Plastic recycling has had some success – but oil companies aren’t helping. CC-licensed photo by lwicks_2000 on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 11 links for you. Just me, or is it hot in here? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

As China boomed, it didn’t take climate change into account. Now it must • The New York Times

Steven Lee Myers, Keith Bradsher and Chris Buckley:

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China has always had floods, but as Kong Feng, then a public policy professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, wrote in 2019, the flooding of cities across China in recent years is “a general manifestation of urban problems” in the country.
The vast expansion of roads, subways and railways in cities that swelled almost overnight meant there were fewer places where rain could safely be absorbed — disrupting what scientists call the natural hydrological cycle.

Faith Chan, a professor of geology with the University of Nottingham in Ningbo in eastern China, said the country’s cities — and there are 93 with populations of more than a million — modernized at a time when Chinese leaders made climate resiliency less of a priority than economic growth.

“If they had a chance to build a city again, or to plan one, I think they would agree to make it more balanced,” said Mr. Chan, who is also a visiting fellow at the Water@Leeds Research Institute of the University of Leeds.

As early as 2013, Mr. Xi promised to build an “ecological civilization” in China. “We must maintain harmony between man and nature and pursue sustainable development,” he said in a speech in Geneva in 2013.

The country has nearly quintupled the acreage of green space in its cities over the past two decades. It introduced a pilot program to create “sponge cities,” including Zhengzhou, that better absorb rainfall. Last year, Mr. Xi pledged to speed up reductions in emissions and reach carbon neutrality by 2060. It was a tectonic shift in policy and may prove to be one in practice, as well.

The question is whether it is too late. Even if countries like China and the United States rapidly cut greenhouse gases, the warming from those already emitted is likely to have long-lasting consequences.

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(Via John Naughton)
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Three Americans create enough carbon emissions to kill one person, study finds • The Guardian

Oliver Milman:

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The lifestyles of around three average Americans will create enough planet-heating emissions to kill one person, and the emissions from a single coal-fired power plant are likely to result in more than 900 deaths, according to the first analysis to calculate the mortal cost of carbon emissions.

The new research builds upon what is known as the “social cost of carbon”, a monetary figure placed upon the damage caused by each ton of carbon dioxide emissions, by assigning an expected death toll from the emissions that cause the climate crisis.

The analysis draws upon several public health studies to conclude that for every 4,434 metric tons of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere beyond the 2020 rate of emissions, one person globally will die prematurely from the increased temperature. This additional CO2 is equivalent to the current lifetime emissions of 3.5 Americans.

Adding a further 4m metric tons above last year’s level, produced by the average US coal plant, will cost 904 lives worldwide by the end of the century, the research found. On a grander scale, eliminating planet-heating emissions by 2050 would save an expected 74 million lives around the world this century.

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I guess we should round up the average Americans?
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UK already undergoing disruptive climate change • BBC News

Roger Harrabin:

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The UK is already undergoing disruptive climate change with increased rainfall, sunshine and temperatures, according to scientists.

The year 2020 was the third warmest, fifth wettest and eighth sunniest on record, scientists said in the latest UK State of the Climate report.

No other year is in the top 10 on all three criteria.

The experts said that, in the space of 30 years, the UK has become 0.9C warmer and 6% wetter.

The report’s lead author Mike Kendon, climate information scientist at the UK Met Office, told BBC News: “A lot of people think climate change is in the future – but this proves the climate is already changing here in the UK.

“As it continues to warm we are going to see more and more extreme weather such as heatwaves and floods.”

«

Cleverly timed, I thought, coming just after London in particular was hit by colossal downpours at the weekend.
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Instagram influencer Hushpuppi’s rise was allegedly fueled by cyber scams • Bloomberg

Evan Ratliff:

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BEC [business email compromise] attacks started appearing roughly a half-dozen years ago, escalating each year until they surpassed all other forms of internet fraud. The FBI reports there were almost 20,000 such scams against American businesses in 2020 alone, accounting for $1.8bn in losses, though the variety of BEC crimes can make totals hard to pin down. Crane Hassold, the senior director of threat research at the cyberdefense company Agari Data Inc. and a former FBI analyst, likes to define a BEC as “a response-based impersonation attack that’s requesting something of value”—basically, posing as a legitimate business to trick people into giving away their money.

No matter the flavor, a BEC scam generally begins with someone hacking into a corporate email account often using social engineering tactics like phishing. Once inside, the perpetrators don’t steal anything, not at first. Instead they quietly begin forwarding copies of incoming and outgoing email to themselves. Then they wait. “They watch it for a number of weeks or months, looking for details of certain payments that are going out, understanding who their customers are, looking at communication patterns,” Hassold says. When they spot an invoice coming in or out, they “use that intelligence to insert themselves into an actual payment that is supposed to be due.”

From there the scam can work two ways: If the scammers have compromised the email of the intended recipient of the payment, they simply create an invoice identical to the real one, swapping in their own bank account details, and resend it from the recipient’s email (often with apologies for the mix-up). If, on the other hand, they’ve compromised the sender, they might send a follow-up invoice from a “spoofed” email that appears at first glance to match the payee’s, or even create an entire company and website, one letter off from the real one. In either case, [innocent] Phil in accounting sees an email that, without careful scrutiny, matches the ones he receives every day.

«

And then Phil sends the money to that account and it’s lost forever. My bank calls me if I send any substantial amount of money to a new account; my solicitors tell me to call them to get their bank details. People are jumpy about BEC. Even so it carries on.
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Brownsville, we have a problem • Protocol

Anna Kramer:

»

For Cameron County and Brownsville, Musk’s money is a bit like his rockets. The Starship prototype was a gleaming vision for the future of space exploration, but its explosion was devastating to the natural environment. Musk’s determination to build a spaceport and town that will one day launch hundreds of people to Mars has brought with it the promise of jobs, economic revitalization and an influx of wealth to one of the poorest and least-connected places in America. But the investment will also bring wealthy outsiders to a culturally vibrant, family-oriented border town that is proud of its history and the people who’ve lived there for generations, a town full of people skeptical that the money and prestige Musk is offering might be anything more than a poison pill.

SpaceX’s investment likely does mean a change in economic status and power for Brownsville. But the money and vision of the world’s second-richest man could also upend the culture and values that make Brownsville special to its community, a fear that has riven the people of this usually quiet place.

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A lovely portrait of the (don’t say sleepy don’t say sleepy don’t say sleepy) sleepy (dammit) town near which Elon Musk is trying to build a sort of Starbase. It feels like something out of Interstellar.
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NHS data injection: will it hurt? • PC Pro

James O’Malley on the row about the NHS’s plans to collect and centralise patient data:

»

At the heart of the controversy is a trade-off between privacy for the individual and the potential improvements to healthcare that can be achieved with research based on a dataset as richly detailed as the one held by the NHS.

“The really big moment for me was when we did a data collection for diabetic retinopathy screening,” said [Dave] Roberts [head of primary care information at NHS Digital and one of the architects of the new system]. He describes how by centrally collecting data on diabetes patients and inviting those judged at risk for a screening, early interventions can be made to limit or even reverse deterioration. “We were actually changing people’s lives,” he said.

The GP diabetes data is useful on a broader level too, as it feeds into the National Diabetes and Obesity Audits, which identify more effective and efficient treatments.

Roberts also points to how GP data was critical to research carried out by the NHS’s Learning Disabilities Observatory, and led directly to improved care for those patients when they are treated by NHS services. “We’ve probably not shouted enough about the power of data,” conceded Roberts. “I think this is one opportunity to shout that quite loud.”

In terms of how the data is used in research, Roberts argues that it’s a “myth” that NHS Digital is “selling” the data to outside companies for research. Charges only cover costs, and applications to use the data are both vetted and undergo a “data minimisation” process to strip data down to the bare minimum of what is required.

But [Phil] Booth [the coordinator of MedConfidential, a group that’s campaigning against the new data regime] remains concerned due to the track record of some of the companies and organisations that take the data. His site has a long list of organisations — including some NHS bodies — that have previously been found to be in breach of their obligations.

“When audited, [some companies have] been discovered to be breaking the law, but all of them are still getting data,” he said. “They might have had to delete a particular dataset, but they are all customers, and they’re all still receiving data.”

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Fresh warning over rip-off locator forms on Google – BBC News

Chris Fox:

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Rip-off websites which charge people for free Covid-19 passenger locator forms feature at the top of Google search results, the BBC has found.

Airline Ryanair said passengers should be “extra vigilant” and only download forms from the official website. The passenger locator form is designed to help airlines contact people in the event of a coronavirus outbreak.

Google said it had removed several ads but the BBC found some still topped its search results on Wednesday.

“It’s no surprise that these copycat firms have found yet another route to try and make money out of people for something that is free,” said Guy Anker, deputy editor of consumer website Money Saving Expert. While selling passenger locator forms is not illegal, Mr Anker said the rip-off websites were “devious”.

Google’s policy is to ban ads for unofficial websites selling government documents. But in May, the BBC reported that rip-off ads for travel visas, driving licences and other documents topped Google search results every time it checked during a 12-month investigation.

«

You’d think Google would just get an intern to program this as a search and zap the companies that pop up. Or get the intern to run the program and block every advertiser attempting to ride on this.
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The recycling myth: a plastic waste solution littered with failure

Joe Brock, Valerie Volcovici and John Geddie:

»

In early 2018, residents of Boise, Idaho were told by city officials that a breakthrough technology could transform their hard-to-recycle plastic waste into low-polluting fuel. The program, backed by Dow Inc, one of the world’s biggest plastics producers, was hailed locally as a greener alternative to burying it in the county landfill.

A few months later, residents of Boise and its suburbs began stuffing their yogurt containers, cereal-box liners and other plastic waste into special orange garbage bags, which were then trucked more than 300 miles (483km) away, across the state line to Salt Lake City, Utah.

The destination was a company called Renewlogy. The startup marketed itself as an “advanced recycling” company capable of handling hard-to-recycle plastics such as plastic bags or takeout containers – stuff most traditional recyclers won’t touch. Renewlogy’s technology, company founder Priyanka Bakaya told local media at the time, would heat plastic in a special oxygen-starved chamber, transforming the trash into diesel fuel.

«

However, it didn’t work. But because plastics come from oil, oil companies hate the idea of “polluter pays” charges on plastic.

»

The American Chemistry Council (ACC), an industry group whose membership is dominated by plastics makers, says polluter-pays measures would hurt the economy. It’s urging US lawmakers instead to ease regulations on and provide incentives to advanced recycling companies.

«

Which takes us back to the beginning, above, which means nothing improves.
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When will it get too hot for the human body to survive? • Slate

Matthew Lewis:

»

A dry heat feels comfortable because the evaporation happens so fast that you don’t even notice the sweat on your skin. (This is also why dehydration is a huge risk in desert climates—while you feel the dry air is helping you tolerate the heat, you’re also losing water from your body the whole time. “Hydrate or die” is not just a clever slogan; it’s good science.)

Now suppose you’re in the same amount of heat, but in Palm Beach, where the air is incredibly humid. The air is already holding all the water vapor it can hold. So your sweat stays on your skin, and the heat that the sweat is supposed to remove from your body … stays in your body, and accumulates.

Your body has lost its ability to shed heat, and so your core temperature starts creeping up to approach the temperature of the air around you. Let the process go on long enough, and body temperature rises from comfortable 98ºF to deadly 108ºF.

That is why the temperature isn’t enough to know if the human body can survive. You need to know the “wet-bulb temperature.” The term comes from the bulb of a typical mercury thermometer. If you wrap a thermometer bulb with a piece of wet cloth and put it in a hot room, evaporation off the cloth will lower the temperature reading of the thermometer to a point that is cooler than the room; the bulb is functionally “sweating.” But if you increase the humidity of the room enough, the temperature of the water vapor in the air will reach equilibrium with the water on the wet cloth, at which point evaporation no longer results in heat loss. So the bulb is sweating, but the mercury will continue to rise.

«

(Via John Naughton)
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Google bans ‘sugar daddy’ apps from Play Store • Android Police

Ryne Hager:

»

If somehow you aren’t familiar with the term, a “sugar daddy” is more than a caramel candy on a stick. In the more common vernacular, a sugar daddy is a person — usually an older man, but you could have a “sugar mommy” or maybe a gender-neutral “sugar parent?” — that spends or gives money in what is typically a transactional relationship, often for sexual favors.

I don’t judge, different people enjoy different things, and if all parties are consenting with full knowledge, I don’t see how an arrangement like that really harms anyone. But, it seems Google does care, though the company is clear it’s not objecting to the nature of the relationship, merely the fact that they’re often sexual relationships with a perceived compensation basis, and the company has a blanket ban on sexual content — at least partly ignoring the primary impulse for many customers behind more generalized dating apps like Tinder and Hinge, as well as many of the messages that even mainstream dating app users swap.

We’ve reached out to Google for more information behind the ban and the precise logic that targets sugar-dating apps while ignoring other potentially sexualized dating apps. But, in the meantime, starting on September 1st, sugar people of all types will have to either stick to websites or sideload their sugar-dating apps — this is Android, you can still get your apps from wherever, unlike iPhones.

«

I’m guessing that the existing apps won’t stop working? Plus they have a whole month to, what, get downloaded in a hurry by “daddies” and, uh, the other side? It’s a weird move.

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Chromebook growth hits 75% in Q2 2021 worldwide, outperforming other PC market categories • Canalys

»

The latest data from Canalys shows the worldwide PC market (including tablets) posted yet another quarter of annual growth, with shipments up 10% to 121.7m units. Chromebooks continued to outperform the rest of the industry product categories, posting 75% annual growth and a shipment volume of 11.9m units. Tablet shipment growth has begun to stabilize, with an increase in Q2 of just 4% year-on-year to 39.1m units.

Chromebook vendors have doubled down on investments in the product category and most have continued to see strong returns in terms of growth. HP maintained pole position with shipments of 4.3m units and growth of 116% in Q2. Lenovo took second place with 2.6m units shipped increasing shipments by 82% from a year ago. Acer secured a top-three position with growth of 83.0% propelling it above 1.8m units in shipments. Dell and Samsung made up the remainder of the top five, with the former being the only leading vendor to suffer a shipment decline.

«

Creeping up: Chromebooks may be starting to capture that schools-to-university-to-work pipeline. For scale, Apple still sold more iPads than the whole Chromebook market, but that might not stay true for long.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

If you don’t know who the inspiration for the TV detective Columbo is, you’ll be surprised. CC-licensed photo by RTP 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. Papers, please (again). I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Google and Facebook to require workers get vaccinated, a first for big tech – The Washington Post

Heather Kelly and Gerrit De Vynck:

»

Silicon Valley’s tech giants are starting to require vaccines for employees returning to the office and pushing back campus reopening dates as the highly contagious delta variant continues to spread across the United States and around the world.

Google became the first Big Tech company to announce on Wednesday that it will require employees who work in its offices to be fully vaccinated. Facebook later announced a similar policy requiring all in-person workers to get vaccinated before coming into a Facebook office in the U.S.

Google also followed Apple in pushing back its return to office to mid October from early September — moves that could trigger a flurry of copy cats across corporate America.

In a note to employees announcing the changes, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the company has seen high vaccination rates for Google employees so far, which is why it is comfortable bringing workers back into the office. Currently, there are some early volunteers who are already working at various Google campuses. Workers will have to start reporting back to the office on Oct. 18.

“I hope these steps will give everyone greater peace of mind as offices reopen,” said Pichai in the message.

Any Google employee who doesn’t wish to get vaccinated but doesn’t have approval to work remote indefinitely will need to contact human resources and discuss their options, the company said.

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I guess it would be a bit weird for someone at Facebook to claim they don’t want to get vaccinated. Ditto Google. Though ironically it might be their chance to continue remote working.
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Columbo: an origin story • THE COLUMBOPHILE

»

February 20 1968 is a red-letter day in the annals of TV history as the day Prescription: Murder first aired, bringing Lieutenant Columbo, as we mostly know and love him, to the collective consciousness of millions.

But what many casual fans don’t realise is that Columbo, the character, was created by William Link and Richard Levinson nearly a decade earlier and had already graced both the stage and screen long before Peter Falk assumed the beige raincoat and ever-lit cigar.

Levinson and Link were fresh young screen writers on the Hollywood scene when the now infamous Writers Guild strike of 1960 took place. The strike would go on for five months from January to June, leaving the dynamic duo at a loss at how to supplement their incomes.

Fortunately for the world they uncovered a loophole that allowed them to flex their creative muscles. Despite the strike action, it was still permissable for Guild members to write for live television. And so targeting the newly launched Chevy Mystery Show and its weekly one-hour live broadcasts, the two got to work on the script for a murder mystery entitled Enough Rope – the first official script featuring one Lieutenant Columbo.

They based the character squarely on Porfiry Petrovich, the astute but meandering lead investigator in Dostoevsky’s Crime & Punishment – a book both had studied at college.

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That last one is quite the pub quiz answer.
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The thermocline of truth • Roblog

Rob Miller:

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In the ocean, temperature decreases with depth: the deeper you go, the colder it gets. But sometimes, what’s called a thermocline forms: a temperature barrier, a point at which the temperature changes rapidly. Go above the thermocline and the water is warm; pass beneath it, and it’s suddenly cold. This can have huge ramifications for life in the ocean, preventing the passage of oxygen and nutrients past the barrier.

In a 2008 blogpost, legendary IT consultant Bruce F. Webster applied the idea of the thermocline to large-scale IT projects. Why was it, Webster asked, that so many projects seemed to be on-track until just before their launch date, at which point it became suddenly clear that they were miles behind schedule?

Webster observed that, generally speaking, those at the bottom of an organisation have a fairly accurate view of what’s going on. They’re close to the detail; they know whether their area of the project is on-track, and can infer from that the state of the wider project.

Those at the top, though, have no such first-hand knowledge. They rely on the bubbling-up of information from below, in the form of dashboards and status reports. But, Webster noticed, those status reports tend to produce a comically optimistic view of the state of the project. Individual contributors presented a rosy picture of what they were working on to their line managers; middle managers gave good news to their bosses; and senior managers, keen to stay on the promotion track and perhaps hopeful that other parts of the project would fail before theirs, massage the truth yet again.

The result is that there is a thermocline within the organisation: not of temperature, but of truth.

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Lovely idea. Miller uses it to examine how the Post Office IT scandal (criminalising a lot of innocent people) could have happened.
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Social media manager, the most millennial job, comes of age • WSJ

Krithika Varagur:

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Some 15 years after Facebook and Twitter opened their platforms to the public, social media is an established, mainstream career field. There are academic programs dedicated to its practice. Workers say it’s sometimes still treated as a job for rookies, both through pay grades and interpersonal dynamics from those who think it’s just not that serious. But that’s changing: Those in the field see more bargaining power and more full-time roles than ever before.

Many social media-specific jobs still offer lower salaries than comparable fields like marketing. The average annual salary for marketing managers is $102,496 and $109,607 for marketing directors on Glassdoor, according to a spokesperson for the jobs website. Meanwhile, the average annual salary is $67,892 for social media directors and $47,908 for social media assistants.

“There’s still this idea that everyone uses social media, so it must be easy,” says 30-year-old Alana Visconti, a brand social account lead at Verizon.

But Ms. Visconti notes that the field has become more professionalized in recent years. When she got her undergraduate degree at the Fashion Institute of Technology in 2015, she says, “It definitely wasn’t seen as a career path.” Today, following work for clients including Hyatt and Puma, she believes she can dedicate her whole career to social media. “What I love about it is that it’s the way to connect most directly with consumers,” she says.

«

People are appalled by this idea. I really hope nobody’s going to spend money on a degree for something you can – possibly should – learn in a bedroom.

(This is completely a side note, but the grammar choices in this and the weightlifting story (below) are mad. The WSJ hyphenates “social-media” as an adjective but not as a thing. What?? [I’ve changed it in the extract here.] The NYT knows that it’s the International Weightlifting Federation. So what does it call the sport? Weight lifting.)
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Police are telling ShotSpotter to alter evidence from gunshot-detecting AI • Vice

Todd Feathers:

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On May 31 last year, 25-year-old Safarain Herring was shot in the head and dropped off at St. Bernard Hospital in Chicago by a man named Michael Williams. He died two days later. 

Chicago police eventually arrested the 64-year-old Williams and charged him with murder (Williams maintains that Herring was hit in a drive-by shooting). A key piece of evidence in the case is video surveillance footage showing Williams’ car stopped on the 6300 block of South Stony Island Avenue at 11:46 p.m.—the time and location where police say they know Herring was shot.

How did they know that’s where the shooting happened? Police said ShotSpotter, a surveillance system that uses hidden microphone sensors to detect the sound and location of gunshots, generated an alert for that time and place.

Except that’s not entirely true, according to recent court filings. 

That night, 19 ShotSpotter sensors detected a percussive sound at 11:46 p.m. and determined the location to be 5700 South Lake Shore Drive—a mile away from the site where prosecutors say Williams committed the murder, according to a motion filed by Williams’ public defender. The company’s algorithms initially classified the sound as a firework. That weekend had seen widespread protests in Chicago in response to George Floyd’s murder, and some of those protesting lit fireworks.

But after the 11:46 p.m. alert came in, a ShotSpotter analyst manually overrode the algorithms and “reclassified” the sound as a gunshot.

…The case isn’t an anomaly, and the pattern it represents could have huge ramifications for ShotSpotter in Chicago, where the technology generates an average of 21,000 alerts each year. The technology is also currently in use in more than 100 cities.

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The idea that people just reach in and change what could be crucial trial evidence is amazing. The claim was thrown out against Williams because his lawyer objected that it wasn’t a satisfactory forensic method. But the lack of a “chain of evidence” in the system suggests it never should have been.

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Simone Biles and Naomi Osaka highlight the 24-hour rolling hell of Big Sport • The Guardian

Barney Ronay:

»

Keith Miller famously said that pressure is a Messerschmitt up your arse. The point being, when you’ve fought in a world war, pressure isn’t playing Test cricket in the 1950s. Well, Keith, the world has changed. And in the process we seem to have created a particular kind of 24-hour rolling hell for our superstar athletes.

At times this can look like some kind of unregulated social experiment. Be brilliant, constantly. Give us that thing we crave. And yes, you will be judged. You will be diced and dissected to the most minute degree. You will be asked to carry our hopes and fears, to embody our politics, to mean something, and to become even here a kind of commodity. This is unsustainable.

Naomi Osaka has already told us this, if we care to listen. Anyone can lose a tennis match, particularly an Olympic tennis match at the end of a strange, disjointed schedule during a strange, disjointed period in the life of planet Earth. She was gracious in defeat by the world No 42 Marketa Vondrousova.

Asked whether pressure was a part of it, she had the self-possession to avoid giving a definite answer. What words do you really want from me? How many billions of people are hanging, in real time, on the nuances of my answer? What kind of space have we made here? All of these might have been reasonable responses.

Osaka, who knows this world better than anyone because it is her world, eventually said: “Yes and no.” She suggested her recent mental health break hadn’t helped her performance. The question answers itself. Here is a young tennis player who has taken a mental health break, in part to avoid being asked painful questions, who is now answering painful questions about her mental health break.

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As Ronay points out, there’s no respite now from the kleig light glare of attention.
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Weightlifting, an original Olympic sport, may be dropped • The New York Times

Ognian Georgiev and Ken Belson:

»

The weightlifting federation is not the first sports body to run afoul of the Olympic committee, of course. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is running the boxing tournament at the Tokyo Games while it investigates the International Boxing Association, or AIBA, over a series of failings. And in 2018, the IOC lifted a series of restrictions on the International Biathlon Union only after the organization approved governance reforms and greater transparency, particularly related to drug testing.

The scale of corruption at the IWF [International Weightlifting Federation] is far deeper. In January 2020, the German broadcaster ARD produced a documentary called “Lord of the Lifters” that illustrated how entire nations were sidestepping antidoping controls. Six months later, Richard McLaren, a Canadian antidoping investigator, published a 121-page report that pinned much of the blame for weightlifting’s problems on Tamas Ajan, the federation’s longtime leader, who ran the organization with an iron hand.

Ajan, who resigned as the president of the IWF in April 2020, was accused of accepting bribes to bury positive doping results. Efforts to hide positive tests date to at least the 1980s; McLaren said, for example, that in 2016, Ajan called the president of the Albanian weight lifting federation and demanded $100,000 in a suitcase to cover a fine for lifters who tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs. If the money was not paid, the Albanians were told, the country’s entire team would not be able to compete at the Rio Games.

In a phone interview, Ajan said that contrary to the allegations in the McLaren report, he had fought to eliminate the use of performance-enhancing drugs and had been attacked by national federations he penalized for excessive doping.

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Not sure where 600 weightlifters having tested positive for drugs fits into that claim by Ajan. You could read it either way, after all.
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‘Disinfo kills’: protesters demand Facebook act to stop vaccine falsehoods • The Guardian

Kari Paul:

»

Activists descended on Facebook’s Washington headquarters on Wednesday to demand the company take stronger action against vaccine falsehoods spreading on its platform, covering the area in front of Facebook’s office with body bags that read “disinfo kills”.

The day of protest, which comes as Covid cases surge in the US, has been organized by a group of scholars, advocates and activists calling themselves the “Real” Oversight Board. The group is urging Facebook’s shareholders to ban so-called misinformation “superspreaders” – the small number of accounts responsible for the majority of false and misleading content about the Covid-19 vaccines.

“People are making decisions based on the disinformation that’s being spread on Facebook,” said Shireen Mitchell, Member of the Real Facebook Oversight Board and founder of Stop Online Violence Against Women. “If Facebook is not going to take that down, or if all they’re going to do is put out disclaimers, then fundamentally Facebook is participating in these deaths as well.”

In coordination with the protest, the Real Oversight Board has released a new report analyzing the spread of anti-vaccine misinformation on Facebook during the company’s most recent financial quarter. The report and protest also come as Facebook prepares to announce its financial earnings for that same quarter.

The report references a March study from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) that found a small group of accounts – known as the “dirty dozen” – is responsible for more than 73% of anti-vaccine content across social media platforms, including Facebook.

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Think this is a first, seeing Facebook being picketed as though it was Philip Morris selling cigarettes or an oil company cutting down rain forest.
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Techdirt is now entirely without any Google ads or tracking code • Techdirt

Mike Masnick:

»

last summer, we had to pull all ads off of Techdirt, after we kept running into problems with Google, and its overly aggressive, overly sensitive (if somewhat arbitrary) advertising morality police (such as telling us all our stories about Google were “dangerous or derogatory”).

After announcing that, we had a few different companies approach us with possible alternatives, and earlier this year, we tried to put ads back on the site briefly, with a promise from a provider that they could both serve better quality ads as well as “deal with” Google if it started complaining again. Here’s the unfortunate secret underpinning nearly all of the internet advertising space: there are hundreds, if not thousands, of companies which will purport to put ads on your website. And all of them will promise “quality” ads and better rates.

But the unfortunate reality is that they’re all just backstopped by Google, and the ads are all the same crappy ads in the end. Only the largest websites (or highly, highly specialized ones) can really pull their own weight on advertising. And, tragically, wonky tech/legal/policy blogs don’t cut it (unless we wanted to just start running reviews of every silly tech product out there, and that’s not our thing).

So, we worked with a new partner, with promises of higher quality… and it all turned out to just be the same awful Google ads again, and with it, the same automated emails every damn day from Google threatening to cut us off for our “dangerous and derogatory” content. This time around, we just ignored those threats, because at this point, we’re so damn sick of it that if Google cuts us off, so be it.

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Amid Henan floods, China’s authorities focus not on climate change, but on control • Los Angeles Times

Alice Su:

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Large swaths of Henan north of Zhengzhou are underwater, with more rain forecast in coming days. Many of the flooded villages and smaller towns west of Zhengzhou have no running water, electricity or cellphone reception. A massive rescue effort is underway, including both Chinese military and grass-roots volunteers who have rushed from across the country to help.

At the same time, government propaganda is controlling the narrative. Chinese media have been instructed to report on post-disaster recovery, avoid an “exaggeratedly sorrowful tone” and adhere to official statistics on casualties and damage, according to a leaked censorship directive published in the China Digital Times.

Grief has become a target of control. On Monday, Zhengzhou residents laid dozens of bouquets of flowers at the entrance to the subway line where the 14 had drowned. But authorities soon erected a yellow barrier around the flowers, blocking them from view. Journalists and passersby shared photos of the blocked memorial online, sparking thousands of angry comments.

“They are even afraid of flowers,” one wrote.

Another circle of flowers and candles soon surrounded the yellow barrier. At night, videos shared online showed Zhengzhou residents pulling the barrier down as people applauded.

Another leaked directive instructed government workers to go door-to-door around the tunnel and warn shopkeepers: “Heighten awareness, do not accept foreign media interviews, do not give them any possibilities to twist the truth. If any relevant situation happens, report to the district workers or call the police.”

The Times was unable to verify the directive, but foreign reporters from at least five different media outlets were harassed while reporting near the tunnel in the last few days. One salesperson who spoke with The Times about economic losses was pulled away by two women and later threatened by her supervisor, who told her she would be questioned by police.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Rhythmic gymnastics might look like a bizarre pursuit, but it’s a tough sport – as a former national champion explains. CC-licensed photo by IOC Young Reporters 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. Medalling hard. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Facebook creates exec team to work on ‘metaverse’ • CNBC

Kif Leswing:

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Facebook will create a product team to work on the “metaverse,” a concept that involves creating digital worlds that multiple people can inhabit at the same time.

The metaverse team will be part of Facebook’s virtual reality group, Reality Labs, executive Andrew Bosworth said in a Facebook post on Monday.

“Today Portal and Oculus can teleport you into a room with another person, regardless of physical distance, or to new virtual worlds and experiences,” Bosworth wrote. “But to achieve our full vision of the Metaverse, we also need to build the connective tissue between these spaces — so you can remove the limitations of physics and move between them with the same ease as moving from one room in your home to the next.”

Vishal Shah, the executive in charge of product at Instagram, is among those joining Facebook’s new metaverse group.

Technology companies and executives have started to increasingly discuss building a “metaverse” as a successor technology to smartphones and the mobile internet. Generally, technologists consider a metaverse a virtual world where large numbers of people can gather to play, work and socialize.

The metaverse is closely related to virtual reality and augmented reality technologies currently being developed by Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft in addition to Facebook. Roblox, a game targeted at children whose parent company is valued at over $44bn, is often considered an example of a metaverse.

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You want to know what a metaverse would be like? Basically, Facebook or Google or whoever writing the rules about what your life is like, how you can spend your money, where you can go – but not on a screen; in three dimensions. Attractive, isn’t it?
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‘A lesson in loss, humility and absurdity’: how rhythmic gymnastics took over my childhood • The Guardian

Rebecca Liu:

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Every four years, the same argument plays out. The Olympics reminds the public of the existence of rhythmic gymnastics and the public scoffs at this ridiculous spectacle, with its “ribbon dancing”, its sequins, its extravagant bending and pirouetting. Where artistic gymnastics – the one with the beam and the bars, the one with triple backflips and the constant risk of broken bones – is dignified and athletic, rhythmic gymnastics is frilly and absurd. How is this even a sport? Why is it part of the Olympics? These are the usual criticisms. In return, embattled admirers will point out that rhythmic gymnastics is extremely difficult, actually. There is immense skill involved in those backbends and leaps; besides, have you tried throwing and catching a ball while holding your foot above your head?

When I first caught sight of rhythmic gymnastics, I knew nothing of this. The reasons the sport is mocked – the sequins, the balletic dancing, the kilowatt-bright, beauty-pageant smiles of the gymnasts – were the reasons I found it delightful. I was six, sitting in my kitchen in Auckland, staring at the television. On screen, a gymnast at the 2000 Sydney Olympics tossed a bright red ribbon high into the air before catching it with astonishing ease. She was, to me, the height of womanly sophistication: beautiful, graceful, and covered in glitter. I dragged my mother into the room, pointed to the television and announced that this was the sort of lady I would like to become.

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Her story of how she became a national champion and then fell out of love with it – and what it means to her even so – is wonderful.
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Facebook users are more anti-vaccine than Fox News viewers, new data shows • The Washington Post

David Lazer and many others:

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The White House has been sharply critical of how social media has helped circulate misinformation about coronavirus vaccines. President Biden put it bluntly when he said, “They’re killing people.” The day after Biden’s statement, Facebook posted a blog entry asserting that it isn’t responsible for US vaccination rates leveling off. The company emphasized that, in a large survey by Carnegie Mellon, supported by Facebook, 85% of Facebook users reported being vaccinated or wanting to be vaccinated.

It’s hard to say who is right in this heated debate. Survey data can’t prove conclusively whether using Facebook affects vaccine acceptance and resistance. However, the data can indicate whether people who get their news from Facebook have higher or lower vaccination rates than those who don’t. In the Covid States Project survey we conducted, we find a surprisingly strong relationship. If you rely on Facebook to get news and information about the coronavirus, you are substantially less likely than the average American to say you have been vaccinated. In fact, Facebook news consumers are less likely to be vaccinated than people who get their coronavirus information from Fox News.

…Even after accounting for demographic and other differences, we still find that getting coronavirus-related news from Facebook — especially when it’s exclusively from Facebook — is associated with lower vaccination levels and higher levels of vaccine resistance. That relationship is stronger only with Newsmax, which is a much less commonly used source.«

I guess Facebook can at least say that it’s not as bad as Newsmax viewers.
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Ships are starting to bypass South African ports as Transnet tells customers and staff of ‘sabotage’ • Business Insider

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Ships have started to bypass South African ports, and many more may now do so, after Transnet delcared force majeure at its port operations on Monday.

Container vessels that had been due to call at both Cape Town and Durban had been diverted, shipping agents said, in one case to the Port of Maputo, and in other onwards to its Asian stops, bypassing the continent entirely.

Importers – already struggling with shortages of key goods – will now have longer to wait for containers on those ships. Just how long is not yet clear; a global shipping crisis and shortage of some types of containers already has the industry overall scrambling. Those same troubles have made shipping lines allergic to delays they can not quantify.

In a statement on Tuesday morning, Transnet said its force majeure declaration on Transnet Port Terminals ” is expected to be lifted soon”, but provided no other details on its timeline, or the underlying cause.

“The terminals are berthing vessels as planned and facilitating loading and discharge operations with the shipping lines,” it said. “We will continue to work directly with shipping lines in order to facilitate maximum import evacuation and further exports planned for future vessels. Controls have been developed, in conjunction with the shipping lines and SARS’ Customs division to ensure safe clearance and evacuation of each container.”

Logistics operators say the flow of containers had effectively ground to a halt.

Some of Transnet’s computer systems were shut down on 22 July, in what the company described only as a “disruption”.

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“Force majeure” is “an unanticipated or uncontrollable event that releases a company from fulfilling contractual obligations”. Short version: they’ve been hit by a ransomware attack. Goods aren’t moving and some companies are struggling.
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How to create simple Mac apps from shell scripts • Mathias Bynens

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Basically, a Mac application has a .app extension, but it’s not really a file — it’s a package. You can view the application’s contents by navigating to it in the Finder, right-clicking it and then choosing “Show Package Contents”.

The internal folder structure may vary between apps, but you can be sure that every Mac app will have a Contents folder with a MacOS subfolder in it. Inside the MacOS directory, there’s an extension-less file with the exact same name as the app itself. This file can be anything really, but in its simplest form it’s a shell script. As it turns out, this folder/file structure is all it takes to create a functional app!

After this discovery, Thomas Aylott came up with a clever “appify” script that allows you to easily create Mac apps from shell scripts.…

Installing and using appify is pretty straightforward if you’re used to working with UNIX.

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This post actually dates from 2010, but had it confirmed that it still works on the latest version of macOS.
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Amazon denies report of accepting bitcoin as payment • Reuters

Reuters Staff:

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Amazon.com on Monday denied a media report saying the e-commerce giant was looking to accept bitcoin payments by the end of the year.

The report from London’s City A.M. newspaper, citing an unnamed “insider”, sent the world’s biggest cryptocurrency up as much as 14.5% before it trimmed gains to last trade 6% higher at $37,684.04.

“Notwithstanding our interest in the space, the speculation that has ensued around our specific plans for cryptocurrencies is not true,” said a spokesperson from Amazon.

“We remain focused on exploring what this could look like for customers shopping on Amazon.”

The company on July 22 posted a job opening for a digital currency and blockchain product lead.

A growing number of companies have started to accept virtual currencies for payment, bringing an asset class shunned by major financial institutions until a few years ago closer to the mainstream.

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1) Not going to be accepting it by the end of the year
2) Focused on exploring what this could look like for customers shopping on Amazon. So, 2022?

Though you can bet that you’ll get the lousiest exchange rate imaginable on any cryptocoins – it would be like the foreign exchange outlets in airport departure lounges, famous for their eyepopping buy/sell spreads which could only be worse if you were standing on the end of a plank over the sea.
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The HART files: inside the group trying to smuggle anti-vaccine myths into Westminster • Logically

Jordan Wildon, Nick Backovic, and Ernie Piper:

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Logically obtained the HART chat logs via a tip from someone inside the group. The person behind the leak, who spoke to Logically on the condition of anonymity, said that they had been researching the group after a friend shared links from HART. 

“I tried to convince this friend that that site was not a good source of information,” they said. “I became a bit obsessed with the HART group. I wanted to understand them. I wanted to be able to show people, with evidence, why the HART group should not be taken seriously.”

After discovering that a subdomain on the HART website linked to the group’s Rocket.Chat, a popular Slack alternative, they found that the chat was accessible to anyone who registered an account. Later, realizing that they hadn’t been removed from the group, they began saving the messages, automatically archiving redacted message content every hour and uploading it to the internet.

Among the group’s most active and notable contributors are businessman and political activist Narice Bernard, former Pfizer executive widely cited in antivax circles Dr. Michael Yeadon, pathologist Dr. Clare Craig, export credit specialist and libertarian Baron Bernie de Haldevang, anti-mask activist Jemma Moran, retired pediatrician and UsForThem campaigner Ros Jones, and Anna Rayner, who once described herself as a “homeopath specialising in treatment of Autism and related disorders, Vaccine Damage and heavy metal toxicity.”

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“Export credit specialist and libertarian” is certainly one of the better portmanteau job titles I’ve ever heard.
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‘Doctor Peyo’: the horse comforting cancer patients in Calais – in pictures • The Guardian

Jeremy Lempin:

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Peyo and his owner once competed at dressage events. Now they spend their time doing rounds in a French hospital, often staying with sick people until the end.

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No, I didn’t expect to be looking at a horse comforting cancer patients when I started the day either, but here we are.
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See what cities are the furthest away from other major cities • Furthest City

Does what it says on the tin. For the UK, it’s pretty much New Zealand (been there) and places in Australia (ditto).

New York? Australia. (Perth.)

Los Angeles? Ah, that’s rather different. (Have a guess before you try it.)
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Apple’s controversial Safari redesign is now optional in the latest iPadOS 15 beta • The Verge

Ian Carlos Campbell:

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Like in macOS Monterey (and every version of Apple’s desktop OS in recent history), tabs will once again live in their own separate row by default, alleviating some of the crowding that made Apple’s initial compact redesign annoying. The tab experience is now also controlled via a toggle in the Settings app, so if you’re committed to Apple’s original vision, you can enable it with a tap. You can see how the new settings option looks in this screenshot shared by Federico Viticci.

On iOS 15, the fourth beta also includes the return of the dedicated Reload button, one-tap access to Safari’s Reader mode, and a Share button, according to 9to5Mac.

These kinds of changes are what beta tests are for, and this all could entirely change again before the fall, but it is somewhat notable that this is the second major tweak Apple’s made to the new Safari. The company’s dealt with criticism over its design changes in the past (like iOS 7’s flat UI) but making tabs “normal” again by default does seem to suggest that on at least one element of the new Safari, Apple knows it got it wrong.

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Linking to this as a heads-up: Apple came up with a radical (terrible) new design for Safari across mobile and Mac, and the evidence suggests that those who hate it inside Apple are gradually arm-wrestling it back to something tolerable. There’s still a worrying tendency in Apple to break things that aren’t broken in the interest of “different”.

What’s more is that Google experimented with exactly this redesign for Chrome, internally in 2016. They decided it was awful and never rolled it out. Wonder if Apple will learn from that.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: Anna Kiesenhofer, who won the women’s road cycling at the Olympics, is Austrian, not Dutch – it was the Dutch team that she got away from.

A recurrent proposal is that the Olympics should abandon dope testing altogether. Could that be done safely – and what would happen? CC-licensed photo by France Olympique 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. Five gold rings, but not Christmas. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

‘Ted Lasso’ is back, but no longer an underdog • The New York Times

Jeremy Egner interviews the creators and actors in the hit show:

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Q: What was it about the character, and the concept, that felt as if it could support a longer story?

Jason Sudeikis: The theme and tone of it was just something that was bouncing around in my head. I didn’t want to do the arc of son of a bitch to saint — it had already been crushed by Ricky Gervais as David Brent. So it was like, What about just playing a good guy?

The thing Bill and I talked about in the pitch was this antithesis of the cocktail of a human man who is both ignorant and arrogant, which lo and behold, a Batman-villain version of it became president of the United States right around the same time. What if you played an ignorant guy who was actually curious? When someone used a big word like “vernacular,” he didn’t act like he knew it, but just stops the meeting like, “Question, what does that mean?”

And also the idea of just saying please and thank you — I remember holding doors for people when I first got hired at “Saturday Night Live,” and they would stop, thinking I’m going to hit them in the butt or something. It was always really funny to me, and so it was based on those observations about what was going on with society and discourse, and lack of manners, all rolled into one.

Q: But you also get into darker things Ted’s dealing with, like panic attacks. Why was that important to you?

Sudeikis: We had to work backward, because if you’re going to play this nice guy at a certain age who’s married, then why does he take this job? Well, things must not be great at home. It was always about revealing. I’m going to butcher the Mark Twain quote, but every person’s life is a comedy, a drama and a tragedy. So we had to honour those other two elements, because the comedy part was baked into the premise of the fish-out-of-water, bungling idiot who doesn’t know what he’s doing. And the mustache, obviously.

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“An ignorant guy who’s curious”. A simple recipe for a wonderful series.
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The day the good internet died • The Ringer

Katie Baker loved Google Reader, back in 2011: it made sense of the (internet) world. Then Google killed it:

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It’s the year 2021, and I can’t get enough of the internet. This is an admission of defeat. It’s an acknowledgment of my worst tic, the one where I lie in bed until 3 or 4 a.m. and pull-to-refresh, pull-to-refresh, pull-to-refresh, until Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or my email—or, in my lowest moments, Nextdoor—brings me something, anything new.

Sometimes it’s that blasted “oh hello, are you doomscrolling?” Twitter bot getting retweeted into my feed, or a growth-hacking prompt asking for a time you were so totally you back in the day. Sometimes it’s a blurry photo of a former coworker’s third kid with the caption “tfw you’re the third kid…” or a comment thread in which a friendly neighbor unironically and repeatedly calls the California governor “Gavin Newsuck.” Often it’s sponsored content, and I can never tell which service’s offerings leave me more unsettled: Twitter’s bizarre ads and sponsored posts tend to feature either days-old, extremely specific midgame NBA score updates or The 15 Wacky Photobombs You Have to See To Believe!, whereas on Instagram, the DTC marketing strikes are so hyper-targeted, so surgically precise, that they’re able to routinely home in on exactly the lamp made out of 3D-printed corn that I’ve always wanted in my life.

Such is the duality of the internet these days: It is both worse and better than ever, growing tackier as it strives for bespoke, hosting information so limitless that you can’t find any of it anymore.

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I set my browser to remember 366 days of browsing. Beyond that, it’s either lost or if it matters then it will come back again.
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QR codes are here to stay. So is the tracking they allow • The New York Times

Erin Woo:

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QR codes — essentially a kind of bar code that allows transactions to be touchless — have emerged as a permanent tech fixture from the coronavirus pandemic. Restaurants have adopted them en masse, retailers including CVS and Foot Locker have added them to checkout registers, and marketers have splashed them all over retail packaging, direct mail, billboards and TV advertisements.

But the spread of the codes has also let businesses integrate more tools for tracking, targeting and analytics, raising red flags for privacy experts. That’s because QR codes can store digital information such as when, where and how often a scan occurs. They can also open an app or a website that then tracks people’s personal information or requires them to input it.

As a result, QR codes have allowed some restaurants to build a database of their customers’ order histories and contact information. At retail chains, people may soon be confronted by personalized offers and incentives marketed within QR code payment systems.

“People don’t understand that when you use a QR code, it inserts the entire apparatus of online tracking between you and your meal,” said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union. “Suddenly your offline activity of sitting down for a meal has become part of the online advertising empire.”

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No way that the adtech industry will want to let this narrow chance at getting more data slip.
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The math PhD who just shocked Olympic cycling • WSJ

Jason Gay on the Dutch women’s road cycling victor Anna Kiesenhofer, who zoomed away at the start of the race and never let up:

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Technology was a factor. In professional races, riders are equipped with earpieces that allow them to communicate with team personnel traveling behind in support cars. Riders listen for updates about the course and potential hazards—but also, importantly, they can be told what riders are up the road, and what sort of effort is needed to catch up. 

Olympic road racing allows no such technology. The riders have no radio contact with cars. They get time gap information from motorbikes on the course, or on occasions when they’re within earshot of team personnel, but this information delivery is spottier than someone in your ear, telling you exactly what’s going on.

This is apparently why the Dutch super team [back in the peloton] did not ramp up a ferocious pursuit of Kiesenhofer in the closing kilometers. After collecting the remains of the original breakaway, they thought the reel-in work was done. 

You may have seen it by now: the Dutch veteran racer van Vleuten, crossing the finish line next to the speedway grandstand, smiling, arms raised, under the impression that she’d won gold. She didn’t know Kiesenhofer had clinched it already. [A colossal, relatively, 75 seconds earlier]

Now there was heartbreak amid the surprise. A gold medal would have been a poetic result for van Vleuten. In 2016, she’d spent the night of the women’s road race in a hospital in Rio de Janeiro after a horrifying crash that occurred as she was leading the race, likely en route to gold.

Now gold eluded her again, in far more surreal fashion. 

Van Vleuten later confessed to “mixed feelings.” She was proud of her beautiful silver medal— the first of her career—but she sounded frustrated by the confusion and the lack of race radios to give clarity about what was going on.

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Always fascinating how one way or another, technology plays a key role in the winners.
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The transhuman Olympics • Applied Divinity Studies

“ADS” (I assume) suggests that we stop dope-testing at the Olympics:

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Freedom from unfair drug-testing is only the beginning. An improved Olympics would require radical overhaul, but could at least begin with the following principles:

1. No drug-testing of any kind. Since it’s not feasible to conduct an anti-doping regime, the process should be abandoned entirely in favor of harm reduction. The billions of dollars we currently spend on an antiquated anti-doping regime could instead be spent on developing safer steroid alternatives, and investigating the safety of existing compounds.

As basic mitigation against really extreme abuses, medals would be awarded on the day of competition, but not officially confirmed until the next 4-year cycle, after verifying that the athlete remains alive and in generally good health.

2. A permanent Olympic village and stadium. The process for selecting cities enables corruption, not to mention “high debt, wasteful infrastructure and onerous maintenance obligations“, as well as mass displacements, human rights violations, forced evictions, and the over-policing of vulnerable communities. Trying to host the cities in unsuitable environments also leads to athletes playing on “burning sand“ and risk of heat stroke alongside “oppressive humidity“. Instead, a permanent Olympic village should be built to host athletes year round. Since performance enhancing drugs will remain illegal in many countries, the village could also serve as a safe-haven where crucial drug categories are decriminalized, ensuring equal treatment for athletes regardless of country of origin…

3. Liberalize Equipment Restrictions. Nike’s Vaporfly lead to a record sub 2-hour marathon time by Eliud Kipchoge in 2019, but has since been banned in Olympic competition. This has a chilling effect on innovation, and hampers the development of improved athletic technology. The LZR Racer was subject to similar regulation, resulting in 93 new world records, before being banned for providing an “unfair advantage” in a newly invented phenomenon dubbed “technological doping“. This goes beyond mere cultural stagnation, it is the active impairment of technological innovation.

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Initially attractive. However: how far *down* in sport would you allow drugs? Only the Olympics? But what about the qualifying competitions? World Championships? National championships? Regional championships? Regional competitions? Amateur competitions? Friendly competitions? As a proposal, it’s superficially attractive, but it unravels as soon as you pull at it. Would participants in Park Run do a line before heading off?

By contrast, I do like the suggestion that a random amateur should be included in each competition, to show TV viewers just how incredibly good the top-flight competitors are. (Via Nathan T.)
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MVT: a forensic tool to look for signs of infection in smartphone devices • Github

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Mobile Verification Toolkit (MVT) is a collection of utilities to simplify and automate the process of gathering forensic traces helpful to identify a potential compromise of Android and iOS devices.

It has been developed and released by the Amnesty International Security Lab in July 2021 in the context of the Pegasus project along with a technical forensic methodology and forensic evidence.

Warning: MVT is a forensic research tool intended for technologists and investigators. Using it requires understanding the basics of forensic analysis and using command-line tools. This is not intended for end-user self-assessment. If you are concerned with the security of your device please seek expert assistance.

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So, not to actually use (though do let me know if you’re capable of using this), but it’s good to know that this exists. Though I suppose we also need an accompanying file listing people who you can trust to install and run it.

Apple released a point-fix update to iOS on Monday which may be a fix for at least one of the vulnerabilities exploited here.
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Bleach peddler Kerri Rivera appears to have been raided by German police • Vice

Anna Merlan:

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Messages posted to a Telegram group run by Kerri Rivera, a pseudo-medical expert who advocates for the use of a dangerous bleach solution to “cure” autism and other serious illnesses, say she’s being criminally charged as a result of advice she gave to a parent. A person who said they were speaking on Rivera’s behalf posted a message, ostensibly written from her perspective, to her Telegram group on July 21; the message said that her home was raided by police on July 13 and that she is accused of causing bodily harm to a child whose parent she advised on Telegram. It also called the claim that she’d harmed the child “impossible.” 

Rivera is a longtime advocate for the use of chlorine dioxide, a substance that, when mixed with citric acid, forms a powerful and dangerous bleaching agent. She has falsely claimed it can “cure” autism and, more recently, suggested it can treat COVID-19. (Chlorine dioxide is also marketed under the name Miracle Mineral Solution, or MMS, most infamously by the Genesis II Church in Florida, run by a man named Mark Grenon. Grenon and three of his sons were recently indicted on charges related to their sale of MMS.)

Journalists and activists monitoring Rivera’s activities believe she moved several years ago to Bremerhaven, Germany. Bremerhaven police declined to comment on the reported raid, writing, “Unfortunately, we are not allowed to give you any information about individual persons for reasons of data protection.”

…Two activists, Fiona O’Leary and Melissa Eaton, both say they reported Rivera to German authorities. Eaton, a US-based activist who’s gone undercover in Facebook groups where parents are discussing giving their kids chlorine dioxide, told Motherboard that she reported Rivera to German police and consumer protection agencies.

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I was in touch with O’Leary and Eaton when I was writing Social Warming: they’re quoted in the chapter about social networks’ response to the pandemic. As they point out, Facebook in particular is lax about “treatments” such as Rivera’s (which harm children). But it seems like Germany’s police might be more interested.
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Covid cases in US may have been undercounted by 60%, study shows • The Guardian

Jessica Glenza:

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The study incorporated data on deaths, the number of tests administered each day and the proportion that come back positive. Importantly, it also incorporated data from studies of people randomly sampled for Covid-19 in Indiana and Ohio.

Random sample surveys provide strong evidence of actual prevalence of a disease because they do not rely on people seeking out tests, which often fail to capture asymptomatic infections.

Based on analysis of that data, researchers found as many as 65 million Americans may have been infected. Official tallies put the number at about 33 million. The University of Washington researchers estimated that 60% of all cases were missed, with only one in every 2.3 cases counted in Indiana and Ohio.

On Monday, the Covid case count maintained by Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and commonly referred to by media outlets stood at nearly 34.5 million

Undercounts can “depend on the severity of the pandemic and the amount of testing in that state”, said Nicholas J Irons, a study co-author and postdoctoral student.

“If you have a state with severe pandemic but limited testing, the undercount can be very high and you’re missing the vast majority of infections that are occurring,” he said. “Or, you could have a situation where testing is widespread and the pandemic is not as severe. There, the undercount rate would be lower.”

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The recorded cases in the UK will be an undercount too, particularly from the first wave when there weren’t enough tests. The ONS says we’re up to 92% of adults having antibodies (from the disease or immunisation). Cases would be miles below that, of course.
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What is behind the latest fall in cases of Covid across the UK? • The Guardian

Ian Sample:

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Is it because of the school holidays or testing?
There are no new cases without new testing. As Donald Trump declared in May last year: “If we didn’t do any testing, we would have very few cases.” Likewise, substantial changes in testing patterns can feed through into the case numbers. As schools closed in July for the summer holidays, student contact will have fallen off, reducing transmission, but testing will have fallen too, whether infections have declined or not. Given that school pupils have some of the highest rates of Covid in the country, a large shift in how often they test could feed into the decline in recorded cases. Difficulties in accessing testing because of capacity problems would have a similar impact, as would people choosing not to be tested. On this issue at least, an answer should come soon. The Office of National Statistics runs an infection survey that captures case numbers in the community each week. If that shows a decline soon, the trend will be far more convincing.

Could the ‘pingdemic’ be driving down cases?
Hundreds of thousands of people have been sent into isolation by the NHS app in recent weeks. That in itself has curbed, as intended, the spread of the virus. But frustration with being pinged, and widespread media coverage of the “pingdemic” that has raised awareness of the problem, have led some people to delete the app. Young people, who are less likely to be vaccinated and have the highest rates of infection, are deleting it more than others, if polling is reliable. Human behaviour is the toughest variable to predict in all of this.

What about the Euros?
One-off sporting events are not expected to drive vast numbers of new infections. But during the Euro 2020 tournament there was a solid rise in cases across the country among males aged between 15 and 44. That trend has now reversed. The steady increase in infections may have bumped up national case numbers, particularly in July, only for them to fall back the fortnight after the final. Prof Kao said a link to the football was “entirely plausible”.

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Blame it on the Euros? Seems very likely that if you pack a ton of people into pubs and sitting rooms and (to a lesser extent) public transport, you’re going to give Covid a wonderful boost.
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Meet the people who warn the world about new covid variants • MIT Technology Review

Cat Ferguson:

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In April 2020, a handful of prominent virologists in the UK and Australia proposed a system of letters and numbers for naming lineages, or new branches, of the covid family. It had a logic, and a hierarchy, even though the names it generated—like B.1.1.7—were a bit of a mouthful.

One of the authors on the paper was Áine O’Toole, a PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh. Soon she’d become the primary person actually doing that sorting and classifying, eventually combing through hundreds of thousands of sequences by hand.

She says: “Very early on, it was just who was available to curate the sequences. That ended up being my job for a good bit. I guess I never understood quite the scale we were going to get to.”

She quickly set about building software to assign new genomes to the right lineages. Not long after that, another researcher, postdoc Emily Scher, built a machine-learning algorithm to speed things up even more. 

They named the software Pangolin, a tongue-in-cheek reference to a debate about the animal origin of covid. (The whole system is now simply known as Pango.)

The naming system, along with the software to implement it, quickly became a global essential. Although the WHO has recently started using Greek letters for variants that seem especially concerning, like delta, those nicknames are for the public and the media. Delta actually refers to a growing family of variants, which scientists  call by their more precise Pango names: B.1.617.2, AY.1, AY.2, and AY.3.

“When alpha emerged in the UK, Pango made it very easy for us to look for those mutations in our genomes to see if we had that lineage in our country too,” says Jolly. “Ever since then, Pango has been used as the baseline for reporting and surveillance of variants in India.”

Because Pango offers a rational, orderly approach to what would otherwise be chaos, it may forever change the way scientists name viral strains—allowing experts from all over the world to work together with a shared vocabulary. Brito says: “Most likely, this will be a format we’ll use for tracking any other new virus.”

«

The complexity is colossal: from 524 sequences in March 2020 to 35,000 by May 2020. Whereas for flu in 2019, the total was just 40,000.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Despite being seen by his peers as the world’s best climber, Adam Ondra might not even get a medal competing in this year’s Olympic Games – because of its odd format.CC-licensed photo by Mattias Kanhov 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. Delighted that our decision to “let it rip” worked. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Have you considered ordering Social Warming, my latest book?

He couldn’t get over his fiancee’s death. So he brought her back as an AI chatbot • SF Chronicle

Jason Fagone:

»

Last summer, using a borrowed beta-testing credential, [Jason] Rohrer devised a “chatbot” interface that was driven by GPT-3. He made it available to the public through his website. He called the service Project December. Now, for the first time, anyone could have a naturalistic text chat with an A.I. directed by GPT-3, typing back and forth with it on Rohrer’s site.

Users could select from a range of built-in chatbots, each with a distinct style of texting, or they could design their own bots, giving them whatever personality they chose.

Joshua had waded into Project December by degrees, starting with the built-in chatbots. He engaged with “William,” a bot that tried to impersonate Shakespeare, and “Samantha,” a friendly female companion modeled after the A.I. assistant in the movie “Her.” Joshua found both disappointing; William rambled about a woman with “fiery hair” that was “red as a fire,” and Samantha was too clingy.

But as soon as he built his first custom bot — a simulation of Star Trek’s Spock, whom he considered a hero — a light clicked on: By feeding a few Spock quotes from an old TV episode into the site, Joshua summoned a bot that sounded exactly like Spock, yet spoke in original phrases that weren’t found in any script.

As Joshua continued to experiment, he realized there was no rule preventing him from simulating real people. What would happen, he wondered, if he tried to create a chatbot version of his dead fiancee?

There was nothing strange, he thought, about wanting to reconnect with the dead: People do it all the time, in prayers and in dreams. In the last year and a half, more than 600,000 people in the U.S. and Canada have died of COVID-19, often suddenly, without closure for their loved ones, leaving a raw landscape of grief. How many survivors would gladly experiment with a technology that lets them pretend, for a moment, that their dead loved one is alive again — and able to text?

That night in September, Joshua hadn’t actually expected it to work. Jessica was so special, so distinct; a chatbot could never replicate her voice, he assumed. Still, he was curious to see what would happen.

And he missed her.

«

It’s like “Her”, the film and the Black Mirror episode “Be Right Back” – which both aired in 2013. Technology is catching up with art: current delay, eight years.
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Tweet Like Me • John Herrick

Herrick has built a website which uses GPT-3 plus your tweets to produce a facsimile of you. Or perhaps a simulacrum? Here’s one it generated for me.

Which is a bit concerning, really. I don’t think I’ve ever tweeted anything about the Bible or Satan.
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Adam Ondra is the world’s most accomplished climber. He may not win an Olympic medal • The New York Times

Authored by the NY Times’s visual team:

»

In speed climbing, athletes race head to head on a wall that has an identical setup in every race (think of it as a vertical 15-meter dash). In lead, athletes have one chance to climb as high as they can in six minutes. In bouldering, they try to get to the top of four routes. They have four minutes for each “problem.”

Speed climbing is an all-out sprint to the top of a 50-foot-wall, and in Japan, it will count a full third toward the gold medal. It’s by far Ondra’s weakest event. One of the problems slowing him down is that he is attacking it as a climber instead of a sprinter.

“This is another discipline — it’s not real climbing,” said Petr Klofac, Ondra’s training coach. “It’s more running and sprinting. You have to run on this thing.” Here is Ondra training on the speed wall.

You might think Ondra looks pretty good at speed climbing. But don’t be fooled: He’s likely to be among the slowest at the Games.

His best time in competition is 7.46 seconds. The record for the fastest time was set in May by Indonesian climber Veddriq Leonardo, at 5.20 seconds. The two climbs, side by side, show what Ondra may face in this event.

Speed climbing will play well on television, which is why it was chosen, but the decision to include it has drawn criticism from athletes because before it was selected for the Games, speed specialists rarely competed in bouldering and lead climbing, just as Ondra never bothered with speed.

«

That’s a text extract, but to understand why climbing could be the (new) hit of the Games, you should read/watch the whole thing. The lead climbing will leave you gasping, the bouldering moreso. The climbing events start on August 3. (Via Sophie Warnes.)
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A defunct video hosting site is flooding normal websites with hardcore porn • Vice

Matthew Gault and Jason Koebler:

»

Hardcore porn is embedded all over regular-ass websites because a porn company has purchased the domain of a popular, defunct video hosting site. 

As pointed out by Twitter user @dox_gay, hardcore porn is now embedded on the pages of the Huffington Post, New York magazine, The Washington Post, and a host of other websites. This is because a porn site called 5 Star Porn HD bought the domain for Vidme, a brief YouTube competitor founded in 2014 and shuttered in 2017. Its Twitter account is still up, but the domain lapsed. 

Seemingly any vid.me embeds now redirect to the 5 Star Porn HD homepage. The site vid.me also redirects there. For example, if you check out this New York magazine article about former House Majority leader John Boehner’s “creepy kissy face,” you will see photos of Boehner but also images of a man with a gigantic penis fucking a woman. [Not any more – CA]

Archived versions of this page show that there was formerly a vid.me embed on the page; the page’s source code shows the same.

Over at the Huffington Post, an article about Martin Shkreli being banned from Twitter is augmented with videos titled “Getting Into Porsha’s Ass” and “Why Don’t We Tag Team Your GF?”

A pre-Trump-presidency Uproxx article about Trump’s performance at a GOP debate is illustrated with thumbnails for videos titled “Aria Lee Is Back For More” and “Naughty Spy Girls Part 2.”

«

That was just before the weekend, but there was clearly a blitz to remove all those vid.me embeds since then, so you’re fairly safe. Shows the risk that we take with third-party embeds, though; explains also the tendency to rely on those which come from the really big companies. And so the big get bigger.
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How hot could Britain get? Prepare for temperatures of 40ºC • The Sunday Times

Ben Spencer:

»

Britain could experience its first 40ºC day within ten years as intense heatwaves become more frequent, scientists have warned.

If carbon emissions continue to rise and global warming is not curbed the UK will cross the 40ºC threshold more and more often, modelling suggests. Under the worst projections, by the end of the century this temperature would be reached every three years.

Last week’s heatwave peaked at 32.2ºC at Heathrow on Tuesday, and Northern Ireland recorded its highest ever temperature of 31.4ºC in Armagh on Thursday. By the weekend the hot spell had given way to cooler and unsettled weather.

But Chloe Brimicombe, a heatwave hazards researcher at the University of Reading, said last week’s uncomfortable heat could soon be put in the shade. “Southern England could see its first 40-degree day within the next ten years,” she said. The highest temperature seen in the UK so far was 38.7ºC, recorded in July 2019 in Cambridge. The five hottest days have all taken place since 1990.

So what will a 40ºC day mean for us? “Most of our rail network would not be able to run in those sorts of temperatures,” Brimicombe said. “We would see increased pressure on water resources, productivity would be reduced, and it could affect our livestock and our crops.”

«

“End of the century” always feels like a poor offering: it’s 80 years away. People old enough to understand the phrase will in all probability be dead. Give us a 50-year horizon to worry about.
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CNBC launching climate change coverage initiative • Talking Biz News

Chris Roush:

»

Matt [Rosoff] pitched this concept [to CNBC management] with a simple premise: Coverage of climate today, is a lot like coverage of technology 30 years ago. It’s mostly covered by niche, trade publications and small teams at a handful of mainstream outlets. Yet, climate, like technology, is getting built into the business plans of nearly every company. It deserves a fuller examination.

This will take CNBC into topics such as new technology being used to reduce carbon emissions and adapt to an increasingly hostile environment, the billions of dollars being poured into clean energy, the changing scope of business planning and practices, the political and regulatory impacts, and personal strategies for preserving wealth and livelihood.

Cat Clifford, who has been covering climate change and entrepreneurship for CNBC Make It, will focus primarily on technologies such as clean energy, battery technology, carbon capture, mitigation, adaptation, and far-future tech, as well as business planning.

Emma Newburger, who has covered climate politics over the last two years for CNBC.com, will focus on policy. From her new home base in Los Angeles, she will tell the stories of the people and businesses most affected by the changing climate of the U.S. West. She will move over from our politics team.

Lora Kolodny will continue to cover Tesla from the technology team, leading our reporting on the most influential business in climate tech to date. She will now also focus her non-Tesla reporting on influential players in renewable energy, sustainable transportation, food and agriculture, and solutions that enable businesses, communities or individuals to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

«

Good that one major American (business) TV network is actually going to reorient itself around this. Expect more and more news organisations to do this. Eventually, climate will be on a par with politics as the “most important” desks. Hopefully before it’s too late.
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Is Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin the future of space exploration? • Smithsonian Magazine

Charles Fishman:

»

“When you look at expendable rockets today, the cost of propellant is only about 1% of the cost of the mission,” [Bezos] says. “The big costs come from throwing that aerospace-grade hardware away. With reusability, in theory, you can see a path to lowering the cost of access to space by a factor of 100.” 

In other words, a launch that today costs $60 million or $100 million would cost just $1 million. “That’s gigantic,” Bezos says. “It would change everything.”

And much as Amazon isn’t choosy about what you can buy—in fact, it wants you to be able to buy anything and everything—Blue Origin is rather agnostic about what people end up doing in space. The company’s goal is to get them there. “Personally, I would love to go to space,” Bezos says. “But it’s not the thing that’s most important to me. I believe that we are sitting on the edge of a golden age of space exploration. Right on the edge. The thing that I would be most proud of, when I’m 80 years old, is if Blue Origin can lower the cost of access to space by such a large amount that there can be a dynamic, entrepreneurial explosion in space—just as we’ve seen over the last 20 years on the internet.”

…Bezos isn’t building a rocket business for profitability in 2020. He’s aiming for market dominance in 2040.

…Aerospace insiders aren’t sceptical of the entrepreneurs’ ability to master complex technology, just of the need for it. Bezos has predicted 50 to 100 launches a year for Blue Origin alone in the not-too-distant future. The sceptics ask: Where will the demand come from?

«

I’m with the sceptics. I’ve seen a lot of space launches go (it’s what they do), but even getting to the ISS (which Musk’s rocket managed) is barely useful.
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Government spends hundreds of thousands of pounds on contracts for a digital identity scheme • The i

Poppy Wood:

»

DCMS has already spent more than £600,000 on the scheme, according to official contracts.

Oliver Wyman, a US-based management consultancy, was awarded more than £150,000 by DCMS last October to develop a framework for digital identities.

The company has previously suggested they could be used to replace online passwords, office security passes, car rental checks, hotel check-ins and access to government services and digital health records.

But David Davis, former Brexit minister and Conservative MP, told i it was “extraordinary that the Government has spent all this money despite the matter not going to Parliament”.

He said that any digital identity scheme would “open up the public to the loss of information and the possible prevalence of hackers.”

“For centuries, the British people have never had to present our papers to a policeman or official — that’s why we’re a free country. Frankly, it is constitutionally ignorant of the department to go down this route,” he said.

Mr Davis told i the plans were “especially extraordinary in the context of vaccine certificates”.

The Government has faced fierce backlash over plans to make vaccine passports mandatory for entry to nightclubs and other large-scale venues from September, with privacy groups warning it will create a “two-tier society”. 

Mr Davis said: “The argument against vaccine certificates when they were first discussed was that it was the thin end of a wedge into an ID card. Some at the time dismissed that as paranoid — but this demonstrates it was entirely real.”

«

Seems rather strange that this hasn’t had any scrutiny at all in Parliament and yet (comparatively) huge sums are being spent on it.
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The YouTubers who blew the whistle on an anti-vax plot • BBC News

Charlie Haynes and Flora Carmichael:

»

“It started with an email” says Mirko Drotschmann, a German YouTuber and journalist.

Mirko normally ignores offers from brands asking him to advertise their products to his more than 1.5 million subscribers. But the sponsorship offer he received in May this year was unlike any other. An influencer marketing agency called Fazze offered to pay him to promote what it said was leaked information that suggested the death rate among people who had the Pfizer vaccine was almost three times that of the AstraZeneca jab.

The information provided wasn’t true.

It quickly became apparent to Mirko that he was being asked to spread disinformation to undermine public confidence in vaccines in the middle of a pandemic.

“I was shocked,” says Mirko “then I was curious, what’s behind all that?”

In France, science YouTuber Léo Grasset received a similar offer. The agency offered him 2000 euros if he would take part. Fazze said it was acting for a client who wished to remain anonymous. “That’s a huge red flag” says Léo.

Both Léo and Mirko were appalled by the false claims. They pretended to be interested in order to try to find out more and were provided with detailed instructions about what they should say in their videos.

In stilted English, the brief instructed them to “Act like you have the passion and interest in this topic.” It told them not to mention the video had a sponsor – and instead pretend they were spontaneously giving advice out of concern for their viewers.

Social media platforms have rules that ban not disclosing that content is sponsored. In France and Germany it’s also illegal.

Fazze’s brief told influencers to share a story in French newspaper Le Monde about a data leak from the European Medicines Agency. The story was genuine, but didn’t include anything about vaccine deaths. But in this context it would give the false impression that the death rate statistics had come from the leak.

«

One Indian influencer did take the bait. Fazze is part of a digital marketing company registered in the UK and, it says here, Russia.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A single typo – a missing ampersand – meant that Chromebook users who updated recently were locked out of their machines. But don’t worry, a fix is rolling out. CC-licensed photo by Martin Bekkelund on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 11 links for you. The idea of letting things rip is ridiculous and we condemn anyone who suggested it. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Intel CEO says chip shortage could stretch into 2023 • WSJ

Asa Fitch:

»

Intel Corp chief executive Pat Gelsinger sees the global semiconductor shortage potentially stretching into 2023, adding a leading industry voice to the growing view that the chip-supply disruptions hitting companies and consumers won’t wane soon.

The worldwide shortage has fueled rising prices for some consumer gadgets. Meanwhile, the auto industry has been particularly hard-hit as the lack of a key component causes production delays. German car maker Volkswagen AG this month warned the global shortage could worsen over the next six months. Others have said they were bracing for problems through next year.

It could take one or two years to get back to a reasonable supply-and-demand balance in the semiconductor industry, Mr. Gelsinger said in an interview after the company posted second-quarter earnings on Thursday. “We have a long way to go yet,” he said. “It just takes a long time to build [manufacturing] capacity.”

Supply shortages should start showing signs of easing later this year, Mr. Gelsinger said, echoing comments from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world’s largest contract chip maker. TSMC last week said the chip shortage that has hampered car makers could start to ease in the next few months after it ramped up its production of auto chips.

TSMC and Intel are adding new chip-production plants, though some of that capacity won’t be ready for about two more years.

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Anti-vaccine groups changing into ‘dance parties’ on Facebook to avoid detection • NBC News

Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny:

»

Some anti-vaccination groups on Facebook are changing their names to euphemisms like “Dance Party” or “Dinner Party,” and using code words to fit those themes in order to skirt bans from Facebook, as the company attempts to crack down on misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines.

The groups, which are largely private and unsearchable but retain large user bases accrued during the years Facebook permitted anti-vaccination content, also swap out language to fit the new themes and provide code legends, according to screenshots provided to NBC News by multiple members of the groups.

One major “dance party” group has more than 40,000 followers and has stopped allowing new users amid public scrutiny. The backup group for “Dance Party,” known as “Dinner Party” and created by the same moderators, has more than 20,000 followers.

Other anti-vaccine influencers on Instagram use similar language swaps, such as referring to vaccinated people as “swimmers” and the act of vaccination as joining a “swim club.”

A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment but pointed NBC News to the company’s efforts to drive users to authoritative sources on Covid-19 vaccines.

«

Even more proof that Facebook doesn’t have any idea of the scale of misinformation on the platform. It could legitimately think these really were swimming and “dance” groups.
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Senators target Section 230 to fight COVID-19 vaccine misinformation • The Verge

Makena Kelly:

»

As coronavirus cases rise in unvaccinated populations, Democratic senators are introducing a new bill Thursday that would strip away Facebook and other social media platforms’ Section 230 liability shield if they amplify harmful public health misinformation.

The Health Misinformation Act, introduced by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) Thursday, would create a carveout in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act opening social media platforms like Facebook up to lawsuits for hosting some dangerous health misinformation. The bill directs the Health and Human Services secretary to issue guidelines on what should be classified as “health misinformation.”

The carveout would only apply in situations where online misinformation is related to an existing public health emergency like the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, as declared by the HHS secretary. It would only open a platform up to liability if the content is being algorithmically amplified, not through “a neutral mechanism, such as through the use of chronological functionality.”

“For far too long, online platforms have not done enough to protect the health of Americans. These are some of the biggest, richest companies in the world and they must do more to prevent the spread of deadly vaccine misinformation,” Klobuchar said in a statement Thursday. “The coronavirus pandemic has shown us how lethal misinformation can be and it is our responsibility to take action.”

It’s not clear that removing Section 230 protections would have the effect lawmakers intend. Section 230 protects platforms from liability for illegal content hosted on their platforms — but misinformation is not illegal in itself.

«

The idea that S 230 shouldn’t apply to information that has been algorithmically amplified has been bouncing around for a while. But this is not a great idea – as Mike Masnick of Techdirt pointed out on Twitter, what happens when you get a Republican president who decides on a completely different definition of “health misinformation”? It’s not even as if Facebook can recognise it.
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Everyone cites that ‘bugs are 100x more expensive to fix in production’ research, but the study might not even exist • The Register

Tim Anderson:

»

“Software research is a train wreck,” says Hillel Wayne, a Chicago-based software consultant who specialises in formal methods, instancing the received wisdom that bugs are way more expensive to fix once software is deployed.

Wayne did some research, noting that “if you Google ‘cost of a software bug’ you will get tons of articles that say ‘bugs found in requirements are 100x cheaper than bugs found in implementations.’ They all use this chart from the ‘IBM Systems Sciences Institute’… There’s one tiny problem with the IBM Systems Sciences Institute study: it doesn’t exist.”

Laurent Bossavit, an Agile methodology expert and technical advisor at software consultancy CodeWorks in Paris, has dedicated some time to this matter, and has a post on GitHub called “Degrees of intellectual dishonesty”. Bossavit referenced a successful 1987 book by Roger S Pressman called Software Engineering: a Practitioner’s Approach, which states: “To illustrate the cost impact of early error detection, we consider a series of relative costs that are based on actual cost data collected for large software projects [IBM81].”

The reference to [IBM81] notes that the information comes from “course notes” at the IBM Systems Sciences Institute. Bossavit discovered, though, that many other publications have referenced Pressman’s book as the authoritative source for this research, disguising its tentative nature.

«

Terence Eden (occasionally linked here) had a similar problem with the phrase “Big Data is a dataset too big to fit in an Excel spreadsheet”.
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The truth behind the Amazon mystery seeds from China • The Atlantic

Chris Heath circles back (as we say) to that mystery of the packets of seeds from China that arrived unexpectedly last year:

»

Culley ordered those seeds herself, Amazon told me. I took this with a grain of salt. Culley had mentioned that she had bought seeds much earlier in the year, and this matched a pattern I’d observed—that many people who received mystery seeds had previously made genuine seed orders. Maybe, I speculated, the brushers thought it made sense to send something that the recipients were used to receiving.

I assumed that Amazon was speciously linking these different events. I asked Culley to go into her order history and pull out her invoices, so we could show that the seeds she knew she had ordered had been delivered long before the mystery seeds arrived.

What she found was not what she—or I—expected.

On April 25, Culley had ordered three packets of seeds from three different sellers: 100 clematis-flower seeds from C-Pioneer for $1.99, 100 clematis-vine seeds from zhang-yubryy for $1.53, and 25 wisteria seeds from DIANHzu1 for $1.99. Unbeknownst to Culley, these sellers were all Chinese, based in Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Changsha, respectively. Each seller had more negative reviews than positive ones, many complaining about seeds that were delayed, or hadn’t arrived, or had arrived identified as jewelry. And crucially, Culley’s three April orders, the records showed, had not been shipped until between June 15, 2020, and July 7, 2020.

Further corroboration came when I sent this new information to Terry Freeman, the manager of the seed lab at the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food. She had tentatively identified Culley’s seeds as amaranth and pongam tree. But now, knowing what Culley had ordered, she agreed that the larger seeds—the ones Culley had tried to germinate on her windowsill—were probably wisteria. At least one packet seemed to be exactly what Culley had paid for.

This sent me into something of a tailspin. Initially, I had dismissed Amazon’s explanation, and I had cherry-picked Culley’s experience to prove the company wrong. That had backfired. But surely what Amazon was saying couldn’t be generally true?

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(Thanks G for the link.)
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Clubhouse is the big stinker that nobody wants to talk about • Ed Zitron’s Where’s Your Ed At

Ed Zitron:

»

Clubhouse is the elephant in the room in venture, and I believe there is a conscious attempt to not discuss it for fear that it proves that the entire conversation around it was hot air. When everyone desperately rushed to say that it was the next big thing, I asked repeatedly what exactly about it was going to be big, or change things. The answer mostly came down to the idea that we don’t know what the future looks like, and that people were on the waitlist – which is no longer an excuse.

Nick Bilton at Vanity Fair was a rare case of dissent, making a clear warning that this was very much a pandemic app and nothing more – but many people in venture and tech do not seem to want to discuss it as anything other than “a big social network.” The Information questioned whether Clubhouse was the next Foursquare – a promising company with tons of press that ultimately didn’t reach the giddy heights it was “meant to” – but for the most part, people have remained either indifferent or positive about it.

The fact this isn’t regularly discussed is both a bad sign for the app and also a sign, in my opinion, of an industry-wide embarrassment. So many people rushed to join Clubhouse, or discuss what’s big on Clubhouse, or how Clubhouse was the beginning of a “social audio revolution” because they were afraid they’d miss out on the next TikTok, and I’d argue that the press did a woeful job at actually questioning the format.

«

The press – the tech press – tends to be staffed by enthusiasts, because you need to be enthusiastic to keep piling through the relentless onslaught of New Things That Are Soon Gone. Enthusiasts aren’t good at questioning stuff, but then again is that their job? The masses will work out if they can use the New Things. For Clubhouse, unless it gets a massive uplift in India, I think the answer’s no.
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Google pushed a one-character typo to production, bricking Chrome OS devices • Ars Technica

Ron Amadeo:

»

Google says it has fixed a major Chrome OS bug that locked users out of their devices. Google’s bulletin says that Chrome OS version 91.0.4472.165, which was briefly available this week, renders users unable to log in to their devices, essentially bricking them.

Chrome OS automatically downloads updates and switches to the new version after a reboot, so users who reboot their devices are suddenly locked out them. The go-to advice while this broken update is out there is to not reboot.

The bulletin says that a new build, version 91.0.4472.167, is rolling out now to fix the issue, but it could take a “few days” to hit everyone. Users affected by the bad update can either wait for the device to update again or “powerwash” their device—meaning wipe all the local data—to get logged in. Chrome OS is primarily cloud-based, so if you’re not doing something advanced like running Linux apps, this solution presents less of an inconvenience than it would on other operating systems. Still, some users are complaining about lost data.

ChromeOS is open source, so we can get a bit more detail about the fix thanks to Android Police hunting down a Reddit comment from user elitist_ferret. The problem apparently boils down to a single-character typo. Google flubbed a conditional statement in Chrome OS’s Cryptohome VaultKeyset, the part of the OS that holds user encryption keys. The line should read “if (key_data_.has_value() && !key_data_->label().empty()) {” but instead of “&&”—the C++ version of the “AND” operator—the bad update used a single ampersand, breaking the second half of the conditional statement.

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So it’s not just Apple that can screw up on passwords through bad checking. Microsoft’s got some current problems, but nothing quite as egregious.
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Kaseya obtains universal decryptor for REvil ransomware victims • Bleeping Computer

Lawrence Abrams:

»

Kaseya received a universal decryptor that allows victims of the July 2nd REvil ransomware attack to recover their files for free.

On July 2nd, the REvil ransomware operation launched a massive attack by exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in the Kaseya VSA remote management application to encrypt approximately sixty managed service providers and an estimated 1,500 businesses.

After the attack, the threat actors demanded $70 million for a universal decryptor, $5 million for MSPs, and $40,000 for each extension encrypted on a victim’s network.

Soon after, the REvil ransomware gang mysteriously disappeared, and the threat actors shut down their payment sites and infrastructure.

While most victims were not paying, the gang’s disappearance prevented companies who may have needed to purchase a decryptor unable to do so.

Today, Kaseya has stated that they received a universal decryptor for the ransomware attack from a “trusted third party” and are now distributing it to affected customers.

“We can confirm we obtained a decryptor from a trusted third party but can’t share anymore about the source,” Kaseya’s SVP Corporate Marketing Dana Liedholm told BleepingComputer.

“We had the tool validated by an additional third party and have begun releasing it to our customers affected.”

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740 ransomware victims named on data leak sites in Q2 2021: report • ZDNet

Jonathan Greig:

»

More than 700 organizations were attacked with ransomware and had their data posted to data leak sites in Q2 of 2021, according to a new research report from cybersecurity firm Digital Shadows. 

Out of the almost 2,600 victims listed on ransomware data leak sites, 740 of them were named in Q2 2021, representing a 47% increase compared to Q1. 

The report chronicles the quarter’s major events, which included the DarkSide attack on Colonial Pipeline, the attack on global meat processor JBS, and increased law enforcement action from US and European agencies. 

But Digital Shadows’ Photon Research Team found that under the surface, other ransomware trends were emerging. Since the Maze ransomware group helped popularize the data leak site concept, double extortion tactics have become en vogue among groups looking to inflict maximum damage after attacks. 

Digital Shadows tracks the information posted to 31 Dark Web leak sites, giving them access to just how many groups are now stealing data during ransomware attacks and posting it online. 

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Ransomware has zoomed up the charts, and is now the biggest and most expensive problem that most companies and organisations face. Even when decryption keys drop out of the sky (or off the back of a truck).
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Startup claims breakthrough in long-duration batteries • WSJ

Russell Gold:

»

A four-year-old startup says it has built an inexpensive battery that can discharge power for days using one of the most common elements on Earth: iron.

Form Energy Inc.’s batteries are far too heavy for electric cars. But it says they will be capable of solving one of the most elusive problems facing renewable energy: cheaply storing large amounts of electricity to power grids when the sun isn’t shining and wind isn’t blowing.

The work of the Somerville, Mass., company has long been shrouded in secrecy and nondisclosure agreements. It recently shared its progress with The Wall Street Journal, saying it wants to make regulators and utilities aware that if all continues to go according to plan, its iron-air batteries will be capable of affordable, long-duration power storage by 2025.

Its backers include Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a climate investment fund whose investors include Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates and Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos. Form recently initiated a $200 million funding round, led by a strategic investment from steelmaking giant ArcelorMittal SA, MT 1.00% one of the world’s leading iron-ore producers.

Form is preparing to soon be in production of the “kind of battery you need to fully retire thermal assets like coal and natural gas” power plants, said the company’s chief executive, Mateo Jaramillo, who developed Tesla Inc.’s Powerwall battery and worked on some of its earliest automotive powertrains.

«

The chemistry is made to sound simple, but surely won’t be. Fingers crossed this works: it’s very needed.
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How Dominic Cummings always makes things worse • New Statesman

David Gauke was the justice minister under Theresa May:

»

Cummings clearly sees himself as a strategic thinker who has devoted his career to trying to shake up a political and administrative system he considers to be inadequate. He has had extraordinary tactical successes, but these successes have always been essentially destructive; he has never succeeded in replacing what he has destroyed with something better. 

His record is of creating problems faster than he has solved them. After all, what is the result of his supposed ceaseless quest to deliver a system of government that is competent and rigorous and serves the public? Boris Johnson as Prime Minister. 

«

Gauke cuts right to the heart of it. The more Cummings tweets and writes in his post-Johnson existence, the clearer this giant character flaw becomes. Even on Brexit, his most singular achievement, he says nobody can tell yet whether it’s a success. (Many empty supermarket shelves in Northern Ireland suggest not.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

if you’ve ever wondered why Elon Musk is so rich, it’s not because of Tesla’s profits – they’re almost nonexistent. CC-licensed photo by Maurizio Pesce on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 11 links for you. Fairly sure we never suggested people should “rip it up”. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Wikipedia is finally asking big tech to pay up • WIRED

Noam Cohen:

»

Wikipedia is seeking to rebalance its relationships with Google and other big tech firms like Amazon, Facebook, and Apple, whose platforms and virtual assistants lean on Wikipedia as a cost-free virtual crib sheet.

Today, the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates the Wikipedia project in more than 300 languages as well as other wiki-projects, is announcing the launch of a commercial product, Wikimedia Enterprise. The new service is designed for the sale and efficient delivery of Wikipedia’s content directly to these online behemoths (and eventually, to smaller companies too).

Conversations between the foundation’s newly created subsidiary, Wikimedia LLC, and Big Tech companies are already underway, point-people on the project said in an interview, but the next couple of months will be about seeking the reaction of Wikipedia’s thousands of volunteers. Agreements with the firms could be reached as soon as June.

“This is the first time the foundation has recognized that commercial users are users of our service,” says Lane Becker, a senior director at the foundation, who has been ramping up the Enterprise project with a small team. “We’ve known they are there, but we never really treated them as a user base.”

…Once you concede that big platforms will control the flow of commerce and information online, you can focus on how to get your cut. A proud Silicon Valley holdout, the Wikimedia Foundation is finally doing just that. But of course, for a project like Wikipedia and other industries whose products have been siphoned by the platforms, the flip side of Big Tech-funded stability is the threat of dependency. Wikipedia will now necessarily be orienting itself to the demands of the commercial internet, even if it comes in return for sizable payments to support a better, stronger, more diverse community.

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It’s not as radical as changing the licence to prevent unpaid commercial use, but it’s a sensible move to broaden the revenue base.
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Emirati princess phone number appeared on list that included targets of powerful spyware • The Washington Post

Drew Harwell:

»

The princess had been careful, so she left her phone in the cafe’s bathroom. She’d seen what her father could do to women who tried to escape.

She hid in the trunk of a black Audi Q7, then jumped into a Jeep Wrangler as her getaway crew raced that morning from the glittering skyscrapers of Dubai to the rough waves of the Arabian Sea. They launched a dinghy from a beach in neighboring Oman, then, 16 miles out, switched to water scooters. By sunset they’d reached their idling yacht, the Nostromo, and began sailing toward the Sri Lankan coast.

Princess Latifa bint Mohammed al-Maktoum, the 32-year-old daughter of Dubai’s fearsome ruler, believed she was closer than ever to political asylum — and, for the first time, real freedom in the United States, members of her escape team said in interviews.

But there was one threat she hadn’t planned for: The spyware tool Pegasus, which her father’s government was known to have used to secretly hack and track people’s phones. Leaked data shows that by the time armed commandos stormed the yacht, eight days into her escape, operatives had entered the numbers of her closest friends and allies into a system that had also been used for selecting Pegasus surveillance targets.

“Shoot me here. Don’t take me back,” she’d screamed as soldiers dragged her off the boat, roughly 30 miles from the shore, according to a fact-finding judgment by the United Kingdom’s High Court of Justice. Then she disappeared.

«

It’s like something out of a film, but not one with a good ending. Two odd things happened around the broader story of NSO/Pegasus on Wednesday: NSO said it wouldn’t answer any more media inquiries, while Amnesty International said that the list of numbers it had weren’t necessarily all of people who’d been hacked by Pegasus. Both rather odd moves.
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Investigation: how TikTok’s algorithm figures out your deepest desires • WSJ

»

A Wall Street Journal investigation found that TikTok only needs one important piece of information to figure out what you want: the amount of time you linger over a piece of content. Every second you hesitate or rewatch, the app is tracking you.

«

They set up a group of bots, each programmed to show interest in slightly different things, and set them loose on TikTok. The algorithm then did what algorithms do – watch what they showed interest in, tuned to the finest degree. And, as you can probably guess, the algorithm tended to lead them down rabbit holes of deeper and deeper obsession. Dogs? Sure. Depression? Sure. Suicidal ideation? Why not. Oh, no, that shouldn’t be there, the moderators say. Except it is.

There’s no accompanying story (yet?). One wonders how much ByteDance is cooperating, or not, with this.
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Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise? • The BMJ

Richard Smith was the editor of the British Medical Journal (BMJ) until 2004:

»

Ian Roberts, professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, began to have doubts about the honest reporting of trials after a colleague asked if he knew that his systematic review showing the mannitol halved death from head injury was based on trials that had never happened. He didn’t, but he set about investigating the trials and confirmed that they hadn’t ever happened. They all had a lead author who purported to come from an institution that didn’t exist and who killed himself a few years later. The trials were all published in prestigious neurosurgery journals and had multiple co-authors. None of the co-authors had contributed patients to the trials, and some didn’t know that they were co-authors until after the trials were published. When Roberts contacted one of the journals the editor responded that “I wouldn’t trust the data.” Why, Roberts wondered, did he publish the trial? None of the trials have been retracted.

Later Roberts, who headed one of the Cochrane groups, did a systematic review of colloids versus crystalloids only to discover again that many of the trials that were included in the review could not be trusted. He is now sceptical about all systematic reviews, particularly those that are mostly reviews of multiple small trials. He compared the original idea of systematic reviews as searching for diamonds, knowledge that was available if brought together in systematic reviews; now he thinks of systematic reviewing as searching through rubbish. He proposed that small, single centre trials should be discarded, not combined in systematic reviews.

«

The suggestion here is that on average about 20% of medical trials are fatally flawed or untrustworthy – more in some regions. Yet very few are ever retracted, and just float about in the literature.
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Ministers cut off funding to chip factory after sale to Chinese-owned firm • Daily Telegraph

James Titcomb:

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Ministers have cut off taxpayer-funded payments to Britain’s biggest microchip factory after its sale to a Chinese-owned technology company.

UK Research and Investment (UKRI) has suspended grants to Newport Wafer Fab under Government instructions after its sale to Nexperia, The Telegraph understands.

It comes after it emerged that the company had been involved in more than a dozen publicly-backed projects before its sale to Nexperia, including a £5.2m defence initiative.

Earlier this month, Netherlands-based Nexperia took control of Newport Wafer Fab, based in South Wales. 

The Dutch company is owned by Wingtech, a Chinese company partially owned by Beijing-backed investors.

Boris Johnson has ordered Sir Stephen Lovegrove, the National Security Advisor, to review the deal, with a decision expected within weeks.

Pressure on the Government to act rose yesterday after it emerged that Newport Wafer Fab is part of a scheme to use advanced semiconductor technology to support cutting edge radar and satellite systems, alongside defence companies Leonardo, MBDA and Arris.

In total, Newport Wafer Fab is involved in more than a dozen Government-funded programmes worth around £55m, according to one source close to the deal.

«

The numbers involved seem small, but it’s still the largest (last?) wafer fab company in the UK.
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Twitter for iOS begins testing dislike button for some users • 9to5Mac

Chance Miller:

»

Last year, Twitter’s chief product officer Kayvon Beykpour confirmed that the social network was “exploring” the idea of adding a dislike button to the app. Now, it appears that Twitter is in the early stages of testing a dislike/downvote button for some users on iOS.

Twitter confirmed this new test in a tweet posted to the Twitter Support account. The company says that some users on iOS will see new upvote and downvote options on tweets. Downvotes will not be shown publicly, while upvotes will be shown as likes, the company says, implying that the feature is only intended for internal metrics.

According to Twitter, the goal of this new test is to “understand the types of replies you find relevant” in a conversation. The prompt that appears to users in the Twitter for iOS app reads as follows:

Dislikes aren’t public or visible to the author, while Likes are. They both help us understand what people think is valuable to the conversation.

Twitter is testing multiple different designs for this new feature, including upvote and downvote buttons, likes and dislikes, and pairing the classic heart with a downvote…

«

Immediately a lot of people are worried about “hate-bombing” of tweets (pick a divisive topic and those on either side are certain that their opponents will deploy this mercilessly). Presumably that will happen and the algorithm will learn to ignore it. But what is the purpose? To downgrade certain sorts of users? To build a bigger idea about what sort of tweets are regarded as good or bad? The latter is very grandiose.
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The pain of the never-ending work check-in • WSJ

Rachel Feintzeig:

»

Caroline Kim Oh, a leadership coach based near New York City, says that in recent years, many of her clients have started feeling like meetings are just something that happens to them.

“You have no control over your workday,” she says. “They’re just popping up.”

Working from home and living through a crisis seems to have made it worse. In an April survey from meeting scheduling tool Doodle, 69% of 1,000 full-time remote workers said their meetings had increased since the pandemic started, with 56% reporting that their swamped calendars were hurting their job performance.

Constant check-ins have become some bosses’ version of micromanaging, a way to keep tabs on workers they don’t trust. Coordination that used to happen by swiveling your chair or walking across the hall now requires extra formality and time for everyone still spread out across home offices. Plus, there’s the sense that empathetic leaders should stay in touch during moments of transition, whether that’s as the world was shutting down last year or as we head back to headquarters now.

The message to managers is often, “Hey, check in with your employees. See if they’re OK. Care more,” says Ms. Kim Oh, the executive coach. Sometimes caring more means saving a worker from one more Zoom, she adds.

What happens next? If we all go back to work five days a week, we might return to those efficient, in-person check-ins, says Raffaella Sadun, a Harvard Business School professor who has studied meeting loads before and during the pandemic. But organizations testing a hybrid set-up should brace for a mess.

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Love the illustration.
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Biden official: ‘We don’t know exactly why’ ransomware gang vanished from the web • POLITICO

Nahal Toosi:

»

The Biden administration does not know exactly why ransomware gang REvil, thought to be based in Russia, has vanished from the dark web, a senior official said Tuesday.

But the United States will continue to place pressure on criminal groups like REvil, as well as governments, such as Russia, that are responsible for the territory where these groups operate, the administration official added.

The Biden administration official’s comments, given in an interview with POLITICO, were the clearest yet to suggest that the United States did not play a direct role in taking down REvil’s websites and other online infrastructure in recent days.

REvil is suspected of targeting a meat supplier and a major information-technology vendor in recent months. The move hit businesses in the United States and beyond by locking them out of their systems while REvil demanded money to stop the attack.

When pressed on whether the administration has taken any action against such cyber criminals in Russia, the senior official would not say.

On REvil specifically, “We have certainly noticed that they’ve stood down their operations. We don’t know exactly why,” the official said. “But we’re still pressing on Russia to take action against the cyber criminals that are operating on its territory. We’re not declaring victory.”

«

That adds to the mystery. Or perhaps REvil just thought that they’d collected enough money, and things were getting too tricky.
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The nightmare of our snooping phones • The New York Times

Shira Ovide:

»

“Data privacy” is one of those terms that feels stripped of all emotion. It’s like a flat soda. At least until America’s failures to build even basic data privacy protections carry flesh-and-blood repercussions.

This week, a top official in the Roman Catholic Church’s American hierarchy resigned after a news site said that it had data from his cellphone that appeared to show the administrator using the L.G.B.T.Q. dating app Grindr and regularly going to gay bars. Journalists had access to data on the movements and digital trails of his mobile phone for parts of three years and were able to retrace where he went.

I know that people will have complex feelings about this matter. Some of you may believe that it’s acceptable to use any means necessary to determine when a public figure is breaking his promises, including when it’s a priest who may have broken his vow of celibacy.

To me, though, this isn’t about one man. This is about a structural failure that allows real-time data on Americans’ movements to exist in the first place and to be used without our knowledge or true consent. This case shows the tangible consequences of practices by America’s vast and largely unregulated data-harvesting industries.

…I am exasperated that there are still no federal laws restricting the collection or use of location data. If I made a tech to-do list for Congress, such restrictions would be at the top of my agenda.

…Losing control of our data was not inevitable. It was a choice — or rather a failure over years by individuals, governments and corporations to think through the consequences of the digital age. We can now choose a different path.

«

You can, though the question is whether the sclerotic American legislative process will. (Thanks G for the pointer to the original story.)

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Why Elon Musk is so rich: two economies. Two sets of rules • O’Reilly

Tim O’Reilly:

»

Elon Musk’s wealth doesn’t come from him hoarding Tesla’s extractive profits, like a robber baron of old. For most of its existence, Tesla had no profits at all. It became profitable only last year. But even in 2020, Tesla’s profits of $721 million on $31.5 billion in revenue were small—only slightly more than 2% of sales, a bit less than those of the average grocery chain, the least profitable major industry segment in America.

No, Musk won the lottery, or more precisely, the stock market beauty contest. In theory, the price of a stock reflects a company’s value as an ongoing source of profit and cash flow. In practice, it is subject to wild booms and busts that are unrelated to the underlying economics of the businesses that shares of stock are meant to represent.

Why is Musk so rich? The answer tells us something profound about our economy: he is wealthy because people are betting on him. But unlike a bet in a lottery or at a racetrack, in the vast betting economy of the stock market, people can cash out their winnings before the race has ended.

«

Musk’s riches, therefore, depend on his cashing out at the right time.
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Flexible computer processor is the most powerful plastic chip yet • New Scientist

Matthew Sparkes:

»

In recent decades, processors have reduced in size and price to the point that they are now commonly used in everything from televisions to washing machines and watches. But almost all chips manufactured today are rigid devices created on silicon wafers in highly specialised and costly factories where dozens of complex chemical and mechanical processes take up to eight weeks from start to finish. Now, Arm has developed a 32-bit processor called PlasticARM with circuits and components that are printed onto a plastic substrate, just as a printer deposits ink on paper.

James Myers at Arm says the processor can run a variety of programs, although it currently uses read-only memory so is only able to execute the code it was built with. Future versions will use fully programmable and flexible memory.

“It won’t be fast, it won’t be energy efficient, but if I’m going to put it on a lettuce to track shelf life, that’s the idea,” he says. “We’re still looking for the applications, just like the original processor guys in the 1970s. Is this about smart packaging? Is it going to be gas sensors that can tell you whether something is safe to eat or not? It could be wearable health patches, that’s a fun project we’re looking at.”

Flexible chips have been created before, but Arm’s device is the most powerful yet demonstrated. It has 56,340 components packed into less than 60 square millimetres. This gives it around 12 times more components to carry out calculations than the previous best flexible chip.

«

That 60 sq mm needs to come down by an order of magnitude to be commercially viable. Still, in 2015 they were 4900 sq mm. So, heading in the right direction.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

TikTok? You’ll understand how it works if you read Social Warming, my new book.

How quickly can you classify numbers into prime and non-prime? An online game will challenge you. CC-licensed photo by Eva the Weaver on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 11 links for you. A tad easier on the ripping, please. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Ottawa tested facial recognition on millions of travellers at Toronto’s Pearson airport in 2016 – The Globe and Mail

Tom Cardoso and Colin Freeze:

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In an effort to identify potential deportees, the federal government quietly tested facial recognition technology on millions of unsuspecting travellers at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport in 2016.

The six-month initiative, meant to pick out people the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) suspected might try to enter the country using fake identification, is detailed in a document obtained by The Globe and Mail through a freedom of information request. The project is the largest known government deployment of the technology in Canada to date.

As travellers walked through the international arrivals border control area at Pearson’s Terminal 3, 31 cameras captured images of their faces. Whenever the system returned a match against a 5,000-person list of previously deported people, a border officer would review the data and pass the traveller’s information along to an officer on the terminal floor, who would track the traveller down and pull them into a “secondary inspection.”

…Details about the project, dubbed “Faces on the Move,” are scarce. But presentation slides posted online by Face4 Systems Inc., an Ottawa-based contractor hired by the CBSA to provide the technology and run the pilot, say it resulted in 47 “real hits” – travellers whose faces were matched against the CBSA’s database.

It is unclear if any travellers were deported following facial recognition matches.

In a statement, the CBSA told The Globe and Mail that matches were “processed in accordance with [the agency’s] operating procedures,” and later followed up to say “no individual was removed” as a result of the pilot.

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Claims an 89% detection rate, though it’s not clear quite what that actually means.
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UK weather: heatwave health alert for England extended to Friday • The Guardian

Damian Carrington:

»

Experts said the heatwaves in the summer of 2020 caused more than 2,500 premature deaths and that the climate crisis is making heatwaves more intense and more frequent.

PHE’s level 3 heat-health alert requires social and healthcare services to take specific action to protect high-risk groups, such as older people, children and babies. The Met Office issued its first ever extreme heat warning for the UK on Monday.

“Everybody can be affected by high temperatures and most people are aware of good health advice for coping with hot weather,” said Dr Owen Landeg at PHE. “However, it’s important to keep checking on those who are most vulnerable such as older people and those with heart or lung conditions.”

«

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DuckDuckGo launches new Email Protection service to remove trackers • The Verge

Dave Gershgorn:

»

DuckDuckGo is launching a new email privacy service meant to stop ad companies from spying on your inbox.

The company’s new Email Protection feature gives users a free “@duck.com” email address, which will forward emails to your regular inbox after analyzing their contents for trackers and stripping any away. DuckDuckGo is also extending this feature with unique, disposable forwarding addresses, which can be generated easily in DuckDuckGo’s mobile browser or through desktop browser extensions.

The personal DuckDuckGo email is meant to be given out to friends and contacts you know, while the disposable addresses are better served when signing up for free trials, newsletters, or anywhere you suspect might sell your email address. If the email address is compromised, you can easily deactivate it.

These tools are similar to anti-tracking features implemented by Apple in iOS 14 and iOS 15, but DuckDuckGo’s approach integrates into iOS, Android, and all major web browsers. DuckDuckGo will also make it easier to spin up disposable email addresses on the fly, for newsletters or anywhere you might share your email.

Tackling email privacy has been a major goal for DuckDuckGo, as the company pushes for privacy-friendly methods for various online tasks. The company began with its eponymous DuckDuckGo search engine and has more recently introduced its own mobile browser and desktop browser extensions to remove trackers while surfing the web.

«

Coming just a few months ahead of Apple doing the same in its next release of iOS. Android (or Gmail) already does something of the kind. But it’s been a few years since we could all pile in to claim a new email address at a domain, hasn’t it?
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Bezos says space flight reinforced commitment to fighting climate change • Axios

»

Jeff Bezos said in an interview hours after flying to suborbital space on Tuesday that there are “no words” to adequately describe the experience, but that it reinforced his commitment to combatting climate change and keeping Earth “as this beautiful gem of a planet that it is.”

Bezos, the world’s richest man, said he plans to make Blue Origin and the Bezos Earth Fund — a $10bn effort to fight climate change — his life focus moving forward.

He called the flight a small step toward building a “road to space” and developing reusable rockets to cut down on waste.

“We have to build a road to space so our kids can build a future,” Bezos, who successfully traveled to space on a Blue Origin flight alongside his brother and two other passengers, told MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle.

“We live on this beautiful planet. You can’t imagine how thin the atmosphere is when you see it from space. We live in it, and it looks so big. It feels like this atmosphere is huge and we can disregard it and treat it poorly. When you get up there and you see it, you see how tiny it is and how fragile it is,” he continued.

“We need to take all heavy industry, all polluting industry, and move it into space. And keep Earth as this beautiful gem of a planet that it is. That’s going to take decades to achieve, but you have to start. And big things start with small steps.”

«

I’m fairly sure Greta Thunberg hasn’t been into space (or even its edge), yet she seems quite firm on this “climate protection” thing. Reusable rockets, ok, are helpful for launching satellites – though that brings a separate question, about space junk, which is already a problem.
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Tokyo 2020 organizing committee chief won’t rule out last-minute cancellation of Olympics • ESPN

»

The chief of the Tokyo 2020 organizing committee on Tuesday did not rule out a last-minute cancellation of the Olympics, as more athletes tested positive for COVID-19 and major sponsors ditched plans to attend Friday’s opening ceremony.

Asked at a news conference whether the global sporting showpiece might still be canceled, Toshiro Muto said he would keep an eye on infection numbers and liaise with other organizers if necessary.

“We can’t predict what will happen with the number of coronavirus cases. So we will continue discussions if there is a spike in cases,” Muto said.

“We have agreed that based on the coronavirus situation, we will convene five-party talks again. At this point, the coronavirus cases may rise or fall, so we will think about what we should do when the situation arises.”

COVID-19 cases are rising in Tokyo, and the Games, postponed last year because of the pandemic, will be held without spectators. Japan this month decided that participants would compete in empty venues to minimize health risks.

There have been 67 cases of COVID-19 infections in Japan among those accredited for the Games since July 1, when many athletes and officials started arriving, organizers said Tuesday.

«

Keep tabs on it at this PDF (or follow the link on this page). Keep scrolling: the PDF added a whole new page on the 20th. Thousands of people crammed into a small space. It’s almost a test case for following Covid spread.
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White House dispute exposes Facebook blind spot on misinformation • The New York Times

Sheera Frankel:

»

At the start of the pandemic, a group of data scientists at Facebook held a meeting with executives to ask for resources to help measure the prevalence of misinformation about Covid-19 on the social network.

The data scientists said figuring out how many Facebook users saw false or misleading information would be complex, perhaps taking a year a more, according to two people who participated in the meeting. But they added that by putting some new hires on the project and reassigning some existing employees to it, the company could better understand how incorrect facts about the virus spread on the platform.

The executives never approved the resources, and the team was never told why, according to the people, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters.

Now, more than a year later, Facebook has been caught in a firestorm about the very type of information that the data scientists were hoping to track.

…“The suggestion we haven’t put resources toward combating Covid misinformation and supporting the vaccine rollout is just not supported by the facts,” said Dani Lever, a Facebook spokeswoman. “With no standard definition for vaccine misinformation, and with both false and even true content (often shared by mainstream media outlets) potentially discouraging vaccine acceptance, we focus on the outcomes — measuring whether people who use Facebook are accepting of Covid-19 vaccines.”

«

I think this points to a deeper problem at Facebook: it doesn’t know how to measure misinformation. How can your AI measure the misinformation content of a post that says “myocarditis is a complication of Covid vaccination in teenagers”? (It is, but very dependent on dose.) Much depends on context. I think that’s why Facebook’s narrative about this, and so much other misinformation rows, doesn’t talk about how much is there. It doesn’t know. Yet it has to hide that fact, because to admit it would be to open the floodgates for all sorts of unwelcome regulation.
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Chinese army warns dam battered by storms could collapse • The Straits Times

»

The PLA’s Central Theatre Command said it had sent soldiers to carry out an emergency response including blasting and flood diversion.

“On July 20, a 20m breach occurred at the Yihetan dam… the riverbank was severely damaged and the dam may collapse at any time,” it said in the statement.

Floods are common during China’s rainy season, which causes annual chaos and washes away roads, crops and houses.

But the threat has worsened over the decades, due in part to widespread construction of dams and levees that have cut connections between the river and adjacent lakes and disrupted floodplains that had helped absorb the summer surge.

In the nearby city of Zhengzhou, at least one person died and two more were missing since heavy rain began battering the city, according to the state-run People’s Daily, which reported that houses have collapsed.

…According to the weather authorities, the rainfall was the highest recorded since record keeping began sixty years ago as the city saw an average year’s worth of rainfall in just three days.

Authorities closed Zhengzhou’s flooded subway system and cancelled hundreds of flights.

Unverified videos on social media showed passengers in a flooded underground train carriage in Zhengzhou clinging to handles as the water inside surged to shoulder height, with some standing on seats.

«

The videos from inside the carriages are the stuff of nightmares.
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Let’s say we stop burning fossil fuels. What happens next? • Grist

Eve Andrews:

»

We talk so much about the supreme challenge of reducing emissions — something that already requires transitioning our entire economy away from the burning of fossil fuels, adapting to existing climate threats, and doing all that in a way that at the very least doesn’t add to the burdens of already marginalized communities. It’s hard to imagine that there’s more still to do. Can it really be that, on top of all those tasks, we have to pull carbon out of the atmosphere too?

Well, yes.

It’s not like we can just flip a switch in order to return to preindustrial CO2 levels. Zachary Byrum, a research analyst in carbon removal at the World Resources Institute, likes to compare our atmosphere to a rapidly filling bathtub. “Even if we turn the tap off, we still have a bathtub of CO2 that is full up to the top,” he said. “It might evaporate, but that would take a very long time. You have to make a drain so that the water, or CO2 in this metaphor, can go somewhere, and carbon removal is the means to do that.”

There are many types of carbon removal, but they all involve taking existing carbon out of atmospheric circulation, say, by planting new trees, improving soil quality, or using technology to suck it directly out of the air and inject it into the ground. “There is no world in which we don’t need carbon removal” to avert climate disaster, Byrum said.
That urgency is because our atmospheric bathtub is already really close to “overflowing.” According to the latest reading from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, our current level of atmospheric carbon is around 419 parts per million, or ppm, and continues to rise. Way back before the Industrial Revolution — when we figured out that we could haul fossil fuels out of the ground, burn them, and use the resulting energy to power machinery on a massive scale — that CO2 figure was more like 280 ppm.

«

Which is why I’m really not impressed by Bezos, Musk, Branson et al pouring money into rockets instead of useful technology. Bill Gates, by contrast, first poured money into childhood vaccination, and now is focusing on, guess what, stopping global heating.
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Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd paid for ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’ • Rolling Stone

Kory Grow:

»

Eric Idle has revealed how much money rock bands and record labels contributed to financing Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which came out in 1975. According to a tweet, Led Zeppelin contributed £31,500, Pink Floyd Music ponied up £21,000, and Jethro Tull frontman Ian Anderson put in £6,300 of his own money. Adjusting for inflation, that means that Led Zeppelin’s 1974 investment was equal to almost £336,000 in today’s money, Pink Floyd’s was about £224,000, and Anderson’s was worth approximately £67,000.

Other financiers on the film include film producer Michael White (who gave £78,750), Island Records (£21,000), Charisma Records (£5,250), lyricist Tim Rice’s cricket team Heartaches (£5,250), and Chrysalis Records (£6,300). The total budget was £175,350.

In further tweets, Idle said that none of the financiers visited the set since they were shooting in Scotland and joked that even with that much money, “We couldn’t afford horses.”

«

Of course, the lack of horses wasn’t a problem because they could do the fabulous and iconic use of coconuts instead, which led to the running joke about African and European swallows. Everything’s connected.

Oh, and the film seems to have taken $175m in total sales over the years. Not a bad return.
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Is This Prime?

Christian Lawson-Perfect:

»

The Is this prime? game.

For each number you’re shown, click Yes if it’s a prime number, or No otherwise.

Try to correctly sort as many numbers as possible in a minute.

Extras:

If clicking on the buttons is too slow, you can press y or n on the keyboard instead.

If you’d rather let the computer decide what’s prime and what’s not, go to the main Is this prime? website.

«

But of course the person who coded a prime number game would have the surname of Perfect. (On Hacker News they suggest first memorising the prime numbers below 100 – there’s only 25 of them – and then winging it for the rest.)
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Australia’s giant carbon capture project fails to meet key targets • Sydney Morning Herald

Nick O’Malley:

»

The world’s largest carbon capture and storage project has failed to meet a crucial target of capturing and burying an average of 80% of the carbon dioxide produced from gas wells in Western Australia over five years.

The energy giant Chevron agreed to the target with the West Australian government when developing its A$54bn Gorgon project to extract and export gas from fields off the WA coast.

The five year milestone passed on Sunday. In a statement the energy giant Chevron announced that since operations began in August 2019 it had injected five million tonnes of greenhouse gases underground.

According to the independent analyst Peter Milne, that leaves a shortfall of around 4.6 million tonnes, which he estimates would cost about A$100m to offset via carbon credits.

The project has national and even international significance, with the oil and gas industry and the federal government declaring the success of carbon capture and storage to be crucial in tackling climate change while making use of fossil fuels.

…But critics have noted that even if the Gorgon project worked it would only capture 80% of greenhouse gases coming from reservoirs, rather than the gases burnt to create energy to liquefy the gas for export.

«

It’s often overlooked that to slow or, better, reverse global heating we need to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. If we can’t even capture more than half of what’s produced in extracting more fossil fuels (which will then be burnt), then we’re wishing for miracles.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: Andrew Brown got in touch about the elusive broadband minister: “Matt Warman did do one interview (about 5G) with a trade magazine before the pandemic. I know because I conducted it. It was a strangely disorienting experience to talk to a minister who actually knew their subject and was interested in it.”

Finally, Peppa Pig is teaching American children how to talk proper – using English words such as “biscuits”.CC-licensed photo by Eldriva 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. OK, don’t rip it quite so much. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Exclusive: Chinese hackers behind US ransomware attacks, say security firms • Reuters

Joseph Menn:

»

Hackers using tactics and tools previously associated with Chinese government-supported computer network intrusions have joined the booming cyber crime industry of ransomware, four security firms that investigated attacks on U.S. companies said.

Ransomware, which involves encrypting a target’s computer files and then demanding payment to unlock them, has generally been considered the domain of run-of-the-mill cyber criminals.

But executives of the security firms have seen a level of sophistication in at least a half dozen cases over the last three months akin to those used in state-sponsored attacks, including techniques to gain entry and move around the networks, as well as the software used to manage intrusions.

“It is obviously a group of skilled of operators that have some amount of experience conducting intrusions,” said Phil Burdette, who heads an incident response team at Dell SecureWorks.

Burdette said his team was called in on three cases in as many months where hackers spread ransomware after exploiting known vulnerabilities in application servers. From there, the hackers tricked more than 100 computers in each of the companies into installing the malicious programs.

The victims included a transportation company and a technology firm that had 30% of its machines captured.

Security firms Attack Research, InGuardians and G-C Partners, said they had separately investigated three other similar ransomware attacks since December.

Although they cannot be positive, the companies concluded that all were the work of a known advanced threat group from China, Attack Research Chief Executive Val Smith told Reuters.

«

Wonder if the Russians will get upset about these people muscling in on their territory.
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Amazon shuts down NSO Group infrastructure • Vice

Joseph Cox:

»

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has shut down infrastructure and accounts linked to Israeli surveillance vendor NSO Group, Amazon said in a statement.

The move comes as a group of media outlets and activist organizations published new research into NSO’s malware and phone numbers potentially selected for targeting by NSO’s government clients.

“When we learned of this activity, we acted quickly to shut down the relevant infrastructure and accounts,” an AWS spokesperson told Motherboard in an email.

Amnesty International published a forensic investigation on Sunday that, among other things, determined that NSO customers have had access to zero-day attacks in Apple’s iMessage as recently as this year. As part of that research, Amnesty wrote that a phone infected with NSO’s Pegasus malware sent information “to a service fronted by Amazon CloudFront, suggesting NSO Group has switched to using AWS services in recent months.” The Amnesty report included part of the same statement from Amazon, showing Amnesty contacted the company before publication.

Citizen Lab, in a peer review of Amnesty’s findings, said in its own post that the group “independently observed NSO Group begin to make extensive use of Amazon services including CloudFront in 2021.”

CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) that allows customers, in this case NSO, to more quickly and reliably deliver content to users.

«

Retribution of a sort, quickly implemented. I’m going to guess that NSO doesn’t actually need something with the heft of AWS, and that it will (for a somewhat higher price) be able to find a CDN and other services from smaller companies not so worried about what NSO Group does.
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What it feels like to lose your favourite season • Culture Study

Anne Helen Petersen:

»

The preciousness of summer is one of many reasons that the wildfire smoke, which sinks into the Missoula Valley and struggles to leave, feels so threatening — and so deeply, deeply sad. As anyone from the West who understands forest fires knows, fire itself is not, per se, the problem; Indigenous people have long used fire to stave off more fire. The problem is unbridled fire, facilitated by extreme drought brought on by climate change, which transforms the season of summer into the season of smoke.

Here in the West, we knew it was coming. The drought forecasts were alarming and dismal. I bought a big air purifier that promises to blend in with the decor of your household, and the aesthetics of it all, the move to blend with our daily lives, is infuriating. I first tasted the smoke in the air last week. It lifted, briefly, but has now settled in for what the local smoke forecaster says will almost certainly last until the Fall rains arrive. It’s a month early, people say. But it’s here. Over the last decade, the West had slowly ceded August to smoke. But July, too?

Smoke is life-threatening to people with respiratory issues. For everyone else, it’s shitty in ways we don’t yet understanding. And then there are the secondary effects: it makes you cranky. It makes your hair greasy, your acne flare, and, by messing with your sinuses, it can make your teeth ache. It makes me feel alienated from my body. I’ve spent the last week bumping up against a general ennui and sadness, trying to name it, but its name is just fucking smoke. It’s devoured my summer and, in so doing, my sense of self. Who am I without the restoration of my favorite season? What is my axis, if not this time? How do I feel like myself when the windows are always closed, when the air inside feels tinny and canned, when all of this feels like our future?

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A Solarpunk Manifesto • ReDes – Regenerative Design

»

Solarpunk is a movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion, and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question “what does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?” 

The aesthetics of solarpunk merge the practical with the beautiful, the well-designed with the green and lush, the bright and colorful with the earthy and solid. 

Solarpunk can be utopian, just optimistic, or concerned with the struggles en route to a better world ,  but never dystopian. As our world roils with calamity, we need solutions, not only warnings.

Solutions to thrive without fossil fuels, to equitably manage real scarcity and share in abundance instead of supporting false scarcity and false abundance, to be kinder to each other and to the planet we share.

Solarpunk is at once a vision of the future, a thoughtful provocation, a way of living and a set of achievable proposals to get there.

• We are solarpunks because optimism has been taken away from us and we are trying to take it back.
• We are solarpunks because the only other options are denial or despair.
• At its core, Solarpunk is a vision of a future that embodies the best of what humanity can achieve: a post-scarcity, post-hierarchy, post-capitalistic world where humanity sees itself as part of nature and clean energy replaces fossil fuels.
• The “punk” in Solarpunk is about rebellion, counterculture, post-capitalism, decolonialism and enthusiasm. It is about going in a different direction than the mainstream, which is increasingly going in a scary direction.
• Solarpunk is a movement as much as it is a genre: it is not just about the stories, it is also about how we can get there.

«

It’s a 22-point manifesto, some with subheads. But interesting: this is the sort of manifesto that people can coalesce around.
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Peppa Pig, a pandemic favourite, has American children acting British • WSJ

Preetika Rana and Meghan Bobrowsky:

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California kindergartner Dani stunned her parents in May when she addressed her mom, who said she was going to the eye doctor, in a polished British accent: “Mummy, are you going to the optician?”

“And we were like, ‘the what?’ ” says Dani’s father, Matias Cavallin. “That’s like a college-level word,” he says. “At least, I wasn’t using it.”

The culprit? A wildly popular English cartoon about a preschooler pig named Peppa.

Like 5-year-old Dani, children across the U.S. have binge-watched “Peppa Pig” over the past year. They are emerging from the pandemic with an unusual vocabulary and a British accent just like the show’s namesake character.

The Peppa Effect, as some parents call it, already had some children snorting like pigs and using cheeky Britishisms before the pandemic. Then lockdowns sent screen-time limits out the door, and children gorged on the cartoon in a silo away from their usual social interactions, amplifying the effect.

Mr. Cavallin, a public-relations manager in El Cerrito, Calif., stumbled upon the cartoon at the start of the pandemic. He concluded that it was a sweet family show that would keep Dani busy as his wife went to the office and he juggled working from home.

“It was almost like a happy accident at a time when I was trying to find a pseudo babysitter during Zoom meetings,” he says. “It was either Peppa Pig or no work.”

As a result, Mr. Cavallin says, he went from papa to “Daddy,” said in the British way. His daughter calls the gas station the “petrol station” and cookies “biscuits,” and when he’s holding a cup of coffee, Dani asks him, “Are you having tea now?” He says that Dani’s grandparents—immigrants from Argentina who mostly speak Spanish—quip, “We don’t understand her to begin with, and now she’s speaking British?”

«

So all the years of Doctor Who had no effect? I guess they were too old by then.
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Robotaxis: have Google and Amazon backed the wrong technology? • Financial Times

Patrick McGee:

»

suppliers of advanced driver-assistance systems, or ADAS — a bottom-up approach to building autonomous technology — are making massive strides. They already have a great business case, generating profits as they sell their tech to carmakers, constantly upgrade their systems and save lives along the way.

Several experts say this is a better pathway to scaling driverless tech. If they are right, then the central risk for the robotaxi hopefuls is not whether full autonomy can succeed, but whether an entirely different approach to the problem will get there first.

“There’s no more dispute around whether robotaxis are real: they are real today,” says Karl Iagnemma, chief executive of Motional, the autonomous driving unit of Hyundai and Aptiv. “The question is whether the other guy can come along and do the same service, the same product, but at half the price. If you’ve got a competitor who’s in that position, you’re in big trouble.”

Driverless groups such as Waymo, Microsoft-backed Cruise, Amazon-owned Zoox and Aurora, which announced plans for a public listing last week, are betting on a “moonshot” solution with no plan B. They plan to offer full autonomy — albeit ringfenced to certain locations — or nothing at all. In regulatory jargon, this is called Level 4, in which a robot driver requires no input from passengers. Level 5, the highest step, would allow the vehicle to go anywhere.

This “go big or go home” approach stands in direct opposition to the step-by-step path of the ADAS players led by suppliers Mobileye, Aptiv, Magna and Bosch, which work with all the major carmakers. Their advances mean most new vehicles already have partial automation — Levels 1 and 2, including cruise control and automated braking. Tesla’s AutoPilot System is the best-known Level 2 system.

«

One thinks of the tortoise and the hare. ADAS can get there from the bottom up.
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‘Anti-sex’ beds in the Olympic Village? A social media theory is soon debunked • The New York Times

Austin Ramzy:

»

The plan for the 18,000 beds and mattresses — 8,000 will also be used for the Paralympics starting next month — was announced before the pandemic started and social distancing restrictions were first put in place, and they’re sturdier than they look.

“Cardboard beds are actually stronger than the one made of wood or steel,” Airweave said in a statement on Monday.

The modular mattresses are customizable to suit athletes of all body types, and the beds can sustain up to 440 pounds, enough for even the most imposing Olympians.

But Olympic officials still prefer that athletes sleep alone while in Tokyo, and stay away from each other everywhere else as well. A playbook outlining safety measures advises Olympic participants to “avoid unnecessary forms of physical contact such as hugs, high-fives and handshakes.”

To further discourage carousing, alcohol sales will be banned. Condoms, which have been distributed at the Olympics since the Seoul Games in 1988, will be provided to encourage safe sex, but only about one-third as many as the record 450,000 handed out at the Rio Games in 2016. And Olympic officials have made it clear that they are intended for athletes to use only once they’re back in their home countries.

«

People are often surprised that Olympic athletes have SO much sex. It’s probably thanks to the condoms that there aren’t more superbabies whose athletic prowess would astonish us all.
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Digital identity and attributes consultation • GOV.UK

Matt Warman is the minister for digital infrastructure at DCMS:

»

We promised to follow up on other aspects of our Digital Identity Call for Evidence at pace, and this consultation does that now, seeking views on three key issues.

Firstly, to support the trust framework there will need to be a responsible and trusted governance system in place which can oversee digital identity and attribute use and make sure organisations comply with the rules contained within the trust framework. We are using this consultation to solicit views on the exact scope and remit of this governing body. As the consultation makes clear, it will be vital to ensure that this body works closely with other regulators that have oversight of digital services, and supports our wider goals of establishing a coherent regulatory landscape that unlocks innovation and growth.

Secondly, to unlock the benefits digital identities can bring, we need to make it possible to digitally check authoritative government-held data. We need the digital equivalent of checking data sources such as a passport. That’s why we are also consulting on how to allow trusted organisations to make these checks.

Finally, we want to firmly establish the legal validity of digital identities and attributes, to build confidence that they can be as good as the physical proofs of identity with which we are familiar.

«

The UK government wants robust ID without ID cards. Quite a circle to square. (Warman, by the way, used to be a technology journalist at the Daily Telegraph – a contemporary to me at the Guardian. So he at least slightly has the knowledge for this topic. He’s been quietly in charge of crucial stuff for a number of years – this, broadband rollout – and hasn’t done a single interview about them.)
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Google product, or not? • Comics at Google

»

Play with your friends and colleagues! Spot the official Google product logos while avoiding deprecated apps, non-official logos and other traps!

«

You have to go there to realise how many Google products there are, or are not. The page has 64 logos. I spotted the Android logo, and a Windows logo in the Google colours. (Then there are lots more panels. Thanks Paulie for the link.)
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Gurman: MacBook Pro with miniLED display coming between September-November • 9to5Mac

José Adorno:

»

In today’s Power On newsletter, Bloomberg Mark Gurman discusses the availability of the new MacBook Pro with miniLED display, expected to be announced from September to November. Head below for the full details.

Reiterating what reliable Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said a couple of weeks ago, the new MacBook Pro is expected to go into production in the third quarter, which means an announcement is expected around September to November, according to Gurman as well.

In his newsletter, Mark Gurman says “these new MacBooks were supposed to launch earlier, but complications around the new miniLED display have held up production.”

The miniLED display, which Apple calls Liquid Retina XDR, is already available on the new 12.9-inch M1 iPad Pro. This panel uses 10,000 mini-LEDs, which provide much greater control of localized backlighting, allowing higher brightness and deeper blacks. The combination boosts the contrast ratio, as well as using less power.

According to the company, the Liquid Retina XDR display delivers “true-to-life” detail with a 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio. It also features 1000 nits of full-screen brightness and 1600 nits of peak brightness.

Although the new MacBook Pro is expected to feature the M1X chip and more slots, Gurman doesn’t talk about that in today’s newsletter. Instead, he gives a tip about choosing between the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air.

MacBook Pro for those who necessitate more speed and RAM with app development, Photoshop, and heavy video editing, while the Air is ideal for web browsing, email, and light photo editing.

«

MacBook Pro also for those who like the space of a 15in screen, which they can’t get on any other Apple laptop. 13.3in MacBook Air screen area: 79.5 sq in (10:6 length/height ratio). 16in MacBook Pro screen area: 115 sq in (same ratio). DIfference: 44%.

But if it doesn’t go into production until September, it’s hard to imagine it’ll be ready then. October seems like the earliest.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

As USB-C cables come in eight different types, wouldn’t it be great if there was an easy way to know which one you’ve got?CC-licensed photo by Aaron Yoo on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 11 links for you. Let it rip! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Private spy software sold by NSO Group found on cellphones worldwide • Washington Post

Dana Priest, Craig Timberg and Souad Mekhennet:

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Military-grade spyware licensed by an Israeli firm to governments for tracking terrorists and criminals was used in attempted and successful hacks of 37 smartphones belonging to journalists, human rights activists, business executives and two women close to murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, according to an investigation by The Washington Post and 16 media partners.

The phones appeared on a list of more than 50,000 numbers that are concentrated in countries known to engage in surveillance of their citizens and also known to have been clients of the Israeli firm, NSO Group, a worldwide leader in the growing and largely unregulated private spyware industry, the investigation found.

The list does not identify who put the numbers on it, or why, and it is unknown how many of the phones were targeted or surveilled. But forensic analysis of the 37 smartphones shows that many display a tight correlation between time stamps associated with a number on the list and the initiation of surveillance, in some cases as brief as a few seconds.

Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based journalism nonprofit, and Amnesty International, a human rights group, had access to the list and shared it with the news organizations, which did further research and analysis. Amnesty’s Security Lab did the forensic analyses on the smartphones.

«

The Guardian also received the list, and found that the editor of the FT is on it.

Plus:

»

NSO has long insisted that the governments to whom it licenses Pegasus are contractually bound to only use the powerful spying tool to fight “serious crime and terrorism”.

«

Uh-huh, sure Jen. The question in the light of this is what action, if any, will be taken against NSO Group. Or, equally, what liability it might have. (Probably none.)
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Facebook to Biden: ‘we aren’t the reason vaccination goal was missed’ • The New York Times

Cecilia Kang:

»

Facebook and the Biden administration engaged in an increasingly rancorous back and forth over the weekend after the administration denounced the social media giant for spreading misinformation about the Covid-19 vaccines.

On Sunday, the surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, reiterated warnings that false stories about the vaccines had become a dangerous health hazard. “These platforms have to recognize they’ve played a major role in the increase in speed and scale with which misinformation is spreading,” Mr. Murthy said Sunday on CNN.

In a blog post on Saturday, Facebook called on the administration to stop “finger-pointing” and laid out what it had done to encourage users to get vaccinated. The social network also detailed how it had clamped down on lies about the vaccines, which officials have said led people to refuse to be vaccinated.

“The Biden administration has chosen to blame a handful of American social media companies,” Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president of integrity, said in the post. “The fact is that vaccine acceptance among Facebook users in the US has increased.”

Mr. Rosen added that the company’s data showed that 85% of its users in the United States had been or wanted to be vaccinated against the coronavirus. While President Biden had set a goal of getting 70% of Americans vaccinated by July 4, which the White House fell short of, “Facebook is not the reason this goal was missed,” Mr. Rosen said.

Facebook’s response followed a forceful condemnation of the company by Mr. Biden. When asked on Friday about the role of social media in influencing vaccinations, Mr. Biden declared in unusually strong language that the platforms were “killing people.”

“Look,” he added, “the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated, and that — and they’re killing people.”

«

The White House line that a dozen people are responsible for 65% of vaccine disinformation seems a stronger one. Facebook hasn’t responded at all on that one.
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If you’re not a climate reporter yet, you will be: Covid-19 coverage offers lessons for reporting on the climate crisis • Nieman Journalism Lab

Wolfgang Blau:

»

“The last 18 months have been a step change for our newsroom,” said Sven Stockrahm, science editor of German news organization Zeit Online. “Of course, our workload has been staggering, but we are delighted to see how normal it has become for all teams in our newsroom to first consult with the science desk before publishing a story that deals with aspects of Covid-19.” The degree of interdisciplinary collaboration with the science desk is new, and it could prove a model for how news organizations cover the climate crisis.

Today, news reports about the climate crisis primarily come from a newsroom’s science, politics or economics desk. A few news organizations already understand, though, that the climate crisis is more than a beat or a topic — it poses urgent questions that affect all sectors of society. Based on this understanding, journalistic coverage of climate change needs to involve all teams of a newsroom, including its culture, finance, real estate, lifestyle, fashion, health, and sports journalists.

When sports journalism mentions the financial aspects of a team, a transfer, or a tournament, nobody would be surprised to see “business journalism in the sports section.” Climate journalism needs to become just as integrated in every vertical.

«

This is underappreciated. But as we have more and more natural disasters to contend with, journalists are at the very least going to find themselves writing about the effects of climate.
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Coronavirus vaccine resisters: convincing the skeptics • National Review

Michael Brendan Dougherty:

»

Some subset of vaccine hesitancy is conspiratorial. Some of it is just an understandable anxiety in people who have had bad experiences with conventional medicine or have dealt with chronic and unexplained conditions. An even smaller amount is from people who, for instance, are trying to get pregnant and note that there’s been considerably less testing on pregnant women for well-established legal reasons. Some are hesitant to take it because they believe the natural immunity they acquired is sufficient.

But most vaccine skepticism, if by that we mean reluctance, is not based on conspiracy theorizing — it’s based on risk-benefit calculations. You may think it’s an innumerate calculation. But when you look at patterns of uptake in the United States, two factors stand out, factors that are larger in their effect than partisanship: age and density. The older you are and the denser your community, the more likely you are to be vaccinated. The younger you are, and the more rural your community, the less likely you are to have gotten it. This reflects the real facts about the risk of death from COVID. People may be wildly overestimating their risk from the vaccine and underestimating their risks from COVID — but they have the directional thinking correct. Those who are in less danger, act like it.

These risk-benefit calculations are not entirely defined by health outcomes either but involve psychology and politics. Some people, having read or seen that rates to achieve suitable herd immunity may be substantially lower than 80% or 90%, conclude that they don’t have to overcome their fears and can free-ride on the immunity achieved by others. The risk-benefit calculation is also complicated by other factors. People find acts of God easier to accept than mistakes of their own volition. So they may find it easier to accept the risks of facing COVID in nature, which they did not choose to get, than the unknown risks of a vaccine that they did consciously choose to take.

«

I found this a useful article, because it starts from the assumption that vaccine hesitants (and possibly even deniers) start from a rational state, even if they end up at an irrational one.
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Classified Challenger tank specs leaked online for videogame • UK Defence Journal

George Allison:

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A gamer identifying as Challenger 2 commander has posted a classified document online in order to improve the accuracy of the design of the tank in the game ‘War Thunder’.

War Thunder is a vehicular combat multiplayer video game developed and published by Gaijin Entertainment. Despite the fact that Gaijin Entertainment lists itself as a Cyprus-based studio, it was originally founded in Moscow, Russia, where it still has offices today.

It also has branches in Germany, Hungary, and Latvia.

A user identifying as a Challenger 2 commander posted specific excerpts from a Challenger 2 AESP (Army Equipment Support Publication, sort of like a user manual) to show game developers that they “didn’t model it correctly”.

The user identifies as a make in Tidworth with a history of “Tanks & AFV’s, CR2 Tank Commander, AFV Instr, D&M Instr, Gunnery Instr, Former ATDU”. It should be noted that Tidworth is home to the Royal Tank Regiment who operate Challenger 2 tanks.

It is understood that the excerpts from the document had their ‘UK RESTRICTED’ label crossed out and a stamp of ‘UNCLASSIFIED’ added, as well as having various parts fully blanked. One forum user remarked that “the cover for instance had basically everything except CHALLENGER 2 blacked out”.

«

I did not have “accidental espionage by video gamers” on the bingo card.
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Amazon asked Apple to remove an app that spots fake reviews, and Apple agreed • CNBC

Annie Palmer:

»

Apple has removed Fakespot, a well-known app for detecting fake product reviews, from its App Store after Amazon complained the app provided misleading information and potential security risks.

Fakespot’s app works by analyzing the credibility of an Amazon listing’s reviews and gives it a grade of A through F. It then provides shoppers with recommendations for products with high customer satisfaction.

Amazon said it reported Fakespot to Apple for investigation after it grew concerned that a redesigned version of the app confused consumers by displaying Amazon’s website in the app with Fakespot code and content overlaid on top of it. Amazon said it doesn’t allow applications to do this. An Amazon spokesperson claimed, “The app in question provides customers with misleading information about our sellers and their products, harms our sellers’ businesses, and creates potential security risks.”

By Friday afternoon, following a review from Apple, the app was no longer available on the App Store.

Misleading or fake user reviews have proven to be a major problem for online retailers, including Amazon. The company has recently ramped up its efforts to detect and cull fake reviews. Its third-party marketplace, made up of millions of sellers, has grown to account for more than half of the company’s overall sales, but it has become fertile ground for fake reviews, counterfeits and unsafe products.

…Apple said in a statement that Amazon on June 8 initiated a dispute with the Fakespot app over intellectual property rights.

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USB-C cable colour codes •

:

»

USB-C was supposed to be the answer to the chaos that is charge and data cable compatibility. And to an extent it was. It unified ports and reduced the amount of cables and chargers I need to travel with. The cables themselves, however, turned out to be a mess. They come in many varieties with obtuse names, confusing markers, and unclear compatibility rules. Yet they all look exactly the same.

Here is a colour coding scheme for USB-C to USB-C cables to distinguish them by their use.

There are currently 8 types of USB-C cables defined. Benson Leung’s post lists them and explains how they relate to power and data transfer rates. Drawing from that we can observe that cables differ in two dimensions. The first is the kind of data signalling a cable supports, and the second is the amount of current it can carry. Based on this we can give data signalling colours.

• #E69F00 “orange” for USB 2.0
• #56B4E9 “sky blue” for USB 3.2 Gen 1
• #009E73 “blueish green” for USB 3.2 Gen 2
• #F0E442 “yellow” for Thunderbolt 3

And give current ratings numbers of stripes.

• One black stripe for 3A
• Two black stripes for 5A

Putting them together we get the full matrix of the 8 possible USB-C to USB-C cable types today.

	USB 2.0	USB 3.2 Gen 1	USB 3.2 Gen 2	Thunderbolt 3
3A	CC2-3	CC3G1-3	CC3G2-3	CC3G3-3
5A	CC2-5	CC3G1-5	CC3G2-5	CC3G3-5

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The author used nail polish to colour the cables. Wouldn’t it be great if you could identify them more easily.
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Social Warming by Charles Arthur review: a coolly prosecutorial look at social media • The Guardian

Steven Poole reviewed my book, concluding:

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I was left unsure by the titular phrase to describe the havoc that social media is wreaking upon our lives. Warmth, after all, has long been a social metaphor for something desirable: as when people speak warmly, or enjoy a warm friendship. (Indeed, according to some psychological research, loneliness makes you feel cold, and being cold makes you more lonely.) Perhaps, just as some now prefer to use “global heating” or “climate crisis” in the atmospheric context, we should think of social overheating or social boiling. In the mean time, feel free to share this article on Twitter.

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Though calling it “Social Heating” might have made people think it was about getting together with your neighbours to keep the house warm. Balancing act.
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Miami condo collapse raises new fears about Florida’s insurance market • The New York Times

Christopher Flavelle, Patricia Mazzei and Giulia Heyward:

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Days after the collapse, insurance companies sent letters threatening to cut off coverage to older buildings that did not pass mandatory safety inspections. In California, insurers have begun fleeing fire-prone areas; in other parts of the West, officials say they are seeing similar reports of insurers refusing to renew policies.

And it is not just private insurers: In April, the federal government outlined changes to the heavily indebted National Flood Insurance Program that will eventually cause some people’s premiums to rise fivefold or more.

“Coastal areas all across the Gulf and up along the East Coast could start to see very similar dynamics” to what is happening in Florida, said Carolyn Kousky, executive director of the Wharton Risk Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

It is too soon to say whether climate change contributed to the collapse of the building in Surfside. But the effects of global warming, which include extreme heat and more moisture in the air, cause structures to deteriorate more quickly, according to Jesse Keenan, a professor at Tulane University who specializes in the consequences of climate change for the built environment.

“Climate change is actually accelerating the degradation of buildings,” Dr. Keenan said.

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Premiums could quintuple, or simply stop. It’s going to be brutal.
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Out of control: the moment Boris Johnson let Covid run rampant • The Sunday Times

Jeremy Farrar is director of the Wellcome Trust, and a member of Sage; he wrote his latest book with Anjana Ahuja:

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While things were moving frantically on the international front in the summer of 2020, with hopes building for several successful vaccines, the situation in the UK was deteriorating swiftly. The autumn of last year was, without doubt, the lowest point for me during the pandemic. I seriously considered resigning from Sage, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies.

The newly opened economy, buoyed by such schemes as Eat Out to Help Out, was slowly feeding the virus. Taxpayers effectively subsidised its spread.

From July last year onwards, the infection rates began creeping up week by week. During those holiday months of summer 2020 I felt very strongly that not enough had been done, particularly in terms of test, trace and isolate programmes (TTI), to prepare for the winter.

Then, on August 16, news leaked that Public Health England was going to be abolished. Even worse, Dido Harding, who had failed to establish the world-beating TTI system promised over the summer, was appointed interim executive chairwoman of PHE’s replacement, the National Institute for Health Protection. Public Health England was being thrown under the bus in the middle of a pandemic while the figurehead responsible for the TTI system was being promoted.

Weeks later the government announced it was considering “Operation Moonshot”, a plan for rapid mass testing nationwide to try to keep the economy open. It would reportedly cost about £100 billion. The British Medical Journal noted that the enormous sum was within touching distance of the entire annual budget for the NHS in England. Professors of public health, meanwhile, were telling the government that the tests under consideration were nowhere near foolproof, with substantial risks of both false negatives and false positives.

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He is very, very unimpressed with Boris Johnson. As it pretty much everyone these days.
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Europe floods: Rescuers race to find survivors as hundreds remain missing • BBC News

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At least 143 people are now known to have died in the floods in Germany, including four firefighters.

Rescue teams were hampered by difficult conditions on Friday, leaving relatives of the missing waiting anxiously for news.

But by Saturday the authorities said numbers of people unaccounted for had been steadily decreasing.
The states of North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland have been the worst affected by the rainfall. Though the risk of further flooding is diminishing there is growing concern about the Steinbachtal dam in North Rhine-Westphalia, south-west of the city of Bonn.

Inspectors say large parts of the structure have come away leaving it extremely unstable, and more people may be asked to leave their homes. Meanwhile emergency workers have been searching abandoned cars on the still-flooded B265 road, but fire service spokesman Elmar Mettke said no bodies had yet been found.

“It seems like in the cars we have checked so far the occupants have all reached dry land unscathed. But we will continue to look and it will be a while until we are done here,” he told Reuters news agency.

A resident of Schuld in the Rhineland-Palatinate district of Ahrweiler told AFP news agency that cars had been washed away and houses knocked down in scenes he likened to a “war zone”.

In the nearby spa town of Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler residents were determined to begin the huge clean-up operation, scraping mud from the streets and clearing piles of debris.

But many businesses and livelihoods in the town have been swept away. Nearly 100 people in Ahrweiler are believed to have died.

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Worth visiting the page for the shocking Before/After with slider of the post-flood sinkhole in Erftstadt-Blessem.
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You’ve read the review. Why not order Social Warming, my latest book?

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified