized platforms like Meta, Instagram, X, and even Threads (which is still working on ActivityPub integration).
Moreover, the app is truly meant to be an internet reader — so while users can view posts, they won’t be able to create or reply to them.
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Ah. The last paragraph means it’s DOA. Sure, we have apps like Apple News and so on which are just reading apps – but we accept that because we don’t expect to post. If you include sources that you expect to post to, people won’t take not being able to. Rather like Windows Phone: great in theory, not in practice.
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US government disrupts botnet People’s Republic of China used to conceal hacking of critical infrastructure • US Department of Justice
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A December 2023 court-authorized operation has disrupted a botnet of hundreds of US-based small office/home office (SOHO) routers hijacked by People’s Republic of China (PRC) state-sponsored hackers.
The hackers, known to the private sector as “Volt Typhoon,” used privately-owned SOHO routers infected with the “KV Botnet” malware to conceal the PRC origin of further hacking activities directed against U.S. and other foreign victims. These further hacking activities included a campaign targeting critical infrastructure organizations in the United States and elsewhere that was the subject of a May 2023 FBI, National Security Agency, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and foreign partner advisory. The same activity has been the subject of private sector partner advisories in May and December 2023, as well as an additional secure by design alert released today by CISA.
The vast majority of routers that comprised the KV Botnet were Cisco and NetGear routers that were vulnerable because they had reached “end of life” status; that is, they were no longer supported through their manufacturer’s security patches or other software updates. The court-authorized operation deleted the KV Botnet malware from the routers and took additional steps to sever their connection to the botnet, such as blocking communications with other devices used to control the botnet.
“The Justice Department has disrupted a PRC-backed hacking group that attempted to target America’s critical infrastructure utilizing a botnet,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. “The United States will continue to dismantle malicious cyber operations – including those sponsored by foreign governments – that undermine the security of the American people.”
“In wiping out the KV Botnet from hundreds of routers nationwide, the Department of Justice is using all its tools to disrupt national security threats – in real time,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco. “Today’s announcement also highlights our critical partnership with the private sector – victim reporting is key to fighting cybercrime, from home offices to our most critical infrastructure.”
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All fun and games until your water filtration plant gets hacked. Will the DOJ get the routers replaced too? Would be interesting if they just fried them, so people had to replace them anyway.
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The Vision Pro • Daring Fireball
John Gruber:
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This brings me back to the hardware of Vision Pro. The displays are excellent, but I’m already starting to see how they aren’t good enough. The eye tracking is very good, but it’s not as precise as I’d like it to be. The cameras are good, but they don’t approach the dynamic range of your actual eyesight. There sometimes is color fringing at the periphery of your vision, depending on the lighting. A light source to your side, like a window in daytime, will show the fringing. When you move your head, the illusion of true pass-through is broken — you can tell that you’re looking at displays showing the world via footage from cameras.
Just walking around is enough motion to break the illusion of natural pass-through of the real world. In fact, in some ways, the immersive 3D environments — mountaintops, lakesides, the surface of the moon (!) — are more visually realistic than the actual real world, because there’s less latency and shearing as you pan your gaze.
…I’ve saved the best for last. Vision Pro is simply a phenomenal way to watch movies, and 3D immersive experiences are astonishing. There are 3D immersive experiences in Vision Pro that are more compelling than Disney World attractions that people wait in line for hours to see.
First up are movies using apps that haven’t been updated for Vision Pro natively. I’ve used the iPad apps for services like Paramount+ and Peacock. Watching video in apps like these is a great experience, but not jaw-dropping. You just get a window with the video content that you can make as big as you want, but “big”, for these merely “compatible” apps, is about the size of the biggest wall in your room. This is true too for video in Safari when you go “full screen”. It breaks out of the browser window into a standalone video window. (Netflix.com is OK in VisionOS Safari, but YouTube.com stinks — it’s a minefield of UI targets that are too small for eye-tracking’s precision.)
Where things go to the next level are the Disney+ and Apple TV apps, which have been designed specifically for Vision Pro. Both apps offer immersive 360° viewing environments. Disney+ has four: “the Disney+ Theater, inspired by the historic El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood; the Scare Floor from Pixar’s Monsters Inc.; Marvel’s Avengers Tower overlooking downtown Manhattan; and the cockpit of Luke Skywalker’s landspeeder, facing a binary sunset on the planet Tatooine from the Star Wars galaxy.” With the TV app, Apple offers a distraction-free virtual theater.
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Absorbing reading – one of Gruber’s longest ever, I think – which makes me think this is going, like the iPad, to become an “entertainment” product. And none the worse for that.
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The Messenger closes down after blowing millions on ill-fated news site • The Washington Post
Will Sommer and Laura Wagner:
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The Messenger is shutting down immediately, the news site’s founder told employees in an email Wednesday, marking the abrupt demise of one of the stranger and more expensive recent experiments in digital media.
In his email, Jimmy Finkelstein said he was “personally devastated” to announce that he had failed in a last-ditch effort to raise more money for the site, saying he had been fundraising as recently as last night. Finkelstein said the site, which launched last year with outsize ambitions and a mammoth $50m budget, would close “effective immediately.”
The New York Times first reported the site’s closure late Wednesday afternoon, appearing to catch many staffers off-guard, including editor in chief Dan Wakeford.
As employees read the news story, the internal work chat service Slack erupted in what one employee called “pandemonium.” Wakeford posted to Slack that he was “not in the loop,” adding that he was trying to find out more information.
Minutes later, as staffers read Finkelstein’s email, its message was underscored as they were forcibly logged out of their Slack accounts. Former Messenger reporter Jim LaPorta posted on social media that employees would not receive health care or severance.
The Messenger didn’t respond to a request for comment.
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You would have to be certifiably insane to give Finkelstein (not you, S) more money for that absurd project. It was the Quibi of news: unwanted, unnoticed, absurdly overfunded and run by people whose heads are in the media mindseet from decades ago.
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I thought most of us were going to die from the climate crisis. I was wrong • The Guardian
Hannah Ritchie, who has a new book out (Not the End of the World):
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Without a major, unexpected technological breakthrough, we will go past this [1.5ºC] target. Nearly all the climate scientists I know agree: they obviously want to cap warming at 1.5ºC, but very few think it will happen. This doesn’t stop them fighting for it, though; they know that every 0.1ºC matters, and is worth working for. But my perspective on 2ºC has changed. I’m now cautiously optimistic that we can get close to it. It’s more likely than not that we will pass 2ºC, but perhaps not by much. And there is still a reasonable chance – if we really step up to the challenge – that we can stay below it.
My perspective flipped quickly after studying the data, not newspaper headlines. I didn’t focus on where we are today, but on the pace that things have moved at in the past few years, and what this means for the future. One organisation – the Climate Action Tracker – follows every country’s climate policies, and its pledges and targets. It combines them all to map out what will happen to the global climate. At Our World in Data, I sketch out these future climate trajectories and update them every year. Every time, they get closer and closer to the pathways we would need to follow to stay below 2ºC.
If we stick with the climate policies that countries currently have in place, we’re heading towards a world of 2.5ºC to 2.9ºC warming. Let me be clear: this is terrible and we have to avoid it. But countries have pledged to go much further. They’ve committed to making their policies much more ambitious. If each country was to follow through on their climate pledges, we’d come out at 2.1ºC by 2100.
What’s most promising is how these pathways have shifted over time. In a world without climate policies, we’d be heading towards 4ºC or 5ºC, at least. This is the path that most people still think we’re on. That would be a scary world indeed. Thankfully, over time, countries have stepped up their commitments. As we saw with the example of the ozone layer, incremental increases in ambition can make a huge difference.
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The difference about the ozone layer is that there were only a few manufacturers of the ozone-destroying products, and it was comparatively easy to corral them into changing. With climate change, you’re literally up against every single thing people do every day – cars, plastics, energy for their house, anything.
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Universal Music to pull songs from TikTok • BBC News
Peter Hoskins:
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Universal Music is set to pull its millions of songs from TikTok after a breakdown in talks over payments.
The move would mean the social media platform would no longer have access to songs by artists including Taylor Swift, The Weeknd and Drake.
Universal accused TikTok of “bullying” and said it wanted to pay a “fraction” of the rate other social media sites do for access to its vast catalogue. TikTok said Universal was presenting a “false narrative and rhetoric”.
Music companies earn royalty payments when their songs are played on streaming and social media platforms. Although TikTok – which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance – has more than one billion users, it accounts for just 1% of Universal’s total revenue, the label said.
In an “open letter to the artist and songwriter community” Universal – which controls about a third of the world’s music – claimed that “ultimately TikTok is trying to build a music-based business, without paying fair value for the music”.
Universal also said that along with pushing for “appropriate compensation for our artists and songwriters”, it was also concerned about “protecting human artists from the harmful effects of AI, and online safety for TikTok’s users”.
The company said it would stop licensing its content to TikTok when its contract expires on 31 January.
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The question is whether other music labels will follow suit. If a couple of them do, then TikTok starts to have problems.If it’s only Universal, then it’s Universal that has a problem.
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My McLuhan lecture on enshittification (30 Jan 2024) • Pluralistic
Cory Doctorow gave the annual Marshall McLuhan lecture at the Transmediale festival in Berlin, which happily has a transcript too:
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The equilibrium in which companies produce things we like in honourable ways at a fair price is one in which charging more, worsening quality, and harming workers costs more than the company would make by playing dirty.
There are four forces that discipline companies, serving as constraints on their enshittificatory impulses.
First: competition. Companies that fear you will take your business elsewhere are cautious about worsening quality or raising prices.
Second: regulation. Companies that fear a regulator will fine them more than they expect to make from cheating, will cheat less.
These two forces affect all industries, but the next two are far more tech-specific.
Third: self-help. Computers are extremely flexible, and so are the digital products and services we make from them. The only computer we know how to make is the Turing-complete Von Neumann machine, a computer that can run every valid program.
That means that users can always avail themselves of programs that undo the anti-features that shift value from them to a company’s shareholders. Think of a boardroom table where someone says, ‘I’ve calculated that making our ads 20% more invasive will net us 2% more revenue per user.’
In a digital world, someone else might well say ‘Yes, but if we do that, 20% of our users will install ad-blockers, and our revenue from those users will drop to zero, forever.’
This means that digital companies are constrained by the fear that some enshittificatory maneuver will prompt their users to google, ‘How do I disenshittify this?’
Fourth and finally: workers. Tech workers have very low union density, but that doesn’t mean that tech workers don’t have labour power. The historical “talent shortage” of the tech sector meant that workers enjoyed a lot of leverage over their bosses. Workers who disagreed with their bosses could quit and walk across the street and get another job – a better job.
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I’ve heard Doctorow speak, and he’s incredibly persuasive: he has that rare talent of making everything he says sound like it’s completely obvious, and each successive piece of logic as inexorable as Lego pieces joining. Also: I’ve no idea how he produces so much, day after day, and finds time to sleep and eat. (Via John Naughton.)
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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 