Want to know why Apple blocks you buying Kindle content in the app? Blame Steve Jobs. CC-licensed photo by Robert Occhialini 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 11 links for you. Undelayed. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Congress forced Silicon Valley to answer for its misdeeds. It was a glorious sight • The Guardian

Matt Stoller, who is a former Senate staffer and strong anti-monopolist:

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I have reported on small and medium-sized businesses frightened to come forward with stories of how they are abused by counterfeiting or unfair fees by the goliaths. As one told me about his relationship to Amazon, “I’m a hostage.”

Fortunately, the voices of small businesspeople afraid of retaliation came through their elected leaders. “I pay 20% of my income to Uncle Sam in taxes, and 30% to Apple,” one member of Congress noted she heard from businesspeople. Representative Ken Buck, Republican from Colorado, talked about one of the few courageous businesspeople who testified openly months ago, the founder of PopSockets, who had been forced to pay $2m to Amazon just to get Amazon to stop allowing counterfeits of its items sold on the platform. Another Republican representative, Kelly Armstrong, went into the details of Google’s use of tracking to disadvantage its competitors in advertising, joined by Democrat Pramila Jayapal, who asked Google’s CEO why the corporation kept directing ad revenue to its own network of properties instead of sending ad traffic to the best available result.

Over and over, the CEOs had similar answers. I don’t know. I’ll get back to you. I’m not aware of that. Or long rambling attempts to deflect, followed by members of Congress cutting them off to get answers to crisp questions. I learned two things from the surprisingly wan responses of these powerful men. First, they had not had to deal with being asked for real answers about their business behavior for years, if ever, and so they were not ready to respond. And two, antitrust enforcers for the last 15 years, stretching back to the Bush and Obama administrations, bear massive culpability for the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of these corporations.

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Stoller was one of the people in the Open Markets team at the New America Foundation (NAF). But in mid-2017, the Open Markets team wrote an article praising the EU for fining Google for breaking antitrust rules. Two days later, the Open Markets team were given two months to leave the NAF by its chief. The NAF had previously received more than $21m from the family foundation of Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO.
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Dirty tricks and the 2020 election: lessons from the KGB • CNN

Donie O’Sullivan:

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Oleg Kalugin, another KGB agent who lived in the US undercover, recounted in his book “Spymaster” how the KGB paid Americans to paint swastikas on synagogues in New York and Washington. This tactic had the potential to inflame tensions in the US and give the Soviet-controlled press a negative story to tell Russians back home about their capitalist foe.
In the decades since, our lives have largely moved online — and so have Russia’s attempts at disinformation and meddling in US affairs.

In groundbreaking work from the Atlantic Council and the online investigations company Graphika, researchers showed how a suspected Russian group has been distributing forged documents online over the past few years. These efforts included a fake letter purporting to be from a US senator and another letter designed to look like it came from the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

The same Russian group is believed to have been behind a fake tweet from Sen. Marco Rubio claiming that a purported British spy agency planned to derail the campaigns of Republican candidates in the 2018 midterm elections. The fake tweet was picked up and falsely reported as real by RT, a Russian state-controlled news outlet. There’s no evidence of coordination between RT and the Russian group that promoted the fake tweet but RT did not issue a correction.

The internet hasn’t just made it easier for Russia to create forgeries, it’s also helped in their ability to distribute documents, forged or stolen.

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Hurrah for social media! At least, if you’re a spy trying to destabilise countries that insist on letting them run rampant. Not sure why this is so hard for some folk to grasp.
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Apple emails reveal internal debate on Right to Repair • iFixit

Kyle Wiens:

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These internal discussions reveal that what looks like Apple’s united front against Right to Repair is really an internal debate, rife with uncertainty.

The New York Times editorial in favor of Right to Repair last April set off a fire alarm inside Apple’s public relations team. When Binyamin Appelbaum reached out to research the issue, Apple’s VP of communications said in an internal email that “We should get him on the phone with [Apple VP Greg] Joz [Joswiak] or [Senior VP] Phil [Schiller].” That spawned an instant debate. “The larger issue is that our strategy around all of this is unclear. Right now we’re talking out of both sides of our mouth and no one is clear on where we’re headed.”

The emails show the high profile of Right to Repair inside Apple as leaders debate how to respond to a request for comment on an upcoming column. “The piece is using [Senator] Warren’s new right to repair for agriculture to talk about the broader right to repair effort and plans to use Apple as a symbol in that fight. We’re meeting with everyone shortly about the overall strategy and then I’ll connect with [Greg ‘Joz’ Joswiak].” The email goes on, “Appelbaum has, of course, talked with iFixIt [sic] and others.” They’re right about that!

The conversation resulted in a set of talking points that Kaiann Drance, VP of Marketing, talked through with Appelbaum. Afterwards, Apple PR wrote, “Kaiann did a great job and emphasized the need for a thoughtful approach to repair policy because of how important it is to balance customer safety with access to more convenient repairs.”

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Emails detail Amazon’s plan to crush a startup rival with price cuts • Ars Technica

Timothy Lee:

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Quidsi’s founders didn’t want to sell their company, but Amazon’s diaper price war was starting to hurt Quidsi. Growth was slowing, and Quidsi was having trouble raising additional capital to continue expanding.

On September 14, the founders of Quidsi flew to Seattle to meet with Amazon and discuss a possible acquisition. As Quidsi’s founders were sitting in a meeting with Amazon brass, Amazon hit Quidsi in the gut. It announced a new program called “Amazon Mom” that offered free Prime service and an additional 30-percent discount on diapers if users signed up to get them through Amazon’s monthly “subscribe and save” program. This was a larger discount than Amazon offered on most other Subscribe and Save items.

This put Quidsi in an untenable situation, as [author of The Everything Store, Brad] Stone writes:

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That month, Diapers.com listed a case of Pampers at $45; Amazon priced it at $39, and Amazon Mom customers with Subscribe and Save could get a case for less than $30. At one point, Quidsi executives took what they knew about shipping rates, factored in Proctor and Gamble’s wholesale prices, and calculated that Amazon was on track to lose $100m over three months in the diapers category alone. Amazon’s losses may have actually been even larger. During Wednesday’s hearing, Scanlon said that internal documents obtained by the committee showed Amazon losing $200m in a single month from diaper products.

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Amazon knew it was bleeding Quidsi dry. An internal email later in September discussed the price cuts Quidsi was forced to make to compete with the new Amazon Mom discounts. “They expect to lose lots of money in the next few yrs,” wrote executive Peter Krawiec. “This will make it worse.”

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Read Steve Jobs’ emails about why you can’t buy digital books in Amazon’s apps • The Verge

Jay Peters:

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Two sets of emails discuss the decisions that, to this day, keep iPhone and iPad users from buying digital books in Amazon’s apps. (You have to use a web browser as a workaround.)

In one email from November 2010, marketing chief Phil Schiller wrote to Jobs, internet services lead Eddy Cue, and product marketing head Greg Joswiak about how Amazon was marketing the Kindle mobile app at the time as a way to easily read Kindle books across both an iPhone and an Android device. Jobs said, “[i]t’s time for Amazon to decide to use our payment mechanism or bow out [of the App Store],” and followed that with “[a]nd I think it’s time to begin applying this uniformly except for existing subscriptions (but applying it for new ones).”

In another conversation, Cue laid out a draft of new subscription policies for apps on the App Store on February 6th, 2011, days before Apple officially announced the new policies.

Jobs said: “I think this is all pretty simple — iBooks is going to be the only bookstore on iOS devices. We need to hold our heads high. One can read books bought elsewhere, just not buy/rent/subscribe from iOS without paying us, which we acknowledge is prohibitive for many things.”

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Documents show Apple gave Amazon special treatment to get Prime Video into App Store • The Verge

Kim Lyons:

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During a hearing before the House antitrust subcommittee on Wednesday, Apple CEO Tim Cook testified that “we apply the rules to all developers evenly” when it comes to the App Store. But documents revealed by the subcommittee’s investigation show Apple senior vice president Eddy Cue offered Amazon a unique deal in 2016: Apple would only take a 15% fee on subscriptions that signed up through the app, compared to the standard 30% that most developers must hand over.

An email from Cue to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos lists the terms negotiated:

That meeting took place in 2016, and at the time, Bezos said he was waiting for “acceptable business terms” before launching the Prime Video app on Apple’s platforms. Pressed for whether the terms may have included a reduction in the 30% App Store cut, Bezos told The Verge’s Nilay Patel that “private business discussions should stay private.”

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That hearing sure has turned up some great content.
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Children COVID carriers: researchers find coronavirus-infected children are major carriers, further complicating the school-reopening debate • Fortune

Katherine Dunn:

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In a study of children under five who show mild to moderate symptoms of COVID-19, those kids were found to contain higher concentrations of the virus compared to older children, teens and adults, according to researchers at a Chicago pediatric hospital and Northwestern University.

The findings come as parents, educators and policymakers around the world grapple with the question of whether it’s safe to reopen day-care centers and schools in the coming weeks.

The study, which was released Thursday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, did not test the transmission rate of children—but does raise the prospect that children could be just as, or even more, prone to COVID infection and transmission than adults, although symptoms in the vast majority of children are comparably milder, the researchers found.

“One of the things that’s come up in the whole school reopening discussion, is: since kids are less sick, is it because they have less of the virus?,” said Taylor Heald-Sargent, the lead author and a pediatric infectious diseases specialist at Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, and assistant professor of pediatrics at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine.

“And our data does not support that,” she told Fortune. As a result, “we can’t assume that kids aren’t able to spread the virus.”

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But but but: what proportion of children under five show mild to moderate symptoms? How liable are they to infection? That’s the key question that remains unanswered.
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Telegram files EU antitrust complaint against Apple’s App Store • Financial Times

Javier Espinosa:

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In a complaint to EU competition chief Margrethe Vestager, Telegram, which has more than 400m users, said Apple must “allow users to have the opportunity of downloading software outside of the App Store”.

In June, Ms Vestager announced two antitrust investigations into Apple, one of which concerned the App Store. Apple’s conflicts with developers over the rules of the App Store have also escalated recently.

Both Spotify and Rakuten have previously complained to the EU that the app store represents a monopoly power, given that developers have to accept Apple’s terms, including a 30% commission on in-app purchases, in order to reach the hundreds of millions of people who use iPhones.

Apple’s App Store fees across the world are estimated to generate more than $1bn for the company each month.

In its complaint, Telegram took issue with Apple’s argument that the App Store commission keeps it running.

In a post this week, Mr Durov said: “Every quarter, Apple receives billions of dollars from third-party apps. Meanwhile, the expenses required to host and review these apps are in the tens of millions, not billions of dollars. We know that because we at Telegram host and review more public content than the App Store ever will.”

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Google’s $2.1bn Fitbit deal faces EU antitrust probe: sources • Reuters

Foo Yun Chee:

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Alphabet Inc unit Google this month offered not to use Fitbit’s health data to help it target ads in an attempt to address EU antitrust concerns. The opening of a full-scale investigation suggests that this is not sufficient.

The deal, announced last November, would see Google compete with market leader Apple and Samsung in the fitness-tracking and smart-watch market, alongside others including Huawei and Xiaomi.

The European Commission, which will launch the probe following the end of its preliminary review on Aug. 4, is expected to make use of the four-month long investigation to explore in depth the use of data in healthcare, one of the people said.

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What happens to Fitbit in the meantime? Does Google slip a bit of money under the door to keep it going? The next quarterlies are on 5 August, so those will be something to watch. (In the quarter to April it lost $20m on sales of $188m, selling 2.2m devices for a lower price than the year before. It’s got $251m of cash on hand, down from $334m in December (ie down $83m). Things aren’t looking good.
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It looks like Apple’s iPhone 12 release date is definitely delayed • BGR

Chris Smith:

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Qualcomm’s Chief Financial Officer Akash Palkhiwala talked to Reuters about the chipmaker’s guidance for the September quarter. The exec explained that a delay of a flagship phone next quarter would impact its bottom line of the period.

“We’re seeing a partial impact from the delay of a flagship phone launch. And so what we’ve seen is a slight delay that pushes some of the units out from the September quarter to the December quarter for us,” he said.

Palkhiwala would not explicitly name the iPhone 12 series, but only a device like the iPhone could alter earnings guidance in such a manner that Qualcomm would have to address it.

Qualcomm is expected to provide the 5G modem for all the upcoming iPhone 12 models, and that’s why a delay would impact its bottom line. The exec said that Qualcomm would provide 5G components to all major smartphone makers, including the customer facing a delayed launch. Again, the CFO did not name Apple. “Suffice to say, I think going forward we expect to be selling to all of them,” Palkhiwala said.

Assuming all of this information is accurate, and Apple will launch the iPhone 12 series in October, we’d still expect the company to unveil the handsets on time, during a mid-September press event.

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I had been thinking that Qualcomm doesn’t make Apple’s CPU, but if it’s making the modems that makes more sense. Although “launch in September, but wait a few weeks for it to go on sale” isn’t that much different from normal, is it.
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Huawei trumps Samsung for first time in worldwide smartphone market in Q2 2020 • Canalys

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Huawei shipped more smartphones worldwide than any other vendor for the first time in Q2 2020. It marks the first quarter in nine years that a company other than Samsung or Apple has led the market. Huawei shipped 55.8m devices, down 5% year on year. But second-placed Samsung shipped 53.7m smartphones, a 30% fall against Q2 2019.

Huawei is still subject to US government restrictions, which have stifled its business outside of mainland China. Its overseas shipments fell 27% in Q2. But it has grown to dominate its domestic market, boosting its Chinese shipments by 8% in Q2, and it now sells over 70% of its smartphones in mainland China. China has emerged strongest from the coronavirus pandemic, with factories reopened, economic development continuing and tight controls on new outbreaks.

“This is a remarkable result that few people would have predicted a year ago,” said Canalys senior analyst Ben Stanton. “If it wasn’t for COVID-19, it wouldn’t have happened. Huawei has taken full advantage of the Chinese economic recovery to reignite its smartphone business. Samsung has a very small presence in China, with less than 1% market share, and has seen its core markets, such as Brazil, India, the United States and Europe, ravaged by outbreaks and subsequent lockdowns.”

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All down to China.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Main Square at Disney World, Florida, in busier times: find out what it’s like in a pandemic CC-licensed photo by Wally Gobetz 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 10 links for you. Not under oath. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

(The on-off-you’re-muted-out-of-time inquisition of the four tech chiefs by the US Congress finished too late to be included here. We’ll see what there is worth including tomorrow.)

Disney World during the pandemic is extremely weird • The Atlantic

Graeme Wood went there at the height of the… emptiness:

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You emerge from the tunnel into a town square, the first of several themed sub-parks of the Magic Kingdom, and the only one that is compulsory, because you must pass through it to reach the others. It is designed to look like small-town Middle America roughly 100 years ago, during the heyday of sarsaparillas and the Model T. The square has a train station, then one shop-lined avenue leading to the rest of the park. This sub-park, called Main Street, U.S.A., is unique in that it has no rides—nothing to do at all, really, other than buy merchandise with your MagicBand and, in normal times, enjoy the first of many interactions with beloved cartoon characters, or, rather, sweaty adults entombed in costumes.

Main Street, U.S.A., is fairly crowded and mirthful compared with a small town in America a century ago, when the country had only about a third of the population it has today. But compared with a normal, pandemic-free day, it is desolate and somber, like a small town hit hard by scarlet fever and bad news about local boys off fighting in the Great War. The music still plays, but every 10 minutes a voice interrupts to instruct us all to “please wear a face covering. Wash your hands often and thoroughly. Cover your mouth and nose when coughing and sneezing, and maintain physical distancing.” This memento mori is especially grim when it is played between “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “When You Wish Upon a Star.”

The characters keep their distance. In fact, I do not think I saw a proper Mickey, Minnie, Pluto, or Jiminy Cricket during my entire visit. On the balconies of certain buildings, occasionally a princess dances around and calls out to visitors. And at intervals, a parade of characters passes—but preceding it there are surgical-masked, uniformed cast members, clearing the streets like Secret Service agents to make sure the princesses have a path forward and perhaps to intercept any overly enthusiastic children who want to run up to give them a hug. Among the most American elements of Disney magic is that it lets kids imagine princesses as accessible and pure-hearted, rather than as aristocrats worried they might be coughed on by proles. That particular magical spell is temporarily broken.

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Many, many wonderful lines. (Via the wonderful Emma Beddington.)
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Amazon’s enforcement failures leave open a back door to banned goods—some sold and shipped by Amazon Itself • The Markup

Annie Gilbertson and Jon Keegan:

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Amazon bans pill presses used to make prescription drugs. They’re included among 38 pages of third-party seller rules and prohibitions for its U.S. marketplace.

Yet an investigation by The Markup found that Amazon fails to properly enforce that list, allowing third-party sellers to put up and sell banned items.

Alongside its third-party marketplace, Amazon sells products to consumers directly, and The Markup found it was also selling banned items itself, revealing cracks in the largely automated purchasing system that feeds its massive product catalog.

We found nearly 100 listings for products that the company bans under its categories of drugs, theft, spying, weapons and other dangerous items, a virtual back alley where mostly third-party sellers peddle prohibited goods, some of which are used for illicit and potentially criminal activities.

The Markup filled a shopping cart with a bounty of banned items: marijuana bongs, “dab kits” used to inhale cannabis concentrates, “crackers” that can be used to get high on nitrous oxide, and compounds that reviews showed were used as injectable drugs.

We found two pill presses and a die used to shape tablets into a Transformers logo, which is among the characters that have been found imprinted on club drugs such as ecstasy. We found listings for prohibited tools for picking locks and jimmying open car doors. And we found AR-15 gun parts and accessories that Amazon specifically bans.

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Teaching GPT-3 to identify nonsense • Arram Sabeti

:

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One of the trickiest things about GPT-3 is that you can prove that it knows how to do something, but you can’t prove that it doesn’t, since a slightly different prompt can get much better results.

Nick Cammarata of OpenAI responded to Kevin’s post on Twitter: “it’s all about the prelude before the conversation. You need to tell it what the AI is and is not capable. It’s not trying to be right, it’s trying to complete what it thinks the AI would do :)”

Nick changed Kevin’s prompt to add a prelude saying: ‘This is a conversation between a human and a brilliant AI. If a question is “normal” the AI answers it. If the question is “nonsense” the AI says “yo be real”’ and added two examples of nonsense questions…

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This gets pretty scary. Once you have an AI that knows when you’re trying to fool it and responds by telling you to “be real”, the Turing Test is all but passed.
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TheirTube

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Theirtube is a Youtube filter bubble simulator that provides a look into how videos are recommended on other people’s YouTube. Users can experience how the YouTube home page would look for six different personas.

Each persona simulates the viewing environment of real Youtube users who experienced being inside a recommendation bubble through recreating a Youtube account with a similar viewing history. TheirTube shows how YouTube’s recommendations can drastically shape someone’s experience on the platform and, as a result, shape their worldview. It is part of the Mozilla Creative Media Awards 2020 — art and advocacy project for examining AI’s effect on media and truth, developed by Tomo Kihara.

How does it work?

Each of these TheirTube personas is informed by interviews with real YouTube users who experienced similar recommendation bubbles. Six YouTube accounts were created in order to simulate the interviewees’ experiences. These accounts subscribe to the channels that the interviewees followed, and watches videos from these channels to reproduce a similar viewing history and a recommendation bubble.

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The choices are Fruitarian, “Prepper”, “Liberal”, “Conservative”, conspiracist, climate denier. The context of “liberal” and “conservative” is the American political one, so “liberal” means “somewhere in the middle of the British Conservative Party” for British readers.
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Google offers refunds after smart glasses stop working • BBC News

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The Canadian company, recently purchased by Google, says its Focals glasses will cease functioning on Friday.

From then, owners will not be able to use “any features” of the glasses, or connect to the companion app. But the company has also said it will automatically refund all customers. It promised to send the purchase price back to the original payment method, and to contact those customers whose refunds it could not process.

At the end of June, North announced it was being acquired by Google, and would not release a planned second-generation device. It also said it would “wind down” its first generation smart glasses, released last year.

Customers found out that meant the smart glasses would be rendered “dumb” through a statement published on the company’s website and by email.

The Focals glasses, however, come with prescription lenses as an option, meaning they can function as everyday prescription eyewear. The bulky frames, housing a laser, battery, and other kit will no longer do anything that regular spectacles cannot do.

Ben Wood, chief analyst at CCS Insight, said the pulling of features from cloud-powered hardware is not uncommon – and something that has happened to him before. “If you want to be an early adopter and have some fun new tech that an ambitious start-up has created, there’s always a risk that they won’t be able to make the business plan stack up,” he warned.

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Hong Kong students arrested under national security law • BBC News

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Four students have been arrested in Hong Kong in the first police operation to enforce China’s new national security law for the territory.

The four were detained for “inciting secession” on social media after the new law began on 1 July, police said. A pro-independence group said those arrested included its former leader, Tony Chung.

Beijing’s controversial new law criminalises subversion, secession and collusion with foreign forces.
Previous arrests under the new law have been made for slogans and banners at protests.

Critics say China’s new law erodes Hong Kong’s freedoms. But Beijing has dismissed the criticism, saying that the law is necessary to stop the type of pro-democracy protests seen in Hong Kong during much of 2019.

Three men and a woman aged between 16 and 21 were arrested on suspicion of organising and inciting secession, police said.

“Our sources and investigation show that the group recently announced on social media to set up [sic] an organisation that advocates Hong Kong independence,” said Li Kwai-wah from the new national security unit inside Hong Kong police.

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China gets the quiet crackdown underway. Are these people ever going to be seen in public again? And will the UK and US (and other countries) extend HK citizens some sort of immigration waiver? That would be the way to undermine this Chinese takeover.
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Face masks are breaking facial recognition algorithms, says new government study • The Verge

James Vincent:

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Wearing face masks that adequately cover the mouth and nose causes the error rate of some of the most widely used facial recognition algorithms to spike to between 5% and 50 percent, a study by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has found. Black masks were more likely to cause errors than blue masks, and the more of the nose covered by the mask, the harder the algorithms found it to identify the face.

“With the arrival of the pandemic, we need to understand how face recognition technology deals with masked faces,” said Mei Ngan, an author of the report and NIST computer scientist. “We have begun by focusing on how an algorithm developed before the pandemic might be affected by subjects wearing face masks. Later this summer, we plan to test the accuracy of algorithms that were intentionally developed with masked faces in mind.”

Facial recognition algorithms such as those tested by NIST work by measuring the distances between features in a target’s face. Masks reduce the accuracy of these algorithms by removing most of these features, although some still remain. This is slightly different to how facial recognition works on iPhones, for example, which use depth sensors for extra security, ensuring that the algorithms can’t be fooled by showing the camera a picture (a danger that is not present in the scenarios NIST is concerned with).

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Comment on Twitter: “next week there’ll be a ‘viral challenge’ to post a photo of yourself with and without a mask.”
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New disinformation resembles 2016 Russian meddling: FireEye report • Business Insider

Jeff Elder:

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Bad actors are hacking media websites to post fraudulent stories, creating fake journalist personas, and spreading anti-US disinformation, researchers from FireEye warned Wednesday. The tactics are reminiscent of Russian meddling around the 2016 election – but are significantly more sophisticated, researchers say.

“We have good reason to believe these are Russians,” says John Hultquist, senior director of analysis at Mandiant Threat Intelligence, a research division of FireEye. “The elections could be their goal.”

Researchers say disinformation campaigns in 2016 also originated in Eastern Europe and targeted an English-language audience with narratives that disparaged the US. The campaigns then moved West and took root in the US in time to hit social media before the 2016 election, and a hacking group tied to Russian military intelligence ultimately gained access to the Democratic National Committee email servers. And this campaign now taking place in Eastern Europe looks very similar, Hultquist says.

The new campaigns originated in the same way and are propagating the same kind of content, but hacking media websites and creating convincing journalist personas is a new level of skill, according to Hultquist.

“This is not just troll farm stuff,” he said.

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You Download the App and it Doesn’t Work

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“There are many things that they [Hey] could do to make the app work within the rules that we have. We would love for them to do that.

“You download the app and it doesn’t work, that’s not what we want on the store.”

–Phil Schiller

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There follows a long list of apps where you download it and it doesn’t work. Apple’s position here is so clearly compromised that the only sensible thing to get out from under a ton of antitrust complaints is to remove this daft rule. Because there’s no way it’s going to be able to enforce it on everyone.
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‘Instagram can hurt us’: Mark Zuckerberg emails outline plan to neutralize competitors • The Verge

Casey Newton and Nilay Patel:

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nIn late February 2012, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg emailed his chief financial officer, David Ebersman, to float the idea of buying smaller competitors, including Instagram and Path. “These businesses are nascent but the networks established, the brands are already meaningful, and if they grow to a large scale the could be very disruptive to us,” he wrote. “Given that we think our own valuation is fairly aggressive and that we’re vulnerable in mobile, I’m curious if we should consider going after one or two of them. What do you think?”

Ebersman was skeptical. “All the research I have seen is that most deals fail to create the value expected by the acquirer,” he wrote back. “I would ask you to find a compelling elucidation of what you are trying to accomplish.” Ebersman went on to list four potential reasons to buy companies and his thoughts on each: neutralizing a competitor, acquiring talent, integrating products to improve the Facebook service, and “other.”

It’s a combination of neutralizing a competitor and improving Facebook, Zuckerberg said in a reply. “There are network effect around social products and a finite number of different social mechanics to invent. Once someone wins at a specific mechanic, it’s difficult for others to supplant them without doing something different.”

Zuckerberg continued: “One way of looking at this is that what we’re really buying is time. Even if some new competitors springs up, buying Instagram, Path, Foursquare, etc now will give us a year or more to integrate their dynamics before anyone can get close to their scale again. Within that time, if we incorporate the social mechanics they were using, those new products won’t get much traction since we’ll already have their mechanics deployed at scale.”

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Released as part of the US Antitrust Committee hearings – as is a text conversation between Kevin Systrom, the founder of Instagram, and Matt Cohler, an investor, about whether to accept Zuck’s offer to buy Instagram. “We’ll never escape the wrath of Mark.” I reiterate: put a ceiling on the size of social networks. It’s the only way to control them.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Want a better picture from your webcam? Camo, a British app, lets you use your iPhone camera for Mac apps CC-licensed photo by Brett Renfer 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 10 links for you. Clearly. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Google’s top search result? Surprise! It’s Google • The Markup

Adrianne Jeffries and Leon Yin:

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A trending search in our data for “myocardial infarction” shows how Google has piled up its products at the top. It returned:

• Google’s dictionary definition
• A “people also ask” box that expanded to answer related questions without leaving the search results page
• A “knowledge panel,” which is an abridged encyclopedia entry with various links
• And a “related conditions” carousel leading to various new Google searches for other diseases

All of these appeared before search results by WebMD, Harvard University, and Medscape. In fact, a user would have to scroll nearly halfway down the page—about 42 percent—before reaching the first “organic” result in that search.

Google’s decision to place its products above competitors’ and to present “answers” on the search page has led to lawsuits and regulatory fines. A number of websites said it killed their revenues—and their companies. Founders of both innovative startups and companies that had been around for a decade or more told The Markup that once Google started placing its product first, they didn’t stand a chance.  

Travel research firm Skift wrote in November that the entire online travel industry is suffering. “The fact that Google is leveraging its dominance as a search engine into taking market share away from travel competitors is no longer even debatable.”

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There’s a supporting article about how they did their research. It feels as though Google has decided not to leave it to chance any more: keep people on the site to show them ads.

Do read through to the point where it shows that Google doesn’t always (often?) offer the best prices for flights, either. That’s the danger of shopping monopolies: you might not see what is being hidden from you.
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Ex-Twitter workers win US case dismissal over Saudi hacks • Bloomberg via MSN

Clare Roth and Peter Blumberg:

»

The US sought to dismiss charges it brought late last year against two former Twitter Inc. employees and a Saudi national for allegedly helping Riyadh spy on dissidents who use the social network.

Prosecutors in San Francisco on Tuesday asked for a judge’s permission to drop the charges. The two-page filing doesn’t offer a reason but specifies that the dismissal would be “without prejudice,” meaning the government could file new charges.

The two former Twitter employees, Ahmad Abouammo and Ali Alzabarah, were accused of feeding the Saudi government information about Twitter users critical of it. They were recruited by a Saudi named Ahmed Almutairi, who lives in the kingdom and has worked for the royal family’s social media company, according to prosecutors.

All three were charged with acting as illegal foreign agents. Of the three, only Abouammo, a U.S. citizen, is in custody. He has pleaded not guilty.

Twitter, the Saudi Embassy, a lawyer for Abouammo and the U.S. attorney in San Francisco didn’t immediately respond to calls and emails seeking comment on the prosecutor’s request for dismissal.

«

What possible reason would there be to withdraw these charges? The suspicion is that this is some corrupt deal sewn up by the US DOJ with Saudi Arabia. Four years ago, that wouldn’t have been countenanced. Now, it’s the first suggestion.
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The rise of synthetic audio deepfakes • Nisos Security

Robert Volkert, VP Threat Investigations and Dev Badlu, VP Technology at Nisos:

»

Audio deepfakes are the new frontier for business compromise schemes and are becoming more common pathways for criminals to deceptively gain access to corporate funds. Nisos recently investigated and obtained an original attempted deepfake synthetic audio used in a fraud attempt against a technology company. The deepfake took the form of a voicemail message from the company’s purported CEO, asking an employee to call back to “finalize an urgent business deal.” The recipient immediately thought it suspicious and did not contact the number, instead referring it to their legal department, and as a result the attack was not successful.

Nisos investigated the phone number the would-be attacker used and determined it was a VOIP service with no owner registration information. It was likely simply acquired and used as a “burner” for this fraud attempt only. While there was no actual voicemail message associated with the number, we made no attempt for live contact with the owner of the phone number for legal reasons.

…The most famous use of deep fake synthetic audio technology in criminal fraud was a September 2019 incident involving a British energy company. The criminals reportedly used voice-mimicking software to imitate the British executive’s speech and trick his subordinate into sending hundreds of thousands of dollars to a secret account.

The managing director of this company, believing his boss was on the phone, followed orders to wire more than $240,000 to an account in Hungary.1

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So the threat from audio deepfakes is really to business rather than to politics. So far, anyhow.
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Making news and enlightening audiences: BBC’s flagship news show in the pandemic • Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

Sarah Sands is leaving as editor of the BBC’s Today programme after three years, and last December was facing a boycott by government ministers who thought they were going to teach the BBC a lesson; they wouldn’t appear on the show:

»

if there is a problem with the show, it’s down to me.

And having no ministers is a problem.  

I said I would not beg [for forgiveness, because the programme wasn’t at fault], and I didn’t. But I did go to Downing Street to see if we could find a way through. Serious issues were on the agenda – floods, a big decision on HS2, Huawei. The Today programme seemed the right place to talk about them. Downing Street wondered what was in it for the government.

On January 29, Chinese nationals at a hotel in York [were] reported to have fallen ill, the first coronavirus cases on British soil. 

Over the following month, coverage of the crisis increased by the day. We talked to doctors, to epidemiologists, WHO officials, to the brightest minds we could find. They came on willingly and shared everything they knew. Everyone seemed happy to answer intelligent questions for an intelligent audience. Everyone, except the government.    

And something really interested happened during those weeks.

«

What if the pandemic hadn’t intervened? I think the result would have been the same. The government would discover that it needed to be heard more than it could use social media.
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Facebook’s ‘red team’ hacks its own AI programs • WIRED

Tom Simonite:

»

Deepfake technology is becoming easier to access and has been used for targeted harassment. When Canton’s group formed last year, researchers had begun to publish ideas for how to automatically filter out deepfakes. But he found some results suspicious. “There was no way to measure progress,” he says. “Some people were reporting 99% accuracy, and we were like ‘That is not true.’”

Facebook’s AI red team launched a project called the Deepfakes Detection Challenge to spur advances in detecting AI-generated videos. It paid 4,000 actors to star in videos featuring a variety of genders, skin tones, and ages. After Facebook engineers turned some of the clips into deepfakes by swapping people’s faces around, developers were challenged to create software that could spot the simulacra.

The results, released last month, show that the best algorithm could spot deepfakes not in Facebook’s collection only 65% of the time. That suggests Facebook isn’t likely to be able to reliably detect deepfakes soon. “It’s a really hard problem, and it’s not solved,” Canton says.

Canton’s team is now examining the robustness of Facebook’s misinformation detectors and political ad classifiers. “We’re trying to think very broadly about the pressing problems in the upcoming elections,” he says.

Most companies using AI in their business don’t have to worry as Facebook does about being accused of skewing a presidential election. But Ram Shankar Siva Kumar, who works on AI security at Microsoft, says they should still worry about people messing with their AI models. He contributed to a paper published in March that found 22 of 25 companies queried did not secure their AI systems at all. “The bulk of security analysts are still wrapping their head around machine learning,” he says. “Phishing and malware on the box is still their main thing.”

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Camo – Use your phone as a pro webcam, free • Reincubate

»

Camo:

Look amazing on video calls. Use your iPhone or iPad as a pro webcam and get powerful effects and adjustments for Zoom, Meet, and more.

«

A British software company with the answer to Joanna Stern’s (and everyone else’s) prayers: use your iPhone as the webcam while you use your Mac. (As recommended on Benedict Evans’s newsletter.)

There are a growing number of iPhone/iPad + Mac app pairings – Duet is another, to make an iPad work as a second screen for a Mac. Others?
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Their businesses went virtual. Then Apple wanted a cut • The New York Times

Jack Nicas and David McCabe:

»

ClassPass built its business on helping people book exercise classes at local gyms. So when the pandemic forced gyms across the United States to close, the company shifted to virtual classes.

Then ClassPass received a concerning message from Apple. Because the classes it sold on its iPhone app were now virtual, Apple said it was entitled to 30% of the sales, up from no fee previously, according to a person close to ClassPass who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of upsetting Apple. The iPhone maker said it was merely enforcing a decade-old rule.

Airbnb experienced similar demands from Apple after it began an “online experiences” business that offered virtual cooking classes, meditation sessions and drag-queen shows, augmenting the in-person experiences it started selling in 2016, according to two people familiar with the issues.

Airbnb discussed Apple’s demands with House lawmakers’ offices that are investigating how Apple controls its App Store, according to three people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. Those lawmakers are now considering Apple’s efforts to collect a commission from Airbnb and ClassPass as part of their yearlong antitrust inquiry into the biggest tech companies, according to a person with knowledge of their investigation.

…With gyms shut down, ClassPass dropped its typical commission on virtual classes, passing along 100% of sales to gyms, the person close to the company said. That meant Apple would have taken its cut from hundreds of struggling independent fitness centers, yoga studios and boxing gyms.

Apple said that with Airbnb and ClassPass, it was not trying to generate revenue — though that is a side effect — but instead was trying to enforce a rule that has been in place since it first published its app guidelines in 2010.

«

That’s going to make for an interesting session when Tim Cook gets grilled by the US House Antitrust Committee.
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Sen. Josh Hawley wants to strip legal protections from sites with targeted ads • The Verge

Adi Robertson:

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Sen. Josh Hawley (Republican, Missouri) has introduced the latest of several bills designed to weaken a key online legal shield. The Behavioral Advertising Decisions Are Downgrading Services (or BAD ADS) Act would remove protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act for large web services that display ads based on “personal traits of the user” or a user’s previous online behavior. This is defined as “behavioral advertising” and does not include targeting based on users’ locations or the content of the site they’re on.

Section 230 shields websites from legal liability for user-created content. Unlike several previous bills, including ones sponsored by Hawley, the BAD ADS Act doesn’t appear to address any specific critiques of Section 230. It’s seemingly an anti-targeted ads bill that threatens companies with the loss of an unrelated legal protection instead of monetary fines. Hawley has previously introduced a bill that would create a Do Not Call list equivalent for targeted advertising, and he’s proposed banning “addictive” design features like endless scrolling on social networking apps.

In a statement, Hawley said that “manipulative ads are not what Congress had in mind when passing Section 230,” although he did not elaborate on a relationship between the two topics.

«

The trouble with Hawley’s plan is that stripping s230 would leave such companies liable for absolutely everything, so they’d just block everything except the most vanilla content, and certainly anything that might get them co-sued. It’s a self-defeating move: why wouldn’t someone sue Hawley for things he tweets or posts on Facebook causing some sort of harm?

Here’s my suggestion (pass it on): put a ceiling on the size of social networks. 100 million, 200 million? The specific danger comes from size, not from particularly what they do. Let the right-wing nutjobs be on Gab or Parler. Let the others be on Mastodon, Counter.social, whatever. But put the limit on how many they can reach.
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Two Donald Trump tweets deleted by Twitter overnight • HillReporter.com

Steph Bazzle:

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Twitter has started acting when a tweet from Donald Trump violates their site rules. Over Monday night, two tweets from the president were removed. Unlike some of the recent responses from the site, this time they didn’t include a statement about the content. However, the tweets in question are archived, and the content may be a clue.

According to Factbase, one of the tweets was about COVID-19. It was a retweet, and while the link to the article is no longer visible, the text describes the claims of one Dr. Vladimir Zelenko. “I have treated over 350 patients [using hydroxychloroquine] with 100% success.”

Here’s the problem with this claim, as documented by the New York Times back in April (when Zelenko was already claiming 350 cases cured). Zelenko’s claims aren’t backed by evidence, the officials in his New York village, Kiryas Joel, have asked him to stop, saying that he’s exaggerating the outbreak in their community and inflating numbers by falsifying the number who became ill, and the numbers don’t reflect what scientific studies continue to find. Further, without sufficient testing, any suggestion for treating pre-symptomatic patients becomes moot.

Trump’s second deleted tweet was also a retweet. This one linked to an article by The Post Millenial. It claims that Garrett Foster, a protester killed in Austin, shot at a car five times before a driver fired back, killing him. That article has since been updated to include the following correction [saying that Foster, who was killed, was not the first shooter].

«

Interesting that we haven’t heard any screaming from Trump about this. (Related: his dim son – OK, Junior, I have to narrow it down – had his Twitter access limited for tweeting nonsense about hydroxychloroquine. So of course the right-wingers claimed it was election interference. Night, day, follow.)
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A doctor ran 22 miles with a face mask on to debunk a ridiculous myth • BGR

Chris Smith:

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Face mask protesters have made up several silly reasons to oppose the use of the simplest tool possible to reduce the risk of COVID-19 transmission. Some oppose the idea of being told what to do, suggesting face masks are about complying with the government. They are not. It’s about curbing the spread of the virus. Others claim the use of face masks is actually harmful, claiming they can reduce the flow of oxygen. That’s also false. Again, the use of face covers can reduce the spread of a pathogen, protecting both the person wearing the mask and others.

A few weeks ago, a doctor put on six surgical masks at the same time to prove it wouldn’t affect his breathing. He wore a pulse oximeter, a device that measures oxygen saturation, as proof. Unsurprisingly, the medical gadget confirmed his blood oxygen levels stayed within normal parameters. Another doctor performed an even more audacious task to dispel the hypoxia myth; he ran 22 miles and monitored his oxygen with the same type of device. The conclusion was identical: face masks do not reduce the flow of oxygen, even if you’re running and need a much higher intake of air to supply the increased oxygen needs of the muscles.

Dr. Tom Lawton from the Bradford Royal Infirmary in Yorkshire, England decided to run with a face mask on to fight misinformation and the spread of fake news about face masks. His oxygen levels never fell below 98% during the course of his run — any value of over 94% is considered normal.

«

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Blank no longer: Garmin has “solved” a ransomware attack, but won’t say how CC-licensed photo by otama 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. The joke edition. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The scourge of hygiene theatre • The Atlantic

Derek Thompson on why scrubbing tables won’t save you (because you’re not actually going to catch it from a “fomite”, or virus-laden gunk on a surface):

»

hygiene theatre builds a false sense of security, which can ironically lead to more infections. Many bars, indoor restaurants, and gyms, where patrons are huffing and puffing one another’s stale air, shouldn’t be open at all. They should be shut down and bailed out by the government until the pandemic is under control. No amount of soap and bleach changes this calculation.

Instead, many of these establishments are boasting about their cleaning practices while inviting strangers into unventilated indoor spaces to share one another’s microbial exhalations. This logic is warped. It completely misrepresents the nature of an airborne threat. It’s as if an oceanside town stalked by a frenzy of ravenous sharks urged people to return to the beach by saying, We care about your health and safety, so we’ve reinforced the boardwalk with concrete. Lovely. Now people can sturdily walk into the ocean and be separated from their limbs.

By funneling our anxieties into empty cleaning rituals, we lose focus on the more common modes of COVID-19 transmission and the most crucial policies to stop this plague. “My point is not to relax, but rather to focus on what matters and what works,” Goldman said. “Masks, social distancing, and moving activities outdoors. That’s it. That’s how we protect ourselves. That’s how we beat this thing.”

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Hygiene theatre being the followup to security theatre, as seen in airports everywhere after September 2001.
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Are we in an AI overhang? • LessWrong 2.0

Andy Jones:

»

An overhang is when you have had the ability to build transformative AI for quite some time, but you haven’t because no-one’s realised it’s possible. Then someone does and surprise! It’s a lot more capable than everyone expected.

I am worried we’re in an overhang right now. I think we right now have the ability to build an orders-of-magnitude more powerful system than we already have, and I think GPT-3 is the trigger for 100x-larger projects at Google and Facebook and the like, with timelines measured in months.

GPT-3 is the first AI system that has obvious, immediate, transformative economic value. While much hay has been made about how much more expensive it is than a typical AI research project, in the wider context of megacorp investment it is insignificant.

GPT-3 has been estimated to cost $5m in compute to train, and – looking at the author list and OpenAI’s overall size – maybe another $10m in labour, on the outside.

Google, Amazon and Microsoft all each spend ~$20bn/year on R&D and another ~$20bn each on capital expenditure. Very roughly it totals to ~$100bn/year. So dropping $1bn or more on scaling GPT up by another factor of 100x is entirely plausible right now. All that’s necessary is that tech executives stop thinking of NLP as cutesy blue-sky research and start thinking in terms of quarters-till-profitability.

«

If GPT-3 has really only cost $5m, then I’d expect all of Google, Amazon and Microsoft (and even Apple) to have much better AI by now. But they don’t. It’s a sort of anti-existential proof, because they all have good reasons to build such systems.
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The doctor behind the disputed Covid data • The New York Times

Ellen Gabler and Roni Caryn Rabin on the peculiar case of Sapan Desai, the man behind Surgisphere, the company behind the nonexistent Covid-19 case data in the cases testing the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine:

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Over the next five years [from 2006], his performance and a pattern of behaviour at the North Carolina hospital worried colleagues, according to physicians who worked with him there.

In interviews, Drs. Olcese, Mani Daneshmand, Dawn Elfenbein and 10 others — who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media or feared retribution from their employers or Duke — said there were broad concerns inside the surgery department about Dr. Desai.

The doctors, many of whom were also residents, said they could not trust information he provided about patients’ medical conditions or test results. Several doctors said it became standard practice to double check anything Dr. Desai said about a patient, such as how the person had fared overnight or whether a test had been ordered.

Several former colleagues said that often he did not follow through on directives about treating patients, and that when he was questioned about it, he sometimes passed blame or offered implausible explanations.

In one instance, Dr. Desai did not respond to pages from nurses during an overnight shift while on call, recalled Dr. Olcese. When she asked about the missed pages, he said he had been resuscitating an infant by performing a rare, complicated procedure — an incident the charge nurse said never occurred, according to Dr. Olcese and another doctor present for Dr. Desai’s explanation.

“He was essentially a giant roadblock that you had to work around,” said Dr. Olcese, now a neurocritical care doctor at Wexner Medical Center in Columbus, Ohio. “You didn’t want him to bring you down with him.”

«

And a reminder, once more, that the Surgisphere fabulism was exposed not by the two peer-reviewed journals which published HCL articles, but by a journalist at The Guardian (Australia) puzzled by the fact that the papers cited more cases and deaths in Australia than had been recorded.

If that’s stopped a liar, that’s a good job done.
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Google to keep employees home until summer 2021 amid coronavirus pandemic • WSJ

Rob Copeland:

»

The move will affect nearly all of the roughly 200,000 full-time and contract employees across Google parent Alphabet Inc, and is sure to pressure other technology giants that have slated staff to return as soon as January.

Alphabet Chief Executive Sundar Pichai made the decision himself last week after debate among Google Leads, an internal group of top executives that he chairs, according to a person familiar with the matter. A small number of Google staffers were notified later in the week, people familiar said.

Mr. Pichai was swayed in part by sympathy for employees with families to plan for uncertain school years that may involve at-home instruction, depending on geography. It also frees staff to sign full-year leases elsewhere if they choose to move.

“I know it hasn’t been easy,” Mr. Pichai wrote in a note to staff Monday, after The Wall Street Journal reported the impending extension. “I hope this will offer the flexibility you need to balance work with taking care of yourselves and your loved ones over the next 12 months.”

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Feels reasonable; by this time next year I’d hope we’ll have a working vaccine that is rolling out on a wide scale. (Let’s come back and check, shall we?)
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Twitter’s security woes included broad access to user accounts • Bloomberglaw

Jordan Robertson, Kartikay Mehrotra and Kurt Wagner:

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Twitter’s oversight over the 1,500 workers who reset accounts, review user breaches and respond to potential content violations for the service’s 186 million daily users have been a source of recurring concern, the employees said. The breadth of personal data most of those workers could access is relatively limited — including such things as Internet Protocol addresses, email addresses and phone numbers — but it’s a starting point to snoop on or even hack an account, they said.

The controls were so porous that at one point in 2017 and 2018 some contractors made a kind of game out of creating bogus help-desk inquiries that allowed them to peek into celebrity accounts, including Beyonce’s, to track the stars’ personal data including their approximate locations gleaned from their devices’ IP addresses, two of the former employees said.

…According to the former security employees, Twitter management has often dragged its heels on upgrades to information security controls while prioritizing consumer products and features, a source of tension for many businesses.

Efforts to better govern Twitter’s user-support staff and contractors have also gotten short shrift, resulting in a workplace where too many people have access to too many powerful tools, the former employees said. Even with some basic tracking systems in place, contractors have found workarounds to explore details about former lovers, politicians, favorite brands and celebrities, they added.

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This is such a mess. Twitter has clearly been a mess that nobody has been willing to clear up for years. The longer it goes on, the harder to clear up.
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Coronavirus: Lewis Hamilton deletes vaccine conspiracy theory post • BBC News

Marianna Springfield:

»

Formula 1 champion Lewis Hamilton has issued a statement “clarifying his thoughts” and confirming he is not anti-vaccine after sharing a video linked to unfounded conspiracy theories about a coronavirus vaccination.

Hamilton originally shared the post about Bill Gates and vaccine trials on his Instagram story to his 18 million followers. It stayed up for 13 hours before he deleted it.

The F1 driver has now issued a statement on the same platform, explaining that he “hadn’t actually seen the comment attached” to the post in question, saying that he’s “only human”.

…He said he had not seen the comment attached to the video he shared and “has a lot of respect for the charity work Bill Gates does”.

He added: “I also want to be clear that I’m not against a vaccine and no doubt it will be important in the fight against coronavirus” – although he did express concerns about potential side effects and how a vaccine might be funded.

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Perhaps a multi-millionaire who lives abroad in order to avoid tax might be able to help fund it? Then he couldn’t have any concerns about it.
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Sick of AI engines scraping your pics for facial recognition? Here’s a way to Fawkes them right up • The Register

Thomas Claburn:

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Researchers at the University of Chicago’s Sand Lab have developed a technique for tweaking photos of people so that they sabotage facial-recognition systems.

…Fawkes consists of software that runs an algorithm designed to “cloak” photos so they mistrain facial recognition systems, rendering them ineffective at identifying the depicted person. These “cloaks,” which AI researchers refer to as perturbations, are claimed to be robust enough to survive subsequent blurring and image compression.

The paper [PDF], titled, “Fawkes: Protecting Privacy against Unauthorized Deep Learning Models,” is co-authored by Shawn Shan, Emily Wenger, Jiayun Zhang, Huiying Li, Haitao Zheng, and Ben Zhao, all with the University of Chicago.

“Our distortion or ‘cloaking’ algorithm takes the user’s photos and computes minimal perturbations that shift them significantly in the feature space of a facial recognition model (using real or synthetic images of a third party as a landmark),” the researchers explain in their paper. “Any facial recognition model trained using these images of the user learns an altered set of ‘features’ of what makes them look like them.”

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Wonder how long it will take for this to be an option in smartphones. “Distort selfies” as a preference setting.
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Pre-existing and de novo humoral immunity to SARS-CoV-2 in humans • bioRxiv

(A very big UK-based team of researchers):

»

Zoonotic introduction of novel coronaviruses is thought to occur in the absence of pre-existing immunity in the target human population. Using diverse assays for detection of antibodies reactive with the SARS-CoV-2 spike (S) glycoprotein, we demonstrate the presence of pre-existing humoral immunity in uninfected and unexposed humans to the new coronavirus.

SARS-CoV-2 S-reactive antibodies were readily detectable by a sensitive flow cytometry-based method in SARS-CoV-2-uninfected individuals and were particularly prevalent in children and adolescents. These were predominantly of the IgG class and targeted the S2 subunit. In contrast, SARS-CoV-2 infection induced higher titres of SARS-CoV-2 S-reactive IgG antibodies, targeting both the S1 and S2 subunits, as well as concomitant IgM and IgA antibodies, lasting throughout the observation period of 6 weeks since symptoms onset.

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If I’m reading this right, it says that children and teenagers have effective antibodies despite not having been exposed to the virus that causes Covid-19. That explains a lot of things, though it then offers up the puzzle of why that resistance diminishes with age, since you’d expect people to be continually exposed to various coronaviruses through their life.
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Garmin obtains decryption key after ransomware attack • Sky News

Alexander Martin:

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Last week, Garmin’s services were taken offline after hackers infected the company’s networks with a ransomware virus known as WastedLocker.

A number of the company’s services are operational again and the business has now confirmed the “cyber attack” for the first time, stating: “Affected systems are being restored and we expect to return to normal operation over the next few days.”

…Security sources who spoke to Sky News said WastedLocker is believed to be developed by Evil Corp, a hacking group based in Russia which was sanctioned by the US Treasury last December.

The sanctions mean that “US persons are generally prohibited from engaging in transactions” with the cyber criminals, although the US Treasury did not respond to questions about whether the general prohibition applied in the circumstances of extortion.

Sources with knowledge of the Garmin incident who spoke to Sky News on the condition of anonymity said that the company – an American multinational which is publicly listed on the NASDAQ – did not directly make a payment to the hackers.

«

That last bit raises so many questions. Did a middleman carry the bag with the money? Or did someone crack the encryption for them (highly unlikely)? The bigger question is whether their paying the middleman breaches US sanctions. I’d guess that if Garmin is necessary enough to the US military, it’ll be decided that it doesn’t.

Dad joke: Q: where did the hackers go? A: I dunno, they ransomware.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

FBI? Yes, I’d like to report the death of the G4 Cube, 19 years ago. CC-licensed photo by Matt Thomas 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 11 links for you. Back to it. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

20 years ago, Steve Jobs built the “coolest computer ever”—and it bombed • Ars Technica

Steven Levy:

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This month marks the 20th anniversary of the Power Mac G4 Cube, which debuted July 19, 2000. It also marks the 19th anniversary of Apple’s announcement that it was putting the Cube on ice. That’s not my joke—it’s Apple’s, straight from the headline of its July 3, 2001, press release that officially pulled the plug.

The idea of such a quick turnaround was nowhere in the mind of Apple CEO Steve Jobs on the eve of the product’s announcement at that summer 2000 Macworld Expo. I was reminded of this last week, as I listened to a cassette tape recorded 20 years prior, almost to the day. It documented a two-hour session with Jobs in Cupertino, California, shortly before the launch. The main reason he had summoned me to Apple’s headquarters was sitting under the cover of a dark sheet of fabric on the long table in the boardroom of One Infinite Loop.

“We have made the coolest computer ever,” he told me. “I guess I’ll just show it to you.”

He yanked off the fabric, exposing an 8-inch stump of transparent plastic with a block of electronics suspended inside. It looked less like a computer than a toaster born from an immaculate conception between Philip K. Dick and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. (But the fingerprints were, of course, Jony Ive’s.) Alongside it were two speakers encased in Christmas-ornament-sized, glasslike spheres.

“The Cube,” Jobs said, in a stage whisper, hardly containing his excitement.

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I remember talking to Fred Anderson, then Apple’s CFO, who was insistent that it was going to be popular with “prosumers” (consumers who want sorta-kinda professional quality but at consumer-ish prices). The Cube’s rapid failure persuaded me that there’s no viable market in targeting prosumers, and never will be.

It is to Jobs’s credit that he was so prepared to change course so quickly. But in July 2000, Apple was missing the boat on MP3s and CD burning. By July 2001, the iPod was a few months away and the Cube was ballast Apple didn’t need.
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Exclusive: want Face ID on the Mac? macOS Big Sur suggests the TrueDepth camera is coming • 9to5Mac

:

»

We were able to find a new extension on macOS Big Sur beta 3 with codes intended to support “PearlCamera.” You may not remember, but this is the internal codename Apple uses for the TrueDepth camera and Face ID, which was first revealed with the iPhone X leaks in 2017.

Codes such as “FaceDetect” and “BioCapture” found within this extension confirms that Apple is preparing macOS to operate with Face ID, as these codes are similar to those used by iOS. We investigated and this Face ID extension was clearly built for macOS, and it’s not some remnant code from Catalyst technology.

However, the implementation is still in the early stages, so it might take some time before Apple announces a new Mac model with the TrueDepth camera to support Face ID.

Only the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro currently feature biometric authentication through Touch ID integrated into the keyboard. Having Face ID on the Mac would bring even more convenience to unlocking the computer, and it would also fit perfectly on iMac, which doesn’t have a built-in keyboard. As Touch ID depends on the T2 security chip, it would be impractical for Apple to add it to a separate wireless keyboard.

«

Overdue, inasmuch as Windows machines have had it for quite a while. But likely another thing to make Apple Silicon computers attractive. Or maybe even the forthcoming Intel ones too.
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Intel ‘stunning failure’ heralds end of era for US chip sector • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Ian King:

»

After Chief Executive Officer Bob Swan said Intel is considering outsourcing, the company’s shares slumped 16% on Friday, the most since March, when the stock market plummeted in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“We view the roadmap missteps to be a stunning failure for a company once known for flawless execution, and could well represent the end of Intel’s computing dominance,” Chris Caso, an analyst at Raymond James, wrote in a research note on Friday.

Swan says where a semiconductor is made isn’t that important. However, domestic chip production has become a national priority for China, and some U.S. politicians and national-security experts consider sending this technical knowhow overseas to be a potentially dangerous mistake.

“We’ve seen how vulnerable we are,” John Cornyn, a top Senate Republican, said in June when U.S. lawmakers proposed an estimated $25bn in funding and tax credits to strengthen domestic semiconductor production.

Intel’s Xeon chips run computers and data centers that support the design of nuclear power stations, spacecraft and jets, while helping governments quickly understand intelligence and other crucial information.

Many of these processors are made at facilities in Oregon, Arizona and New Mexico. If Intel outsources this work, it would likely be done by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., which focuses on production and is currently the world leader. It’s based in Hsinchu, one of the closest Taiwanese cities to China, which considers the Asian island a rogue province rather than an independent country.

«

Feels like a hinge moment in the chip business. TSMC becomes the most important manufacturer in the entire world. Diversification suddenly becomes more important than ever.
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Microsoft’s Surface Duo looks like it’s ready to launch • The Verge

Tom Warren:

»

Microsoft has spent the past few weeks teasing the Surface Duo on Twitter, and it now looks like the dual-screen device is ready to launch. Microsoft’s new Android-powered device first appeared at the FCC earlier this week, and today it has shown up on the Bluetooth SIG certification page. Devices typically appear in FCC and Bluetooth listings just a few weeks away from launch.

Recent rumors had suggested the Surface Duo might appear in July, but it’s clear the device isn’t ready to launch this month. Instead, it looks increasingly likely that Microsoft will launch the Surface Duo in the coming weeks.

Sources familiar with Microsoft’s plans tell The Verge that the company had originally planned to focus on the Surface Duo and dual-screen devices at Build earlier this year. These plans changed once it was clear Build would be held virtually due to the pandemic, and Microsoft also pushed back its Windows 10X dual-screen plans to far beyond 2020.

«

Have to say, the form factor makes far more sense than the foldables from Samsung and Huawei: you get a full-size screen (with the other screen folded back, facing out) and then a two-screen combo. It’s more honest about the foldable-ness than the others. Probably won’t sell many, but that’s about Microsoft’s position in the phone business more than comparative merit.
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You won’t even hear it whispered in No 10, but they’re desperate for Joe Biden to beat Donald Trump • The Sunday Times

Tim Shipman:

»

Johnson’s China crisis will not disappear if Joe Biden, the former vice-president who leads in the polls, wins the top job. As Pompeo told MPs last week: “China is the only bipartisan issue we have in the States. It won’t matter if it’s President Trump or President Biden. The policy is the same.”

However, Biden will try to rein in Beijing’s international aggression using alliances and institutions, rather than Twitter. “They [senior Democrats] believe in going to the UN and working with allies,” a source said.

This appeals to Johnson. The only episode from his spell as foreign secretary about which he likes to boast is the building of a global coalition to kick out more than 150 Russian spies after the Salisbury poisonings in 2018.

Biden’s approach on trade could also take the sting from the dodgy-chicken debate, since he has signalled that he might revive Barack Obama’s plan to join the Pacific free trade area — the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) — which the UK had expressed a desire to join in June.

A Tory adviser said: “The assumption in Whitehall is that if Biden wins, we won’t need to do a bilateral trade deal because we might both end up in CPTPP. That is already committed to high standards of animal welfare. Some of the sting will be removed from those issues.”

«

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Imint is the Swedish firm that gives Chinese smartphones an edge in video production • TechCrunch

Rita Liao:

»

The hyper-competitive nature of Chinese phone makers means they are easily sold on new technology that can help them stand out. The flipside is the intensity that comes with competition. The Chinese tech industry is both well-respected — and notorious — for its fast pace. Slow movers can be crushed in a matter of a few months.

“In some aspects, it’s very U.S.-like. It’s very straight to the point and very opportunistic,” [Imint CEO and founder Andreas] Lifvendahl reflected on his experience with Chinese clients. “You can get an offer even in the first or second meeting, like, ‘Okay, this is interesting, if you can show that this works in our next product launch, which is due in three months. Would you set up a contract now?’”

“That’s a good side,” he continued. “The drawback for a Swedish company is the demand they have on suppliers. They want us to go on-site and offer support, and that’s hard for a small Swedish company. So we need to be really efficient, making good tools and have good support systems.”

The fast pace also permeates into the phone makers’ development cycle, which is not always good for innovation, suggested Lifvendahl. They are reacting to market trends, not thinking ahead of the curve — what Apple excels in — or conducting adequate market research.

«

(Thanks Adewale Adetugbo for the link.)
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Frequent, fast, and cheap is better than sensitive • Marginal REVOLUTION

Taylor Cowen:

»

A number of firms have developed cheap, paper-strip tests for coronavirus that report results at-home in about 15 minutes but they have yet to be approved for use by the FDA because the FDA appears to be demanding that all tests reach accuracy levels similar to the PCR test. This is another deadly FDA mistake.

…The PCR tests can discover virus at significantly lower concentration levels than the cheap tests but that extra sensitivity doesn’t matter much in practice. Why not? First, at the lowest levels that the PCR test can detect, the person tested probably isn’t infectious. The cheap is better at telling you whether you are infectious than whether you are infected but that’s what we want to know open schools and workplaces. Second, the virus grows so quickly that the time period in which the PCR tests outperforms the cheap test is as little as a day or two. Third, the PCR tests are taking days or even a week or more to report which means the results are significantly outdated and less actionable by the time they are reported.

The fundamental issue is this: if a test is cheap and fast we shouldn’t compare it head to head against the PCR test. Instead, we should compare test regimes. A strip test could cost $5 which means you can do one per day for the same price as a PCR test (say $35). Thus, the right comparison is seven cheap tests with one PCR test.

«

You’d probably need some complicated maths to figure out quite how likely the test was to be right if you got a positive, a negative, and a negative. But the general principle – test often, not slowly – has to be the right one.
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Fire and fawning • No Mercy / No Malice

Scott Galloway:

»

The CEOs of Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google are scheduled to testify in front of the US House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee. Some thoughts…

Big tech has won before the hearing starts. Agreeing to let all four testify concurrently inhibits the committee’s ability to go deep on any one issue, and will leave the American public with a sentiment instead of a viewpoint on big tech, much less any conclusions (such as, that the Obama DOJ was asleep at the switch, and Instagram and Whatsapp should be divested). The Covid-inspired remote format dramatically lessens the likelihood of an unscripted moment that reveals something the American public didn’t previously know. Fabric softener for tough questioning is the deep pockets that keep members in power.

«

Some of the questions are good (“Your market capitalization per employee is thousands of times higher than that of other companies in your sectors. Do you think your companies contribute to income inequality?”) though quite a few focus too much on market capitalisation, which isn’t something the companies directly control; some mistake what market power companies have, or show that it’s not big – as in Apple, where the “Apple tax” on streaming services works out to a few% of total revenues. And Jeff Bezos’s “worth” isn’t money in the bank: it’s shares, which can go down as well as up. (Via John Naughton)
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YouTube’s psychic wounds • Columbia Journalism Review

Nicholson Baker decided to try YouTube, and set up a brand new account on a new email address, chose an Elvis video to watch, and then some parakeets, and then:

»

I went back to my home screen, where the breaking news of the day, displayed as a row of smaller video thumbnails, was “Biden Talks ‘Presidential Leadership’ in Time of Coronavirus.” Biden says, “Just over a week ago, many of the pundits declared that this candidacy was dead. Now we’re very much alive.” A crowd cheers.

Then something oddly political happened. The next video that the algorithm gave me was a three-year-old monologue by Judge Jeanine Pirro, on Fox News, about why Hillary Clinton used a private email account for her government correspondence. Before it played, an ad came on from the Trump campaign, wanting me to take a survey. Then I got a second ad, for a newspaper with ultraconservative and Falun Gong connections called the Epoch Times: “Are you tired of the media spinning the truth and pushing false narratives?” Evidently YouTube, not knowing much about me yet, wrongly assumed that I was a member of the alt-right. Based on what? Where I live, in Maine, or that I like dancing-cockatoo videos? That I like Elvis? Maybe it was Elvis.

Judge Jeanine’s monologue was bitter and unpleasant. “Bill and Hillary Clinton are the Bonnie and Clyde of American politics,” she says. I clicked the “next” arrow. Now I was given fourteen minutes of Hillary Clinton testifying about Benghazi from 2015. Why?

«

Avoiding the news stuff turns out to be very tricky. Yet feasible.
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Lenovo Flex 5G review: insane battery life, at a cost • Android Authority

Eric Zeman:

»

There’s no Intel inside. The Lenovo Flex 5G is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx mobile processor with eight Kryo 495 cores clocked at 2.84GHz. It features an Adreno 680 GPU, 8GB of LPDDR4 RAM, and 256GB of UFS 3.0 storage. This system felt fast across the board, though its Geekbench 5 scores were only 721 for single-core and 2862 for multi-core.

Battery life is absolutely outstanding. The machine has a four-cell 60Wh lithium-polymer battery inside. Combined with the 8cx, it absolutely kills. Lenovo rates battery life at an astounding 24 hours. I couldn’t kill the battery over a period of several days. It lasts and lasts and lasts. That includes time spent surfing on 5G, which you’d expect to drain the battery right quick. The Lenovo Flex 5G has some of the best battery life we’ve tested.

«

Seems to me this is a hint of what Apple Silicon might be able to do. The A12Z, in the iPad Pro, is a 2.48GHz chip, and that knocks lots of Windows (and Mac) machines into a box. Ramp up the speed, add in a few cores, and you’ve still got something that will be faster and last all day.

Plus this Lenovo has 5G built in. Even 4G would be welcome to lots of people.
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America’s looming primary-care crisis • The New Yorker

Clifford Marks:

»

Even before the pandemic, primary care was in crisis. Primary-care doctors were already among the most poorly compensated physicians in the country; for medical students burdened with debt, those smaller salaries lessened the specialty’s allure. Experts have long warned of a shortage of doctors providing foundational forms of outpatient care, especially in rural areas. Last year, the Kaiser Family Foundation estimated that more than fourteen thousand primary-care physicians were needed to eliminate existing shortages.

For this article, I spoke with more than twenty primary-care physicians, from New York City to rural Nebraska and suburban Colorado. They work in single-physician practices, in multi-specialty groups, or as part of hospital systems. Nearly all of them described dramatic declines in revenue. Many benefitted from the P.P.P. [government bailout money]; without it, some of their clinics might not have survived. All of the physicians expressed concern about how they would navigate the uncertainty ahead. “This is taking us down,” Jacqueline Fincher, an internist and the president of the American College of Physicians, told me. “We’re not going to have a vaccine and herd immunity for probably a year—so, is this sustainable for a year? The reality is, it’s probably not, certainly not for most small practices.” If many of them go out of business, the consequences for Americans’ health could be profound and enduring. What’s at stake is not just a pattern of health outcomes but the shape of the health-care system as a whole. The way that patients interact with their doctors and the path that American health care takes in the future may be about to shift.

«

America, land of concurrent looming crises.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Might this be the next way to get a different experience on Twitter? It’s “exploring” subscription options. CC-licensed photo by Aranami 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. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook ignored racial bias research, employees say • NBC News

Olivia Solon:

»

In mid-2019, researchers at Facebook began studying a new set of rules proposed for the automated system that Instagram uses to remove accounts for bullying and other infractions.

What they found was alarming. Users on the Facebook-owned Instagram in the United States whose activity on the app suggested they were Black were about 50% more likely under the new rules to have their accounts automatically disabled by the moderation system than those whose activity indicated they were white, according to two current employees and one former employee, who all spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to talk to the media.

The findings were echoed by interviews with Facebook and Instagram users who said they felt that the platforms’ moderation practices were discriminatory, the employees said.

The researchers took their findings to their superiors, expecting that it would prompt managers to quash the changes. Instead, they were told not share their findings with co-workers or conduct any further research into racial bias in Instagram’s automated account removal system. Instagram ended up implementing a slightly different version of the new rules but declined to let the researchers test the new version.

«

Unsurprisingly, the employees were annoyed – and they say Facebook managers keep ignoring this sort of stuff. And we’re not surprised, are we. But there are signs of fracture in Facebook’s culture: read on.
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Facebook employee leaks show feelings of betrayal by company leadership • Buzzfeed News

Ryan Mac and Craig Silverman:

»

In spite of the occasional internal dustup, employees generally felt the company was doing more good than harm. At the very least, they avoided publicly airing their grievances.

“We are failing, and what’s worse, we have enshrined that failure in our policies.”
“This time, our response feels different,” wrote Facebook engineer Dan Abramov in a June 26 post on Workplace, the company’s internal communications platform. “I’ve taken some [paid time off] to refocus, but I can’t shake the feeling that the company leadership has betrayed the trust my colleagues and I have placed in them.”

Messages like those from Wang and Abramov illustrate how Facebook’s handling of the president’s often divisive posts has caused a sea change in its ranks and led to a crisis of confidence in leadership, according to interviews with current and former employees and dozens of documents obtained by BuzzFeed News. The documents — which include company discussion threads, employee survey results, and recordings of Zuckerberg — reveal that the company was slow to take down ads with white nationalist and Nazi content reported by its own employees. They demonstrate how the company’s public declarations about supporting racial justice causes are at odds with policies forbidding Facebookers from using company resources to support political matters. They show Zuckerberg being publicly accused of misleading his employees. Above all, they portray a fracturing company culture.

…Yaël Eisenstat, Facebook’s former election ads integrity lead, said the employees’ concerns reflect her experience at the company, which she believes is on a dangerous path heading into the election.

“All of these steps are leading up to a situation where, come November, a portion of Facebook users will not trust the outcome of the election because they have been bombarded with messages on Facebook preparing them to not trust it,” she told BuzzFeed News..

«

Eisenstat’s point is the important one – and Facebook, I bet you, doesn’t have a policy about it.
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The UK’s response to Covid-19 has been world-class • Bloomberg via MSN

Tyler Cowen, who does agree at the start that the UK’s public health response has been lousy, and that it has one of the highest death rates per million:

»

the most important factor in the global response to Covid-19 has to be progress on the biomedical front, and on that score the U.K. receives stellar marks. In fact, I would argue, it is tops in the world, and certainly No. 1 on a per capita basis.

First, a cheap steroid known as dexamethasone was the first drug shown to reduce death in Covid-19 patients, and the trials proving its effectiveness came from the U.K., with Oxford University playing a prominent role. In one sample, the drug reduced deaths among a vulnerable group by one-third (it is less effective for milder cases). Dexamethasone is now a part of treatment regimens around the world, and even poor countries can afford it.

It is fair to call this achievement a home run, or at least a triple (or must I say, “a six”?). And while Spain also had a role in proving the beneficial use of this drug, the U.K. clinched the path-breaking research.

The world is also in the midst of a race to find a safe and effective vaccine against Covid-19. And so far the leading contender comes from the U.K. Results published on Monday indicate that the vaccine generated an immune response in a group of about 1,000 patients. To develop this vaccine, the British-Swedish drug company AstraZeneca has been working with Oxford, and the company has inked a major deal for widespread distribution to poorer countries.

«

I guess you could say that in areas that are useful to the world, the UK has done well. On everything else.. no.
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Coronavirus: New NHS England contact-tracing app may bring ‘personal benefits’ • Sky News

Rowland Manthorpe:

»

NHS England’s coronavirus contact-tracing app could be revamped with new features designed to bring “personal benefits” to users, Sky News can reveal.

The proposed features include “Fitbit-style” alerts letting people know whether they might have been at risk of catching coronavirus, and “check-ins” with QR codes at the entrances of businesses, according to a person involved with the project.

Officials at NHS England’s innovation unit, NHSX, believe this will help win over a sceptical public and revitalise the troubled project after a series of high-profile delays and development issues.

But one of the proposed features could bring the UK government into further conflict with Apple after it emerged that the tech company had refused a request by another government to add QR check-ins to its app.

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Going to take a wild guess that this is going to fall far short.
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Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products • WSJ

Dana Mattioli and Cara Lombardo:

»

When Amazon’s venture-capital fund invested in DefinedCrowd Corp, it gained access to the technology startup’s finances and other confidential information.

Nearly four years later, in April, Amazon’s cloud-computing unit launched an artificial-intelligence product that does almost exactly what DefinedCrowd does, said DefinedCrowd founder and Chief Executive Daniela Braga.

The new offering from Amazon Web Services, called A2I, competes directly “with one of our bread-and-butter foundational products” that collects and labels data, said Ms. Braga. After seeing the A2I announcement, Ms. Braga limited the Amazon fund’s access to her company’s data and diluted its stake by 90% by raising more capital.

Ms. Braga is one of more than two dozen entrepreneurs, investors and deal advisers interviewed by The Wall Street Journal who said Amazon appeared to use the investment and deal-making process to help develop competing products.

In some cases, Amazon’s decision to launch a competing product devastated the business in which it invested. In other cases, it met with startups about potential takeovers, sought to understand how their technology works, then declined to invest and later introduced similar Amazon-branded products, according to some of the entrepreneurs and investors.

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This is the same complaint that used to be made against Microsoft. (Stac Electronics was the classic case.)
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US investors try to buy TikTok from Chinese owner • Financial Times

Henny Sender, Arash Massoudi, Miles Kruppa and Hannah Murphy:

»

A group of US tech investors has launched an ambitious plan to buy TikTok from its Chinese owner, as the popular short video app tries to escape being banned by the White House. 

The investors, led by the venture capital firms General Atlantic and Sequoia Capital, are in discussions with the US Treasury and other regulators to see if spinning out TikTok and firewalling it from its Chinese parent would satisfy US concerns about the app, according to two people involved in the process. 

Last weekend, President Donald Trump’s election campaign placed ads on Facebook suggesting that TikTok was “spying” on US users, a claim the company has denied. Other critics have noted the app’s huge influence as it sits on the mobile phones of tens of millions of Americans.

Other investors, including New York-based private equity firms and Silicon Valley tech firms, have also made approaches to ByteDance and its founder, Zhang Yiming, about a potential deal for TikTok.

But none is as far advanced as the General Atlantic and Sequoia group, according to the people involved. ByteDance was reluctant to share its technology with a rival company, said one of the investors, adding: “This is the only viable plan.”

«

CFIUS – the US body which looks at foreign takeovers – is also considering making it unwind its 2017 acquisition of Musical.ly. But the power of TikTok now is the algorithm, not necessarily the music.
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Twitter says it’s looking at subscription options, as ad revenue drops sharply • CNN

Brian Fung, CNN Business:

»

Twitter is actively exploring additional ways to make money from its users, including by considering a subscription model, CEO Jack Dorsey said Thursday. The move comes as Twitter suffers a sharp decline in its core advertising business.

“You will likely see some tests this year” of various approaches, Dorsey told analysts on an investor call held to discuss the company’s second quarter earnings results. Dorsey said he has “a really high bar for when we would ask consumers to pay for aspects of Twitter,” but confirmed that the company is seeking to diversify its sources of revenue in what are “very, very early phases of exploring.”

Earlier this month, rumors flared about a paid Twitter option after the company posted a job opening focused on building a subscription platform codenamed “Gryphon.” Twitter’s stock surged at the time, signaling investor appetite for the company to find new revenue streams.

Shares of Twitter rose 4% in early trading Thursday following the earnings results.

«

That would be something. Twitter has shown that it’s not afraid to think of different ways to do things. Zero ads? A free pass to other subscription sites? Guaranteed verification? It has to be something that cn be reversed, of course.
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Facebook is simulating users’ bad behavior using AI • The Verge

James Vincent:

»

Facebook’s engineers have developed a new method to help them identify and prevent harmful behavior like users spreading spam, scamming others, or buying and selling weapons and drugs. They can now simulate the actions of bad actors using AI-powered bots by letting them loose on a parallel version of Facebook. Researchers can then study the bots’ behavior in simulation and experiment with new ways to stop them.

…In real life, scammers often start their work by prowling a users’ friendship groups to find potential marks. To model this behavior in WW, Facebook engineers created a group of “innocent” bots to act as targets and trained a number of “bad” bots who explored the network to try to find them. The engineers then tried different ways to stop the bad bots, introducing various constraints, like limiting the number of private messages and posts the bots could send each minute, to see how this affected their behavior.

Harman compares the work to that of city planners trying to reduce speeding on busy roads. In that case, engineers model traffic flows in simulators and then experiment with introducing things like speed bumps on certain streets to see what effect they have. WW simulation allows Facebook to do the same thing but with Facebook users.

«

Will it simulate Facebook suggesting “bad actors” join white supremacist groups and similar? Because that’s a bit of a problem in the real world.
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The star of ‘Plandemic’ spent years flooding the vaccine court system with bad science • Vice

Anna Merlan:

»

These are heady times, not just for Mikovits and Wakefield, but for the broader anti-vaccine movement. Amid the ongoing devastation of the coronavirus pandemic and the promise of a COVID-19 vaccine—one experts worry could potentially be rushed into production, and thus subject to fear and suspicion and rejection from people who desperately need it—they see an opportunity to discredit the entire vaccine schedule, and the science behind it.

The goal appears to be nothing less than to undermine the basic functioning of the vaccine manufacture system at a time when we need it more urgently than ever. But a secondary goal is to be able to sue vaccine manufacturers in civil court again, which hasn’t been possible since the 1980s—and which could not only undermine the production of vaccines, but mean a staggering payday for many of the attorneys who make up the backbone of the anti-vaccine movement.

Justice is coming for vaccine makers, Mikovits, Wakefield and other anti-vaccine celebrities are promising their devoted fans. The vaccine system is teetering on the brink of collapse, they suggest. And with the COVID-19 vaccine projected for the near future, they clearly hope that now is the right time to persuade others that vaccines are fundamentally unsafe, and that resisting them is nothing less than humanity’s last stand.

In the meantime, though, the first part of this plan—inserting discredited science into an already overtaxed system and falsely linking vaccines with a variety of ailments—has already been underway for a long, long time.

«

The weird thing about all this is how it sounds like a conspiracy theory. We’re fighting their conspiracy theory with our conspiracy theory.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: I wrongly said that “K-12” in the US is secondary school. I should have checked: it’s “Kindergarten to 12th grade”. Basically, all of formal school that isn’t university.

Protesters against the HB 6 bill, which became law in Ohio: its architect has been arrested on suspicion of taking bribes. CC-licensed photo by Becker1999 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. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook begins labeling, but not fact-checking, posts from Trump and Biden • CNN

Donie O’Sullivan and Marshall Cohen:

»

After President Donald Trump posted an unfounded claim to Facebook (FB) on Tuesday that mail-in voting could lead to a “corrupt election,” the social network slapped a label on it. But the label did not attempt to fact-check the post as true or false. Instead, it directed users to a government website to learn more about how to vote.

The response is part of Facebook’s new policy, announced by CEO Mark Zuckerberg last month, to label posts about the November election. In recent days, Facebook has placed the same label beneath a mix of posts from Trump and presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden, including one from the former vice president calling to “vote Donald Trump out this November” that does not make any factual assertions about voting.

This new approach has already been criticized by some industry watchers who worry the labels are confusing or could even be viewed as tacit endorsements of the President’s controversial posts.
“This warning seems pretty useless — it might even seem that Facebook is endorsing what Trump is saying and providing a path for more information,” Rick Hasen, a professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine, wrote on Twitter.

Twitter’s rigid fact-check rules allow Trump to continue spreading false information about the election
The labeling began rolling out over the last few days, according to Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone. It comes in the aftermath of employees and civil rights leaders panning Facebook’s decision not to take action on earlier incendiary posts from Trump, including one on mail-in ballots and another during a protest, in which he said “looting” would lead to “shooting.” (Twitter flagged these posts by the President.)

«

Classic Facebook. It’s always never enough. Always, continually, predictably. If there are two options, it will always take the less-good, less-effective, less-useful one.
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Larry Householder affidavit: Ohio energy law that bailed out FirstEnergy was fueled by bribery • Vox

Leah Stokes:

»

On Tuesday, the news broke that the FBI had arrested Ohio Speaker of the House of Representatives Larry Householder, the architect of HB 6, a law that passed in July 2019. That bill, widely recognized as the worst energy policy in the country, gutted Ohio’s renewables and energy efficiency laws while bailing out several coal and nuclear plants.

As I wrote in my book, Short Circuiting Policy, the law was a multibillion-dollar gift to FirstEnergy, a private electric utility that has resisted climate policy for decades. It turns out it was a gift paid for with $61m in bribes.

Spending a few million to get more than a billion dollars? Not a bad return on investment.

Unfortunately, this kind of corruption is not an aberration for the electric utility industry. Across the US, most private utilities are resisting the clean energy transition, and many are buying off politicians with campaign contributions to do it. What’s more, the industry celebrates it — the Edison Electric Institute, the national private utility association, gave FirstEnergy an award for its work to pass HB 6.

Corruption like this within the electric utility industry is a barrier to solving the climate crisis. But the way forward is clear: citizens must demand that politicians stop taking money from these fossil fuel companies and start holding them accountable.

«

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Slack files EU antitrust complaint against Microsoft • WSJ

Sam Schechner:

»

Business-messaging app Slack has filed an antitrust complaint against Microsoft in the European Union, accusing the software giant of abusing its dominance in allegations that echo the Windows-maker’s competition battles more than a decade ago.

The complaint, filed Wednesday to the European Commission, the EU’s top competition regulator, accuses Microsoft of trying to snuff out competition in its push into workplace collaboration tools by tying its Teams software to its widely used Office productivity suite.

Slack Technologies, which supplies its messaging app as well as a hub for other business-collaboration apps, alleges that Microsoft forces companies to install Teams, blocks its removal and makes certain types of interoperability impossible. The company is asking the EU to force Microsoft to sell Teams as a stand-alone product, rather than bundling it with Office.

Microsoft said that it is committed to providing its customers a variety of choice and that it looks forward to providing additional information to the European Commission.

A spokeswoman for the European Commission said the regulator has received Slack’s complaint against Microsoft and “will assess it under our standard procedures.” In the past such complaints have at times—but not always—led to formal investigations.

«

It’s all the same song that we used to hear: interoperability, bundling, pricing. All they have to do is show that Microsoft has a dominant market share and they’re sold. And in about 2025, there will be the first steps to a resolution.
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Can you become reinfected with Covid? It’s very unlikely, experts say • The New York Times

Apoorva Mandavilli:

»

What’s unusual in the current pandemic, Dr. Mina said, is to see how this dynamic plays out in adults, because they so rarely experience a virus for the first time.

Even after the first surge of immunity fades, there is likely to be some residual protection. And while antibodies have received all the attention because they are easier to study and detect, memory T cells and B cells are also powerful immune warriors in a fight against any pathogen.

A study published July 15, for example, looked at three different groups. In one, each of 36 people exposed to the new virus had T cells that recognize a protein that looks similar in all coronaviruses. In another, 23 people infected with the SARS virus in 2003 also had these T cells, as did 37 people in the third group who were never exposed to either pathogen.

“A level of pre-existing immunity against SARS-CoV2 appears to exist in the general population,” said Dr. Antonio Bertoletti, a virologist at Duke NUS Medical School in Singapore.

The immunity may have been stimulated by prior exposure to coronaviruses that cause common colds. These T cells may not thwart infection, but they would blunt the illness and may explain why some people with Covid-19 have mild to no symptoms. “I believe that cellular and antibody immunity will be equally important,” Dr. Bertoletti said.

«

This is interesting in the context of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s top dolt, who has now tested positive three times. Except there don’t seem to be any occasions where he’s tested negative. He’s just mildly ill, perhaps.

Or, perhaps, he hasn’t tested positive at all, because at his age (65) he could get pretty ill. Telling the press you’re ill when you’re not would be a good way to play the tough guy, and reinforce his message that it’s nothing to worry about. Meanwhile, people are dying.
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So *that’s* how Breitbart is still making money • BRANDED

BRANDED:

»

For the past few years, we’ve all believed that not funding hate is as easy as blocking bad sites. That you can avoid the risks of being viewed next to terrorist propaganda or hate speech by simply opting out.

But nothing about digital advertising is straightforward.

Last month, Zach Edwards, a data supply researcher, reached out to us with a tip. He told us he had found evidence that Breitbart was continuing to siphon advertising dollars from unsuspecting brands without their knowledge or consent. He told us the average marketer would never know — that you wouldn’t find any clues of this by checking your site list.

This tactic enables vast sums of money to be funnelled towards bad actors mostly without detection, which means that the biggest companies in the world are still funnelling ad dollars towards hate and disinformation. Even if you have blocked Breitbart or use an inclusion list, your brand could still be at risk.

Zach has been our guide to understanding this type of ad fraud, which we find to be so egregious that it should be illegal. We decided to join forces with him for this story.

👉🏽 You can read Zach’s technical version here.

«

This is super-complicated. But a weird thing: Breitbart, Drudgereport, the Mirror in the UK are somehow sharing advertising revenue. Embarrassing for the Mirror among others.
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Artificial intelligence is the hope 2020 needs • Bloomberg via MSN

Tyler Cowen:

»

GPT-3 does not try to pass the Turing test by being indistinguishable from a human in its responses. Rather, it is built for generality and depth, even though that means it will serve up bad answers to many queries, at least in its current state. As a general philosophical principle, it accepts that being weird sometimes is a necessary part of being smart. In any case, like so many other technologies, GPT-3 has the potential to rapidly improve.

It is not difficult to imagine a wide variety of GPT-3 spinoffs, or companies built around auxiliary services, or industry task forces to improve the less accurate aspects of GPT-3. Unlike some innovations, it could conceivably generate an entire ecosystem.

There is a notable buzz about GPT-3 in the tech community. One user in the U.K. tweeted: “I just got access to gpt-3 and I can’t stop smiling, i am so excited.” Venture capitalist Paul Graham noted coyly: “Hackers are fascinated by GPT-3. To everyone else it seems a toy. Pattern seem familiar to anyone?” Venture capitalist and AI expert Daniel Gross referred to GPT-3 as “a landmark moment in the field of AI.”

«

Want some more reading? Here’s more about GPT-3. Make sure you read to the end. If you’re not paying attention to GPT-3, watch out for GPT-4 in a couple of years’ time.
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The racist history of tipping • POLITICO Magazine

Reverend Dr William Barber:

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You might not think of tipping as a legacy of slavery, but it has a far more racialized history than most Americans realize. Tipping originated in feudal Europe and was imported back to the United States by American travelers eager to seem sophisticated. The practice spread throughout the country after the Civil War as US employers, largely in the hospitality sector, looked for ways to avoid paying formerly enslaved workers.

One of the most notorious examples comes from the Pullman Company, which hired newly freed African American men as porters. Rather than paying them a real wage, Pullman provided the black porters with just a meager pittance, forcing them to rely on tips from their white clientele for most of their pay.

Tipping further entrenched a unique and often racialized class structure in service jobs, in which workers must please both customer and employer to earn anything at all. A journalist quoted in Kerry Segrave’s 2009 book, Tipping: An American Social History of Gratuities, wrote in 1902 that he was embarrassed to offer a tip to a white man. “Negroes take tips, of course; one expects that of them—it is a token of their inferiority,” he wrote. “Tips go with servility, and no man who is a voter in this country is in the least justified in being in service.”

The immorality of paying an insufficient wage to workers, who then were forced to rely on tips, was acknowledged at the time. In his popular 1916 anti-tipping study, The Itching Palm, writer William Scott described tipping as an aristocratic custom that went against American ideals. “The relation of a man giving a tip and a man accepting it is as undemocratic as the relation of master and slave,” Scott wrote. “A citizen in a republic ought to stand shoulder to shoulder with every other citizen, with no thought of cringing, without an assumption of superiority or an acknowledgment of inferiority.”

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As someone remarked on Twitter, almost every unusual practice you see in America is linked to racism.
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Twitter cracks down on QAnon, bans thousands of accounts • The Washington Post

Tim Elfrink:

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As QAnon conspiracy theorists bombarded Chrissy Teigen with false claims and threats last week, the model and author blocked more than 1 million accounts and threatened to abandon the platform and her 13 million followers.

On Tuesday, Twitter took broad action itself against the right-wing conspiracy theory. The social media company recently deleted more than 7,000 QAnon accounts, the company confirmed to The Washington Post, and is removing QAnon URLs from tweets and working to prevent the conspiracy theory from showing up in recommendations and trending topics. The changes could ultimately affect more than 150,000 accounts.

The company told The Post the move to crack down on QAnon wasn’t directly motivated by Teigen’s high-profile conflict last week, but rather an emerging trend of QAnon groups coordinating to abuse people.

Teigen backed the move, telling a critic who called Twitter’s announcement “censorship” that harassment isn’t free speech.

“You don’t have a ‘right’ to coordinate attacks and make death threats,” Teigen wrote on Twitter. “It is not an ‘opinion’ to call people pedophiles who rape and eat children.”

«

Teigen has had a grisly time. The fruitloops of QAnut have been going after her for years. Wiping the ones coordinating it off the site is an overdue move.
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Nvidia interested in buying SoftBank’s Arm chip designer • TheStreet

Rob Lenihan:

»

Nvidia is reportedly interested in acquiring Arm Ltd., the semiconductor designer owned by Japanese investment group SoftBank Group.

Shares of Nvidia at last check were up 1.2% at $418.

Nvidia made an approach in recent weeks about a potential deal for Cambridge, England-based Arm, Bloomberg reported, citing people with knowledge of the matter.

SoftBank is exploring options to sell part or all of its stake in Arm through a private deal or public stock listing, Bloomberg said. Other potential bidders could also emerge.

Nvidia’s interest may not lead to a deal, and SoftBank may still opt to pursue a listing, the people said. 

Arm sells semiconductor designs and also licenses the fundamentals of how chips communicate with software, known as instruction sets. Even some companies that design their own chips, such as Apple, do so using Arm’s instruction set.

A deal for Arm could become the biggest-ever acquisition in the chip industry, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. 

Arm is owned by SoftBank and its $100bn Vision Fund. SoftBank bought Arm in 2016 for $32bn, which at the time was the UK’s largest listed technology company.

«

Doubtful whether Nvidia will get the go-ahead for this: the competition question (you’re a dominant GPU designer and you want to own the dominant CPU designer?) is obvious.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Need to buy a parrot? In Bangladesh, you’ll start looking on Facebook, where F-commerce happens. CC-licensed photo by Peter Miller 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. Uninfluenced. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Russia report reveals UK government failed to investigate Kremlin interference • The Guardian

Dan Sabbagh:

»

The British government and intelligence agencies failed to conduct any proper assessment of Kremlin attempts to interfere with the 2016 Brexit referendum, according to the long-delayed Russia report.

The damning conclusion is contained within the 50-page document from parliament’s intelligence and security committee, which said ministers in effect turned a blind eye to allegations of Russian disruption. It said the government “had not seen or sought evidence of successful interference in UK democratic processes” at the time, and it made clear that no serious effort was made to do so.

“The report reveals that no one in government knew if Russia interfered in or sought to influence the referendum because they did not want to know,” said Stewart Hosie, a Scottish National party MP who sits on the cross-party committee. “The UK Government have actively avoided looking for evidence that Russia interfered. We were told that they hadn’t seen any evidence, but that is meaningless if they hadn’t looked for it.”

The committee, which scrutinises the work of Britain’s spy agencies, said: “We have not been provided with any post-referendum assessment of Russian attempts at interference”. It contrasted the response with that of the US.

…Committee members noted that publicly available studies have pointed to “the preponderance of pro-Brexit or anti-EU stories” on the Russia Today and Sputnik TV channels at the time of the vote, and “the use of ‘bots’ and ‘trolls’” on Twitter, as evidence of Russian attempts to influence the process.

There was “credible open source commentary” that Russia undertook “influence campaigns” relating to the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, but despite this, no effort was made to look at the Kremlin threat to British democracy until after the Brexit vote.

It was only after Russia hacked US Democratic party emails in July 2016 that any assessment appeared to have been made – and the document suggests that some sort of exercise was conducted after the 2017 general election.

«

The indifference – because Russian donors were funnelling so much money into the Tory party coffers – is utterly disgraceful. It’s also corrupt. Money corrupts everything, but it corrupts politics before anything else.
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Coronavirus: harmful lies spread easily due to lack of UK law • BBC News

Marianna Spring, disinformation reporter:

»

Misleading and harmful online content about Covid-19 has spread “virulently” because the UK still lacks a law to regulate social media, an influential group of MPs has said.

The Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee urged the government to publish a draft copy of promised legislation by the autumn.

It follows suggestions the Online Harms Bill might not be in force until 2024.

The group’s chairman said tech firms could not be left to self-regulate. “We still haven’t seen correct legislative architecture put in place, and we are still relying on social media companies’ consciences,” said Julian Knight. “This just is not good enough. Our legislation is not in any way fit for purpose, and we’re still waiting. What I’ve seen so far has just been quite a lot of delay.”

Google and Facebook have said they have invested in measures to tackle posts that breach their guidelines. But the report has already been welcomed by the children’s charity NSPCC.

“The committee is right to be concerned about the pace of legislation and whether the regulator will have the teeth it needs,” said Andy Burrows, its head of child safety online policy.

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The government has made noises about “online harms” for years. But does nothing about it.
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Covid could become the new common cold • UnHerd

Tom Chivers:

»

Babak Javid, a professor of immunology at the University of California San Francisco says that “the only definitive data we have with immunity and coronaviruses” comes from studies from a few decades ago, so-called “human challenge” studies, in which people were deliberately given the common cold and then their immune responses were tracked. 

Crucially, they found that if patients had detectable levels of antibodies before they were given the virus, they were immune. But, as you’d expect, people who didn’t have the antibodies got a cold — and then developed antibodies. The studies found, as with the current coronavirus, that the number of antibodies in the bloodstream then tailed off rapidly. 

A year later, the scientists tried infecting them again. They “were virologically affected”, says Javid – that is, if you swabbed them and tested for a virus, you would find it — but “they had no symptoms whatsoever, even in people with no antibody response”. The period in which they were themselves infectious appears to have been much shorter, as well.

Part of what’s going on here is that antibodies are only part of your body’s immune response to infection.

«

There’s plenty more, and you’ll learn a lot about immune responses, and a good simile for why you want high thresholds for false positives. Very informative, which is more than you can say about many articles on this topic.
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In Bangladesh, everything is bought and sold through Facebook • Rest of World

Nilesh Christopher:

»

After most of the management classes Kabir taught at a university in Dhaka were canceled or moved online, he suddenly had plenty of time to focus on his passion project: becoming a part-time bird breeder. Sitting in his three-bedroom apartment one day, Kabir keyed in the phrase “Buy-sell birds Dhaka” on Facebook and joined about half a dozen groups dedicated to avian retail.

“Breeding pair. Age: 20 days. Contact by phone or inbox” read one post, alongside images of a pair of grayish-brown cockatiels. Another seller, located in the Kallyanpur neighborhood in Dhaka, posted pictures of yellow-feathered lutino cockatiels, with the Bengali phrase hat bodol hobe — which loosely translates as “to change hands.” The wording was intended to circumvent a Facebook algorithm that, to prevent wildlife trafficking, automatically takes down posts with “buy” or “sell” in the description. If an interested buyer did contact an owner, the next step was to haggle over the price of the bird on Facebook Messenger.

Kabir bought his first pair of birds from the 3,000-person Facebook group A.S.ককাটেল পাখি হাত বদল — “A.S. Cockatiel changes hands.” For that purchase, the seller delivered the birds in person to collect them, and Kabir paid in cash. He was so pleased with his decision that he bought 24 more pairs over the next two weeks, including breeds such as Gouldian finches, Bengalese finches, and crested Bengalese finches. Each pair cost anywhere between $15 and $60, depending upon the breed and its age. “At one point, I started running out of space to accommodate all the birds, and sent about half a dozen Bengalese finches, along with some Gouldians, to my fiancee’s place,” he recalled. Finally, he gave in and bought a large birdcage.

From discovery to delivery, this whole process happened on Facebook.

«

Evading Facebook algorithms; and the whole space of “F-commerce” – Facebook commerce.
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Microsoft president raised Apple issues to House Antitrust group • Bloomberg

Dina Bass:

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Microsoft Corp. President Brad Smith raised concerns to U.S. lawmakers about what the company regards as Apple Inc.’s anti-competitive behavior around its app store, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Smith, who is also chief legal officer, was invited by the House of Representatives’s antitrust subcommittee to share his experiences around Microsoft’s own antitrust battle with the U.S. government in the late 1990s. During the conversation, which occurred weeks ago, he discussed the company’s issue with Apple, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the discussion was private.

The House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee will hold a hearing with the CEOs of Apple, Amazon.com Inc., Facebook Inc. and Google-parent Alphabet Inc. on July 27. A Microsoft spokesperson declined to comment Monday.

Smith said last month that regulators should examine app store rules, which he called a far higher barrier to fair competition than Microsoft’s Windows operating software when it was found guilty of antitrust violations 20 years ago. While Smith didn’t name Apple in that public interview, a Microsoft spokesperson said later the executive was referring to the iPhone maker.

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Wonder what Microsoft is trying to get out of this. A smaller cut on iOS sales, at a guess.
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3D Book Image CSS Generator

Sebastien Castiel created this neat little page which generates a CSS-only animation of a book – any book. Grab an image and URL from Amazon and away you go. Very neat.
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China may retaliate against Nokia and Ericsson if EU countries move to ban Huawei • WSJ

Liza Lin, Stu Woo and Lingling Wei:

»

China’s Ministry of Commerce is mulling export controls that would prevent Nokia and Ericsson from sending products it makes in China to other countries, the people said. One person added that this was a worst-case scenario that Beijing would use only if European countries came down hard on Chinese suppliers and banned them from their 5G networks.

Last week, the U.K., which left the EU earlier this year, ordered its wireless carriers to stop buying Huawei 5G equipment by the end of 2020 and to remove Huawei 5G equipment from its networks by the end of 2027.

The EU hasn’t banned Huawei, but took a softer stance in January by releasing 5G cybersecurity recommendations that member states could voluntarily adopt to restrict Huawei’s presence in each country. It is expected to soon publish a report detailing how its 27 member states have adopted them.

The EU’s biggest country, Germany, isn’t expected to decide whether to bar Huawei from its 5G networks until September at the earliest.

The Chinese Commerce Ministry said last Thursday that the country will take necessary measures to protect the legitimate rights of Chinese companies, in response to a recent ban on Huawei by the British government. The ministry didn’t respond to a request for comment on Monday.

“This kind of action could backfire by frightening some foreign tech companies into moving manufacturing out of China,” said Jim McGregor, the Greater China chairman of advisory and advocacy consulting firm APCO Worldwide.

«

China isn’t a big market for Nokia or Ericsson; this will just accelerate any plans they might have had to move manufacturing out of China, and it’s also going to make other companies think the same. I wonder what the planning meetings are like inside Apple.
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Lebanon’s economic crisis worsens amid shortages, currency collapse • The Washington Post

Liz Sly:

»

Known as an oasis of prosperity and relative stability during the past decade of Middle East turmoil, Lebanon is descending into poverty, despair and potentially chaos. Economists are now predicting a Venezuela-style collapse, with acute shortages of essential products and services, runaway inflation and rising lawlessness — in a country at the heart of an already unstable region.

The Lebanese pound has lost over 60% of its value in just the past month, and 80% of its value since October. Prices are soaring and goods disappearing.

Bread, a staple of the Lebanese diet, is in short supply because the government can’t fund imports of wheat. Essential medicines are disappearing from pharmacies. Hospitals are laying off staff because the government isn’t paying its portion, and canceling surgeries because they don’t have electricity or the fuel to operate generators.

Newly impoverished people are taking to Facebook to offer to trade household items for milk. Crime is on the rise. In one widely circulated video, a man wearing a coronavirus mask and wielding a pistol holds up a drugstore and demands that the pharmacist hand over diapers.

“Lebanon is no longer on the brink of collapse. The economy of Lebanon has collapsed,” said Fawaz Gerges, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics. “The Lebanese model established since the end of the civil war in 1990 has failed. It was a house of glass, and it has shattered beyond any hope of return.”

The implications are worrying, he said. Lebanon occupies a uniquely fragile position as a country in a state of war with one of its neighbors (Israel), located next door to another war (Syria’s) and in the crosshairs of the conflict between the United States and Iran.

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Sometimes the news just isn’t good.
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WSJ journalists ask publisher for clearer distinction between news and opinion content • WSJ

Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg:

»

A group of journalists at The Wall Street Journal and other Dow Jones staffers sent a letter on Tuesday to the paper’s new publisher, Almar Latour, calling for a clearer differentiation between news and opinion content online, citing concerns about the Opinion section’s accuracy and transparency.

The letter, signed by more than 280 reporters, editors and other employees says, “Opinion’s lack of fact-checking and transparency, and its apparent disregard for evidence, undermine our readers’ trust and our ability to gain credibility with sources.”

The letter cites several examples of concern, including a recent essay by Vice President Mike Pence about coronavirus infections. The letter’s authors said the editors published Mr. Pence’s figures “without checking government figures” and noted that the piece, “There Isn’t a Coronavirus ‘Second Wave,’” was later corrected.

The letter says many readers don’t understand that there is a wall between the Journal’s editorial page operations, which have been overseen by Paul Gigot since 2001, and the news staff, which is overseen by Editor in Chief Matt Murray. Mr. Murray was also copied on the letter.

The letter proposed more prominently labeling editorials and opinion columns on the website and mobile apps, including the line “The Wall Street Journal’s Opinion pages are independent of its newsroom.” It also suggests removing opinion pieces from the “Most Popular Articles” and “Recommended Videos” lists on the website, and creating a separate “Most Popular in Opinion” list.

«

I love how the staff wrote the letter and it’s published in the Business section. But they’re completely right. The WSJ’s Opinion section has long been full of loose-screw nonsense, yet its news stories – breaking the Stormy Daniels payoff, for example, and much more around how National Enquirer suppressed negative stories about Trump – have been first-class.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Is GPT-3 a foretaste of something like HAL 9000, from 2001: A Space Odyssey? CC-licensed photo by James Vaughan 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 10 links for you. Not a joke. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The troll: a fake flag burning at Gettysburg was only his latest hoax • The Washington Post

Shawn Boburg and Dalton Bennett:

»

[Adam] Rahuba once claimed that activists were planning to desecrate a Confederate cemetery in Georgia, The Post found. He seeded rumors of an organized effort to report Trump supporters for supposed child abuse. And he promoted a purported grass-roots campaign to confiscate Americans’ guns.

These false claims circulated widely on social media and on Internet message boards. They were often amplified by right-wing commentators and covered as real news by media outlets such as Breitbart News and the Gateway Pundit.

The hoaxes, outlandish in their details, have spurred fringe groups of conspiracy-minded Americans to action by playing on partisan fears. They have led to highly combustible situations — attracting heavily armed militia members and far-right activists eager to protect values they think are under siege — as well as large mobilizations of police.

…Some of Rahuba’s hoaxes have taxed law enforcement agencies and put bystanders in danger. In Gettysburg this year, a local pastor wearing a Black Lives Matter T-shirt was surrounded by armed counterprotesters until officers accompanied him out of the park for his own safety. Three years ago, an armed man who went to Gettysburg in response to a purported flag burning Rahuba had promoted on Facebook accidentally shot himself in the leg with a revolver.

Rahuba dismissed concerns that his efforts had harmed people or put them at risk.

“The message here was that any idiot on the Internet can get a bunch of people to show up at a Union cemetery with a bunch of Confederate flags and Nazi tattoos on their necks that just make them look foolish,” he said.

He also had little sympathy for the man who shot himself. “There’s some comedic value to that happening,” Rahuba said.

Rahuba, a lifelong resident of the Pittsburgh area, said he began trolling in high school. Using a dial-up modem, he and a group of friends posed as a 12- or 13-year-old girl in online chat rooms to lure older men to meetings, he said. In his telling, the men arrived to find Rahuba and his friends mocking them.

“It made me realize that people will believe the most unrealistic nonsense on the Internet,” he said.

«

I have to say I’m with Rahuba on this. If people are so stupid as to believe this junk – and the outlets that amplify it – then that’s on them. If people didn’t do stupid things, they wouldn’t be made to look like fools. (See also bitcoin, below.)
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GPT-3, etc. • Marginal REVOLUTION

Tyler Cowen:

»

I am increasingly convinced that Scott Alexander was right that NLP and human language might boostrap a general intelligence. A rough criteria for AGI might be something like (i) pass the Turing test, and (ii) solve general problems; the GPT-3-AI-Dungeon examples above appear to accomplish preliminary versions of both.

GPT was published in June 2018, GPT-2 in February 2019, GPT-3 in May 2020.

As best I can tell GPT -> GPT2 was ~10x increase in parameters over ~8 months, and GPT2 -> GPT3 was ~100x increase of parameters over ~14 months. Any number of naive projections puts a much more powerful release happening over the next ~1-2yrs, and I also know that GPT-3 isn’t necessarily the most powerful NLP AI (perhaps rather the most popularly known.)

When future AI textbooks are written, I could easily imagine them citing 2020 or 2021 as years when preliminary AGI first emerged,. This is very different than my own previous personal forecasts for AGI emerging in something like 20-50 years…

p.s. One of the users above notes that AI Dungeon GPT-3 (“Dragon”) is a subscription service, something like ~$6 a week. MIE.”

«

AGI = artificial general intelligence (HAL 9000, all that kind of thing)
GPT-3 = latest version of an AI system that is astounding everyone who comes into contact with it because it’s so damn human-like, at least in what it does with text.

Yes, you can start worrying now. If GPT-3 becomes cheap, you’ll never (for example) be able to trust that the comments on a story, or the reviews on a site, were written by a human. Or that the story was written by a human. Or anything. This blogpost suggests you curb your enthusiasm. Given that it’s essentially regurgitating the English-language web, it’s also got terrible inbuilt biases.

Like HAL 9000 did, after all.
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WindowSwap

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Open a new window somewhere in the world.

Let’s face it. We are all stuck indoors. And it’s going to be a while till we travel again.

Window Swap is here to fill that deep void in our wanderlust hearts by allowing us to look through someone else’s window, somewhere in the world, for a while.

A place on the internet where all we travel hungry fools share our ‘window views’ to help each other feel a little bit better till we can (responsibly) explore our beautiful planet again.

«

This is really lovely – 10-minute HD videos (with sound) taken from peoples’ windows all over the world. A sort of nice, relaxing version of Chatroulette. (See the About page for more details.)
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Oxford coronavirus vaccine triggers immune response, trial shows • The Guardian

Sarah Boseley:

»

The results were “a really important milestone” on the path to a vaccine, said the study’s lead author, Prof Andrew Pollard. They showed the vaccine was very well tolerated, he added. “We are seeing exactly the sort of immune responses we were hoping for, including neutralising antibodies and T-cell responses, which, at least from what we’ve seen in the animal studies, seem to be those that are associated with protection.”

The problem is, he said: “We just don’t know what level is needed if you meet this virus in the wild, to provide protection, so we need to do the clinical trials and to work that out.”

Hopefully researchers would find out from the trials to come, added Pollard, which would help all vaccine developers.

“We don’t know what high is. We’ve got immune responses that we can measure, we can see the virus being neutralised when the antibodies are tested in the laboratory, but we don’t know how much is needed. I mean it’s encouraging but it’s only the first milestone on this long path,” he said.

Ideally the vaccine would protect against any infection, but scientists already accept it may reduce the severity of the disease instead, meaning people would be less likely to become very sick and die.

The volunteers have been followed up for eight weeks so far after immunisation. A further question is how long any immune response will last – if for only six months or a year, people might need regular booster shots.

«

So it’s good news, but we’re only a little way down a long road. Two more phases to go, and then ramping up production, and actually injecting people. This time next year?
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USS University • No Mercy, No Malice

Scott Galloway:

»

There is a dangerous conflation of the discussion about K-12 and university reopenings. The two are starkly different. There are strong reasons to reopen K-12, and there are stronger reasons to keep universities shuttered. University leadership needs to evolve from denial (“It’s business as usual”) past bargaining (“We’ll have a hybrid model with some classes in person”) to citizenship (“We are the warriors against this virus, not its enablers”). 

Think about this. Next month, as currently envisioned, 2,800+ cruise ships retrofitted with white boards and a younger cohort will set sail in the midst of a raging pandemic. The density and socialization on these cruise ships could render college towns across America the next virus hot spots.

Why are administrators putting the lives of faculty, staff, students, and our broader populace at risk? 

The ugly truth is many college presidents believe they have no choice. College is an expensive operation with a relatively inflexible cost structure. Tenure and union contracts render the largest cost (faculty and administrator salaries) near immovable objects. The average salary of a full professor (before benefits and admin support costs) is $104,820, though some make much more, and roughly 50% of full-time faculty have tenure. While some universities enjoy revenue streams from technology transfer, hospitals, returns on multibillion dollar endowments, and public funding, the bulk of colleges have become tuition dependent. If students don’t return in the fall, many colleges will have to take drastic action that could have serious long-term impacts on their ability to fulfill their missions. 

That gruesome calculus has resulted in a tsunami of denial. 

Universities owning up to the truth have one thing in common: they can afford to.

«

Thinking of them as giant cruise ships certainly puts it into a grim perspective. (K-12 is what Britons call secondary school: children at that age seem to be asymptomatic.)
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David Shor’s unified theory of the 2020 election • NY Mag

Eric Levitz with a fascinating (long) interview with a longtime election strategist:

»

Mitt Romney and Donald Trump agreed on basically every issue, as did Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. And yet, a bunch of people changed their votes. And the reason that happened was because the salience of various issues changed. Both sides talked a lot more about immigration, and because of that, correlation between preferences on immigration and which candidate people voted for went up. In 2012, both sides talked about health care. In 2016, they didn’t. And so the correlation between views on health care and which candidate people voted for went down.

So this means that every time you open your mouth, you have this complex optimization problem where what you say gains you some voters and loses you other voters. But this is actually cool because campaigns have a lot of control over what issues they talk about.

Non-college-educated whites, on average, have very conservative views on immigration, and generally conservative racial attitudes. But they have center-left views on economics; they support universal health care and minimum-wage increases. So I think Democrats need to talk about the issues they are with us on, and try really hard not to talk about the issues where we disagree. Which, in practice, means not talking about immigration.

…What’s powerful about nonviolent protest — and particularly nonviolent protest that incurs a disproportionate response from the police — is that it can shift the conversation, in a really visceral way, into the part of this issue space that benefits Democrats and the center left. Which is the pursuit of equality, social justice, fairness — these Democratic-loaded concepts — without the trade-off of crime or public safety.

«

Altogether fascinating about what politicians can and can’t effect through campaigning.
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Exclusive: Twitter hackers could have stolen a whole lot more bitcoin • Forbes

Billy Bambrough:

»

Coinbase, the largest U.S. bitcoin and cryptocurrency exchange with around 35 million users around the world, has said it prevented just over 1,100 Coinbase customers from sending a total of 30.4 bitcoin, worth almost $280,000, to the scam.

“We noticed within about a minute of the Gemini and Binance tweets,” Philip Martin, Coinbase chief information security officer, said during a phone interview. Bitcoin exchanges Gemini and Binance were both targeted early on by the hackers, just before Coinbase itself.

Only 14 Coinbase users were able to send around $3,000 worth of bitcoin to the scam bitcoin address before Coinbase blacklisted it, according to Martin.

“It was a vanishingly small group of Coinbase users that tried to send bitcoin to the scam address,” Martin said, adding that the San Francisco-based exchange, which is reportedly gearing up for a stock market listing that could come as early as this year, often blacklists the bitcoin and cryptocurrency addresses used by giveaway scammers.

Other bitcoin exchanges, including New York-based Gemini, owned by the Winklevoss twins, San Francisco-based Kraken and Binance, of no fixed address, all confirmed they stopped funds from flowing into the hacker’s bitcoin address—though their combined users didn’t attempt to send anywhere near as much as Coinbase.

“This hack shows that security is about layers of protection,” Jesse Powell, chief executive of Kraken, said via email. “Somebody has to be watching the admins and setting up alerts to watch for these vulnerabilities.”

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I’m now thinking that the overlap of dim bulbs and bitcoin users is quite a bit larger than I thought. Also that the script kiddies who did the hack knew more about the value of what they were doing than most people suspected.
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Government admits breaking privacy law with NHS test and trace • The Guardian

Sarah Marsh and Alex Hern:

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The UK government broke the law in rolling out its test-and-trace programme without a full assessment of the privacy implications, the Department of Health and Social Care has admitted after a legal challenge.

The Guardian can reveal the programme has already led to three data breaches involving email mishaps and unredacted personal information being shared in training materials.

“The reckless behaviour of this government in ignoring a vital and legally required safety step known as the data protection impact assessment (DPIA) has endangered public health,” said Jim Killock, the executive director of Open Rights Group (ORG). “We have a ‘world beating’ unlawful test-and-trace programme.

“A crucial element in the fight against the pandemic is mutual trust between the public and the government, which is undermined by their operating the programme without basic privacy safeguards. The government bears responsibility for the public health consequences.”

A DPIA is required before carrying out any “high risk” processing of personal data. The government had previously argued that the test-and-trace programmes, which involves carrying detailed personal information from patients across the country, did not qualify as high risk, until the ORG threatened to take it to court over the claim.

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World-beatingly unlawful.
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FAQ: Should you delete TikTok? Here’s everything you need to weigh the real privacy risks • The Washington Post

Geoffrey Fowler:

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“Protecting the privacy of our users’ data is of the utmost importance to TikTok,” said spokeswoman Ashley Nash-Hahn. “TikTok collects much less U.S. user information than many of the companies in our space and stores it in the U.S. and Singapore. We have not, and would not, give it to the Chinese government.”

My takeaway: TikTok doesn’t appear to grab any more personal information than Facebook. That’s still an appalling amount of data to mine about the lives of Americans. But there’s scant evidence that TikTok is sharing our data with China, and we should be wary of xenophobia dressed up as privacy concerns.

I don’t mean to excuse China’s record of online repression — it’s possible China will force TikTok to change its practices in the future. For now, it comes down to whether you inherently distrust data mining from Chinese-owned companies more than data mining from U.S.-owned ones. Just remember: companies in China probably make your phone, laptop and TV, too.
Let’s dive into the specifics.

…Its US privacy policy also says it gathers your country location, Internet address and the type of device you’re using. If you give it permission, it will also grab your exact location, your phone’s contacts and other social network connections, as well as your age and phone number.

That all adds up to a profile of you useful not only to target ads, but also to understand who you are, who your friends and family are, what you like, what you find funny and what you say to your friends.

Jackson, from Disconnect, said the app sends an “abnormal” amount of information from devices to its computers.

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Lockdown was a boon for Spotify. Now musicians are fighting back • WIRED UK

Will Pritchard:

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imagine payouts are calculated monthly and in June 2020 Apple Music is paying out £100 to rights holders. If 10% of the total streams on the platform for that month were Ariana Grande songs, then Grande – or the rights holder for those recordings, which in this case is Universal subsidiary Republic Records – would receive 10% of the total payout pot, or £10. The same method applies to songwriters, although these rights are typically owned separately (and, again, often by a major label entity). This way of dividing payments means the most popular artists (those with the most streams) receive a chunk of revenue from users of the platform who haven’t played any of their songs.

Under this system, the Ariana Grande stan who pays £10 a month for Apple Music and plays ‘thank u, next’ on repeat all week also has a far greater influence on who gets paid what than, for instance, their dad who also pays £10 a month but only uses Apple Music to stream his favourite Paul Weller album to wind down at the weekend. Effectively, the Paul Weller fan is supplementing Ariana’s income when the Apple Music cheque lands.

This is a simplified explanation of the process, since streaming platforms also give a different weighting to streams from paying, premium subscribers versus free users who listen to the service with ads, for instance – that adds another level of complexity to the breakdown, but broadly the system works as described.

It means that most of your ten pound subscription actually goes to Ed Sheeran or Drake or Lady Gaga rather than the other musicians whose music you may have been listening to.

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This really is how it works, and it feels so wrong. Under the old system when you bought someone’s LP, CD or download, they’d get their cut. (Yes I know I know record label contracts evil awful terrible exploitative. But.) The streaming payment system is so unfair to artists. Further reading. (Thanks G for the links.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The EU is investigating whether Alexa, Siri and Google Home might threaten consumer rights (not consumers). CC-licensed photo by Stock Catalog 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 10 links for you. Unsubstantiated. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

TikTok halts talks on London HQ amid UK-China tensions • The Guardian

Phillip Inman:

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The Chinese social media firm TikTok has pulled back from talks to site the headquarters for its non-China business in the UK, threatening the creation of 3,000 jobs, as fears grow of a tit-for-tat trade war between London and Beijing.

Its parent company, ByteDance, which is based in Beijing, had spent months in negotiations with the Department for International Trade and No 10 officials to expand operations in addition to the near 800 employed by TikTok.

It is understood talks were suspended after ByteDance executives cited the “wider geopolitical context” following the UK government’s ban on Chinese telecoms firm Huawei from developing Britain’s 5G mobile phone network.

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Pretty much kills off any claim that TikTok isn’t a Chinese company. And that the Chinese government isn’t pushing it hither and thither.
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Hackers tell the story of the Twitter attack from the inside • The New York Times

Nathaniel Popper and Kate Conger:

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four people who participated in the scheme spoke with The Times and shared numerous logs and screen shots of the conversations they had on Tuesday and Wednesday, demonstrating their involvement both before and after the hack became public.

The interviews indicate that the attack was not the work of a single country like Russia or a sophisticated group of hackers. Instead, it was done by a group of young people — one of whom says he lives at home with his mother — who got to know one another because of their obsession with owning early or unusual screen names, particularly one letter or number, like @y or @6.

The Times verified that the four people were connected to the hack by matching their social media and cryptocurrency accounts to accounts that were involved with the events on Wednesday. They also presented corroborating evidence of their involvement, like the logs from their conversations on Discord, a messaging platform popular with gamers and hackers, and Twitter.

Playing a central role in the attack was “Kirk”, who was taking money in and out of the same Bitcoin address as the day went on, according to an analysis of the Bitcoin transactions by The Times, with assistance from the research firm Chainalysis.

But the identity of Kirk, his motivation and whether he shared his access to Twitter with anyone else remain a mystery even to the people who worked with him. It is still unclear how much Kirk used his access to the accounts of people like Mr. Biden and Mr. Musk to gain more privileged information, like their private conversations on Twitter.

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I do wonder whether Musk, Biden or Obama would do any confidential work by DM. (Biden surely doesn’t run his own account.) Script kiddies’ obsession with getting control of accounts with single or a couple of letters is quite strange, but a real driving force.
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Seven ‘no log’ VPN providers accused of leaking – yup, you guessed it – 1.2TB of user logs onto the internet • The Register

Shaun Nichols:

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A string of “zero logging” VPN providers have some explaining to do after more than a terabyte of user logs were found on their servers unprotected and facing the public internet.

This data, we are told, included in at least some cases clear-text passwords, personal information, and lists of websites visited, all for anyone to stumble upon.

It all came to light this week after Comparitech’s Bob Diachenko spotted 894GB of records in an unsecured Elasticsearch cluster that belonged to UFO VPN.

The silo contained streams of log entries as netizens connected to UFO’s service: this information included what appeared to be account passwords in plain text, VPN session secrets and tokens, IP addresses of users’ devices and the VPN servers they connected to, connection timestamps, location information, device characteristics and OS versions, and web domains from which ads were injected into the browsers of UFO’s free-tier users.

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Never ever ever ever ever believe VPN companies which tell you that they don’t keep logs.
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Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant in the spotlight as Europe launches Internet of Things investigation • ZDNet

Daphne Leprince-Ringuet:

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The organization’s commissioner Margrethe Vestager announced the launch of a sector probe to make sure that the companies behind smart products and digital assistants aren’t building monopolies that could threaten consumer rights in the EU.

Vestager named Apple’s Siri, Google’s Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa, but also Deutshe Telekom’s Magenta as the voice assistants “at the centre of it all”. While the technologies have great potential, the commissioner warned that they should be deployed carefully.

“We’ll only see the full benefits – low prices, wide choice, innovative products and services – if the markets for these devices stay open and competitive. And the trouble is that competition in digital markets can be fragile,” said Vestager.

In Europe, the total number of smart home devices was around 108 million at the end of 2019 and is forecast to reach 184 million devices by 2023. The value of the smart home market is expected to almost double in the next four years to more than €27bn ($30.8bn).

With Internet of Things (IoT) products carrying out tasks ranging from fitness tracking to front door unlocking, connected devices are set to become a huge part of users’ everyday lives. Vestager stressed the need to “act in good time” to avoid monopoly from bigger players, which would lead to consumers being denied a fair choice when buying the devices.

“We have seen this type of conduct before,” said Vestager. “This is not new. So we know there’s a risk that some of these players could become gatekeepers of the Internet of Things, with the power to make or break other companies.”

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Already thinking hard about Google’s takeover of Fitbit.
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Facebook beats NSO’s attempt to crush WhatsApp malware suit • MSN

Malathi Nayak:

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WhatsApp and its parent Facebook can press ahead with a lawsuit accusing Israeli spyware maker NSO Group of creating accounts to send malware to mobile phones of 1,400 people to snoop on them.

US District Judge Phyllis Hamilton on Thursday denied NSO’s request to dismiss the lawsuit. NSO unsuccessfully argued the court lacked jurisdiction because the company was immune to legal action as a contractor of foreign governments. NSO is an agent of the Kingdom of Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Mexico, according to Facebook’s complaint.

Hamilton did, however, grant NSO’s request to dismiss a claim that NSO wrongfully interfered with WhatsApp servers.

“The complaint does not detail any actual harm caused by defendants’ program or access to WhatsApp’s computers or servers,” she said. But she gave Facebook 21 days to revise and refile that allegation in Oakland federal court.

Hamilton also disagreed with NSO’s argument that Facebook didn’t include its foreign customers as parties to the suit.

WhatsApp welcomed the ruling. “The decision also confirms that WhatsApp will be able to obtain relevant documents and other information about NSO’s practices,” a spokesperson for the company said.

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Could get juicy if WhatsApp gets a close look at NSO’s documents; that’s the company that has hacked a number of activists for authoritarian regimes. The FBI has been investigating NSO since at least 2017.
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Patients aren’t being told about the AI systems advising their care • Stat News

Rebecca Robbins:

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At a growing number of prominent hospitals and clinics around the country, clinicians are turning to AI-powered decision support tools — many of them unproven — to help predict whether hospitalized patients are likely to develop complications or deteriorate, whether they’re at risk of readmission, and whether they’re likely to die soon. But these patients and their family members are often not informed about or asked to consent to the use of these tools in their care, a STAT examination has found.

The result: Machines that are completely invisible to patients are increasingly guiding decision-making in the clinic.

Hospitals and clinicians “are operating under the assumption that you do not disclose, and that’s not really something that has been defended or really thought about,” Harvard Law School professor Glenn Cohen said. Cohen is the author of one of only a few articles examining the issue, which has received surprisingly scant attention in the medical literature even as research about AI and machine learning proliferates.

In some cases, there’s little room for harm: Patients may not need to know about an AI system that’s nudging their doctor to move up an MRI scan by a day, like the one deployed by M Health Fairview, or to be more thoughtful, such as with algorithms meant to encourage clinicians to broach end-of-life conversations. But in other cases, lack of disclosure means that patients may never know what happened if an AI model makes a faulty recommendation that is part of the reason they are denied needed care or undergo an unnecessary, costly, or even harmful intervention.

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Although is this so very different from the doctors who they don’t see deciding, whose biases aren’t known?
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How to lie with data visualisation • (seen on Twitter)

Andisheh Nouraee:

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In just 15 days the total number of #COVID19 cases in Georgia is up 49%, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at the state’s data visualization map of cases. The first map is July 2. The second is today. Do you see a 50% case increase? Can you spot how they’re hiding it?

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Click through and have a look at the graphics. A crime against data visualisation. Georgia’s state government says that “this chart is meant to aid understanding [of] whether the outbreak is growing, leveling off or declining”. In fact it does nothing of the sort. It’s almost possible to think that the error is due to the software automatically assigning numbers each time to create five “buckets” while keeping the colours the same – meaning the growing numbers of cases in specific places don’t show up.

But given that Georgia’s governor essentially wants to open the place up even as cases are soaring, I’ll go with “intentional”.

You can also read a blogpost insisting “no, it’s not intentional, this critique is totally unfair”. I disagree with it: any competent person producing dataviz will know how their software works, and avoid misleading people.
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TikTok and 32 other iOS apps still snoop your sensitive clipboard data • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

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Recent headlines have focused particular attention on TikTok, in large part because of its massive base of active users (reported to be 800 million, with an estimated 104 million iOS installs in the first half of 2018 alone, making it the most downloaded app for that period).

TikTok’s continued snooping has gotten extra scrutiny for other reasons. When called out in March, the video-sharing provider told UK publication The Telegraph it would end the practice in the coming weeks. Mysk said that the app never stopped the monitoring. What’s more, a Wednesday Twitter thread revealed that the clipboard reading occurred each time a user entered a punctuation mark or tapped the space bar while composing a comment. That means the clipboard reading can happen every second or so, a much more aggressive pace than documented in the March research, which found monitoring happened when the app was opened or reopened.

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I’ve thought more about this. By its nature, the clipboard has to be open to everything on the system without having to be given permission – as John Gruber said on a recent episode of the Dithering podcast, the keystroke you use to paste is just that, a keystroke to achieve something, not a granting of permission in its own right.

Maybe it makes better sense to treat the clipboard as always potentially unsafe, and so not put your password on there. (Though I’d like to know how iOS’s password autofill on web pages functions: does that populate the clipboard? In which case that’s bad.)

The list of apps eagerly grabbing content off the clipboard with gay abandon is pretty alarming, though. Games apps particularly, but also a meditation app. Why, exactly?
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Explaining the Cloudflare outage on July 17, 2020 • Cloudflare blog

John Graham-Cumming is CTO of Cloudflare :

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Today a configuration error in our backbone network caused an outage for Internet properties and Cloudflare services that lasted 27 minutes. We saw traffic drop by about 50% across our network. Because of the architecture of our backbone this outage didn’t affect the entire Cloudflare network and was localized to certain geographies.

The outage occurred because, while working on an unrelated issue with a segment of the backbone from Newark to Chicago, our network engineering team updated the configuration on a router in Atlanta to alleviate congestion. This configuration contained an error that caused all traffic across our backbone to be sent to Atlanta. This quickly overwhelmed the Atlanta router and caused Cloudflare network locations connected to the backbone to fail.

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In financial markets, this would be called “fat finger trouble”. There it loses millions of pounds/euros/dollars (ever noticed how fat fingers never make huge profits?); here it knocks out the internet. Should we give the job to GPT-3 in future?
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Inside Trump’s failure: the rush to abandon leadership role on the virus • The New York Times

Michael D. Shear, Noah Weiland, Eric Lipton, Maggie Haberman and David E. Sanger:

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On April 14, the country passed what the group saw as a milestone, administering its three millionth test. Inside the West Wing, Mr. Kushner was insistent on that point: Given their assumption that infections would not surge again until the fall, there was enough testing ability out there.

Those outside experts who disagreed were largely brushed off. In mid-April, Dr. Ashish K. Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, urged a top administration official to embrace his call for conducting 500,000 coronavirus tests a day — far more than was happening at the time.

The official, Adm. Brett P. Giroir, the administration’s testing czar, who had been delivering upbeat descriptions of the nation’s growing testing capacity, eventually conceded to Dr. Jha that his plan seemed to be needed. But he made clear the federal government was not prepared to get there quickly.

“At some point down the road,” is what Dr. Jha said Admiral Giroir told him.

“My take is that Jared Kushner believes that this is not something that the White House should get too involved in,” Dr. Jha recalled. “And then the president believes that it is better left up to the states.”

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Trump, Kushner and all the other fools are completely out of their depth on any normal day; on this, they’re so utterly unsuitable to the job they might as well be trying to swim the Atlantic. Deborah Birx’s reputation will never recover from her Pollyanna role. Meanwhile, people are dead who could otherwise be alive.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified