a Polish keyboard: the Medium website discovered a strange problem with its S when users complained. The problem? Deeply embedded. CC-licensed photo by Marcin Wichary 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. Have a beer. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Suggestion: preorder Social Warming, my forthcoming book, due out June 24. And in audiobook, which I’m going to record this week. Hot off the press.

Buying a pink NFT cat was a crypto nightmare • BBC News

Cristina Criddle:

»

I settled on Kim Catdarshian – a pink creature dotted with diamonds in her fur and a cocked eyebrow.

According to her profile, she has a “confuzzled” mouth and can be snappy, taking 10 minutes to “cool down”. Sounds about right, given her diva namesake.

NFTs are sold in cryptocurrency. My purchase was in ETH, known as Ether, which is stored on the Ethereum blockchain. Similar to Bitcoin, it is a highly volatile currency and relies on computers to verify transactions. This process – called mining – uses huge amounts of energy, often from fossil fuels.
Kim was on sale for 0.006 ETH, which at the time was worth about £13.

Using a Chrome extension called MetaMask, I set up a digital wallet to convert money from my bank account into cryptocurrency. I transferred the minimum amount: £30 and a “gas fee”, required for every ETH transaction to pay the miners who keep the network running. It is similar to tipping a waiter.

Depending on how many transactions are being processed on the Ethereum blockchain, and how many miners are available, the cost of gas can rise and fall. The higher your price, the faster your transaction goes through.

After my initial payment, all I could afford was less than half the recommended rate for gas. Transferring my ETH back into my bank account would have cost more money, so I reluctantly ploughed on, hoping a miner would take pity and process my NFT bid for a low fee. Then, I was left waiting in the ether for the sale to be approved.

While the value of my ETH shot up and down. I considered spending more money to speed up the transaction, but I held firm and my patience paid off three days later, when Kim Catdarshian finally became mine.

The whole experience sucked all the fun out of my fluffy pink friend and if I wanted to sell Kim, it would cost me. I should have done more research into all the extra charges involved in ETH, but it was just meant to be a whimsical joke present.

Unless you’re prepared to spend a lot of money and time learning the market – it is hard to imagine making money from NFTs. Even though I am a technology journalist (albeit not a crypto-expert), I was baffled by how complicated the process was, and realised I wasn’t alone.

Countless users have complained in online forums about transactions getting “stuck” after demand, and high gas prices clogging up the network.

«

13 years on, still not ready for prime time. The responses from the crypto bros, of course, was that (1) she was doing it wrong (2) it’s going to be much easier Real Soon Now.
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WhatsApp now won’t limit functionality if you don’t accept its new privacy policy • The Verge

Jay Peters:

»

Earlier this month, Facebook-owned WhatsApp said that users would lose functionality over time if they didn’t accept its new privacy policy by May 15th. In a reversal, Facebook now says that plan has changed, and users who don’t accept the updated policy actually won’t see limited functionality (via TNW).

“Given recent discussions with various authorities and privacy experts, we want to make clear that we will not limit the functionality of how WhatsApp works for those who have not yet accepted the update,” a WhatsApp spokesperson said in a statement to The Verge. WhatsApp tells The Verge that this is the plan moving forward indefinitely.

The rollout of the policy has been a confusing mess, and raised concerns that WhatsApp would begin sharing more of users’ personal data with Facebook. (Some WhatsApp user data, such as users’ phone numbers, is already shared with Facebook, a policy that went into place in 2016.) WhatsApp has stressed this is not the case, though — the policy update is regarding messages sent to businesses via WhatsApp, which may be stored on Facebook’s servers.

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Delayed and then revoked. Classic example of how management discovers that it has made a bad decision.
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The curious case of the disappearing Polish S • Medium Engineering

Marcin Wichary:

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A few weeks ago, someone reported this to us at Medium:

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“I just started an article in Polish. I can type in every letter, except Ś. When I press the key for Ś, the letter just doesn’t appear. It only happens on Medium.”

«

This was odd. We don’t really special-case any language in any way, and even if we did… out of 32 Polish characters, why would this random one be the only one causing problems?

Turns out, it wasn’t so random. This is a story of how four incidental ingredients spanning decades (if not centuries) came together to cause the most curious of bugs, and how we fixed it.

«

Typewriters, communism, habits and – inevitably – Microsoft Windows.
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By your powers combined: Is it too late for Google’s wearable alliance? • Android Authority

Adamya Sharma:

»

Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 3 is perhaps one of the best premium smartwatches you can buy right now. Fitbit has devices like the Versa 3 and the Sense that bring good value to the table. Google still doesn’t have a Pixel Watch, but devices like the Mobvoi TicWatch Pro 3 and Fossil Gen 5 perhaps represent the best of what Wear OS currently offers.

However, all three platforms and brands combined supply far fewer apps compared to the Apple Watch. While Samsung and Wear OS watches are better off than Fitbit, whose app selection is anemic, they are still not on a level playing field with Apple.

What’s also lacking with Samsung, Wear OS, and Fitbit wearables is the uncanny seamlessness of the Apple Watch. Aside from apps, its productivity features outnumber those of all three platforms.

The Apple Watch’s hardware is also far superior. The Series 6 runs on Apple’s new S6 SoC based on the A13 Bionic chip used on iPhone 11. That’s like an Android watch powered by the Snapdragon 888. Of course, the latter doesn’t exist.

There’s no guarantee that Google’s alliance with Samsung or Fitbit could ever result in the much-needed hardware boost for Wear OS smartwatches that are sluggish and slower in comparison.

Other Wear OS problems also hang in the balance right now. The most annoying thing about the software is the lack of timely updates. Even with Samsung’s collaboration, Google will most likely be the one to issue future Wear OS updates. However, unlike Android proper, it has never followed a regular schedule for Wear OS updates. The situation is reminiscent of LG’s awful update center that promised timely software updates but failed spectacularly in doing so.

«

“Uncanny seamlessness of the Apple Watch” is quite the phrase. It’s not uncanny; it’s the result of lots of iterations, and a relentless will to make it better. (Contrast how little effort went into the HomePod: two iterations over three years, with the most impressive one being discontinued after excessive sales predictions.)

By contrast, Google was ahead of Apple by about a year with Wear OS, but the lack of integration between Google and OEMs and chipmaker meant that was wasted. Neil Cybart suggests Apple now has a ten-year lead in wearables.
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Friends don’t let friends become Chinese billionaires • Forbes

Ray Kwong:

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I’m no statistics whiz, but it seems to me that a Chinese billionaire dies every 40 days.

China Daily reported Friday that unnatural deaths have taken the lives of 72 mainland billionaires over the past eight years. (Do the math.)

Which means that if you’re one of China’s 115 current billionaires, as listed on the 2011 Forbes Billionaires List, you should be more than a little nervous.

Mortality rate notwithstanding, what’s more disturbing is how these mega wealthy souls met their demise. According to China Daily, 15 were murdered, 17 committed suicide, seven died from accidents and 19 died from illness. Oh, yes, and 14 were executed. (Welcome to China.)

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Possibly the “suicide” number might want re-examination, to see if any ought to be recategorised.
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Ignore the naysayers – low emission zones do work • The Guardian

Gary Fuller:

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Lessons from London’s [ultra low emission] zone [ULEZ] and the hundreds that operate in Europe counter many of the myths around these schemes.

First, the zones work, if they are sufficiently ambitious. London’s ultra-low emission zone (Ulez) reduced nitrogen dioxide by 37%, compared with roads far outside the zone. Following Sadiq Kahn’s re-election as London mayor, the Ulez will become 18 times larger.

Second, benefits do not start when the charge starts. For the Ulez, a 20% decrease in nitrogen dioxide came as taxis, buses and delivery vehicles were upgraded ahead of charging. Pre-scheme benefits were also seen when London first introduced a low emission zone in 2008. In Leeds, the pre-charging gains were thought to be sufficient and the zone was cancelled in 2020. It remains to be seen if benefits will be locked in without the charge.

Third, air pollution does not get worse outside the zone due to diverting vehicles. Instead the experience from London and cities in Germany show that the cleaner vehicles are also used in the surrounding area, spreading the benefit.

Fourth, it is often said that the zone charges unfairly penalise the least well off. In fact, poorer communities have most to gain. They experience worse air pollution than their richer counterparts but, when it comes to driving, they contribute less to the problem. Yes, placing charges on older vehicles would have more of an impact in poorer areas, but this effect is small: a 2019 study found that cars in the UK’s poorest areas were, on average, just over a year older than those owned by the most well off. This was due to multi-car households in wealthier areas and the age of their second, third and in some cases fourth cars.

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Divisive COVID ‘lab leak’ debate prompts dire warnings from researchers • Nature

Amy Maxmen:

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US headlines are exploding with revived interest in the lab-leak hypothesis, many of them related to two articles in The Wall Street Journal. One story refers to an undisclosed document from an anonymous official who was part of former US president Donald Trump’s administration, suggesting that three WIV researchers were sick in November 2019. And the second says that Chinese authorities stopped a journalist from entering an abandoned mine where WIV researchers recovered coronaviruses from bats in 2012. The researchers have long maintained that none of the viruses were SARS-CoV-2. Responding to The Wall Street Journal, China’s foreign ministry said: “The US keeps concocting inconsistent claims and clamoring to investigate labs in Wuhan.”

Kristian Andersen, a virologist at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, maintains that no strong evidence supports a lab leak, and he worries that hostile demands for an investigation into the WIV will backfire, because they often sound like allegations. He says this could make Chinese scientists and officials less likely to share information. Other virologists suggest that such sentiments could lead to more scrutiny of US grants for research projects conducted in China. They point to a coronavirus project run by a US non-profit organization and the WIV that was abruptly suspended last year after the US National Institutes of Health pulled its funding. Without such collaborations, says Andersen, scientists will have difficulty discovering the source of the pandemic.

More is at stake than the discovery of COVID-19’s origins, however. Global health-policy analysts argue that it’s crucial for countries to work together to curb the pandemic and prepare the world for future outbreaks. Actions needed, they say, include expanding the distribution of vaccines and reforming biosecurity rules, such as standards for reporting virus-surveillance data. But such measures require a broad consensus among powerful countries, says Amanda Glassman, a global-health specialist at the Center for Global Development in Washington DC. “We need to look at the big picture and focus on incentives that get us where we want to go,” she says. “A confrontational approach will make things worse.”

«

The real problem here is that you’re trying to prove a negative: that the virus absolutely positively didn’t leak from the laboratory. How do you prove that? You’d have to let investigators run riot through it, which the CCP wouldn’t like or approve one little bit. The whole scenario is strongly reminiscent of the runup to the Iraq war: the US and UK were insistent there were weapons of mass destruction there somewhere in Iraq. Hans Blix, who was on the ground visiting installations, said he’d found nothing. You know how that ended up.
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Amazon Prime is an economy-distorting lie • BIG by Matt Stoller

Matt Stoller:

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Shipping and logistics is extremely expensive, far more than the membership fees charged by Prime; Amazon spent $37.9bn on shipping costs in 2019, and much more in 2020. No matter how amazing your logistics operation, you can’t just offer free shipping to customers without having someone pay for it. Amazon found its solution in the relationship between Prime and Marketplace. It forced third party sellers to de facto pay for its shipping costs, by charging them commissions that reach as high as 45%, according to Racine, merely to access Amazon customers. That’s nearly half the revenue of a seller going to Amazon! And this high fee isn’t just because fulfillment or selling online is expensive; Walmart charges significantly less for its fulfillment services and access charges to its online market, and eBay’s market access fees are also much lower than Amazon’s.

…How does Amazon force sellers to pay such high fees? Monopolization! The scheme itself is subtle, and requires a bit of explanation. Nearly anyone may list their wares on Amazon, but the ability to actually get your wares in front of customers is dependent on being able to ‘win the Buy Box,’ which is that white box on the right-side that you get to after you search for an item on Amazon. Over 80% of Amazon purchases go through the Buy Box. The Buy Box is the lever Amazon uses to control access to customers.

…In addition, sellers are prohibited from charging for shipping from Prime members, though they are allowed to charge shipping from non-Prime members.

How do sellers handle these large fees from Amazon, and the inability to charge for shipping? Simple. They raise their prices on consumers. The resulting higher prices to consumers, paid to Amazon in fees by third party merchants, is why Amazon is able to offer ‘free shipping’ to Prime members. Prime, in other words, is basically a money laundering scheme. Amazon forces brands/sellers to bake the cost of Prime into their consumer price so it appears like Amazon offers free shipping when in reality the cost is incorporated into the consumer price.

«

If your monopolistic activity is raising prices to consumers, suddenly US antitrust gets interested. Stoller’s piece was triggered by the lawsuit filed last week by the Washington DC attorney, Karl Racine.
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Unredacted Google lawsuit docs detail efforts to collect user location • Business Insider

Tyler Sonnemaker:

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Newly unredacted documents in a lawsuit against Google reveal that the company’s own executives and engineers knew just how difficult the company had made it for smartphone users to keep their location data private.

Google continued collecting location data even when users turned off various location-sharing settings, made popular privacy settings harder to find, and even pressured LG and other phone makers into hiding settings precisely because users liked them, according to the documents.

Jack Menzel, a former vice president overseeing Google Maps, admitted during a deposition that the only way Google wouldn’t be able to figure out a user’s home and work locations is if that person intentionally threw Google off the trail by setting their home and work addresses as some other random locations.

Jen Chai, a Google senior product manager in charge of location services, didn’t know how the company’s complex web of privacy settings interacted with each other, according to the documents.

Google and LG did not respond to requests for comment on this story.

The documents are part of a lawsuit brought against Google by the Arizona attorney general’s office last year, which accused the company of illegally collecting location data from smartphone users even after they opted out.

A judge ordered new sections of the documents to be unredacted last week in response to a request by trade groups Digital Content Next and News Media Alliance, which argued that it was in the public’s interest to know and that Google was using its legal resources to suppress scrutiny of its data collection practices.

The unsealed versions of the documents paint an even more detailed picture of how Google obscured its data collection techniques, confusing not just its users but also its own employees.

Google uses a variety of avenues to collect user location data, according to the documents, including WiFi and even third-party apps not affiliated with Google, forcing users to share their data in order to use those apps or, in some cases, even connect their phones to WiFi.

«

The Arizona AG’s site was unreachable when I tried to look at the documents, but others have seen them. They’re pretty damning.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Hard drives prices have risen 50% in the past few months as the Chia cryptocraze has taken off. Unfortunately. CC-licensed photo by Robert Scoble 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. Here for you. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

‘FIND THIS FUCK:’ inside Citizen’s dangerous effort to cash in on vigilantism • Vice

Joseph Cox:

»

Andrew Frame was excited. 

It was Saturday night two weeks ago, and Frame, the CEO of the crime and neighborhood watch app Citizen, was on Slack, whipping himself and his employees into what he’d later call at an all-hands meeting a “fury of passion” about a wildfire that had broken out earlier that afternoon in Los Angeles’ Pacific Palisades neighborhood. 

Citizen had gotten a tip that the wildfire was started by an arsonist, and Frame had decided earlier in the night that the fire was a huge opportunity. Citizen, using a new livestreaming service it had just launched called OnAir, would catch the suspect live on air, with thousands of people watching. Frame decided the Citizen user who provided information that led to the suspect’s arrest would get $10,000. Frame wanted him. Before midnight. As the night wore on, Citizen got more information about the supposed suspect. They obtained a photo of the man, which they kept up on the livestream for large portions of the night. More information trickled in through a tips line Citizen had set up. (Citizen said “The information about the person of interest came from an on-the-ground tip from an LAPD Sergeant, followed by emails from local residents who had been approached by LAPD officers.”)

“first name? What is it?! publish ALL info,” Frame told employees working in a Citizen Slack room who were working on the case. 

“FIND THIS FUCK,” he told them. “LETS GET THIS GUY BEFORE MIDNIGHT HES GOING DOWN.”

“BREAKING NEWS. this guy is the devil. get him,” Frame said. “by midnight!@#! we hate this guy. GET HIM.”

«

Slack really is a boon to journalism these days. Screenshot, email, boom. Also: here’s the problem with people who think they know they’re right, and never ask whether they might be wrong.
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Industry groups sue to stop Florida’s new social media law • The Verge

Adi Robertson:

»

Two tech industry organizations have sued Florida over its newly passed rules for social networks. NetChoice and the CCIA — which represent Amazon, Google, Intel, Samsung, Facebook, and other tech giants — say SB 7072 violates private companies’ constitutional rights. They’re asking a court to prevent the law from taking effect, calling it a “frontal assault on the First Amendment.”

SB 7072, which Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed earlier this week, restricts how large social apps and websites can moderate user-generated content. It makes banning any Florida political candidate or “journalistic enterprise” unlawful, lets users sue if they believe they were banned without sufficient reason, requires an option to “opt out” of sorting algorithms, and places companies that break the law on an “antitrust violator blacklist” that bars them from doing business with public entities in Florida. Notably, it includes an exception for companies that operate a theme park.

NetChoice and the CCIA say SB 7072 conflicts with both constitutional protections and federal Section 230 rules.

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Didn’t take long.
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Bitcoin rival Chia ‘destroyed’ hard disc supply chains, says its boss • New Scientist

Matthew Sparkes:

»

Chia, a cryptocurrency intended to be a “green” alternative to bitcoin has instead caused a global shortage of hard discs. Gene Hoffman, the president of Chia Network, the company behind the currency, admits that “we’ve kind of destroyed the short-term supply chain”, but he denies it will become an environmental drain.

Bitcoin requires so-called miners to do vast amounts of useless calculations to maintain the network, a system that is known as proof of work. The most recent studies show that bitcoin may currently consume 0.53% of the world’s electricity supply. Chia instead uses a proof-of-space approach that ditches these calculations and relies on empty hard disc space. The more space a miner devotes to the task, the higher their probability of receiving new coins.

In theory, this would consume less energy, but there has been a surge in demand for hard discs since the currency launched earlier this year. Around 12 million terabytes of hard disc space is currently being used to mine Chia, having risen on an exponential curve since its launch in March. When New Scientist first reported on Chia just two weeks ago, that figure was only at 3 million terabytes.

These discs still require energy to produce and run, and there are reports that the constant reading and writing involved in mining can wear them out in weeks, rendering them useless. Hoffman says this problem only affects the cheapest discs.

«

Well that escalated quickly. Prices for hard drives have risen by 50% at suppliers. To think there was a time when we thought email spam was a problem.
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Texas’s winter storm death toll likely four times higher than reported • Buzzfeed News

Peter Aldhous, Stephanie Lee and Zahra Hirji:

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The true number of people killed by the disastrous winter storm and power outages that devastated Texas in February is likely four or five times what the state has acknowledged so far. A BuzzFeed News data analysis reveals the hidden scale of a catastrophe that trapped millions of people in freezing darkness, cut off access to running water, and overwhelmed emergency services for days.

The state’s tally currently stands at 151 deaths. But by looking at how many more people died during and immediately after the storm than would have been expected — an established method that has been used to count the full toll of other disasters — we estimate that 700 people were killed by the storm during the week with the worst power outages. This astonishing toll exposes the full consequence of officials’ neglect in preventing the power grid’s collapse despite repeated warnings of its vulnerability to cold weather, as well as the state’s failure to reckon with the magnitude of the crisis that followed.

Many of the uncounted victims of the storm and power outages were already medically vulnerable — with chronic conditions including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and kidney problems. But without the intense cold and stress they experienced during the crisis, many of these people could still be alive today.

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“Vaccine-induced Covid-19 mimicry” syndrome: splice reactions within the SARS-CoV-2 Spike open reading frame result in Spike protein variants that may cause thromboembolic events in patients immunized with vector-based vaccines • Research Square

Eric Kowarz and others at Goethe University, Frankfurt:

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Soluble Spike variants together with newly built antibodies against Spike protein as well as the highly specific blood flow conditions in the central venous sinus of the brain may result in the rare but severe events after vaccination observed with ADZ1222/Vaxzevria. Noteworthy, the vaccine from Johnson & Johnson appears to carry fewer splice donor sequences, especially SD506 and SD3614 (see Table 1B and 1C), which are the strongest predicted splice donor sites in the AZD1222 sequence (see Fig. 1A). This may explain the ~ 10-fold lower incidence of severe side effects with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine when compared to the AZD1222 vaccine.

In principle, such thromboses may occur in any site of the human body where endothelial cells express ACE2. Soluble Spike proteins which still exhibit the important core portion of the S1 domain (R319-F551) will be able to bind these receptors. When the immune system starts to produce antibodies against the Spike protein, the endothelial cells will not only bind the soluble Spike protein variants, but would also be decorated with the newly formed antibodies. This will give rise to strong inflammatory reactions either by ADCC (antibody dependent cell-mediated cytotoxicity) or CDC (complement dependent cytotoxicity) occurring in these vessels at various sites where such soluble Spike protein variants accumulate.

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OK, so this is very technical, but it’s the explanation for why the non-mRNA vaccines (eg AstraZeneca, less so Johnson & Johnson) can occasionally provoke blood clots, particularly in the brain. It also explains what needs to be done to lessen that risk. If confirmed – it’s still a preprint – a very important paper.
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What Instagram really learned from hiding like counts • The Verge

Casey Newton:

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After more than two years of testing, today Instagram announced what it found: removing likes doesn’t seem to meaningfully depressurize Instagram, for young people or anyone else, and so likes will remain publicly viewable by default. But all users will now get the ability to switch them off if they like, either for their whole feed or on a per-post basis.

“What we heard from people and experts was that not seeing like counts was beneficial for some, and annoying to others, particularly because people use like counts to get a sense for what’s trending or popular, so we’re giving you the choice,” the company said in a blog post.

At first blush, this move feels like a remarkable anticlimax. The company invested more than two years in testing these changes, with Mosseri himself telling Wired he spent “a lot of time on this personally” as the company began the project. For a moment, it seemed as if Instagram might be on the verge of a fundamental transformation — away from an influencer-driven social media reality show toward something more intimate and humane.

In 2019, this no-public-metrics, friends-first approach had been perfected by Instagram’s forever rival, Snapchat. And the idea of stripping out likes, view counts, followers and other popularity scoreboards gained traction in some circles — the artist Ben Grosser’s Demetricator project made a series of tools that implemented the idea via browser extensions, to positive reviews.

So what happened at Instagram?

“It turned out that it didn’t actually change nearly as much about … how people felt, or how much they used the experience as we thought it would,” Mosseri said in a briefing with reporters this week. “But it did end up being pretty polarizing. Some people really liked it, and some people really didn’t.”

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Very meta, that people liked or didn’t like when there were or weren’t Likes.
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Facebook no longer treating ‘man-made’ Covid as a crackpot idea • POLITICO

Cristiano Lima:

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Facebook will no longer take down posts claiming that Covid-19 was man-made or manufactured, a company spokesperson told POLITICO on Wednesday, a move that acknowledges the renewed debate about the virus’ origins.

Facebook’s policy tweak arrives as support surges in Washington for a fuller investigation into the origins of Covid-19 after the Wall Street Journal reported that three scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were hospitalized in late 2019 with symptoms consistent with the virus. The findings have reinvigorated the debate about the so-called Wuhan lab-leak theory, once dismissed as a fringe conspiracy theory.

President Joe Biden said Wednesday that he has ordered the intelligence community to “redouble” its efforts to find out the virus’ origin and report back in 90 days. Biden also revealed that the intelligence community is split between two theories about Covid-19’s origin, and said the review will examine “whether it emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident.” Bipartisan support is also building on Capitol Hill for a congressional inquiry.

But the focus of late has been on the notion that the virus may have accidentally escaped from the lab, not that it was man-made or purposely released — theories that could now propagate on Facebook. Genetic studies of the virus have found flaws in the protein it uses to bind to human cells. Those are features that someone trying to engineer a bioweapon likely would have avoided.

Shifting definitions on social media: Facebook announced in February it had expanded the list of misleading health claims that it would remove from its platforms to include those asserting that “COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured.”

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This is slightly exhausting. I didn’t link earlier this week to the WSJ report (three people from the Wuhan Institute of Virology went to hospital, like everyone in China who’s a bit ill; that’s pretty much it) because of a comprehensive demolition on Twitter by an account I trust of the story’s lack of rigour, and obvious non-intelligence-community derivation.

But it’s been taken up as being somehow “evidence” that the lab leak hypothesis is more likely than it was a week ago. That’s not true. It’s still absurd to claim that SARS-Cov-2 is man-made or manufactured: that’s a fringe conspiracy theory. It’s possible to think there could have been an accidental leak of something, but there’s still zero evidence. A Congressional inquiry will discover absolutely nothing, except there’s lot of non-scientists who like the sound of their own prejudices.
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Google medical researchers humbled when AI screening tool falls short in real-life testing • TechCrunch

Devin Coldewey, writing in April 2020:

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The Google system was intended to provide ophthalmologist-like expertise in seconds. In internal tests it identified degrees of DR with 90% accuracy; the nurses could then make a preliminary recommendation for referral or further testing in a minute instead of a month (automatic decisions were ground truth checked by an ophthalmologist within a week). Sounds great — in theory.

But that theory fell apart as soon as the study authors hit the ground. As the study describes it:

»

We observed a high degree of variation in the eye-screening process across the 11 clinics in our study. The processes of capturing and grading images were consistent across clinics, but nurses had a large degree of autonomy on how they organized the screening workflow, and different resources were available at each clinic.

The setting and locations where eye screenings took place were also highly varied across clinics. Only two clinics had a dedicated screening room that could be darkened to ensure patients’ pupils were large enough to take a high-quality fundus photo.

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The variety of conditions and processes resulted in images being sent to the server not being up to the algorithm’s high standards:

»

The deep learning system has stringent guidelines regarding the images it will assess…If an image has a bit of blur or a dark area, for instance, the system will reject it, even if it could make a strong prediction. The system’s high standards for image quality is at odds with the consistency and quality of images that the nurses were routinely capturing under the constraints of the clinic, and this mismatch caused frustration and added work.

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Images with obvious DR but poor quality would be refused by the system, complicating and extending the process. And that’s when they could get them uploaded to the system in the first place.

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Since I was wondering yesterday about Google’s deal with a US hospital, and how medical data had gone. The answer is: not always well. And then there’s the data….
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A software error made Spain’s child Covid mortality rate seem to skyrocket • Slate

Elena Debré:

»

On March 10, a respected peer-reviewed medical journal, the Lancet, published Spain’s child Covid mortality rate as around two to four times that of the U.S., U.K., Italy, Germany, France, and South Korea. The paper said that 54 children (defined as below 19) had died of Covid in the small country, making Spain’s reported death rates a staggering 4.9% for kids aged 10-19—which is at least 2.92 percentage points higher than other country in the report.

Right after the Lancet paper was published, Pere Soler, a pediatrician at hospital in Catalonia, started getting calls. Concerned reporters were trying to reach him for comment. “The first question that I received was, ‘Have you been lying to us?'” Soler says. He and other prominent pediatricians around the country had been in close contact with a circle of reporters throughout the pandemic, keeping them updated on child Covid research and school reopenings. This high of a child mortality rate did not add up with the numbers doctors had been seeing and feeding to the media.

As a re-examination of the information would soon reveal, in reality, only seven children had died of Covid. (The Lancet data has since been corrected.)

“Even though I didn’t know what the problem was, I knew it wasn’t the right data,” Soler realized once he got his hands on the Lancet paper. “Our data is not worse than other countries. I would say it is even better,” he says.

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Turned out the system they used couldn’t handle people aged over 100: it only expected people to live to 99.
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Nine things we learned from the Epic v. Apple trial • The Verge

Russell Brandom:

»

It’s been just over three weeks since the Epic v. Apple proceedings kicked off, and the news has been relentless. So as we wait for a verdict to roll in, we’re taking a quick turn through all the biggest takeaways from the trial. A lot of the juiciest points didn’t speak directly to the verdict — like the profit structure of the Xbox or the troubled history of Fortnite crossplay — but that’s part of the fun of a massive trans-corporate dustup like this. Once you start digging through CEO Tim Cook’s inbox, all sorts of interesting stuff comes out.

«

It’s not just Apple stuff: there’s also Epic Games’s weird economics of its store, Xbox’s hardware economics, and how Apple slow-walks progressive web apps.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Activist shareholders backed by big pension funds have installed two directors pushing climate activism on Exxon’s board. CC-licensed photo by Mike Mozart 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. Feeling fine. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Google strikes deal with hospital chain to develop healthcare algorithms • WSJ

Melanie Evans:

»

Google and national hospital chain HCA Healthcare have struck a deal to develop healthcare algorithms using patient records, the latest foray by a tech giant into the $3 trillion healthcare sector.

HCA, which operates across about 2,000 locations in 21 states, would consolidate and store with Google data from digital health records and internet-connected medical devices under the multiyear agreement. Google and HCA engineers will work to develop algorithms to help improve operating efficiency, monitor patients and guide doctors’ decisions, according to the companies.

“Data are spun off of every patient in real time,” said Dr. Jonathan Perlin, chief medical officer of HCA, which is based in Nashville, Tenn. “Part of what we’re building is a central nervous system to help interpret the various signals.”

The deal expands Google’s reach in healthcare, where the recent shift to digital records has created an explosion of data and a new market for technology giants and startups. Data crunching offers the opportunity to develop new treatments and improve patient safety, but algorithm-development deals between hospitals and tech companies have also raised privacy alarms.

Google has previously reached deals with other prominent US hospital systems, including St. Louis-based Ascension, that granted access to personal patient information, drawing public scrutiny.

…HCA said Google isn’t permitted to use patient-identifiable information under the agreement. Dr. Perlin said HCA patient records would be stripped of identifying information before being shared with Google data scientists and that the hospital system would control access to the data.

…Google will access data when needed with consent from HCA, but the tech giant can develop analytic tools without patient records and allow HCA to test the models independently, said Chris Sakalosky, managing director of healthcare and life sciences at Google Cloud.

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There have been quite a few of these deals, but nothing publicly announced. Power centres, the UK national grid, Moorfields Eye Hospital, and this. Have they ever been successful?
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USB-C is about to go from 100W to 240W, enough to power beefier laptops • The Verge

Sean Hollister:

»

Soon, the majority of portable PCs won’t need to be equipped with an ugly barrel jack and a proprietary power brick to charge. The USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) has just announced (via CNET) that it’s more than doubling the amount of power you can send over a USB-C cable to 240 watts, which means you’ll eventually be able to plug in the same kind of multipurpose USB-C cable you currently use on lightweight laptops, tablets, and phones to charge all but the beefiest gaming laptops.

Previously, the USB-C Power Delivery spec tops out at 100 watts, and it’s definitely held the industry back a tad — for example, while my own Dell XPS 15 can technically charge over USB-C, it needs 130W of power to charge and run at full bore simultaneously. Some manufacturers have sold off-spec USB-C adapters (I have a Dell dock that outputs 130W), but they don’t always come bundled with machines and generally have a fixed, non-detachable cable to prevent against misuse.

But with 240W of power — something that the USB-IF is calling “Extended Power Range” or EPR for short — you could theoretically charge an full-fat Alienware m17 gaming laptop over USB-C.

You’ll need new USB-C chargers and cables to take advantage of the new spec, of course, though you should hopefully be able to tell which is which: “All EPR cables shall be visibly identified with EPR cable identification items,” reads part of the USB-IF’s requirements for the new spec.

«

Without a doubt this is going to create even more problems as people try to use cables that arne’t suitable. I had a problem earlier this week with a USB-C disk connected by a USB-C cable: the disk had a ton of write errors, wasn’t working properly. I was going to junk it, when I wondered if it might be the (2m, Apple-brand) cable I was using: perhaps it wasn’t up to the job? Swapped for a 10cm cable: happy disk again. USB-C remains a pain.
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Lone wolf Dominic Cummings continues to howl at the system • The Guardian

Martin Kettle:

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There is a backbone of consistency in Cummings’s political career. He has always engaged in a battle against a largely imaginary elite conspiracy to hold back iconoclastic innovators of the kind he sees in the shaving mirror each morning. It takes the form of Cummings’s deep-rooted hostility to institutions – such as the civil service and the BBC – that seem to him to reproduce and strengthen the elite. It is suffused with a lone-wolf purism that enables Cummings to commit idiocies like the Barnard Castle incident and still present himself as a virtuous lone knight in an evil world.

This drove Cummings’s politics, long before the Brexit campaign. The Commons hearing shows it still drives him today, long after the Brexit triumph. When he first stepped across the threshold of the education department as Michael Gove’s adviser, Cummings is said to have promised to set the whole place on fire, such was his contempt towards what he famously dubbed “the blob”. Incineration was a suitably Wagnerian image for Cummings’s sense that it was, and still is, him against the system.

…People like him, by contrast, are holy solitaries rather than team players. Occasionally, his tweets will celebrate an ally who is deemed worthy – one is “a brilliant young neuroscientist I recruited to No 10”, another “a brilliant young woman” whose work averted some of the Covid social care crisis in 2020. Last week he approvingly retweeted that “It’s not only in actual politics that earnestness seems to be a handicap, but also in office politics and academic politics.” People like this, Cummings added, are “seen as mad/unreliable and are weeded out”.

If this makes Cummings in many ways the colleague from hell, it is important to also acknowledge that, in many respects, he was also right, more right than many of those around him, and that he had his supporters, notably the chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance.

«

American papers didn’t pick up on this, but the PM’s chief adviser during (most of) 2019 and 2020 gave an excoriating account of his former boss’s former and current failings. It was also an indictment of the British state, in its civil service form.
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WhatsApp is suing the Indian government to protect people’s privacy • Buzzfeed News

Pranav Dixit:

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Messaging service WhatsApp is suing the Indian government in the Delhi High Court, challenging new rules that would force it to break its encryption, potentially revealing the identities of people who had sent and received billions of messages on its platform, a WhatsApp spokesperson told BuzzFeed News.

“Civil society and technical experts around the world have consistently argued that a requirement to ‘trace’ private messages would break end-to-end encryption and lead to real abuse,” a WhatsApp spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. “WhatsApp is committed to protecting the privacy of people’s personal messages and we will continue to do all we can within the laws of India to do so.”

In a statement published on Wednesday morning, India’s IT ministry said it will only require WhatsApp to disclose who sent a message in cases related to the “sovereignty, integrity and security of India, public order incitement to an offence relating to rape, sexually explicit material or child sexual abuse material.”

It also pointed out that rumors and misinformation spreading over WhatsApp had caused lynchings and riots in the past.

“Any operations being run in India are subject to the law of the land,” the ministry’s statement added. “WhatsApp’s refusal to comply with the [rules] is a clear act of [defiance].”

More than 400 million of the 1.2 billion people who use WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, are from India.

«

The continuation of the deadline, which passed on Wednesday morning. It probably won’t take long for the first case where the Indian government wants that disclosure – and it will pick a case where public opinion is on its side.
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Google launches its third major operating system, Fuchsia • Ars Technica

Ron Amadeo:

»

Fuchsia has long been a secretive project. We first saw the OS as a pre-alpha smartphone UI that was ported to Android in 2017. In 2018, we got the OS running natively on a Pixelbook. After that, the Fuchsia team stopped doing its work in the open and stripped all UI work out of the public repository.

There’s no blog post or any fanfare at all to mark Fuchsia’s launch. Google’s I/O conference happened last week, and the company didn’t make a peep about Fuchsia there, either. Really, this ultra-quiet, invisible release is the most “Fuchsia” launch possible.

Fuchsia is something very rare in the world of tech: it’s a built-from-scratch operating system that isn’t based on Linux. Fuchsia uses a microkernel called “Zircon” that Google developed in house. Creating an operating system entirely from scratch and bringing it all the way to production sounds like a difficult task, but Google managed to do exactly that over the past six years. Fuchsia’s primary app-development language is Flutter, a cross-platform UI toolkit from Google. Flutter runs on Android, iOS, and the web, so writing Flutter apps today for existing platforms means you’re also writing Fuchsia apps for tomorrow.

The Nest Hub’s switch to Fuchsia is kind of interesting because of how invisible it should be. It will be the first test of this Fuchsia’s future-facing Flutter app support—the Google smart display interface is written in Flutter, so Google can take the existing interface, rip out all the Google Cast guts underneath, and plop the exact same interface code down on top of Fuchsia. Google watchers have long speculated that this was the plan all along. Rather than having a disruptive OS switch, Google could just get coders to write in Flutter and then it could seamlessly swap out the operating system.

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A suggestion in the comments is that this was done so that it’s completely, utterly clear of any Java/Oracle APIs. Perhaps a defensive move in case Google lost the Supreme Court case. In which case, not needed on voyage, as it turns out.
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Huawei’s HarmonyOS: “Fake it till you make it” meets OS development • Ars Technica

Ron Amadeo:

»

Huawei wants independence from the worldwide smartphone supply chain. While hardware independence is something the company needs to work on, Huawei also needs to get free of Google’s software. So, as many companies have tried to do before it, Huawei hopes to make an Android killer.

The company’s attempt at an in-house OS is called “HarmonyOS” (also known as “HongmengOS” in China). “Version 2” was released in December, bringing “beta” smartphone support to the operating system for the first time. Can Huawei succeed where Windows Phone, Blackberry 10, Sailfish OS, Ubuntu Touch, Firefox OS, Symbian, MeeGo, WebOS, and Samsung’s Tizen have all tried and failed?

To hear Huawei tell the story, HarmonyOS is an original in-house creation—a defiant act that will let the company break free of American software influence. Huawei’s OS announcement in 2019 got big, splashy articles in the national media. CNN called HarmonyOS “a rival to Android,” and Richard Yu, the CEO of Huawei’s consumer business group, told the outlet that HarmonyOS “is completely different from Android and iOS.” Huawei President of Consumer Software Wang Chenglu repeated these claims just last month, saying (through translation), “HarmonyOS is not a copy of Android, nor is it a copy of iOS.”

That makes HarmonyOS sound super interesting. Naturally, we had to take a deep dive.

After getting access to HarmonyOS through a grossly invasive sign-up process, firing up the SDK and emulator, and poring over the developer documents, I can’t come to any other conclusion: HarmonyOS is essentially an Android fork. The way that Huawei describes the OS to the press and in developer documents doesn’t seem to have much to do with what the company is actually shipping.

«

But to get that far he had to upload his passport, and wait two days for it to be checked. So he could try being a developer? Huawei has entered a strange hinterland.
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Inner Mongolia reinforces Beijing’s ban on mining with strict rules as more operators prepare to relocate offshore • South China Morning Post

Coco Feng:

»

Targeting industrial parks, data centres, telecoms companies, internet firms, and even cybercafes, the draft rules promise to punish bitcoin miners or those providing resources to miners by banning them from the region’s power trading scheme, revoking business licenses, and even shutting their businesses down completely, according to a statement issued Tuesday by the region’s top economic planner.

Under the new rules, which are available for public review until June 1, individuals who flout the regulations could be put on a social credit blacklist barring them from getting loans or making use of the country’s transportation system, as well as facing other legal consequences.

The draft rules mark a sharp escalation in an already surprising change in attitude by the central government towards bitcoin miners and come less than a week after the Inner Mongolia region called on citizens to report illegal bitcoin mines.

Although the creation and trading of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin have been illegal in China since 2017 – a move that forced exchanges like Binance, Huobi and OkEx offshore – authorities have until recently turned a blind eye to the companies and individuals that “mine” bitcoin by operating the computers that make up the cryptocurrency’s decentralised network.

Miners who have taken advantage of cheap, coal-powered electricity in places like Xinjiang, Sichuan, and Inner Mongolia, are finding that this tolerance is fading fast.

«

“Coal-powered”? But I was told that bitcoin is all green! Also, this is going to start to squeeze bitcoin if the CCP really does follow through on this. Though as the story notes, it’s had the sword of Damocles hanging up there for four years already. (Iran is also banning bitcoin mining for four months.)
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GameStop announces that it’s working on NFTs • HYPEBEAST

»

GameStop on Tuesday quietly announced that it was beginning to build out a team to develop NFTs.

The company teased the new operation through a website dedicated to the blockchain asset. The announcement, titled “Change the Game,” featured a gaming cartridge that slides into a handheld gaming console that resembles a GameBoy. “Power to the players. Power to the creators. Power to the collectors,” a message on the device reads.

Alongside the announcement is a callout for “exceptional engineers (solidity, react, python), designers, gamers, marketers, and community leaders.” The company provided an email for those who wish to be a part of the forthcoming NFT project.

Eagle-eyed Reddit users spotted a GameStop job listing from earlier this month, looking for an analyst with experience in “blockchain, cryptocurrency or non-fungible tokens” to join their Grapevine, Texas, headquarters.

According to Etherscan, the company also appears to have recently created its own GME token.

«

Gamestop’s new slogan: if you can’t beat.. actually, what the hell, just join them, it’s a lot quicker.
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Engine No. 1 wins at least 2 Exxon board seats as activist pushes for climate strategy change • CNBC

Pippa Stevens:

»

Activist firm Engine No. 1 won at least two board seats at Exxon following a historic battle over the oil giant’s board of directors, signaling investors’ support for greater disclosure from the company as the world shifts away from fossil fuels.

The vote over a third candidate proposed by Engine No. 1 was too close to call as of 3pm on Wall Street.

“We’re looking forward to welcoming the new directors,” Exxon CEO Darren Woods said Wednesday on CNBC’s “Closing Bell.” “I look forward to helping them understand our plans and then hear their insights and perspectives.”

Engine No. 1, which has a 0.02% stake in Exxon, has been targeting the company since December, pushing the oil giant to reconsider its role in a zero-carbon world.

Wednesday’s vote came during Exxon’s annual shareholder meeting, where CEO Darren Woods fielded questions from shareholders ranging from the company’s dividend to Exxon’s investments in carbon capture technology.

…The activist firm nominated four independent director candidates and won support from large pension funds, including CalPERS, calSTRS and New York State Common Retirement Fund.

«

The board has 13 directors, so this might make some difference, but not – yet – a critical one. Notice how a tiny stake can have big leverage with the help of activist, er, pension funds.
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Joe Biden opens up California coast to offshore wind • The Verge

Justine Calma:

»

Offshore wind is headed west. The Biden administration announced today that it will open up parts of the Pacific coast to commercial-scale offshore renewable energy development for the first time. The geography of the West Coast poses huge technical challenges for wind energy. But rising to meet those challenges is a big opportunity for both President Joe Biden and California Governor Gavin Newsom to meet their clean energy goals.

There are two areas now slotted for development off the coast of Central and Northern California — one at Morro Bay and another near Humboldt County. Together, these areas could generate up to 4.6GW of energy, enough power for 1.6 million homes over the next decade, according to a White House fact sheet.

“I believe that a clean energy future is within our grasp in the United States, but it will take all of us and the best-available science to make it happen,” Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland said in a statement today.

«

“For the first time”? There’s a lot of ocean out there, and a lot of coastline. Amazing that it has taken this long.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

How good are you at counting items in a photo? Don’t worry, there’s an app that will do the job for you. CC-licensed photo by Trevor Haldenby 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. Counted by a computer. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Will India ban WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter from May 26? Unlikely, but it is complicated • MSN.com

India Tech:

»

Almost all internet companies, whether they are social media networks, messaging services, news organisations or even streaming services like Netflix, all have to follow the new rules [announced in February with a three-month deadline]. The deadline to do so, that is to comply with the new rules, expires May 25. In other words, the next day means a big headache ahead for companies like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

First the big question: Will Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp be banned in India from May 26?

Unlikely. But if they do not comply with the new rules they will always be at risk of a significant government action against them. To understand this all, let’s first take a quick look at what the government is asking.

There are a number of new conditions and regulatory requirements that the government seeks to impose on social media companies. But a few significant ones are:

1- Big tech companies — the government calls them “significant social media” — must have a chief compliance officer in India who can respond to government demands and needs whenever required. For example, if the government requires data of User A from Twitter, and if the demand is legally valid, then this compliance officer will be responsible for producing this data.

2- The tech companies have also been asked to hire a nodal officer that will coordinate with law enforcement agencies 24 x 7 and whenever the government requires such coordination.

3- The social media companies have been asked to hire a grievance redressal officer, whom the social media users will be able to approach with their grievances if they have any.

4- And finally, companies like WhatsApp have been asked to ensure that they can trace a message to the original sender. Effectively this means breaking or circumventing end-to-end encryption on messages. Complying with such a request is incredibly challenging, if not outright impossible, for a service like WhatsApp.

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This all depends on how long the Indian government waits to enforce the rules. So let’s see what happens.
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This app will count literally anything you show it • Android Police

Michael Crider:

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CountThings is basically an app version of those famous scenes from Rain Man. And though it has some definite novelty potential, it’s actually designed for straight-laced industrial applications. The system uses pre-existing templates to analyze still images, counting up all of the similar items even when they’re arranged in nonsensical patterns that makes our pathetic meat-powered brains spin.

Logs of lumber stacked on a truck are a perfect example: the irregular circles are surprisingly difficult to count up by hand, since they don’t stack into neat rows and columns. But CountThings can do it in just a couple of seconds, using the template provided by the developer.

Because CountThings is an industrial tool, it’s not free. In fact it’s a long way from free: its in-app purchases for counting templates start at $20 and go up to $120. And that’s relatively inexpensive compared to the enterprise options, which start at $20 for 24 hours, with $2000 per year (for one device!) for the most complex video-based version of the tool.

The tool managed to get every key except the space bar, but missed six screws.

But if you just want to make your phone count stuff, you can download the app and try a few free scans for kicks. My results varied: while it’s excellent at getting anything with a regular, repeating shape, more complex outlines could fool it. It managed to count every key on my keyboard correctly (except the space key), but consistently missed a few screws spilled out onto my desk because some of them were bunched up or sitting on their heads.

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Seems like fun, and who wouldn’t want an app (available for all the platforms) that they could do some totally random counting with. The templates (in the link above) are fascinating: square bars, round bars, angle bars and so many more (all end-on of course).
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Influencers say Russia-linked PR agency asked them to disparage Pfizer vaccine • The Guardian

Jon Henley:

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French and German YouTubers, bloggers and influencers have been offered money by a supposedly UK-based PR agency with apparent Russian connections to falsely tell their followers the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine is responsible for hundreds of deaths.

Fazze, which said it was an “influencer marketing platform … connecting bloggers and advertisers”, claimed to be based at 5 Percy Street in London but is not registered there. On Tuesday, it closed its website and made its Instagram account private.

The agency contacted several French health and science YouTubers last week and asked them, in poor English, to “explain … the death rate among the vaccinated with Pfizer is almost 3x higher than the vaccinated by AstraZeneca”.

The influencers were told to publish links on YouTube, Instagram or TikTok to reports in Le Monde, on Reddit and on the Ethical Hacker website about a leaked report containing data that supposedly substantiates the claim.

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The Russian misinformation campaign goes on – because it’s relatively cheap. (Thanks G for the link.)
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Apple employees are going public about workplace issues — and there’s no going back • The Verge

Zoe Schiffer:

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The events [of García-Martinez’s firing] stunned even the letter writers. They’d expected the note to cause a stir inside Apple, but they hadn’t intended for it to become public. “The leak was very shocking to everybody who was vocal and involved in writing the letter,” says one worker who asked to remain anonymous for fear of professional retaliation. “Either somebody is a very good actor or there’s someone else who felt like the letter was going to disappear unless it became public.”

A week after The Verge published the García Martínez letter, a group of Muslim employees at Apple penned a note calling for the company to release a statement in support of Palestine. When Tim Cook didn’t respond, the letter was leaked to The Verge.

The two letters, and their leaks, are signs of a slow cultural shift at Apple. Employees, once tight-lipped about internal problems, are now joining a wave of public dissent that’s roiling Silicon Valley. Employees say this is partly because Apple’s typical avenues for reporting don’t work for big cultural issues. They also note the company rolled out Slack in 2019, allowing workers to find and organize with one another.

Now, some are beginning to feel that the company culture has harmed diversity and inclusion efforts. “Apple’s secrecy works great for protecting our customers and our products, but it hinders inclusion and diversity,” says an anonymous employee. “There’s a lack of education around what is confidential versus what is your protected speech and you should speak up about.”

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Very easy to claim everything is going to change, but the Palestine letter didn’t get any response, and Apple could – at the ultimate extreme – take the same approach as Basecamp and just tell people it’s not a topic to talk about inside the company any more. Sure, it’s a lot bigger, but journalistic confidence is cheap.
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Galaxy upcycling: how Samsung ruined its best idea in years • iFixit

Kevin Purdy:

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A small team of Samsung engineers showed us something exciting four years ago. It was novel, revolutionary, and not what you’d expect from the smartphone king. They wanted our help to make it real.

It wasn’t a folding phone, a robot, or a VR kit—this invention didn’t even have a price. It was a marketplace of clever uses for old, easily unlocked Samsung phones. This was exactly the kind of lifespan-prologinging idea that we love. We were instantly sold.

“There is another way to create even more value” than recycling, Samsung said in a video at the time. “It’s called upcycling.” With code and creativity, upcycling could turn a Galaxy S5 into a smart fish tank monitor, a controller for all your smart home devices, a weather station, a nanny cam, or lots more. Upcycling not only kept your old phone from being shredded or stuck in junk-drawer purgatory, it could keep you from buying more single-purpose devices. It was a smart way to reduce our collective upgrade guilt.

We were so excited, in fact, that when Samsung asked us to help launch the product in the fall of 2017, we jumped at the chance. You’ll see iFixit’s name and logo all over Samsung’s original Galaxy Upcycling materials. Samsung, a company without much of a public environmental message, was tossing around big ideas born at a grassroots level. This was something new. We were jazzed, and after validating the concept with working code in our labs, lent our name and credibility to the effort.

But sometimes well-intentioned projects get muzzled inside giant companies.

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This is the story of how it got muzzled.
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Robots, manners and stress • Light Blue Touchpaper

Professor Ross Anderson:

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As robots develop situational awareness, like humans, and react to real or potential attacks by falling back to a more cautious mode of operation, a hostile environment will cause the equivalent of stress. Sometimes this will be deliberate; one can imagine constant low-level engagement between drones at tense national borders, just as countries currently probe each others’ air defences. But much of the time it may well be a by-product of poor automation design coupled with companies hustling aggressively for consumers’ attention.

This suggests a missing factor in machine-learning research: manners. We’ve evolved manners to signal to others that our intent is not hostile, and to negotiate the many little transactions that in a hostile environment might lead to a tussle for dominance. Yet these are hard for robots. Food-delivery robots can become unpopular for obstructing and harassing other pavement users; and one of the show-stoppers for automated driving is the difficulty that self-driving cars have in crossing traffic, or otherwise negotiating precedence with other road users. And even in the military, manners have a role – from the chivalry codes of medieval knights to the more modern protocols whereby warships and warplanes warn other craft before opening fire. If we let loose swarms of killer drones with no manners, conflict will be more likely.

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The irony: Anderson’s team were invited to talk about this at a conference with two convenors, but one made too many difficult demands. Manners! But they’ve put a paper online.
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COVID-19 vaccine breakthrough infections reported to CDC, US, January 1–April 30, 2021 • MMWR

The CDC has the latest data:

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A total of 10,262 SARS-CoV-2 vaccine breakthrough infections had been reported from 46 US states and territories as of April 30, 2021. [A 0.01% incidence, given the 101 million people who were fully vaccinated.]

Among these cases, 6,446 (63%) occurred in females, and the median patient age was 58 years (interquartile range = 40–74 years). Based on preliminary data, 2,725 (27%) vaccine breakthrough infections were asymptomatic, 995 (10%) patients were known to be hospitalized, and 160 (2%) patients died.

Among the 995 hospitalized patients, 289 (29%) were asymptomatic or hospitalized for a reason unrelated to COVID-19. The median age of patients who died was 82 years (interquartile range = 71–89 years); 28 (18%) decedents were asymptomatic or died from a cause unrelated to COVID-19. Sequence data were available from 555 (5%) reported cases, 356 (64%) of which were identified as SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern,§ including B.1.1.7 (199; 56%), B.1.429 (88; 25%), B.1.427 (28; 8%), P.1 (28; 8%), and B.1.351 (13; 4%).

As of April 30, 2021, approximately 101 million persons in the United States had been fully vaccinated against COVID-19.¶ However, during the surveillance period, SARS-CoV-2 transmission continued at high levels in many parts of the country, with approximately 355,000 COVID-19 cases reported nationally during the week of April 24–30, 2021.**

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Also worth noting: “The proportion of reported vaccine breakthrough infections attributed to variants of concern has also been similar to the proportion of these variants circulating throughout the United States.” Though they point out that they can’t be certain if this is all the cases that occurred, particularly because some might be asymptomatic.
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Share of time spent listening to audio at home in the US increases 44% during COVID-19 disruption • Edison Research

»

Edison Research measures the location of all listening, and the table below shows the share of time spent with audio by location. Findings show that while total time spent listening was only slightly lower during the COVID-19 disruptions in the United States, there was a considerable shift in where that audio consumption happened. While 48.5% of all listening occurred at home before COVID-19 (and this finding has been very consistent since Share of Ear began in 2014), 70.0% of all listening was at-home in May.  All three other locations – car, work and ‘other’ — dropped. 

“It’s important to recognize that our survey asks where the respondent is when they are listening to audio – not what they are doing,” said Edison Research director Laura Ivey.  “The shift to ‘work-from-home’ for so many, especially office workers who tend to spend a lot of time with audio, is clearly reflected.” 

The enormous changes in daily life for so many Americans led to changes in what people are listening to and what device they are using to access their audio. 

Podcasting’s Share of Ear jumped significantly – up 26% from the Quarter 1 2020 report to this new update. During COVID-19 restrictions, 5.4% of all time spent with audio was with podcasts, up from 4.3% in Q1. While podcasting share increases with every update, this represents an all-time high for podcast listening share of all audio. 

Smart Speakers also hit a new high, with its share leaping by more than 40% (albeit from a relatively low base). During COVID-19 restrictions, 5.3% of all time spent with audio was through a smart speaker, up from 3.7% in Q1. 

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The podcasting feels like a slight surprise – weren’t people listening while they commuted before? – but the only surprise in the shift to home is that it isn’t more like 100%.
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David Berglas: how to make a concert grand vanish in a crowded room • YouTube

»

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I came across this in a Jason Kottke post: Berglas is now 94, and still being coy about how he does some of his tricks. But not this one, where he made a concert grand piano (the very biggest kind) disappear while he was speaking to an audience.
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Why Florida’s social media law will be struck down • Ars Technica

Jon Brodkin:

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Experts who say the new law is unconstitutional cite a previous case in which a similar Florida law was struck down. After [Florida governor Ron] DeSantis announced the proposal in February, First Amendment attorney Ari Cohn told Law & Crime that it “raises the same issue as a previous Florida law which required newspapers that criticized a political candidate to publish that candidate’s response.” In the 1974 case, Miami Herald v. Tornillo, “the Supreme Court struck down the law, ruling that it violated the newspapers’ First Amendment right to choose which content to run or not run,” Cohn said. That case involved a law enacted in 1913.

The Law & Crime article continued:

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Professor Daxton “Chip” Stewart, a media law expert who referred to the proposal as “hilariously unconstitutional,” said that DeSantis exhibited a fundamental misunderstanding of corporations’ rights.
“Basically, DeSantis seems to forget that private companies like Facebook and Twitter have First Amendment rights, too,” Stewart noted. “The government can’t force them to host speech they don’t want to, or threaten punishment like these absurd fines for refusing to give platforms to people they find intolerable. Just as a platform can remove accounts of terrorists or the KKK or a cabal that conspires to violently overthrow the government, they can remove accounts of any other individual.”

«

The Electronic Frontier Foundation cited the same case. “Since Tornillo, courts have consistently applied it as binding precedent, including applying Tornillo to social media and Internet search engines, the very targets of the [Florida] Transparency in Technology Act (unless they own a theme park),” EFF General Counsel Kurt Opsahl wrote earlier this month. “Indeed, the compelled speech doctrine has even been used to strike down other attempts to counter perceived censorship of conservative speakers.”

On the Lawfare blog in March, TechFreedom Internet Policy Counsel Corbin Barthold and President Berin Szóka also pointed to the Miami Herald v. Tornillo case as an example of why the new law won’t pass constitutional muster. The Supreme Court “has repeatedly held that digital media enjoy the same First Amendment protection as traditional media,” they wrote.

«

I’ve changed the title on this article; it’s about the passing of the law, but adds these informed explanations of why it will fail. As I said, its intention is just to wind people up – on both sides.
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Please preorder Social Warming, my forthcoming book. It’s full of words.

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

If you think you can discern lossless audio, good news – we’ve got the audio tests so you can prove it. CC-licensed photo by Jim 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.

Florida governor signs law to block ‘deplatforming’ of Florida politicians • The Verge

Makena Kelly:

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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill Monday that bars social media companies like Twitter and Facebook from “knowingly” deplatforming politicians.

The bill, SB 7072, was proposed in February, weeks after former President Donald Trump was banned from Facebook and Twitter after the deadly right-wing riot at the US Capitol. The law bars social media platforms from banning Floridian political candidates and authorizes the Florida Election Commission to impose fines if these candidates were to be deplatformed. The fines range from $250,000 per day for statewide office candidates and $25,000 per day for non-statewide offices.

“This will lead to more speech, not less speech,” DeSantis said during a press conference at the Florida International University in Miami Monday. “Because speech that’s inconvenient to the narrative will be protected.”

Many are already skeptical about the new law’s legality, with the tech-friendly Chamber of Progress calling it “clearly unconstitutional.” As a state law, the measure could be overturned if courts find it conflicts with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which broadly immunizes platforms from liability for good-faith moderation activity. It could also be subject to a constitutional challenge under the First Amendment, which has been interpreted to broadly prevent government interference to corporate speech.

But regardless of its legal status, the measure will help establish DeSantis’ political bona-fides among the anti-tech wing of the Republican Party. For years, Republicans have pressured platforms like Facebook over their content moderation policies, accusing the companies of being biased against conservative speech online. DeSantis’ bill is one of the first major victories for populist Republicans in opposition to the power of Big Tech.

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Hilariously, the bill makes an exception for companies (in Florida) which own a theme park more than 25 acres in size. You may have heard of it: starts with D, ends with -isney. Not sure if it runs a social network, but just in case! Got to keep those funders happy. Which offers the exciting prospect of Twitter World – run the rollercoaster of angry tweets! – and Facebook Land, where everyone is your Friend.

The number of Floridian politicians likely to be permanently deplatformed is roughly zero, at a guess (it’s not retrospective; there is one ex-politician living in Florida who has been deplatformed). The aim of this law is to be repealed, to create anger, the one true fuel for life online. Social warming: it’s all around us.
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The costly pursuit of self-driving cars continues on. And on. And on • The New York Times

Cade Metz:

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The tech and auto giants could still toil for years on their driverless car projects. Each will spend an additional $6bn to $10bn before the technology becomes commonplace — sometime around the end of the decade, according to estimates from Pitchbook, a research firm that tracks financial activity. But even that prediction might be overly optimistic.

“This is a transformation that is going to happen over 30 years and possibly longer,” said Chris Urmson, an early engineer on the Google self-driving car project before it became the Alphabet business unit called Waymo. He is now chief executive of Aurora, the company that acquired Uber’s autonomous vehicle unit.

So what went wrong? Some researchers would say nothing — that’s how science works. You can’t entirely predict what will happen in an experiment. The self-driving car project just happened to be one of the most hyped technology experiments of this century, occurring on streets all over the country and run by some of its highest-profile companies.

…“You have to peel back every layer before you can see the next layer” of challenges for the technology, said Nathaniel Fairfield, a Waymo software engineer who has worked on the project since 2009, describing some of the distractions faced by the cars. “Your car has to be pretty good at driving before you can really get it into the situations where it handles the next most challenging thing.”

Like Waymo, Aurora is now developing autonomous trucks as well as passenger vehicles. No company has deployed trucks without safety drivers behind the wheel, but Mr. Urmson and others argue that autonomous trucks will make it to market faster than anything designed to transport regular consumers.

Long-haul trucking does not involve passengers who might not be forgiving of twitchy brakes. The routes are also simpler. Once you master one stretch of highway, Mr. Urmson said, it is easier to master another. But even driving down a long, relatively straight highway is extraordinarily difficult. Delivering dinner orders across a small neighborhood is an even greater challenge.

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ABX High Fidelity Test list

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IS YOUR AUDIO SYSTEM REALLY READY FOR LOSSLESS SOUND?

Here you will find a set of ABX tests allowing you to compare lossless and lossy compression in a variety of formats and bitrates. This site is still in its infancy, and the number of tests available will probably grow over time.

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Created in November 2014, last updated.. well, minor additions aside, not since then. But it’s a useful list if you’d like to find out whether you’ve got “golden ears” – that is, your ears are so good that you’re going to have to sell a lot of gold in order to satisfy them. (Not really. It means that your ears are terrific.) You have to take multiple tests, not knowing which one you’re hearing.

If you succeed on recognising the difference, do get in touch. And, of course, you’ll qualify to justifiedly turn on the “lossless” settings on Apple Music or Amazon Music next month. (Thanks Geraint P for the link.)
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lofi.cafe – lofi music 🎧

Rather neat: background music to work by, with lots of different “radio” stations to choose from. Saves the mental effort of choosing music, which so often is the most time-consuming part of getting some background music on. OK, might not be just what you want but at least you’ve got more choices now for your new life back perching on cafe tables asking for the Wi-Fi password. Not lossless, obviously. Sorry about that.
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Bitcoin’s troubles go far beyond Elon Musk • The New Yorker

John Cassidy:

»

Early last week, three state-run Chinese financial agencies warned Chinese banks not to provide their customers with any services relating to bitcoin and other virtual currencies, including trading, storage, or acceptance as a means of payment. Later in the week, the State Council, China’s cabinet, issued a statement that said, “We should crack down on bitcoin mining and trading activities and prevent individual risks from being passed to the whole society.” Since the bitcoin-mining system relies heavily on power provided by Chinese power plants, this was no idle threat. And China has accompanied its moves against bitcoin by taking steps to roll out its own digital currency, which will initially circulate alongside cash.

The United States and other Western countries haven’t yet gone as far as China has, but their governments aren’t standing idle, either. Earlier this year, Janet Yellen, the Treasury Secretary, described bitcoin (correctly) as an “extremely inefficient way of conducting transactions,” and pointed out (equally correctly) that it is used “often for illicit finance.”

…In India, where investing in bitcoin has become popular, there have been reports that the government is preparing to ban people from owning the digital currency. Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s biggest hedge fund, has suggested that, under certain circumstances, even the U.S. government could outlaw bitcoin, to protect its monopoly on the supply of money. At this stage, such a development doesn’t seem likely. Still, the ultimate outcome is uncertain—a fact that Musk acknowledged over the weekend. In yet another tweet, he wrote, “The true battle is between fiat & crypto. On balance, I support the latter.” That pledge of allegiance came as no surprise. But, if investors have learned anything over the past few decades, it is that fighting the feds can be costly.

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More mood music. Bad mood music.
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Police in Delhi have descended on Twitter’s headquarters in the country • Buzzfeed News

Pranav Dixit:

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On Monday, a team of officers from the Special Cell, an elite branch of the police in charge of investigating terrorism and organized crime in New Delhi, descended on Twitter’s offices in the city to “serve a notice” to the head of Twitter in India. Police also attempted to enter a Twitter office in Gurugram, a location that has been permanently closed, a Twitter spokesperson told BuzzFeed News.

The move came three days after Twitter put a “manipulated media” label on the tweets of half a dozen members of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, in which they had accused the Indian National Congress, the main opposition party, of scheming to damage Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his handling of the second wave of India’s coronavirus pandemic.

In an image the members circulated, they claimed that the Indian National Congress was giving special medical favors to journalists affected by the pandemic among other things. AltNews, an Indian fact-checking website, found that the image was forged. (Congress has also filed a police complaint against Sambit Patra, the BJP spokesperson who initially shared the image.) On Friday, India’s IT ministry sent a letter to the company asking it to remove the labels. Twitter did not.

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The temperature is rising, and there’s no obvious way that this is going to be resolved except through the Indian government banning Twitter – as it already has done with TikTok (as part of a feud with China).
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Amazon removes popular tech brands amid fake review leak • Digital Trends

Andrew Martonik:

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If you go to Amazon looking for a new charger or a pair of headphones today, your options will be limited. People have started noticing that chargers, cables, webcams, keyboards, mice, speakers, and headphones — likely among other categories — from popular companies are either unavailable for shipping or gone from the platform entirely. Aukey and Mpow, extremely well-known companies with popular products, have all but disappeared from Amazon.

And we have a good idea of the reason: Fake reviews.

Online safety advocate SafetyDetective uncovered a massive trove of data pointing to wide-reaching pay-for-play review systems purportedly focused on China-based phone and computer accessory companies that primarily sell on Amazon. The leak exposed a system of companies paying to generate real-looking — but completely falsified — reviews for new products. The goal is simple: shoot up the Amazon rankings for having a high number of reviews and an average rating, which starts the waterwheel of purchases and real reviews.

The system would essentially have third-party companies buy products, submit favorable 5-star reviews from fake user accounts, and then be reimbursed for the products (and then some) via a separate payment platform to protect the integrity of the “verified purchase” denotation on Amazon. The leak shows over 75,000 Amazon accounts being used for the services, though the true scale isn’t yet known. There could be many more individuals or smaller groups implicated in the scheme.

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The discouraging thing is that it wasn’t Amazon that found this. As so often, the task of improving the site feels like it’s being outsourced to the users.
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Smart guitar will practically play itself • Hackaday

Kristina Panos:

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Honestly, the guitar is kind of an unwelcoming instrument, even if you don’t have any physical disabilities.

A Russian startup company called Noli Music wants to change all of that. They’re building a guitar that’s playable for everyone, regardless of physical or musical ability. Noli Music was founded by [Denis Goncharov] who has a form of muscular dystrophy. [Denis] has always wanted to rock out to his favorite songs, but struggles to play a standard guitar.

If you can touch the fretboard, it seems, you can whale away on this axe without trouble. It’s made to be easier to play all around. The strings aren’t fully tensioned, so they’re easy to pluck — the site says they only take 1.7oz of force to actuate.

Right now, the guitar is in the prototype stage. But when it’s ready to rock, it will do so a couple of ways. One uses embedded sensors in the fretboard detect finger positions and sound the appropriate note whether you pluck it or simply fret it. In another mode, the finger positions light up to help you learn new songs. The guitar will have a touchscreen interface, and Noli are planning on building a companion app to provide interactive lessons.

«

Seems like this would be a recipe for a lot of bum notes as you accidentally touch the strings or move your fingers around the frets. The requirement to press a little hard on the strings to begin to generate a note (which you then have to pluck) is a feature, not a bug. Sure, this will be good for someone with muscular dystrophy. But it’s going to create a different kind of guitar sound.
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Google’s new Samsung smartwatch partnership looks a lot like giving up • The Verge

Chaim Gartenberg:

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or the past few years, there’s been no cohesive vision for what Wear OS should be; Google hasn’t offered one. And by the looks of the recent Samsung partnership, it’s choosing to punt on the issue entirely, handing off the business of imagining the future of Android wearables to one of its partners instead.

Samsung used to offer an Android Wear watch, until it jumped ship for its own Tizen platform. OnePlus’ recent smartwatch also skips Wear OS entirely. You have to have screwed up badly to get partners to forgo the deep built-in integration and the wealth of apps on the Play Store, but Google has managed to accomplish it with Wear OS.

Maybe the Tizen-hybrid Wear will fix that. It’s certainly a win for Samsung, the hero that gets to provide the essential backbone for Google’s third-act of wearable hardware while reaping the benefits of the massive Android developer community.

And Google does get some big benefits here. There’s one fewer competitor for its future smartwatch platform (something that there were already relatively few of outside of Apple after Google bought Fitbit.) And there’s also the potential of gaining Samsung’s semiconductor expertise for future smartwatch chips, which would certainly help with the Qualcomm issues that the company has had in the past.

But Google hasn’t shown yet that it’ll handle the next phase of its wearables any better than the first two. And it’s a concerning start that a company that’s best known for leading on software innovation had to go and outsource its next wearable operating system to Samsung instead.

«

Part of the problem is Qualcomm, whose chips haven’t been up to the task. But wearables are a little business compared to YouTube, Android, search. Ditto for Chromebooks and tablets.
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Preorder Social Warming, my forthcoming book. That’s all.

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Here’s a theory – what if Apple didn’t replace its maddening remote because it made too many in the first place? CC-licensed photo by pablofalv 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. Don’t lose them in the couch cushions. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Can Apple change ads? • Benedict Evans

After pointing out that Apple moved from dominating music, to dominating phones, to dominating App Store revenue, and found itself stymied at each turn:

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the obvious, cynical theory is that Apple decided to cripple third-party app install ads just at the point that it was poised to launch its own, and to weaken the broader smartphone ad model so that companies would be driven towards in-app purchase instead. (The even more cynical theory would be that Apple expects to lose a big chunk of App Store commission as a result of lawsuits and so plans to replace this with app install ads. I don’t actually believe this – amongst other things I think Apple believes it will win its Epic and Spotify cases.)

Much more interesting, though, is what happens if Apple opens up its cohort tracking and targeting, and says that apps, or Safari, can now serve anonymous, targeted, private ads without the publisher or developer knowing the targeting data. It could create an API to serve those ads in Safari and in apps, without the publisher knowing what the cohort was or even without knowing what the ad was. What if Apple offered that, and described it as a truly ‘private, personalised’ ad model, on a platform with at least 60% of US mobile traffic, and over a billion global users?

…The ad market is a mess, and now very unstable, and poised, perhaps, to move to a very different idea of what ‘privacy’ means and how it works. Apple has both the market power and the brand to launch a new privacy-based tracking and targeting ad model, and offer it on hundreds of millions of high-spending users’ devices.

On the other hand, this may be a case of what my old colleague Steven Sinofsky likes to call the ‘Dr Evil’ theory of company strategy. The press used to see five or ten things going on in different parts of Microsoft, imagine they were all linked together, and say “Aha! We have worked out their evil brilliant plan for world domination!” – and people at Microsoft would read the story and say “That’s a good idea! We should do that! – except we could never make it work.”

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Forecasting s-curves is hard • Constance Crozier

Crozier is a researcher at the University of Colorado’s engineering group:

»

the reason that these curves have been back in the news, is the propagation of disease. In this case the exponential growth occurs when the virus is new, such that most people encountering it will not have developed immunity. The level-off occurs because the virus is no longer encountering people without immunity (either due to ‘herd immunity’ or isolation of those infected). The graph below shows the number of deaths in China from the SARS outbreak in 2003, again with a best-fit s-curve.

Deaths due to SARS in China [3]
S-curves have only three parameters, and so it is perhaps impressive that they fit a variety of systems so well. Broadly, the three parameters describe the initial growth rate, the level-off rate, and the value at which it levels-off. Therefore, if you can estimate these three numbers, then you have the trend curve. Many of us will have learnt in school that if there are three parameters to be found, you need three data points to define the function. This would suggest that you could perfectly predict the level-off point based on only three observations (spoiler: you can’t). 

In reality, while we can say that the overall trend of the data is likely to fit to some s-curve, the individual points will not all lie along it.

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There’s a lovely animation in the post which shows how difficult it is to fit an s-curve to the available data: is it going to be huge, tiny, quick, slow?
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Google unit DeepMind tried—and failed—to win AI autonomy from parent • WSJ

Parmy Olson:

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Senior managers at Google artificial-intelligence unit DeepMind have been negotiating for years with the parent company for more autonomy, seeking an independent legal structure for the sensitive research they do.

DeepMind told staff late last month that Google called off those talks, according to people familiar with the matter. The end of the long-running negotiations, which hasn’t previously been reported, is the latest example of how Google and other tech giants are trying to strengthen their control over the study and advancement of artificial intelligence. Earlier this month, Google unveiled plans to double the size of its team studying the ethics of artificial intelligence and to consolidate that research.

Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai has called the technology key to the company’s future, and parent Alphabet has invested billions of dollars in AI. The technology, which handles tasks once the exclusive domain of humans, making life more efficient at home and work, has raised complex questions about the growing influence of computer algorithms in a wide range of public and private life.

…DeepMind’s founders had sought, among other ideas, a legal structure used by nonprofit groups, reasoning that the powerful artificial intelligence they were researching shouldn’t be controlled by a single corporate entity, according to people familiar with those plans.

On a video call last month with DeepMind staff, co-founder Demis Hassabis said the unit’s effort to negotiate a more autonomous corporate structure was over, according to people familiar with the matter. He also said DeepMind’s AI research and its application would be reviewed by an ethics board staffed mostly by senior Google executives.

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Feels like this only begins to capture the tension that must exist between the parent and subsidiary. The firings in Google’s AI ethics unit can’t have made them comfortable either.
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Once tech’s favorite economist, now a thorn in its side • The New York Times

Steve Lohr:

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Paul Romer was once Silicon Valley’s favorite economist. The theory that helped him win a Nobel prize — that ideas are the turbocharged fuel of the modern economy — resonated deeply in the global capital of wealth-generating ideas. In the 1990s, Wired magazine called him “an economist for the technological age.” The Wall Street Journal said the tech industry treated him “like a rock star.”

Not anymore.

Today, Mr. Romer, 65, remains a believer in science and technology as engines of progress. But he has also become a fierce critic of the tech industry’s largest companies, saying that they stifle the flow of new ideas. He has championed new state taxes on the digital ads sold by companies like Facebook and Google, an idea that Maryland adopted this year.

And he is hard on economists, including himself, for long supplying the intellectual cover for hands-off policies and court rulings that have led to what he calls the “collapse of competition” in tech and other industries.

“Economists taught, ‘It’s the market. There’s nothing we can do,’” Mr. Romer said. “That’s really just so wrong.”

Mr. Romer’s current call for government activism, he said, reflects “a profound change in my thinking” in recent years. It also fits into a broader re-evaluation about the tech industry and government regulation among prominent economists.

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It sounds like neoliberalism is dying an inch at a time. Only a few miles to go. The idea of local taxing on ads seems like an obvious one; the surprise is that it’s not there. And the attitude to advertising is shifting subtly.
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Belarus accused of ‘hijacking’ Ryanair flight diverted to arrest blogger • The Guardian

Andrew Roth:

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Belarus has been accused of hijacking a European jetliner and engaging in an act of state terrorism when it forced a Ryanair flight to perform an emergency landing in Minsk after a bomb threat and arrested an opposition blogger critical of authoritarian president Alexander Lukashenko.

Roman Protasevich, a former editor of the influential Telegram channels Nexta and Nexta Live, was detained by police after his flight was diverted to Minsk national airport. Minsk confirmed that Lukashenko ordered his military to scramble a Mig-29 fighter to escort the plane.

The Polish prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, said the plane had been “hijacked” and accused Lukashenko of a “reprehensible act of state terrorism”. He said he would demand new sanctions against Belarus at a European Council meeting scheduled for Monday.

Tom Tugendhat, the chair of the UK foreign affairs select committee, said: “If aircraft can be forced to the ground … in order to punish the political opponents of tyrants, then journalists here in the UK, politicians anywhere in Europe will find it harder to speak out.”

“We are coordinating with our allies,” said Dominic Raab, the UK foreign secretary. “This outlandish action by Lukashenko will have serious implications.”

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By the time you read this there will doubtless be a lot more happening. I do hope this isn’t like the time when I linked to an article in The Guardian in late January 2020 about a strange new disease in China.
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After the storm • Hey World

David Heinemeier Hansson, co-founder at Basecamp, where a third of the staff resigned at the end of a torrid week over the company’s policies about “discussing politics” (subsequently traced at its roots to a single longserving executive who posted lots of Breitbart links in the company Slack):

»

It’s been three weeks since Jason and I announced the set of workplace policy changes that led to a public firestorm and a really difficult, stressful time for everyone at Basecamp.

Since then, we’ve been regrouping, hiring new colleagues, and continued operating our services without a hitch. We have a great team in place, and everyone has been helping out wherever needed.

We’ve also kept a watchful eye on the business. While there was a small uptick in cancelations for HEY during the first tumultuous week, they were more than offset by an increase in new customer signups for Basecamp. And now both products are growing like they were before that difficult week.

When you’re in the midst of a storm like we were, it’s easy to temporarily lose hope. To feel like it’ll never pass. But it usually does, and so it did at Basecamp.

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You rarely see the followup to these media storms, which is why this is useful to see. The open question, which we won’t know for months, is how all that affected the product.
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What the ephemerality of the Web means for your hyperlinks • Columbia Journalism Review

John Bowers, Clare Stanton and Jonathan Zittrain:

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Our team of researchers at Harvard Law School has undertaken a project to gain insight into the extent and characteristics of journalistic linkrot and content drift. We examined hyperlinks in New York Times articles, starting with the launch of the Times website in 1996 up through mid-2019, developed on the basis of a data set provided to us by the Times. The substantial linkrot and content drift we found here reflect the inherent difficulties of long-term linking to pieces of a volatile Web. The Times in particular is a well-resourced standard-bearer for digital journalism, with a robust institutional archiving structure. Their interest in facing the challenge of linkrot indicates that it has yet to be understood or comprehensively addressed across the field.

The data set of links on which we built our analysis was assembled by Times software engineers who extracted URLs embedded in archival articles and packaged them with basic article metadata such as section and publication date. We measured linkrot by writing a script to visit each of the unique “deep” URLs in the data set and log HTTP response codes, redirects, and server timeouts. On the basis of this analysis, we labeled each link as being “rotted” (removed or unreachable) or “intact” (returning a valid page).

We found that of the 553,693 articles within the purview of our study––meaning they included URLs on nytimes.com––there were a total of 2,283,445 hyperlinks pointing to content outside of nytimes.com. Seventy-two% of those were “deep links” with a path to a specific page, such as example.com/article, which is where we focused our analysis (as opposed to simply example.com, which composed the rest of the data set).

Of these deep links, 25% of all links were completely inaccessible. Linkrot became more common over time: 6% of links from 2018 had rotted, as compared to 43% of links from 2008 and 72% of links from 1998. 53% of all articles that contained deep links had at least one rotted link. 

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Check your financial privilege • Bitcoin Magazine

Alex Gladstein:

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While Western headlines focus on Coinbase going public, Tesla buying billions of dollars’ worth of Bitcoin and tech bros getting fabulously rich, there is a quiet revolution happening worldwide. Until now, governments and corporations have controlled the rules of money. That is changing.

To learn more, the author spoke to Bitcoin users in Sudan, Nigeria and Ethiopia, three countries with a combined population of 366 million, well in excess of the number of individuals living in the United States.

The three speak for millions whose lived experience is much closer to that of the average person on this planet. Gates, Munger and Buffett may not have recently dealt with conflict and violence, black markets, relentless inflation, political repression, and rampant corruption in their daily routine, but most do.

And yet, these Bitcoiners are more hopeful for the future than the doomers listed above. For them, Bitcoin is a protest, a lifeline and a way out.

Here are their stories.

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This has individuals’ stories from Nigeria, Sudan and Ethiopia. They’re definitely interesting; yet the visible weakness of each of their positions is that their governments could, and to some extent already do, shut down much of the trading. And they see bitcoin (mostly; though they use other coins too) as a currency, not a speculative asset in the way its boosters in the west seem to.
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Apple VP talks Apple TV 4K living room takeover, gaming and the future of the streaming platform • Mobile Syrup

Patrick O’Rourke interviews Tim Twerdahl, Apple’s vp of product marketing for home and audio:

»

Q: Was there ever any thought to adding some sort of U1 AirTag-like technology in the 2nd-gen Siri Remote? I’m always losing the remote in my couch cushions and it seems like it would be a great idea. Did Apple not bother because the ‘Find My’ network is more designed for use outside of the home?

Twerdahl: We are super excited about AirTags and what we’re doing with U1, and part of that power is the Find My network and the fact that we can leverage a billion devices around the world to help you find stuff.

To your point, that is the most powerful out of the home. With the changes we’ve made to the Siri Remote — including making it a bit thicker so it won’t fall in your couch cushions as much — that need to have all these other network devices find it seems a little bit lower.

«

I suspect that Apple has had this “new” remote in-house for years. But something or someone was blocking it being released. It’s so much more usable than what went before. Is it possible that, like the HomePod, Apple drastically overestimated demand for the Apple TV, made a ton of the dire remotes, and was left with surplus stock it refused to junk and waited to sell off?
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About lossless audio in Apple Music • Apple Support

»

What you need to know about lossless in Apple Music

• Streaming lossless audio over a cellular or Wi-Fi network consumes significantly more data. And downloading lossless audio uses significantly more space on your device. Higher resolutions use more data than lower ones.
• AirPods, AirPods Pro, AirPods Max, and Beats wireless headphones use Apple AAC Bluetooth Codec to ensure excellent audio quality. However, Bluetooth connections aren’t lossless.
• To get a lossless version of music that you already downloaded from Apple Music, just delete the music and redownload it from the Apple Music catalog.

…Can I listen to lossless audio on my HomePod or HomePod mini?

• HomePod and HomePod mini currently use AAC to ensure excellent audio quality. Support for lossless is coming in a future software update.

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Totally, utterly pointless, especially on the Homepod mini, which has sound quality concomitant with its orange-sized volume to begin with. Lossless takes about 10 times more data, and you won’t be able to hear the difference.

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It’s Monday (somewhere): why not preorder Social Warming, my forthcoming book?

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Ever wondered how those CD-Rs you burnt a few years back are faring? CC-licensed photo by Daniel Dreier 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. Twenty down, 31 to go. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Snap’s new Spectacles let you see the world in augmented reality • The Verge

Alex Heath:

»

Snap’s new Spectacles glasses are its most ambitious yet. But there’s a big catch: you can’t buy them.

On Thursday, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel unveiled the company’s first true augmented reality glasses, technology that he and rivals like Facebook think will one day be as ubiquitous as mobile phones. A demo showed virtual butterflies fluttering over colourful plants and landing in Spiegel’s extended hand.

The new Spectacles have dual waveguide displays capable of superimposing AR effects made with Snapchat’s software tools. The frame features four built-in microphones, two stereo speakers, and a built-in touchpad. Front-facing cameras help the glasses detect objects and surfaces you’re looking at so that graphics more naturally interact with the world around you.

These Spectacles, however, aren’t ready for the mass market. Unlike past models, Snap isn’t selling them. Instead, it’s giving them directly to an undisclosed number of AR effects creators through an application program online. (Another indication they aren’t ready for everyday use: the battery only lasts 30 minutes.)

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They look appalling. Snap has been driving a ton of publicity for these, giving interviews with anyone who will listen. Such as the FT:

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“Nobody else is doing this right now, in the way that we are and in the form factor that we are,” he said in an interview with the Financial Times, adding: “I don’t think people expect us to be this far along. Every other product out there is like a helmet.”

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I’m not sure Magic Leap (remember them?) would be too impressed by that suggestion. Ugly for sure, but not a helmet. Snap keeps trying, and keeps missing. AR spectacles: tech’s real unicorn.
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The particular psychology of destroying a planet • The New Yorker

Bill McKibben:

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What kind of thinking goes into adopting a tobacco-industry strategy to protect a business model as you wreck the climate system? (And it’s not just Exxon—here’s an analysis of how Big Meat is playing the same climate tricks.)

No one, of course, can peer inside the heads of oil-company executives or those of their enablers in the legal, financial, and political worlds. But there’s an interesting explanation in a new book from the British psychoanalyst Sally Weintrobe. “Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis” states its argument in its subtitle: “Neoliberal Exceptionalism and the Culture of Uncare.”

Weintrobe writes that people’s psyches are divided into caring and uncaring parts, and the conflict between them “is at the heart of great literature down the ages, and all major religions.” The uncaring part wants to put ourselves first; it’s the narcissistic corners of the brain that persuade each of us that we are uniquely important and deserving, and make us want to except ourselves from the rules that society or morality set so that we can have what we want. “Most people’s caring self is strong enough to hold their inner exception in check,” she notes, but, troublingly, “ours is the Golden Age of Exceptionalism.”

Neoliberalism—especially the ideas of people such as Ayn Rand, enshrined in public policy by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher—“crossed a Rubicon in the 1980s” and neoliberals “have been steadily consolidating their power ever since.”

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Apple has ‘lost interest in TV’ claims top analyst • Digital TV Europe

Jonathan Easton:

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Speaking at Freeview’s Out Of the Box event, top analyst Benedict Evans said that “ownership of content has no strategic value to tech companies,” and specifically said that “Apple has lost interest in TV.”

The analyst said that “it is important to remember what the tech players are trying to achieve by investing in video” and suggested that the device-agnostic nature of streaming services is antithetical to the strategy of companies like Apple and Google.

He added that “For tech players, the TV as a device is just another user endpoint like a smart door lock.”

Evans questioned how important the Apple TV+ SVOD business is to the iPhone maker, posing the hypothetical “Does Tim Cook get daily updates on content deals that Apple has done?”

The analyst said that Amazon, while being a prolific device maker, is a different case as it “has this big subscription business” that it needs to maintain and grow, and that the company “looks for things with no marginal cost that they can bundle onto Prime subscriptions.”

One way for Amazon to boost Prime is via the addition of content for Prime Video, with the company reportedly eyeing a US$9bn purchase of MGM. Evans suggested that the purchase of MGM would be a way for Amazon to go from a “secondary-tier” streaming service to a “top-tier” SVOD capable of truly rivalling the likes of Netflix.

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I’d have thought Cook would have been told when TV+ secured the Tom Hanks film last year, or that audience response was positive enough to justify a second season of Ted Lasso. But Apple isn’t a content producer in the same way as Netflix.
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The CDs you burned are going bad: here’s what you need to do • How To Geek

Ben Edwards:

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If you used a computer between 1997 and 2005, you probably burned valuable data to at least one recordable CD (CD-R) or DVD-R. Unfortunately, these have a limited lifespan, and many have already become unreadable. That’s why it’s important to back up your recordable discs before it’s too late—here’s how to do it.

CD-Rs and DVD-Rs store data on a layer of dye that is melted by the laser when the data is written. This dye layer isn’t completely stable and can chemically break down over time, causing data loss. Also, the reflective layer on the top of the disc can oxidize, making the data difficult to read.

As a result, many CD-R and DVD-Rs burned in the late ’90s and early ’00s are now unreadable in modern optical disc drives. And for those that remain, the clock is ticking.

Estimates on the lifespan of CD- and DVD-Rs vary wildly, from between two and 100 years. In 2004, the U.S. Library of Congress sponsored a study that estimated the shelf life of recordable discs available at that time. It simulated the aging of CD- and DVD-Rs stored in perfect environmental conditions (that is, a room temperature of 50% humidity with no sunlight, and no rough handling).

The study concluded that most recordable discs stored in ideal conditions would last at least 30 years, but the results varied wildly by brand. However, it also stated that “discs exposed to more severe conditions of temperature and humidity would be expected to experience a shorter life.”

So, if you store your CD- or DVD-Rs in a hot attic, you might find a higher portion of them have gone bad.

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I’m thinking of all the CD-Rs that I burnt, and I’m worried that I’ve no longer got a disk drive that can read CD-Rs. Seriously: does the average user have any need for their 15-plus-year-old CD-Rs?
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Apple previews powerful software updates designed for people with disabilities • Apple

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To support users with limited mobility, Apple is introducing a revolutionary new accessibility feature for Apple Watch. AssistiveTouch for watchOS allows users with upper body limb differences to enjoy the benefits of Apple Watch without ever having to touch the display or controls. Using built-in motion sensors like the gyroscope and accelerometer, along with the optical heart rate sensor and on-device machine learning, Apple Watch can detect subtle differences in muscle movement and tendon activity, which lets users navigate a cursor on the display through a series of hand gestures, like a pinch or a clench. AssistiveTouch on Apple Watch enables customers who have limb differences to more easily answer incoming calls, control an onscreen motion pointer, and access Notification Center, Control Center, and more.

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When I’d only read the headlines and before I’d watched the video, I was very “suuure” about this. Then you watch the video: this lets you control your Watch using your fist (clench twice – a neat echo of the double-click from the first Macintosh) or pinching (like the iPhone). In effect, it adds a mouse pointer to the Watch – but you don’t have a mouse. It’s very, very clever. So follow the link and watch the video.
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Citizen app falsely accuses man of starting California brush fire • Gizmodo

Dharna Noor:

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California’s wildfire season is already underway (well, it may never have actually stopped), and state investigators are looking into what ignited a 1,325-acre brush fire that’s currently burning through Los Angeles’ Pacific Palisades and Topanga Canyon neighborhoods.

They believe an arsonist may have started the blaze and currently have two suspects detained for questioning. But that’s not before users of the Citizen app led to someone being detained without sufficient evidence. Citizen is a phone app that sends users real-time, location-based safety alerts when crimes and other potentially dangerous events happen in their area. On Sunday, the app sent Los Angeles users a photograph of a man purportedly suspected of starting the fire, along with the promise of a cash reward for providing information.

“Citizen is offering a $30,000 reward to anyone who provides information that leads to the arrest of the arson suspect,” the notification said. Cerise Castle, a journalist following along as broadcasters on the app talked about the fire, tweeted that they were “repeating unsubstantiated ‘tips’ as facts and asking people to ‘hunt this guy down’. One of the tips just played out in air as being a lie.”

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Citizen then retracted the posting, saying “it was a ‘mistake’ to have posted the photo, which came from a tipster, without ‘formal’ coordination with authorities.”

Reminiscent in its way of the way that Reddit users “found” the Boston Marathon bomber in 2013. Same mistakes, over and over. (The “Citizen” app was previously called “Vigilante”.)
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Apple wants users to trust iOS, but it doesn’t trust iOS users • The Verge

Adi Robertson on the testimony of Craig Federighi, Apple’s head of software engineering:

»

Epic Games sued Apple to force its hand, saying that if an open model is good enough for macOS, Apple’s claims about iOS ring hollow. On the stand yesterday, Federighi tried to resolve this problem by portraying iPhones and Macs as dramatically different devices — and in the process, threw macOS under the bus.

Federighi outlined three main differences between iOS and macOS. The first is scale. Far more people use iPhones than Macs, and the more users a platform gets, the more enticing that audience becomes to malware developers. Federighi argued iOS users are also much more casual about downloading software, giving attackers better odds of luring them into a download. “iOS users are just accustomed to getting apps all the time,” he said, citing Apple’s old catchphrase: “There’s an app for that.”

The second difference is data sensitivity. “iPhones are very attractive targets. They are very personal devices that are with you all the time. They have some of your most personal information — of course your contacts, your photos, but also other things,” he said. Mobile devices put a camera, microphone, and GPS tracker in your pocket. “All of these things make access or control of these devices potentially incredibly valuable to an attacker.”

That may undersell private interactions with Macs; Epic’s counsel Yonatan Even noted that many telemedicine calls and other virtual interactions happen on desktop. Still, it’s fair to say phones have become many people’s all-purpose digital lockboxes.

The third difference is more conceptual. Federighi basically says iOS users need to be more protected because the Mac is a specialist tool for people who know how to navigate the complexities of a powerful system, while the iPhone and iPad are — literally — for babies.

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Semiconductor shortage enters ‘danger zone’ as lead times rise • ExtremeTech

Joel Hruska:

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The semiconductor shortage affecting much of the world’s chip production is still worsening, in at least some markets. The average lead time for chip deliveries increased to 17 weeks in April, up from 16 weeks in March. Just before the beginning of the pandemic began, average lead time was running around 12 weeks.

“All major product categories up considerably,” Susquehanna analyst Chris Rolland wrote in a recent investment note. “These were some of the largest increases since we started tracking the data.” Bloomberg notes that Susquehanna referred to this as a “danger zone” for chips as the risk of buyers engaging in behavior that magnifies the impact of the crisis increases.

Auto manufacturers have signaled they expect to lose out on $110 billion in potential sales this year, due to a shortage of parts. The problem with these types of shortfalls is that they encourage behavior like hoarding. A company that can’t ship a $50,000 final product due to a shortage of $5 parts has every reason on Earth to hoard and stockpile said parts, whether they actually need them or not.

…Hoarding now could make the long-term economic hangover worse by depressing demand during what would otherwise have been a rebound. Other factors mentioned include the impact of an ongoing drought on Taiwan, where the annual monsoon rainy season has yet to begin, and the spike in COVID-19 cases on the island, but these are recent developments. Component lead times have risen for four straight months.

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Relaunching verification and what’s next • Twitter blog

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The blue badge is one of the ways we help people distinguish the authenticity of accounts that are of high public interest. It gives people on Twitter more context about who they’re having conversations with so they can determine if it’s trustworthy, which our research has shown leads to healthier, more informed conversations. 

With today’s application launch, we’re also introducing new guidelines for verified accounts on Twitter. These verification guidelines are intended to encourage healthy conversations for the betterment of the Twitter community overall. They follow the philosophy to lead by example, Tweet others how they want to be Tweeted, and serve the public conversation authentically, respectfully, and with consideration. As always, all accounts, including verified accounts, must follow the Twitter Rules. And as we previously shared, verified accounts that repeatedly violate the Twitter Rules are subject to have the blue badge removed.

To qualify for verification, you must fit the criteria of one of the six categories listed below:
• Government
• Companies, brands and organizations
• News organizations and journalists
• Entertainment
• Sports and gaming
• Activists, organizers, and other influential individuals.

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Apparently parody accounts can’t get verified. Ted Lasso is verified. Ergo, Ted Lasso is real. Twitter logic.
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Freenode IRC staff quit after new owner “seizes” control of network • Boing Boing

Rob Beschizza:

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Staff at the freenode IRC network have resigned en-masse after control of it passed to what one described as a “narcissistic Trumpian wannabe korean royalty bitcoins millionaire.” Resignation letters piled up from Fuchs, Ed Kellett, Emīls Piņķis, Jessica Sophie Porter and others, capping weeks of drama in the FOSS world’s biggest chatbox.

Aaron Jones details the sequence of events and concludes that “a hostile entity is now in operational control over the network, and is in posession of your data.” Another resignee, Svante Bengtson, puts it succinctly:

»

During the past few months in general, and last weeks in particular, it has become increasingly clear that the owners of the holding company freenode Ltd have been planning a hostile takeover of the freenode network. That takeover is now about to happen, and I cannot in good faith volunteer for this “new” freenode. freenode Ltd’s current owners’ values do not align with the values freenode the network was founded on and operated under up until now.

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Yet another. Marco d’Itri, puts it in still-blunter terms:

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To make a long story short, the former freenode head of staff secretly “sold” the network to this person even if it was not hers to sell, and our lawyers have advised us that there is not much that we can do about it without some of us risking financial ruin.

«

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Important in the world of open source software: 80,000 users on 40,000 channels, 26 years old.
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Preorder Social Warming, my forthcoming book.

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

How much is everyone looking forward to getting back to commuting? Not very much, apparently. CC-licensed photo by Brian Sawyer 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. Nearly essential. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Still a little time to
preorder Social Warming, out June 24.

Apple asks court to rule iOS is not an ‘essential facility’ • The Verge

Russell Brandom:

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After two and a half weeks in court, Apple is taking aim at one of the central elements of Epic’s antitrust case. In a filing Tuesday night, Apple asked the court to dismiss one of the 10 counts alleged in the initial complaint, arguing Epic had failed to establish any evidence for the charge that Apple had violated the essential facilities doctrine by failing to provide access to software distribution tools on iOS.

“At trial, Epic adduced no proof in support of this claim,” Apple’s filing reads. “On the contrary, Epic’s principal expert expressly disclaimed any opinion on essential facility, and (in response to a direct question from the Court) rejected the notion that iOS should be treated as a public utility. The Court should enter judgment for Apple on this claim.”

Filed as a motion for partial findings, Apple is pushing to split off the essential facilities charge from the other nine charges made in Epic’s initial complaint. In essence, Apple believes it can win a quick victory on this specific point. That won’t settle the case entirely since the other nine charges still require a ruling, but it would be an unexpected and embarrassing loss for Epic.

…The essential facilities doctrine is a long-standing element of antitrust law that prevents dominant firms from using bottleneck services to box out competitors. In a foundational example from 1912, a railroad consortium prevented competitors from offering passage to and from St. Louis by denying access to switching yards around the city. The Supreme Court ruled that the arrangement was an illegal restraint of trade, establishing that companies must provide reasonable use of facilities that are essential for competitors.

In its complaint, Epic argues that app distribution on iOS is the same kind of bottleneck, charging that Apple has used its control over the iOS platform to prevent Epic and other competitors from offering competing app stores.

…But Apple is now countering that Epic has reasonable access to iOS through the App Store itself — and that iOS customers are plainly not essential to the operation of its business since the company has been broadly successful without them.

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Another win surely in the offing for Apple’s lawyers here, but the extent to which the workings (and money!) of the App Store have been laid bare, along with all the embarrassing emails. Epic has had to bear that too, but not quite so badly.
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Google AMP is dead! AMP pages no longer get preferential treatment in Google search • Plausible Analytics

Marko Saric:

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Google is rolling out a significant change as a part of their page experience ranking algorithm in June 2021.

From the release of the Core Web Vitals and the page experience algorithm, there is no longer any preferential treatment for Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) in Google’s search results, Top Stories carousel and the Google News. Google will even remove the AMP badge icon from the search results.

You can now safely ignore Google AMP when building a more diverse and more exciting web without any artificial restrictions set by the adtech giant.

Here’s what Google had to say:

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The Top Stories carousel feature on Google Search will be updated to include all news content. This means that using the AMP format is no longer required and that any page, irrespective of its Core Web Vitals score or page experience status, will be eligible to appear in the Top Stories carousel.

We’re also bringing similar updates to the Google News app, a key destination for users around the world to get a comprehensive view of the important news of the day. As part of the page experience update, we’re expanding the usage of non-AMP content to power the core experience on news.google.com and in the Google News app.

Additionally, we will no longer show the AMP badge icon to indicate AMP content

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That’s a surprise. Pushback from publishers? Wary of antitrust?
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Commuting is psychological torture • Welcome to Hell World

Luke O’Neil:

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So how has not having to commute every day changed people’s lives this year and in the recent past? Here’s some of what people told me below. Responses have been lightly edited or condensed. There are a lot of them so you know maybe you don’t have to read them all but who cares.

• No one’s stopping anyone who works from home from going out and riding in circles on the subway for 30 minutes before they go back to their desk.

• I save roughly $100 a month now. I have time in the morning to take my dog for a long walk every day. I have time in the evening to cook dinner. Commuting is psychological torture and my physical and mental health is significantly better without it.

• The three hours I spent commuting is now an extra hour of sleep, 30 minutes of exercise, two meals with my family, and 30 minutes of more actual work. I’m happier, healthier, and a better employee, but these effing vampires want me to be in the office more for some reason.

• Any unpaid commute is wage theft.

• When my wife and I were both commuting into the city we spent over $650 on monthly passes for trains that were on time 80% of the time if we were lucky. I doubt I’ll ever take a city job again.

• I love to drive 30 minutes to stare at a different computer.

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And plenty more where that came from. People really don’t like commuting.
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Google just fixed the worst thing about dealing with hacked passwords • BGR

Chris Smith:

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Chrome’s password manager already checks saved passwords against lists of compromised credentials to determine whether hackers have obtained access to any of your online accounts. Whenever it finds a breached account, it notifies users to change their password, and this is where the tedious process begins.

But you have to navigate to the app or service in question, and manually change the password to something else that’s unique and strong, and then update the password in your password manager apps, Chrome included. The process isn’t difficult, but it’s tedious enough for some people to postpone changing the password to later and then forget about doing it.

Google announced at I/O 2021 a feature that only Google would be able to pull off. Google can automatically change the password of a breached account, performing the same steps above automatically on supported sites. All you need to do is tap a button when Google tells you an account was breached. That’s the new “Change password” option from the Assistant.

“When you tap the button, Chrome will not only navigate to the site but also go through the entire process of changing your password,” Google explains in a blog post. Users can still get involved in the process or do it manually from the start. But Google Assistant simplifies all that.

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When it arrives, that’s going to be a terrific feature. (iOS is currently telling me that a gazillion passwords have been exposed in a breach. But: 2FA.)
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Amazon partners with Tile to take on Apple AirTags • CNBC

Jon Fortt and Fahiemah Al-Ali:

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Amazon announced Friday that it is partnering with Tile, a company that makes trackers for lost items, and Level, which makes smart locks, to use those devices to enhance its tracking network based on Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technology.

The strength and number of devices on a given tracking network is key to its accuracy. That’s part of the reason why many think Apple’s tracking network will be so strong since it relies on more than 1 billion iPhones, iPads and Macs to help with lost item tracking.

Tile has also been vocal against Apple’s entry into the lost-item tracking space, recently telling Congress that it and other app developers are “afraid” of Apple’s policies for third-party apps and hardware accessories.

Amazon’s partnership will allow it beef up its tracking network, called Sidewalk, by letting Tile and Level devices tap into the Bluetooth networks created by millions of its Echo products. Tile will start working with Amazon’s network beginning June 14.

…Sidewalk rolled out late last year and is billed as a free network sharing service throughout neighborhoods that uses Echo devices as “bridges” to share a small fraction of a users’ low-bandwidth Wi-Fi with devices like Echo devices and Ring cameras.

…Amazon said Sidewalk will also strengthen Tile’s existing in-home finding experience with Alexa. Customers can say, “Alexa, find my keys” and their Tile tracker will start ringing from a coat pocket or from under the bed signaling where to find their lost item.

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Don’t know why Amazon doesn’t just buy Tile. Perhaps because that would spoil Tile’s complaint to Congress that it’s the small guy getting beaten up by big Apple.
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Insider Q&A: Sophie Zhang, Facebook whistleblower

Barbara Ortutay talks to the woman who was looking at election malfeasance and interference inside Facebook – in her spare time:

»

Q: How did you get into the work you did?

A: When I joined the company I was, like many people, deeply affected by Russia 2016. And I decided to start looking for overlap between inauthentic activity and political targets. And I started finding many results in many places, particularly what we call the global South, in Honduras, Brazil, India.

Honduras got my attention because it had a very large amount (of inauthentic behavior) compared to the others. This was very unsophisticated activity we are talking about. Literal bots. And then I realized that this was essentially a troll farm being run quite openly by an employee of the president of Honduras. And that seemed extraordinarily awful.

Q: Then what did you do?

A: I talked about it internally. Essentially everyone agreed that it was bad. No one wants to be defending this sort of activity, but people couldn’t agree on whose job it was to deal with it.

I was trying desperately to find anyone who cared. I talked with my manager and their manager. I talked to the threat intelligence team. I talked with many integrity teams. It took almost a year for anything to happen.

Q: You’ve said there is a priority list of countries. What happens to countries that aren’t on that list?

A: It’s not a hard and fast rule. Facebook does takedowns in small countries, too. But most of these takedowns are reactive, by which I mean they come from outside groups — tips from opposition groups, tips from NGOs, reporter investigations, reports from the CIA, etc. What happened in this case was that no one outside the company was complaining.

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Classic big company behaviour: it’s totally internally focussed unless driven by something external, and responsibilities dribble around if they aren’t part of the mission forced from the top.
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US small towns take on energy-guzzling bitcoin miners • Reuters Foundation

Avi Asher-Schapiro:

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In mid-April, nearly 150 local environmentalists marched to the gates of Greenidge Generation, a bitcoin mining facility in upstate New York, in a last-ditch effort to block its expansion.

Their objection: that the creation of the cryptocurrency, an energy-intensive process in which computers compete to solve mathematical puzzles, may harm efforts to limit global warming.

Three days later, the planning board in the small town of Torrey voted 4-1 to allow Greenidge Generation to more than double the number of machines it has mining bitcoin.

“Everything we want to do to fight climate change could be erased,” Yvonne Taylor, one of the march’s leaders, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

…In 2018, Plattsburgh, New York, imposed a moratorium on cryptocurrency mining, after it became the city’s top power consumer.

And earlier this month, lawmakers introduced a proposal to suspend cryptocurrency mining operations for three years throughout New York state, as it carries out a review of the industry’s environmental impact.

Officials also recently took steps to limit that impact in Missoula County, Montana, where operations take advantage of cheap electricity from a local hydropower plant.

“At a certain point, this industry was using about a third of all of the county’s electricity,” said Diana Maneta, the county’s sustainability officer.

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Climate change meant Hurricane Sandy caused $8bn more damage • New Scientist

Karina Shah:

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Rising sea levels, linked to climate change, are known to worsen the effects of coastal storms by intensifying storm surges and increasing floods. Benjamin Strauss at Climate Central in New Jersey and his colleagues have now estimated the economic costs of human-induced sea level rise on Hurricane Sandy [in late 2012].

The team focused on the damage in the US, using a flood model that simulated the actual water levels during Hurricane Sandy on the US east coast. The group then compared this with the simulation of how much damage there would have been without human-induced sea level rise – estimated as 10.5cm in total between 1900 and 2012.

There was a difference of $8.1bn in damages between the real costs to New York, New Jersey and Connecticut and costs for scenarios without human-induced sea level rise. However, this could have been as high as $14bn using higher estimates for human-induced sea level rise.

“Climate change is already harming us a lot more than we may realise,” says Strauss. “Most, if not all, coastal floods around the world today, and especially for the last half century, have been made worse.”

The team’s model also estimates that between 40,000 and 131,000 more people in the US were exposed to flooding than would have been the case in the absence of human-induced sea level rise. This equates to approximately 36,000 housing units.

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Everything we didn’t see at Google I/O • Android Authority

Eric Zeman:

»

The Google I/O keynote has come and gone and was chock full of exciting news.

Among the announcements, we learned about a fresh design for Android 12, with upgrades to your privacy, and about Google’s new partnership with Samsung to revitalize Wear OS. We also saw how Google Photos would surface old memories and take better photos of people of color.

While there was plenty to love during the Google I/O keynote, there was also plenty left out of the presentation. Here’s a look at what Google didn’t show us — nor even talk about! — during its I/O keynote.

«

Stadia, Chrome and Chrome OS, Pixel Buds, the Pixel itself, Android tablets, and the in-house Whitechapel chip that will drive the phone. You wouldn’t really expect them to talk about hardware, so the phones, earphones and chip wouldn’t come up. But tablets and Stadia – nothing new happening there.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Popular belief says that the second-cheapest wine in a restaurant is the worst value. Turns out that’s wrong. CC-licensed photo by Wendy House 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. No corkage. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Try this one weird trick Russian hackers hate • Krebs on Security

Brian Krebs:

»

In Russia, for example, authorities there generally will not initiate a cybercrime investigation against one of their own unless a company or individual within the country’s borders files an official complaint as a victim. Ensuring that no affiliates can produce victims in their own countries is the easiest way for these criminals to stay off the radar of domestic law enforcement agencies.

…DarkSide, like a great many other malware strains, has a hard-coded do-not-install list of countries which are the principal members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) — former Soviet satellites that mostly have favorable relations with the Kremlin. [A full list of CIS countries is included in the article.]

Simply put, countless malware strains will check for the presence of one of these languages on the system, and if they’re detected the malware will exit and fail to install.

(Side note. Many security experts have pointed to connections between the DarkSide and REvil (a.k.a. “Sodinokibi”) ransomware groups. REvil was previously known as GandCrab, and one of the many things GandCrab had in common with REvil was that both programs barred affiliates from infecting victims in Syria. As we can see from the chart above, Syria is also exempted from infections by DarkSide ransomware. And DarkSide itself proved their connection to REvil this past week when it announced it was closing up shop after its servers and bitcoin funds were seized.)

Will installing one of these languages keep your Windows computer safe from all malware? Absolutely not. There is plenty of malware that doesn’t care where in the world you are. And there is no substitute for adopting a defense-in-depth posture, and avoiding risky behaviors online.

But is there really a downside to taking this simple, free, prophylactic approach? None that I can see, other than perhaps a sinking feeling of capitulation. The worst that could happen is that you accidentally toggle the language settings and all your menu options are in Russian.

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Hoping that this will get an empirical test by some security companies, because it would be even cheaper than backups. No doubt the next step will be that add-on Russian language packs sold in English will have a trojan in them, which installs ransomware.
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Google I/O 2021: the biggest announcements • The Verge

Jay Peters:

»

Google just finished its live Google I/O 2021 keynote, where the company unveiled a huge number of announcements, including a new look coming to Android, a bunch of features coming to its Google Workspace productivity suite, and even a new AI that talked as if it were Pluto.

Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn followed the whole thing in real time right here on our live blog. But if you just want to get caught up on the biggest news from the show, read on for our recap.

«

Plenty of bits and bobs (some quite a way off). Notable things: Android 12 will let you prevent individual apps having access to the mic and camera; Wear OS has (as predicted) pulled in Samsung, which is giving up on Tizen, and there will be a Fitbit smartwatch running Wear OS.
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This is why hardly anyone buys Google’s Pixel phones • WIRED UK

Adam Speight:

»

If you don’t recall seeing a Pixel advert on TV, or think it’s a rarity, the breakdown of Google’s ad spend explains this. Google spent just £14m on TV ad spend in the [UK since 2016] while Apple spent £75m and Samsung shelled out a whopping £124m. Samsung is spending more than three times as much on just its TV campaigns than Google’s entire Pixel ad spend in the UK.

Google isn’t short on resource, so this begs the question, why isn’t it spending more to get the Pixel out there? This question was being posed way back in 2016, with Wharton University publishing an article titled “Why Google’s Pixel is more about strategy than smartphones.” Professor of management David Hsu stated: “The main business of Google is enabling their advertising revenue model. Hardware is always going to pale in comparison.”

Also, in 2016, both Hsu and assistant professor of business economics and public policy Michael Sinkinson suggested the Pixel range should’ve been priced more aggressively. Since then, the “a” series of Pixels and Pixel 5 have done just that, yet not much else has changed. In the same article, Gerald Faulhauber, professor emeritus of business economics and public policy, argued Pixel would likely be around for “a couple of years and go away”. You’d forgive Faulhauber for thinking this, given Google’s track record, but the company is sticking at it.

Google’s Pixel marketing plan has demonstrated there’s plenty of room for it to invest more. But Counterpoint Research’s Neil Shah thinks Google may be stuck between a rock and a hard place. “Google is in a Catch-22 situation with its hardware strategy. Google’s DNA is cloud, software and AI – it’s not hardware. Also, building your own hardware and competing with your partners, especially Samsung or Chinese vendors, is not healthy in long run.” This argument was made before the launch of the Pixel though, whether vendors would be happy about the company behind Android making its own phone, but Google pushed on.

«

Even if the next Pixel is based on Google’s own chips, that’s not what matters: it takes huge investment not just in advertising, but also in getting carriers to adopt them and push them to customers. Samsung and Apple have done huge amounts of work on that. Google, rather less.
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All fossil fuel exploration needs to end this year, IEA says • Ars Technica

Tim de Chant:

»

To limit global warming to 1.5˚C by the end of the century, the world has to deploy clean technologies en masse while slashing investment in new oil, gas, and coal supplies, according to a new report by the International Energy Agency.

Getting to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 will require a historic deployment of widespread renewable power, electric vehicles, and new technologies, many of which are only now in the prototype stage. To get a jump-start, we’ll need to double our investments in clean technologies to $4 trillion by the end of the decade.

“The pathway to net zero by 2050 is narrow but still achievable if governments act now,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said in a tweet. Most of the reductions in CO2 emissions through 2030 will come from technologies already on the market. But in 2050, almost half will come from technologies that are still in development.

“Big leaps in innovation are needed by 2030 to get these technologies ready in time,” Birol added.

The report comes as we’re unlikely to hit net zero by 2050.

«

“Unlikely” is putting it mildly. Without some amazing technology that pulls carbon (dioxide) out of the atmosphere, there’s no way of hitting that target or of limiting temperatures.
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Clubhouse Users in America • Edison Research

»

According to a new study from Edison Research entitled “Clubhouse Users in America,” 15% of social media users 18+ say they have ever used Clubhouse, the invitation-only audio-based social networking platform that debuted last year. Data for this first look at Clubhouse users is from Edison Research’s weekly social media tracking service, The Social Habit, which provides ongoing behavior and usage data for all major social media platforms.

Although Clubhouse has a relatively small number of users compared to other social media networking services, it has garnered significant attention due to its premise of shared audio spaces and the exclusive nature of its invitation-only membership. Clubhouse Users in America found that the percentage of social media users who use Clubhouse remained relatively flat over the survey period (Feb 2021 – Apr 2021) and that time spent using the service declined in April. However, those that do use the service use it often, with 44% of Clubhouse users saying they use the service at least once per day, and 28% saying they use it at least once per week.

«

Two-thirds male, 59% are white, 56% aged 18-34. That might sound promising, but it’s down there with Gab and Parler in the “have you ever used” category. If the Android version doesn’t kickstart things then it’s going to slide out of view. The iPhone user base seems played out, if usage declined in April.
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Delivery text scams: the nasty new fraud wave sweeping the UK • The Guardian

Hilary Osborne:

»

Scams making use of delivery firms’ names are not new, but the online shopping boom – and confusion over new fees that have come in since the Brexit transition period ended on 31 December – have given fraudsters a bigger pool of potential victims to phish in. Previous incarnations – which have involved cards put through letterboxes asking recipients to phone premium-rate numbers, as well as texts – tended to happen around Christmas, when people expected parcels from friends and, in more recent years, online deliveries.

With lockdown, we have all become mail-order shoppers, meaning more chance of a spam text landing with someone who is expecting a parcel. Action Fraud, the UK’s national reporting centre for these types of crimes, wasn’t able to give figures across the delivery industry, but says that between June 2020 and January 2021 it received 2,867 crime reports mentioning DPD, and that victims reported losing £3.4m over the same period. In December, the equivalent of 533 fake DPD emails a day were sent on to the suspicious email reporting service, which was launched last year.

When the Guardian asked readers if they had fallen victim to the scam, it received more than 120 responses in five days. Some were from people who had been taken in by the text and the website, and put in their details before smelling a rat. Others had got as far as pressing enter before they realised something was amiss. Others had been caught out completely.

«

This is the consequence of the requirement that the UK government can tap phones. I wonder when that fact will start to seep into the public consciousness.
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Apple may build 40-core ARM-based Mac Pro, plans 10-core MacBook Pro • ExtremeTech

Joel Hruska:

»

Bloomberg reports that Apple is prepping multiple new M-class variants for different markets. We don’t know how Apple is branding the CPUs, but we’ve heard “M2” floated recently. Supposedly, we’ll see a new round of MacBook Pro systems, “followed by a revamped MacBook Air, a new low-end MacBook Pro, and an all-new Mac Pro workstation.” There are also reports of a revamped Mac mini and a larger iMac system, both with a CPU intended to greatly outperform the current M1.

…The MacBook Pro is said to be getting a new eight-core CPU with six high-performance CPU cores and just two high-efficiency cores. That’s an interesting switch, given that the high-efficiency cores on the M1 are partly responsible for why the system reportedly feels so responsive. Many background workloads are handled by the low-power IceStorm cores, freeing the FireStorm cores to immediately update the GUI or respond to user input. An improved neural engine, up to 64GB of onboard RAM, and additional Thunderbolt ports are all promised for the new hardware.

It’s the new Mac Pro, however, that really sounds like a game-changer. This system may not appear until next year, but it’s said to be based on the Jade 2C-Die and Jade 4C-Die, with either 20 or 40 CPU cores.

«

The new MacBook Pros do sound like fun. Honestly all I’m waiting for is the bigger screen – the 16in. If there were an M1 portable with that screen size, I think I’d be happy.

The timing of Bloomberg’s story suggests that these could be announced at WWDC. That would be good. (I didn’t use Bloomberg’s story, but instead a writeup of it, is because I can’t bear the tortured language Mark Gurman is obliged to use – “expected to debut as soon as early this summer, said the people, who requested anonymity to discuss an internal matter”. Just call them “sources” and have done with it.)
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Chia coin spurs HDD shortage: prices up, high capacities sell out • Tom’s Hardware

Anton Shilov:

»

The number of hard drives sold each year has declined recently due to the migration of consumer PCs to SSDs, and also demand for higher-capacity HDDs by exascale datacenters. As a result, HDD makers no longer produce as many drives as they used to six or seven years ago (they have even adjusted production capacities to cut costs). Also, wholesalers and retailers no longer carry as many HDDs in reserve. Consequently, when demand for HDDs spikes, retailers sell out quickly, and prices increase as dealers come into play.

This is apparently what happened to the prices of HDDs in recent weeks as many popular models got $100, $200, or even $300 more expensive than they were just a few days ago. There are various reasons why the demand for hard drives is increasing. Still, considering how fast space allocated to the Chia network is growing (from 1 exabyte to 6 exabytes in about two weeks), we have every reason to believe that Chia cryptocurrency farming is a major factor that affects HDD availability and pricing in the channel and retail. Chia ‘farmers’ use all types of drives (mostly high-capacity models, though), so it is getting increasingly hard to buy a high-capacity HDD.

«

Good grief, it’s like mad obsessions taking over everything. The final stage will surely be a cryptocurrency based on paperclips.
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Deepfake dubs could help translate film and TV without losing an actor’s original performance • The Verge

James Vincent:

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We often think of deepfakes as manipulating the entire image of a person or scene, but Flawless’ technology focuses on just a single element: the mouth. Customers feed the company’s software with video from a film or TV show along with dubbed dialogue recorded by humans. Flawless’ machine learning models then create new lip movements that match the translated speech and paste them automatically onto the actor’s head.

“When someone’s watching this dubbed footage, they’re not jolted out of the performance by a jarring word or a mistimed mouth movement,” Flawless’ co-founder Nick Lynes tells The Verge. “It’s all about retaining the performance and retaining the original style.”

Flawless Demo – www.flawlessai.com from Flawless on Vimeo.

The results — despite the company’s name — aren’t 100% flawless, but they are pretty good. You can see and hear how they look in the demo reel above, which features a French dub of the classic 1992 legal drama A Few Good Men, starring Jack Nicholson and Tom Cruise. We asked a native French speaker what they made of the footage, and they said it was off in a few places but still a lot smoother than traditional dubbing.

«

At last, a positive use for deepfakes.
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Is the second-cheapest wine a ripoff? Economics v psychology in product-line pricing • Wine Economics

David de Meza and Vikram Pathania:

»

Restaurateurs are believed to overprice the second-cheapest wine to exploit naïve diners embarrassed to choose the cheapest option. This paper investigates which view is correct.

We find that the mark-up on the second cheapest wine is significantly below that on the four next more expensive wines. It is an urban myth that the second-cheapest wine is an especially bad buy. Percentage mark-ups are highest on mid-range wines.

This is consistent with the profit-maximising pricing of a vertically differentiated product line with no behavioral elements, although other factors may contribute to the price pattern.

«

Someone I knew who ran a restaurant in London’s Battersea told me years ago that the cost of the first glass of wine of a bottle covered its cost to him. Everything after that was profit. (Which doesn’t disprove this research at all, of course. It’s just something to be aware of, I guess.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Preorder Social Warming, my forthcoming book.

for years, CAPTCHAs have fed Google’s AI systems with valuable data – but now Cloudflare has a quicker alternative. CC-licensed photo by Becky Stern 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. No squiggly text. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Cloudflare’s CAPTCHA proposal would end AI’s source of free labor • Quartz

Nicolás Rivero:

»

Are you a human? If so, chances are you’ve filled out countless CAPTCHAs, the all-too-frequent tests internet users have to take to prove their humanity by identifying garbled text, fuzzy numbers, or images of traffic lights.

The tests serve the crucial function of differentiating genuine human web users from malign bots attempting to hack or spam a website. But they’re also annoying and time-consuming. Web infrastructure company Cloudflare estimates humanity collectively spends 500 years of labor each day on CAPTCHAs. In a May 13 blog post, the company declared its intention to “get rid of CAPTCHAs completely” through alternatives that wouldn’t require people to complete arbitrary tasks.

These alternatives aren’t entirely new. Identity verification firm Yubico has been selling flash drives that web users can use to prove their humanity since 2008, and Google launched a “No CAPTCHA” technique in 2014 that can confirm some web users’ humanity just by monitoring how they interact with webpages. Cloudflare stopped using Google’s CAPTCHA service last year after the search giant began charging for it, which eventually led to Cloudflare’s recent commitment to reinventing the CAPTCHA.

Alternative solutions, however, will prove very disruptive for the other, less public purpose of CAPTCHA tests: they’re a massive source of free labour for AI developers. Killing the CAPTCHA would derail the gravy train that has provided cheap advances in the field of machine vision for the past decade.

«

Though as the story makes more clear, CAPTCHAs have been a massive source of free labour for *Google’s* AI developers. Not anyone else. Facebook doesn’t use them. Cloudflare’s solution, for now, is a hardware key. (Its reasons for hating CAPTCHAs – particularly their implicit cultural imperialism – are worth reading.)
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Israel-Gaza: Why is the region blurry on Google Maps? • BBC News

Christopher Giles and Jack Goodman:

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Why is Gaza, one of the most densely populated places in the world, blurry on Google Maps?

…on Google Earth, the most widely used image platform, the most recent imagery for Gaza is of low resolution and therefore blurry. “The most recent Google Earth image is from 2016 and looks like trash. I zoomed in on some random rural area of Syria and it has had 20+ images taken since that time, in very high resolution,” tweeted Aric Toler, a journalist for Bellingcat.

…Until last year, the US government restricted the quality of satellite images that American companies were permitted to provide on a commercial basis. The Kyl-Bingaman Amendment (KBA) had been introduced in 1997 to address Israeli security concerns.

Although the ruling only referred to Israel, it was also applied the restriction to images of the Palestinian territories. The KBA limited image quality so that an object the size of a car was just about visible as a highly blurred image, but anything smaller would be very difficult to identify.

“We [Israel] would always prefer to be photographed at the lowest resolution possible”, said Amnon Harari, head of space programmes at Israel’s Defence Ministry last year, reported by Reuters. “It’s always preferable to be seen blurred, rather than precisely.”

«

They’re being updated, but it could take a while.
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Censorship, surveillance and profits: a hard bargain for Apple in China • The New York Times

Jack Nicas, Raymond Zhong and Daisuke Wakabayashi:

»

The Chinese government regularly demands data from Chinese companies, often for law-enforcement investigations. Chinese law requires the companies to comply.

US law has long prohibited American companies from turning over data to Chinese law enforcement. But Apple and the Chinese government have made an unusual arrangement to get around American laws.

In China, Apple has ceded legal ownership of its customers’ data to Guizhou-Cloud Big Data, or GCBD, a company owned by the government of Guizhou Province, whose capital is Guiyang. Apple recently required its Chinese customers to accept new iCloud terms and conditions that list GCBD as the service provider and Apple as “an additional party.” Apple told customers the change was to “improve iCloud services in China mainland and comply with Chinese regulations.”

The terms and conditions included a new provision that does not appear in other countries: “Apple and GCBD will have access to all data that you store on this service” and can share that data “between each other under applicable law.”

Under the new setup, Chinese authorities ask GCBD — not Apple — for Apple customers’ data, Apple said. Apple believes that gives it a legal shield from American law, according to a person who helped create the arrangement. GCBD declined to answer questions about its Apple partnership.

«

OK, China is an authoritarian government. Its citizens live under an authoritarian regime. Question is, does Apple’s presence there help the government? If not (and I’d say it doesn’t), does using Apple’s products help dissidents evade the regime? (Probably not – they don’t need to crack the phone if they can crack your head.) Google withdrew because the state was hacking its product to target opponents. There’s no evidence that Apple’s been subverted in the same way. This long piece essentially reiterates what we’ve known for a long time: there’s no perfect way to interact with China. It always involves moral compromise. Even *not* interacting means you’re not helping.
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AirPods Max and AirPods Pro don’t support Apple Music Lossless, Apple confirms • T3

Matthew Bolton:

»

Apple has announced that it’s adding ‘Lossless’ and ‘Hi-Resolution Lossless’ streaming options to Apple Music in June 2021 for no extra charge, as well as offering Dolby Atmos ‘Spatial Audio’ 3D music, too.

In Apple’s new terminology, ‘Lossless’ is CD quality, from 16-bit 44.1kHz playback up to 24-bit 48kHz, while ‘Hi-Res Lossless’ delivers up to 24-bit 192kHz. Don’t worry if you don’t know what that means – it means music comes in larger files with much less compression, meaning more realistic results, provided you’ve got good enough equipment to actually hear the difference.

Apple has confirmed to T3 that this equipment, sadly, does not include AirPods Pro or AirPods Max. Both of Apple’s elite headphone models only use the Bluetooth AAC codec when connected to an iPhone, which means they can’t receive the full quality of the Apple Music ‘Lossless’ files, which will be encoded as ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) files.

What both of these devices will be able to receive is the new Dolby Atmos ‘Spatial Audio’ versions of songs, which will add more of a surrounding 3D effect in tracks. These aren’t the only headphones that support this feature – anything powered by Apple’s H1 or W1 wireless chips will, and that includes (deep breath): AirPods, AirPods Pro, AirPods Max, BeatsX, Beats Solo3 Wireless, Beats Studio3, Powerbeats3 Wireless, Beats Flex, Powerbeats Pro, and Beats Solo Pro.

«

The AirPods Max won’t even do lossless over the Lightning charging cable (which is an option for playing audio). A firmware update might fix that, but you’d expect that “group working on audio hardware” and “group working on audio software” might talk to each other about future plans? Taken with the hiring and then firing of Antonio García Martinez, it feels like the gaps in Apple’s internal culture are showing. (Side note: Amazon is also making lossless available on Amazon Music, also for free.)
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How Substack soap operas change the media business • The Atlantic

Helen Lewis:

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Normal people—with regular lives and real jobs—have soap operas and reality shows. People who are Extremely Online have Substack.

Over the past few months, the PR travails of the newsletter start-up have become a reliable source of media gossip. Jude Doyle is leaving! Grace Lavery has joined! Oh man, Matt Yglesias shouldn’t have taken that advance; he’d have made far more money purely from subscriptions!

Perhaps those names don’t mean anything to you. Why should they? Doyle has 43,000 Twitter followers, a fan base 20 times smaller than that of the Sarcastic Mars Rover parody account. Lavery is an English professor, an expert on Japanese Victoriana, and one-third of a Brooklyn throuple that also includes Daniel Lavery, who has a Substack named after William Shatner. (Together, the Laverys have received $555,000 in advances from the platform.) Yglesias was an old-school blogger, then co-founded Vox, and has now returned to his independent roots.

But for a certain subset of the American elite—a group of people who are concentrated in journalism, academia, and related fields; who are likely to be active on Twitter; and who have strong opinions on the 1619 Project and the ACLU’s Chase Strangio—following the lives of these people is what they do instead of watching General Hospital or The Bachelor. Many of the authors now showing up on Substack are known for fighting with journalists at other outlets, and one another. By supporting their newsletters, readers get endless feuds, dramatic exits, high-profile guest stars, ambitious crossover events, and compelling villains. Yes, Substack is selling soap operas to people who think they’re above soap operas.

«

Lewis does have her own Substack, but it’s free (and funny), and she doesn’t mess around with internet beefs. Though of course she does comment, when linking to this article in her most recent one, that “You will be pleased to know that everyone I lightly ribbed in this piece responded with the self-deprecating humour and good nature for which they are famed.” 😂
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Google I/O 2021 preview: Google resurrects Wear OS and Android tablets? • Ars Technica

Ron Amadeo, on Google’s event which starts today, Tuesday:

»

The biggest sign that Google is bringing Wear OS back to the land of the living is a widely reported rumor that the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 will run Wear OS instead of Tizen. Plugged-in Samsung leaker Ice Universe called the transition back in February, kicking off this batch of rumors. The latest report from the Korean site MT says Samsung wants to switch to Wear OS due to difficulty in getting developers to create Tizen apps. XDA Developers found references to a “Merlot Wear OS” device in a Samsung Wi-Fi driver, indicating the company is at least experimenting with Wear OS internally. Samsung has been kicking around the idea of returning to Wear OS for some time, though, but the company has yet to pull the trigger.

Samsung adopting Wear would solve a lot of problems. Samsung makes its own smartwatch chips, so the platform could finally stop relying on Qualcomm for smartwatch SoCs. Qualcomm has smothered Wear OS with a lack of significant chip upgrades, which greatly contributed to the current situation. Samsung is also a top-tier hardware manufacturer, so it can push the smartwatch form factor forward with whatever parts it wants. The fashion brands that occupy the Wear OS market right now (like Fossil) can really only source existing parts.

There’s also that $2.1bn acquisition of Fitbit, which Google closed in January. There have been some product launches since then, but we’ve yet to see what the Googlification of Fitbit looks like.

…The next long-dead Android form factor that has been suddenly active lately is the Android tablet. Google’s tablet interfaces for Android probably peaked around Android 3 or 4.0 when tablets first came out. Since then, the company has consistently removed and scaled back tablet interfaces. Google’s hardware division also hasn’t made an Android tablet for years, with the last release being the Pixel C in 2015.

Google’s lack of interest in tablets seems to be changing, though. Google surprised us all earlier this month with the announcement of “Entertainment Space” for tablets, a media aggregation UI that will appear as a home screen panel, replacing the usual Google Discover feed on the left side.

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Pretty sure that Android tablets are not going to become A Thing, at least in terms of third-party apps. Same problem as Samsung/Tizen: no traction.
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Ransomware’s dangerous new trick is double-encrypting your data • WIRED

Lily Hay Newman:

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Double-encryption attacks have happened before, usually stemming from two separate ransomware gangs compromising the same victim at the same time. But antivirus company Emsisoft says it is aware of dozens of incidents in which the same actor or group intentionally layers two types of ransomware on top of each other.

“The groups are constantly trying to work out which strategies are best, which net them the most money for the least amount of effort,” says Emsisoft threat analyst Brett Callow. “So in this approach you have a single actor deploying two types of ransomware. The victim decrypts their data and discovers it’s not actually decrypted at all.”

Some victims get two ransom notes at once, Callow says, meaning that the hackers want their victims to know about the double-encryption attack. In other cases, though, victims only see one ransom note and only find out about the second layer of encryption after they’ve paid to eliminate the first.

“Even in a standard single-encryption ransomware case, recovery is often an absolute nightmare,” Callow says. “But we are seeing this double-encryption tactic often enough that we feel it’s something organizations should be aware of when considering their response.”

 Emsisoft has identified two distinct tactics. In the first, hackers encrypt data with ransomware A and then re-encrypt that data with ransomware B. The other path involves what Emsisoft calls a “side-by-side encryption” attack, in which attacks encrypt some of an organization’s systems with ransomware A and others with ransomware B. In that case, data is only encrypted once, but a victim would need both decryption keys to unlock everything.

«

This seems like a strategic mistake by the ransomware types: if there’s a possibility that you might get double-crossed even if you pay, then people will be less likely to pay.
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The app that lets you pay to control another person’s life • BBC News

Will Smale:

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How would you feel about being able to pay to control multiple aspects of another person’s life? A new app is offering you the chance to do just that.

When writer Brandon Wong recently couldn’t decide what takeaway to order one evening, he asked his followers on social media app NewNew to choose for him.

Those that wanted to get involved in the 24-year-old’s dinner dilemma paid $5 (£3.50) to vote in a poll, and the majority verdict was that he should go for Korean food, so that was what he bought.

“I couldn’t decide between Chinese or Korean, so it was very helpful,” says Mr Wong, who lives in Edmonton, Canada. “I have also used NewNew polls to decide what clothes I should wear that day, and lots of other personal stuff.

“I joined back in March, and I post [polls] three or four times a week. I’ve now had more than 1,700 total votes.”

NewNew is the brainchild of Los Angeles-based entrepreneur Courtne Smith. The app, which is still in its “beta” or pre-full release stage, describes itself as “a human stock market where you buy shares in the lives of real people, in order to control their decisions and watch the outcome”.

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This feels more like the setup for a Philip K Dick short story, in which the writer then discovers that he is actually an android who really is being controlled by humans. (That’s essentially his story The Electric Ant.) But no, it’s Silicon Valley.
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Bill Gates left Microsoft board amid probe into prior relationship with staffer • WSJ

Emily Glazer, Justin Baer, Khadeeja Safdar and Aaron Tilley:

»

Microsoft Corp. board members decided that Bill Gates needed to step down from its board in 2020 as they pursued an investigation into the billionaire’s prior romantic relationship with a female Microsoft employee that was deemed inappropriate, people familiar with the matter said.

Members of the board tasked with the matter hired a law firm to conduct an investigation in late 2019 after a Microsoft engineer alleged in a letter that she had a sexual relationship over years with Mr. Gates, the people said.

During the probe, some board members decided it was no longer suitable for Mr. Gates to sit as a director at the software company he started and led for decades, the people said. Mr. Gates resigned before the board’s investigation was completed and before the full board could make a formal decision on the matter, another person familiar with the matter said.

…A spokeswoman for Mr. Gates said, “There was an affair almost 20 years ago which ended amicably.” She said his “decision to transition off the board was in no way related to this matter. In fact, he had expressed an interest in spending more time on his philanthropy starting several years earlier.”

Mr. Gates resigned from the Microsoft board on March 13, 2020, three months after he had been re-elected to his seat.

«

That he wasn’t a delightful person to work for – yelling and screaming at subordinates (ie pretty much everyone) – was already known; but there’s a darker, or perhaps seamier, side coming out now. Melinda seems to have been very unhappy about Bill seeing Jeffrey Epstein. There’s more to come on that.
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In Mahle’s contact-free electric motor, power reaches the rotor wirelessly • IEEE Spectrum

Philip Ross:

»

Designs that put copper windings in the rotor have to transmit electricity to a moving target, and the point of contact—the slip ring—is subject to wear and tear.

Mahle, a German auto parts company, unveiled a motor that’s free of both rare earths and of physical contact. Power is beamed into the rotor wirelessly, through induction, by a coil carrying alternating current. This induces a current in the receiving electrode, inside the rotor, which energizes the copper windings there to produce an electromagnetic field.

That means there’s practically nothing that can wear out. “There are no contacts to transmit electricity, no abrasion, no dust formation, no mechanical wear,” Martin Berger, Mahle’s head of research, said Wednesday, in an online press conference. “Also I have to say, if one must service a non-magnetized rotor, it’s not difficult to exchange the rotor.” 

It may seem strange to try to minimize wear and tear in electric motors, seeing as they are already famed for their simplicity and durability. Unlike internal-combustion engines, electric motors have practically no moving parts, and they are fairly easy to take apart and put back together. Perhaps Mahle’s engineers got the idea from their longstanding work in wireless charging technology. Maybe the contact-free rotor design provides advantages beyond mere durability. 

Berger says the new motor combines the best points of several motor designs, for instance by offering good efficiency at both low and high torque. Overall, the company asserts, the motor achieves at least 95% efficiency in typical EV use and tops 96% efficiency at many operating points. A release from Mahle says that no EV except for Formula E racing cars has done better.

«

The absence of rare earths means no (or less) reliance on China. Commercial production perhaps two or three years away.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Hey, you made it this far – why not round it all off by preordering Social Warming, my forthcoming book?