The pricey exercise company Peloton may face an endless uphill battle to retain users in the face of inevitable churn. CC-licensed photo by Dana L. Brown 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. In sequence. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Jack Dorsey: the outgoing Twitter CEO with an artist’s vision • The Guardian

Dan Milmo with some background on the guy who sent the first tweet and has now stepped aside as Twitter CEO:

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Dorsey’s artistic mindset was cited, pointedly, when he was removed as chief executive for the first time in 2008. According to Nick Bilton’s book Hatching Twitter, Williams said to him: “You can either be a dressmaker or the CEO of Twitter. But you can’t be both.” Dorsey would apparently intersperse his chief executive duties with breaks for hot yoga and sewing classes.

Dorsey came back as executive chairman in 2011, having set up payment company Square – today worth $100bn – in the meantime. Twitter struggled in the wake of its 2013 flotation, which made Dorsey a billionaire, and he replaced Dick Costolo as chief executive in 2015 while relinquishing the executive chairman role.

Dorsey leaves the company with 210 million daily active users and annual revenues of $3.7bn. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, he is worth $12.3bn, ranked 174th among the ranks of the world’s super-wealthy. He still owns 2.3% of Twitter.

But unrest had been building about Dorsey’s priorities. In 2019 Dorsey surprised staff and investors by announcing plans to move to Africa for up to six months a year. Announcing the move during a month-long trip to the continent, he tweeted, from Addis Ababa: “Sad to be leaving the continent … for now. Africa will define the future (especially the bitcoin one!). Not sure where yet, but I’ll be living here for 3-6 months mid 2020. Grateful I was able to experience a small part.”

Dorsey, who remains a cryptocurrency enthusiast, dropped the plan after coronavirus arrived. But it wouldn’t have dissuaded the activist investor firm Elliott Management from its view that Twitter was a business in need of more focus at the top.

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Hard to know precisely what led him to leave, but I’d guess it was seeing a couple of projects (audio, monetisation) come to fruition. After which, he’s probably going to focus on Square and crypto.
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Twitter’s an important social network for its effects on society: it was one of the first places where people discovered they could create widespread polarisation over a topic through social media. Buy Social Warming, my latest book, and find out what it was – and more.

UK ICO issues provisional view to fine Clearview AI Inc more than £17m • ICO

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The UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has today announced its provisional intent to impose a potential fine of just over £17m on Clearview AI Inc – a company that describes itself as the ‘World’s Largest Facial Network’. In addition, the ICO has issued a provisional notice to stop further processing of the personal data of people in the UK and to delete it following alleged serious breaches of the UK’s data protection laws.

Today’s announcement follows a joint investigation by the ICO and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC), which focused on Clearview AI Inc’s use of images, data scraped from the internet and the use of biometrics for facial recognition. Customers of Clearview AI Inc can also provide an image to the company to carry out biometric searches, including facial recognition searches, on their behalf to identify relevant facial image results against a database of over 10 billion images.

The images in Clearview AI Inc’s database are likely to include the data of a substantial number of people from the UK and may have been gathered without people’s knowledge from publicly available information online, including social media platforms. The ICO also understands that the service provided by Clearview AI Inc was used on a free trial basis by a number of UK law enforcement agencies, but that this trial was discontinued and Clearview AI Inc’s services are no longer being offered in the UK.

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Reckoned to be the ICO’s largest fine, imposed for multiple reasons (which are listed) including “failing to have a process in place to stop the data being retained indefinitely”. Well, that’s your problem – it’s the internet. It tends to do that.
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Collapse of UK energy firms could cost each household extra £120 • The Guardian

Jillian Ambrose:

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Consumers in England, Scotland and Wales could be on the hook for a total of £3.2bn to cover the costs left behind by bust gas and electricity providers, on top of paying for record gas and electricity market prices, according to analysts at Investec.

The bank warned of a “substantial” burden on households to provide a safety net for the customers of bust suppliers, including the largest to go under so far, Bulb Energy, which plunged into a special administration process last week.

“The meltdown in the supply market is likely to see substantial additional costs land on every GB household, hardly welcome when fuel poverty is an issue, inflation is an issue, and commodity costs look set to push energy bills up,” the wealth management group Investec said.

Energy bills had already climbed from an average of £1,138 a year to £1,277 a year from last month under the energy regulator’s price cap, which is used to limit price rises for 11 million homes that pay for a standard dual-fuel tariff by direct debit.

The increase, which has raised concerns among fuel poverty campaigners that hundreds of thousands of additional households will be unable to pay their bills, is expected to be followed by an even steeper price in April.

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Two points of note: First, Ambrose is listed as the “energy correspondent”, which is a title I don’t think I’ve seen before. Second, the article has an embedded table of “UK energy suppliers that have gone bust in 2021”, which stretches back to January: there are 25 on the list (plus two which didn’t supply domestic customers) covering a total of 4.3 million households. The smallest had 600 customers.

More and more this looks like a failure to set up an adequate regulation regime requiring sufficiently capitalised businesses; they were relying on cashflow, but the jump in energy prices linked to the regulator-imposed price cap killed them. Who imposed the price cap? The Tory government. Who set up the Ofgem regulatory regime? Same answer. Bad regulation is indistinguishable from a failed market.
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Whistleblower Frances Haugen still believes in Silicon Valley • WIRED

Steven Levy met Haugen, as it happened, when she worked at Google and he went on a world tour with Marissa Mayer and a group including Haugen in 2007. Subsequently she was diagnosed with coeliac disease which led to a serious clot in one leg, leaving her unable to walk for a long time and requiring physical therapy. She left Google because her manager didn’t take her ailment seriously:

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SL: In those jobs after Google and before Facebook, had your view of tech companies soured?

FH: I still feel very positively about most Silicon Valley tech companies. I don’t think there’s an inherent rot or something like that. I do believe that there is a need for transparency across any power, any platform that has a lot of power. And then I think we need slightly different relationships with them.

SL: By 2019 Facebook had already suffered scandals and had very public defections. Yet you joined that tainted company.

FH: I got approached by a recruiter in December of 2018. I said the only thing I would work on is civic misinformation. I think we need a lot more people working inside Facebook to fix Facebook’s problems. I strongly encourage people to work at Facebook.

SL: Hold on. Even after you unearthed all those damning documents, you’re urging people to join Facebook?

FH: People question whether you can be a person with integrity and work at Facebook. If anything, Facebook is a flat enough organization that if a lot of people came there determined to fix it, I think they would actually have a positive impact.

SL: Yet you left.

FH: I did because I couldn’t stay any longer and continue to live in Puerto Rico [where I moved for health reasons]. I still live with severe pain every day, because I was paralyzed beneath my knees. Even being back in the Bay Area right now is shockingly hard for me because it’s cold and damp here, and really painful every day that I’m here. And so I had to choose between being in a place where I was much more comfortable or working at Facebook.

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Australia to introduce new laws to force media platforms to unmask online trolls • Reuters

Melanie Burton:

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Australia will introduce legislation to make social media giants provide details of users who post defamatory comments, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Sunday.

The government has been looking at the extent of the responsibility of platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, for defamatory material published on their sites and comes after the country’s highest court ruled that publishers can be held liable for public comments on online forums.

The ruling caused some news companies like CNN to deny Australians access to [the news organisations’] Facebook pages.

“The online world should not be a wild west where bots and bigots and trolls and others are anonymously going around and can harm people,” Morrison said at a televised press briefing. “That is not what can happen in the real world, and there is no case for it to be able to be happening in the digital world.”

The new legislation will introduce a complaints mechanism, so that if somebody thinks they are being defamed, bullied or attacked on social media, they will be able to require the platform to take the material down.

If the content is not withdrawn, a court process could force a social media platform to provide details of the commenter.

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I think the writing here is loose: the intro should say “users who post *allegedly* defamatory comments”. It doesn’t say proof has to be supplied before the content gets removed or identities unmasked. And it’s hardly as if the tech companies don’t take content down; it’s just they tend to use slightly different criteria.
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What is a Peloton supposed to do, exactly? • She’s A Beast: A Swole Woman’s Newsletter

Casey Johnston:

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I read this piece on The Verge about the growing tension between users connected exercise device like Pelotons and the companies that make those devices. Essentially, Peloton is stumbling more that its business projections projected, because customers have not been as loyal as the company thought they would be. For one thing, users are starting to chafe at the idea that they need to subscribe to the device in order for it to be useful, and more specifically that they can’t watch anything except the closed-ecosystem, preprogrammed content on the big built-in screens.This includes Peloton, but also the newer models of NordicTrack treadmills, the Tonal strength device that has to be professional adhered to wall studs, and more. NordicTrack owners have gone to war with the company over the fact that it shut down a hack that allowed owners to watch Netflix on the device’s screen. 

The Verge piece mostly focuses on the fact that the subscription-oriented devices are a hassle: Not only are they completely rigid about their users having subscriptions to the platform, but it’s hard to transfer ownership of the bikes. The relatively delicate built-in screens also make them, hilariously to me, difficult to even move around, let alone from one owner’s house to a new owner’s house. 

But there is more here on the issue of motivation, which is a constant challenge for people trying to make a habit of exercise. The question that the hand-in-glove operation of these Peloton-type gadgets with the infotainment platform that are their workout classes actually begs is, do they ever really deliver on the dream of a set-it-and-forget-it relationship with working out, a truly independent and autonomous approach to exercise, if they also encourage and require the subscription?

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A follow-on from yesterday’s 80/20 piece. Personally I think Peloton looks wildly expensive. Alternatives like Zwift are cheaper and in many ways better.
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Could this revolutionary idea pay our climate change debt and supercharge CO2 reductions? • Forbes

David Vetter:

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What if we could accelerate decarbonization and the removal of carbon dioxide from the air, achieving global climate targets, all without saddling future generations with trillions of dollars of debt?

That’s a question being considered by researchers in Oxford who have developed a novel idea for dealing with greenhouse gas emissions—by treating them like financial debt.

The key to the concept: issue carbon emitters such as oil companies with debt instruments called carbon removal obligations (CROs). While these would be tradeable, such obligations would gather interest over time, effectively charging emitters for storing CO2 in the air. The payments on the debt could be used to pay for carbon dioxide removal as such technologies become available at scale.

The brainchild of PhD researcher Johannes Bednar of the Austrian International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in conjunction with the University of Oxford, the concept for carbon removal obligations offers a reversal of the current situation, in which polluters are free to emit greenhouse gases while making vague promises about decarbonizing operations and using carbon capture technologies that don’t yet exist. This means current generations are able to pass the buck of ever higher concentrations of CO2 on to future generations to deal with. The costs of reversing the damage done by today’s carbon polluters have been estimated at some $535 trillion—many times the size of the entire global economy.

CROs, on the other hand, immediately put the responsibility for carbon removal onto the emitter.

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Nice idea, which would of course need everyone to implement it together, and if we’ve learnt anything, doing this with nation states is like trying to herd cats that are presently asleep in front of a steamroller.

Also, Could Forbes Stop Writing Headlines Which Invite The Answer No?
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Origin story: how Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone and more celebs started Planet Hollywood • Esquire

Kate Storey:

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In the mid-nineties, I visited the Orlando Planet Hollywood. I was around ten. I can recall museum-cased memorabilia above my head—I don’t know from which movie. Probably something I wasn’t allowed to see. It didn’t matter. These were real, actual props from movies. And surely, I imagined, movie stars hung out at this crowded central-Florida restaurant all the time. I begged my parents for a T-shirt, which I held on to for years. At that point, Planet Hollywood merch was highly coveted. “For a friend’s son’s bar mitzvah, I managed to get Planet Hollywood to sell me one of the official wool-and-leather jackets. They weren’t for sale, so it was a huge deal,” remembers journalist and author Linda Stasi. “When we gave it to him, people were literally cheering and touching it. The jacket was so rare at the time and Planet Hollywood was so cool that it was like giving a kid a solid-gold Rolex.” A vintage Planet Hollywood leather jacket or bomber can go for as little as sixty dollars on eBay today.

Tourists still flooded into the flagship Manhattan restaurant. The wait was always at least twenty minutes. Sometimes it was a couple hours. Patrons complained, yet they waited behind the velvet rope (a nice Hollywood touch) for the chance to sit underneath one of the fifteen jackets Schwarzenegger wore in The Terminator—even if Schwarzenegger himself was almost never there. They always asked, though. “It was incredibly monotonous for us, because there was a hierarchy like there is at any other job,” says actress Natalie Zea, who worked as a hostess at the Manhattan Planet Hollywood in 1994. “The servers were superior to us, because they’re the ones who got to interact on the occasion when somebody [famous] would come in. There was no real behind-the-scenes. It was just so rote.”

On a night when there wasn’t an opening or a screening, it was like any other midlevel chain restaurant where families in cutoffs clutching bags of sixteen-dollar T-shirts paid about fifteen dollars a person for pasta with a heavy sauce. The bartender mixed up big, bright, syrupy drinks, then put them on trays to be distributed to the smoking and nonsmoking sections. The same twenty songs played over and over. “Girls on Film” by Duran Duran seemed to always be on.

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Why this? Well, if you look in the right way – as Ravi (👋) did, you’ll see a strong resemblance to the origin story of a more recent phenomenon, where the promise of celebrities turning up in person and vouchsafing their wisdom attracted a lot of people; but then the celebrities went away, and so did the special people, until you reach the Yogi Berra paradox of “nobody goes there anymore, it’s too popular”. Except it’s not. (PH went bust, returned, rinse, repeat.)
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Why trying to clean up all the ocean plastic is pointless • Gizmodo

Molly Taft (for Gizmodo) speaks to Max Liboiron, associate professor at the University of Newfoundland and a scholar of plastic pollution – of which we’re putting 8bn kg into the ocean every year:

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Molly Taft, Earther We’re conditioned to think cleaning up the oceans is a net good, which is why projects that have these lofty goals of taking all the trash out of the sea seem to have such a cultural hold. What’s complicated about that premise?

Max Liboiron: One of the things that’s really important to understand is that cleaning up the oceans is fundamentally different than something like cleaning up litter on the street. That’s mostly because of scale problems. The stuff we’re really familiar with at the scale of being a human does not track into the ocean because the ocean is the biggest thing in the world.

You actually have a scale problem where you cannot clean up the ocean in any way at a rate that is commensurate with the amount of plastic going into it. Microplastics are some of the smallest things in the world. They’re smaller than a grain of rice, and they’re in one of the biggest things in the world from a numbers standpoint.

When we teach pollution science, which is different than litter science, what we teach people is that it’s called a stock-and-flow problem. The best metaphor is, OK, you walk into your bathroom and your bathtub is overflowing. Do you, a) turn off the tap, or b) get a mop? I mean, eventually you’ll do both, but you better turn off that tap before you start mopping up or you will never stop mopping up and you will never catch up to the water spilling out. That’s a great model for job security but a horrible model for dealing with pollution.

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Again and again, it feels as though we try to solve problems not by tackling the problem at its root, but by creating makework that enlarges the circuit around which the problem is handed. (See also: CO2 emissions.)
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UK regulator expected to block Meta’s Giphy deal • Financial Times

Kate Beioley and Javier Espinoza:

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Meta has aggressively fought the watchdog’s assessment and a block is likely to be controversial, potentially triggering an appeal. In a response to the CMA’s provisional findings Meta accused the watchdog of “engaging in extraterritorial over-reach” and “sending a chilling message to start-up entrepreneurs: do not build new companies because you will not be able to sell them”.

In August Meta said: “We disagree with the CMA’s preliminary findings, which we do not believe to be supported by the evidence. As we have demonstrated, this merger is in the best interest of people and businesses in the UK — and around the world — who use Giphy and our services. We will continue to work with the CMA to address the misconception that the deal harms competition.” 

According to submissions by Meta’s lawyers, the CMA’s findings contained “fundamental errors of law and fact”. The company also criticised the regulator’s assessment of Giphy’s potential future business ventures in display advertising. It was more likely, Meta said, that Giphy would have “continued in a diminished and underfunded state”.

Meta declined to comment on the CMA’s future move beyond its earlier remarks.

The clash grew more acrimonious in October when the CMA fined Meta £50.5m for a “major breach” of an order that the company remain separate from Giphy during its investigation. The CMA accused Meta of “consciously refusing to report” information about itself and Giphy, handing down by far the largest-ever fine for such a violation.

Regulators around the world have grown increasingly concerned about letting so-called “killer acquisitions” slip through their nets, after waving through Meta’s acquisition of smaller rivals Instagram and WhatsApp.

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If this happens, it would be the first acquisition by a big company to be blocked. Though Luther Lowe points out that Giphy put itself up for sale because Google downrated its results in search, preferring its own GIF search results. I know – how surprising that Google would do such an anticompetitive thing.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Bajau people can hold their breath for exceptionally long times because of a genetic mutation. CC-licensed photo by Borneo Child Aid 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. Enthusiastic infection. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

WHO says too early to understand Omicron severity • Bloomberg via Yahoo

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The 13 omicron cases identified in the Netherlands on Sunday suggest the new variant already has a strong foothold in Europe, with more countries reporting cases. It will “inevitably” arrive in the US, Anthony Fauci said, and that Americans should get vaccines and boosters as prevention. Airline travel is beginning to recall the first days of the pandemic.

Moderna chief medical officer Paul Burton said he suspects omicron may elude current vaccines and, if so, a reformulated shot could be available early next year.

…The World Health Organization is urging caution after two South African health experts, including the doctor who first sounded the alarm about the omicron variant, indicated that symptoms linked to the coronavirus strain have been mild so far.

The initial reported infections were among university students, WHO said, adding that younger patients tend to have milder symptoms.

“Understanding the level of severity of the omicron variant will take days to several weeks,” WHO said in a statement, adding that “there is currently no information to suggest that symptoms associated with omicron are different from those from other variants.”

European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde said vaccination drives in poorer countries must be improved. “We won’t be protected until we are all vaccinated,” Lagarde told Italy’s Rai 3 in a live television interview. “If some companies can deliver packages everywhere, I’m sure we can do that with vaccines too.”

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Of course they decided not to call it “nu” – sounds too like “new” -, or the next option, “xi” because “it’s a common surname. So omicron it is. Two weeks to figure out how virulent it is and how aggressive.
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Israel and Iran broaden cyberwar to attack civilian targets • The New York Times

Farnaz Fassihi and Ronen Bergman:

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Millions of ordinary people in Iran and Israel recently found themselves caught in the crossfire of a cyberwar between their countries. In Tehran, a dentist drove around for hours in search of gasoline, waiting in long lines at four gas stations only to come away empty.

In Tel Aviv, a well-known broadcaster panicked as the intimate details of his sex life, and those of hundreds of thousands of others stolen from an LGBTQ dating site, were uploaded on social media.

For years, Israel and Iran have engaged in a covert war, by land, sea, air and computer, but the targets have usually been military or government related. Now, the cyberwar has widened to target civilians on a large scale.

In recent weeks, a cyberattack on Iran’s nationwide fuel distribution system paralyzed the country’s 4,300 gas stations, which took 12 days to have service fully restored.

That attack was attributed to Israel by two US defense officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential intelligence assessments. It was followed days later by cyberattacks in Israel against a major medical facility and a popular LGBTQ dating site, attacks Israeli officials have attributed to Iran.

The escalation comes as American authorities have warned of Iranian attempts to hack the computer networks of hospitals and other critical infrastructure in the United States. As hopes fade for a diplomatic resurrection of the Iranian nuclear agreement, such attacks are only likely to proliferate.

Hacks have been seeping into civilian arenas for months. Iran’s national railroad was attacked in July, but that relatively unsophisticated hack may not have been Israeli. And Iran is accused of making a failed attack on Israel’s water system last year.

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The essence of cyberwar is that it’s almost certain to involve collateral damage to civilians. A Sky TV series called COBRA, featuring a beleaguered (but actually capable) Prime Minister, had a series-long storyline which was one cyberattack after another, which all looked close to feasible, amplified by social media unrest – which is what would really cause the problems.
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Improving digital public forums’ role in democracy • Imagining the Internet

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862 respondents answered the yes-no question [“Looking ahead to 2035, can digital spaces and people’s use of them be changed in ways that significantly serve the public good – yes or no?”]

61% said they either hope or expect that by 2035 digital spaces and people’s uses of them WILL change in ways that significantly serve the public good. However, because some wrote that this is merely their hope and others listed one or more extremely difficult hurdles to overcome before that outcome can be achieved, the numeric finding of 61 is not fully indicative of the challenge of accomplishing this.

39% said they expect that by 2035, digital spaces and people’s uses of them WILL NOT change in ways that significantly serve the public good.

It is important to note that a large share of those who chose “yes” – that online public spaces will improve significantly by 2035 – said it was their “hope” only and/or also wrote in their answers that the changes between now and then could go either way. They often listed one or more difficult hurdles to overcome before that outcome can be achieved. The simple quantitative results are not fully indicative of the complexities of the challenges. The important findings are found in the respondents’ rich, deep qualitative replies.The full 160-page report includes full details.

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To be read in parallel with the Pew Internet writeup of the same question. (You may find one or the other version more accessible, or hitting the buttons of interest better.) It’s quite a timescale – as long as social networks have been around – and yet one-third are sure of no improvement, and the others only “hope or expect”. (Thanks Seth F for the links.)
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The trouble with troubleshooting • 80/20 Endurance

Matt Fitzgerald:

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where nontraumatic sports injuries are concerned, the person is “better off without” a diagnosis most of the time. For example, in a 2021 study by Indian researchers, forty-four individuals with low-back pain were given MRI’s, after which half of them were given a factual description of the findings and half were told that the findings were normal regardless of the results. Six weeks later, according to the study’s authors, members of the first group had a “more negative perception of their spinal condition, increased catastrophization, decreased pain improvement, and poorer functional status.” That’s not exactly an endorsement of diagnosis.

At first blush, all of this business about athletic pain and overmedicalization might seem to have nothing to do with Bob and Sally, our two hypothetical runners [mentioned earlier in the full article] who had difficulty adjusting to a shift in their daily run time. [Bob laughed it off, Sally was concerned because her run monitoring device said she was having a “bad workout”.] In fact, though, it has everything to do with it. Increasingly, the devices that athletes use to monitor and regulate their training are doing the same thing doctors and diagnostic tests do to athletes. As device features and metrics multiply (Garmin’s new “body battery” takes the cake), so does the number of things that can go wrong. Worse, at the same time these devices raise (mostly false) alarms, they insidiously drain athletes of their autonomy, lulling them into placing more and more trust into the plastic oracles on their wrists and less and less into their own perceptions and judgments.

Someone should do an experiment where sports devices are coded to randomly produce an alert message reading, “You’re having a terrible workout.” I’m willing to bet that a majority of today’s tech-dependent athletes would take this message seriously, rattled by it even if they’re in the middle of a terrific workout when it pops up.

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The Apple Watch doesn’t do that, though I do wonder how hard it would be to ignore if it did. The interaction of our perception of how well we’re doing with the objective measure is subtle, and it probably doesn’t help at all to have qualitative analysis stuck to it.
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Rare mutation among Bajau people lets them stay underwater longer • Gizmodo

George Dvorsky:

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At first glance, the spleen doesn’t seem a likely organ to help us hold our breath. Its primary functions are to filter blood as part of the immune system, fight bacteria, and to recycle red blood cells. But it also plays an important role during acute oxygen shortage, i.e. when we hold our breath for an extended period of time. When breathing stops, our bodies trigger a series of physiological changes: our heart rate slows down, the blood vessels in our extremities constrict, and our spleen shrinks down in size. When the spleen contracts like this, it releases oxygenated red blood cells, which provides an extra supply of oxygen to the bloodstream. The bigger the spleen, the greater amounts of freshly oxygenated blood.

Figuring this was a clue to extraordinary breath-holding ability, lead researcher Melissa Ilardo brought a portable ultrasound machine to southeast Asia to measure the size of Bajau spleens. Which, as the researchers themselves admit, was a bit werid.

“I basically just showed up at the house of the chief of the village, this bizarre, foreign girl [referring to herself] with an ultrasound machine asking about spleens,” said Ilardo in a statement, adding that “They’re the most welcoming people I’ve ever met.”

Results of the ultrasounds showed that Bajau individuals do indeed have larger spleens, and they’re larger that those found in unrelated neighboring populations. At first, this observation was attributed to differences in physical conditioning or physiological responses—but spleen sizes among diving and non-diving Bajau individuals did not vary in size, which suggested something else was going on. Something a bit more genetic.

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A related topic, if you’re going down to the undersea woods today: the secret to holding your breath (much, much) longer. Did *you* know the spleen was involved in oxygen capacity? I always wondered why doctors seem happy to lop it out.
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Why carbon taxes really work • Tim Harford

The Undercover Economist approves of them:

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The price of everything we buy is tied to the cost of resources required to make and deliver it. If something requires acres of land, tonnes of raw materials, megawatt-hours of energy and days of skilled labour, you can bet that it won’t come cheap. The link between price and cost is fuzzy but real. Yet carbon emissions have not been reflected in that cost.

A carbon tax changes that by making the climate impact as real a cost as any other. It sends a signal along all those supply chains, nudging every decision towards the lower-carbon alternative. A shopper may decide that a carbon-taxed T-shirt is too costly, but meanwhile the textile factory is looking to save on electricity, while the electricity supplier is switching to solar. Every part of the value chain becomes greener.

Large changes might well be achievable with a surprisingly subtle carbon tax. The International Monetary Fund has suggested that a tax of $75/ton of CO2 might be required, but even with a £100/tonne tax — nearly twice as much — the day-to-day pain would be less than most people expect.

In the UK, carbon dioxide emissions are less than six tonnes per person per year, plus two or three tonnes more to reflect the carbon footprint of imported goods. A £100/tonne tax that covered those emissions would raise the cost of living by just over £2 a day, and cover more than 5% of UK tax revenue. That’s not nothing: the government would be wise to send everyone a monthly lump sum in compensation. The burden would fall unevenly: those who spent a lot, flew a lot, drove a lot or heated big, draughty houses would pay more. It is unlikely that you would notice much impact on the price of bananas.

Coffee provides an instructive example of how much of the change would be imperceptible. According to Mark Maslin and Carmen Nab of University College London, a kilogram of coffee beans delivered to the UK has a typical footprint of about 15 kilograms of CO2. If farmed and shipped more sustainably, the footprint is 3.5 kilograms. With a £100/tonne carbon tax, that’s either £1.50 or 35 pence. You can make dozens of coffees with a kilogram of beans, so coffee drinkers might not notice, but you can bet that behind the scenes farmers and shippers will be looking to push their costs away from £1.50 and towards 35 pence.

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The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger • Stephen Diehl

Diehl is annoyed (as he often is) by the empty promises of crypto:

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After twelve years of these technologies existing (roughly the same age as the iPhone) there is basically only one type of successful crypto business: exchanges which exist to trade more crypto. But the heart of this issue, and why there’s no other success stories, is because smart contracts tenuously look like a good idea until you actually try to build anything real that has to interact with the non-blockchain outside world. At which point they become too brittle, insecure, or strictly inferior to a centralized alternative.

In database terminology smart contracts are stored procedures that run one of the various incarnations of distributed databases these technologies are built on. In theory they act somewhat like self-automated vending machines but for more complex user interactions. In practice they act more like self-automated bug bounties which typically explode violently when certain exploits are issued against the coded logic, and at which point they spill all of the coins locked up in the contract.

These disasters happen about two or three times a week now because coding at that level of correctness required in a Javascript-like language with loose and ill-defined semantics is near impossible. When a contract does finally meet its end, the only recourse is begging or threats to return the stolen tokens. However it’s unclear that “stolen” is the right word because the contract was simply behaving exactly as instructed and therein lies the core reason why “code is law” is an absolutely rubbish idea.

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I was reminded of his point – that when people exploit these “smart contracts” to take millions, which they are then implored to give back, in a completely non-smart-contract human-to-human appeal, by a piece in the New Yorker about how Kurt Gödel said he’d found a recursive flaw in the US Constitution that left it open to becoming a constitutional dictatorship. And others explain how.
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Bitcoin exchanges face digital tax raid • Sunday Telegraph

James Titcomb:

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The UK tax office has informed online cryptocurrency exchanges that they are subject to the levy, which is designed to ensure tech firms such as Google, Facebook and Amazon pay more to the Exchequer.

HMRC said crypto assets “are not financial instruments” and do not qualify as commodities or money, meaning online exchanges that sell cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and ethereum are not able to claim an exemption for financial marketplaces.

The digital services tax, which came into force last year, places a 2% sales levy on online marketplaces, search engines and social media services that have a global revenue of over £500m and UK sales of over £25m.

It is expected to be phased out after a G20 tax deal earlier this year to punish avoidance, but remains in force until a replacement measure comes into effect.

Companies which may be hit by the levy include Coinbase, one of the world’s biggest exchanges. Its UK subsidiary reported sales of €21.2m (£18m) last year but the company recently reported that global revenues had quadrupled, meaning it is likely to pass the UK threshold in 2021.

CryptoUK, an industry body, is lobbying HMRC and The Treasury over the issue, saying it is unfair to treat cryptocurrencies differently to other financial assets. In the US, they have been treated as commodities.

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At the same time as this, crypto exchanges have to be licensed by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority. So crypto both is and isn’t a financial instrument: it is for the purposes of consumer protection, and it isn’t for the purposes of raising tax.
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The post-truth pandemic • Overmatter

Natasha Loder is health policy editor at The Economist:

»

Imagine, for a moment, that a massive asteroid is hurtling towards our planet. You would think that science, technology, and facts would form the backbone of the response. World leaders would be expected to come up with a strategy, informed by the world’s most brilliant minds, for how to deflect the asteroid. Or failing that, preserve as many lives as possible.

The last couple of years have taught us something. Should this hypothetical asteroid threaten us a number of far more depressing scenarios seem likely. Some leaders will deny the asteroid exists, or lean on non-mainstream ideas that suggest the rock is actually going to whizz right past us. Other politicians would point out that a large asteroid impact is not so bad, really. You know, not much worse than a bad meteor shower.  And some would use the crisis to their advantage, spreading division along the way. Belief in the asteroid could even become a sort of political litmus test.

Over the last few years, one of the questions I’ve been asked the most often is what it was like to be a health journalist covering a pandemic. One thing that stood out was the volume of misinformation that spread from the early days, and the extent to which the infodemic was driven by political leaders and states. So much so, I started to think about the outbreak as a “post-truth pandemic” about halfway through 2020.

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She lists a lot of the things that the leaders of the free (and not-so-free) world did to make it all go so badly wrong.

The asteroid idea, as it happens, is the premise of Don’t Look Up, which is Netflix’s Christmas Eve film. I’d say it’s exactly on point.

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It’s still November, so enough time to order Social Warming, my latest book, on the widespread effects of social networks.

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Samsung’s iconic Galaxy Note – which forged the way for “phablets” – won’t be made any more, reports suggest. CC-licensed photo by Kārlis Dambrāns 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. On the correct day this time. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How the pandemic pulled Nigerian university students into cybercrime • The Record

Olatunji Olaigbe:

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even now [Kayode’s] descent into cybercrime can sound rational given the nightmare of trying to stay afloat amid the pandemic in Nigeria. 

“I needed to do something. I needed to survive,” Kayode said. “I’m not justifying my decision, but there’s something in being at home, doing nothing, but paradoxically doing everything in your capacity to stay alive, yet you are kind of dying, that makes you care less about others.” 

Nigeria represents one of the largest economies in the world and the largest in Africa. Although oil and agriculture are still the country’s largest industries, its tech ecosystem is one of the world’s fastest growing.

But according to Trading Economics, the average Nigerian salary is 43,200 naira (about $105) a month, still far behind that of many other countries with strong tech sectors. Meanwhile, the country’s jobless rate is the second highest in the world—quadrupling in the last five years and surging to 33.3% from 27.1% amid the pandemic, Bloomberg reported in March.

Young Nigerians have been hit the hardest by the epidemic’s unemployment crisis—driving many to online crime and forcing cultural re-evaluation of its morality, according to Oludayo Tade.

“It creates this orientation that this society does not take care of us, so we have to take care of ourselves,” said Tade, who researches and teaches sociology and criminology at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. 

Kayode seems like an unlikely criminal at first glance. 

In high school, he says, he was an A student and served as his school’s social prefect, while also representing his school in academic competitions. And he scored well enough on the Nigerian equivalent of the SAT’s to land a spot at the University of Ilorin, one of the country’s most elite educational institutions—where I also attend.

But as Kayode was in the middle of first semester exams for his sophomore year in March 2020, the Academic Staff Union of University embarked on a two-week warning strike—citing unmet demands and disagreement with the federal government. Then the pandemic struck Nigeria, and the federal government imposed an indefinite nationwide lockdown. University students were encouraged to leave their dorms and go home until education resumed.

That wasn’t so easy for Kayode. 

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Doesn’t have to be cybercrime: plenty got work as essay writers, for richer but less capable people in other countries.
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A trust recession is looming over the American economy – The Atlantic

Jerry Useem:

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The economists Paul Zak and Stephen Knack found, in a study published in 1998, that a 15% bump in a nation’s belief that “most people can be trusted” adds a full percentage point to economic growth each year. That means that if, for the past 20 years, Americans had trusted one another like Ukrainians did, our annual GDP per capita would be $11,000 lower; if we had trusted like New Zealanders did, it’d be $16,000 higher. “If trust is sufficiently low,” they wrote, “economic growth is unachievable.”

…Add to the disruption and isolation of the pandemic a political climate that urges us to meditate on the distance—ethnic, generational, ideological, socioeconomic—separating us from others, and it’s not hard to see why many Americans feel disconnected.

What has suffered most are “weak ties”—relationships with acquaintances who fall somewhere between stranger and friend, which sociologists find are particularly valuable for the dissemination of knowledge. A closed inner circle tends to recycle knowledge it already has. New information is more likely to come from the serendipitous encounter with Alan, the guy with the fern in his office who reports to Phoebe and who remembers the last time someone suggested splitting the marketing division into three teams, and how that went.

Some evidence suggests that having more weak ties can shorten bouts of unemployment. In a famous 1973 survey, the Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter discovered that, among 54 people who had recently found a new job through someone they knew, 28% had heard about the new position from a weak tie, versus 17% from a strong one. When the weak ties fall away, our “radius of trust”—to borrow Fukuyama’s term—shrinks.

That’s a problem for individual employees, as much as they may appreciate the flexibility of working anywhere, anytime. And it’s a problem for business leaders, who are trying to weigh the preferences of those employees against the enduring existence of the place that employs them. They don’t want to end up like IBM. It saved $2bn making much of its workforce remote as early as the 1980s, only to reverse course in 2017, when it recognised that remote work was depressing collaboration. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently wondered whether companies were “burning” some of the face-to-face “social capital we built up in this phase where we are all working remote. What’s the measure for that?”

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Poor regulation, not price cap, to blame for energy market mayhem • Financial Times

Helen Thomas:

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Bulb [which went bust earlier this week, leaving 1.7 million customers in the lurch] wasn’t a “tease and squeeze” merchant, attracting customers with low fixed rates before flipping them close to the price cap. It had one variable tariff. But it had grown very quickly and was perennially lossmaking, thinly-capitalised and in effect sold energy at cost. Its gross margin in the year to March 2019 was 1%.

Its position had looked precarious for some time. The going-concern statement in its March 2020 accounts implied it was reliant on a letter from parent company Simple Energy Limited (which only holds Bulb) guaranteeing support for another 12 months.

It had a £55m loan facility (again guaranteed by its parent). Compare that to Octopus Energy, which at the time had a similar number of customers, with its £340m of committed funding in its April 2020 accounts. While Octopus’s risk discussion of wholesale prices provides details on a “strict and sophisticated” hedging policy, the word “hedging” doesn’t even feature in Bulb’s similar disclosure.

The reality is Bulb probably didn’t have the balance sheet to follow the paint-by-numbers template provided by the regulator for protection consistent with the assumptions in the price cap. It wasn’t required to do so and it’s not clear how much it did hedge.

…The mistake [in regulation] was capping retail prices while allowing companies chasing growth at any cost to take huge amounts of commodity price risk that was in effect backstopped by the state. Recent moves in power prices would have probably meant some failures under most regimes, reckons Peter Atherton, a sector consultant. But the politics of energy mean ultimately “the government is the supplier of last resort — always has been, always will be”, he said.

A regulatory environment that priced in that risk to the taxpayer would have policed existing rules more vigorously. It would have set a much higher bar for new entrants, much earlier. And it would have set tougher requirements on hedging wholesale price risk.

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The energy market will look different – less choice, for sure – next year. Shows how important it is not just to regulate, but to do it well.
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Amid NSO scandal, Israel said to ban cyber tech sales to 65 countries • The Times of Israel

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The [Israel] Defense Ministry has dramatically scaled back the number of countries to which Israeli companies can sell cyber technologies amid global fallout over Israeli spyware firm NSO Group, according to a report Thursday.

The updated November list consists of 37 countries, down from 102, according to the Calcalist business news daily.

Countries with questionable human rights records, including Israel’s new allies Morocco and the UAE, have been removed, the report said.

Other dropped countries include Saudi Arabia and Mexico. The Saudis allegedly used NSO’s Pegasus spyware to monitor Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in 2018. Mexico has also been said to use the surveillance technology on journalists and activists.

However, India — which was also accused of using NSO technology on journalists, opposition politicians, and activists — remains on the updated list.

The new rules are expected to deal a serious blow to Israel’s cyber technology industry, according to the report.

NSO Group has faced a torrent of international criticism over allegations it helps governments spy on dissidents and rights activists. NSO insists its product is meant only to assist countries in fighting crime and terrorism.

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How your product is “meant” to be used and how it’s actually used tend to be two different things. This is going to put NSO in a really tough spot. Imagine a fire sale, though: who would buy Pegasus? Who would oversee the bidding? Increasingly, Pegasus looks like one of the most valuable single pieces of software in the world. You have to hope they’ve got fantastic security, bot computing and physical.
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Galaxy Note 20 production to end, killing the series for good • 9to5Google

Ben Schoon:

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2021 marked a big year for the Galaxy Note series, but not in a good way. Rather, it was the beginning of the end as Samsung prioritized its foldables over the Galaxy Note line. Now, the death of the Note seems set in stone, as Samsung reportedly has no plans for a 2022 Galaxy Note, and is also planning to end production of the Galaxy Note 20. [There was no new Note released in 2021.]

ET News reports that Samsung has pretty much confirmed the end of the Galaxy Note series through two actions. Firstly, Samsung apparently has no plans for a Galaxy Note device in its 2022 roadmap. Likely, that means the only flagship-tier Galaxy smartphones coming next year will be the Galaxy S22 series and new foldables.

On top of that, Samsung will also apparently end production on its Galaxy Note 20 series entirely by the end of 2021. Until now, production on the Galaxy Note 20 has continued as the device has still been selling. In 2021, the series reportedly sold around 3.2 million devices, around a third the number of Note devices sold in 2020.

Of course, we know well at this point that the Galaxy S22 Ultra will act as a spiritual successor to the Galaxy Note series, with the device adopting a design closer to the Note 20 series as well as using the same built-in stylus. The Galaxy Fold series also inherits the S Pen, but still lacks a good place to store it.

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Iconic in its time, but the exploding batteries in autumn 2016 were very much the beginning of the end.
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Will glow-in-the-dark materials someday light our cities? • Knowable

Kurt Kleiner:

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These materials that glow strongly for hours open possibilities, such as “glow-in-the-dark” cities lighted by luminescent pavements and buildings. Since 19% of all global energy use is for lighting, and in Europe about 1.6% specifically for street lighting, the potential energy savings are large, write building engineer Anna Laura Pisello and colleagues in the 2021 Annual Review of Materials Research.

One problem with the approach is that most luminescent material won’t glow all the way through the night. Better materials could help solve that problem, says Pisello, of the University of Perugia, who studies energy-efficient building materials. In the meantime, existing materials could be combined with electric lighting that would come on long enough to recharge the road markings before switching off again.

Luminescent paint could also provide outdoor area lighting. Pisello’s lab developed such a glow-in-the-dark paint and in a 2019 report, simulated what would happen if they painted a public path near a railway station with it. By glowing throughout the night, the paint would reduce energy needed for lighting by about 27% in the immediate area, the scientists found.

If this conjures worries of entire cities glaring throughout the night and adding to harmful light pollution, Pisello says that is unlikely. Luminescent materials would likely only replace existing lighting, not add to it. The colour of the glowing materials could be chosen to avoid the blue frequencies that have been found especially harmful to wildlife.

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Tempted to say “no” reflexively to the headline, but the story is more persuasive.
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Tolkien estate blocks JRR Token crypto-currency • BBC News

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Lord of the Rings creator JRR Tolkien’s estate has successfully blocked a crypto-currency called JRR Token.

Lawyers representing the estate said the product, launched in August, infringed the author’s trademark, with websites selling and promoting the crypto-currency, jrrtoken.com and thetokenofpower.com, featuring rings, hobbit holes and a wizard like Gandalf.

The US-based developer paid the estate’s legal costs, which the lawyers said were “significant”.
The estate filed a complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), one day after tokens for the crypto-currency ($JRR) went on sale aiming to “organise the people towards a common goal of making JRR Token ‘The One Token That Rules Them All'”.

This was very similar to the “one ring to rule them all” line from The Lord of The Rings book, the lawyers said.

And the domain name jrrtoken.com, registered in February 2021, was “specifically designed to mislead” people into believing it had a legitimate commercial connection with the author.

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As TV producer Willard Foxton Todd quipped: he’s a non-fungible Tolkien.
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Scientists call for travel ‘code red’ over Covid variant found in southern Africa • The Guardian

Hannah Devlin and Ian Sample:

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The variant, which was only identified on Tuesday, initially sparked concern because it carries an “extremely high number” of mutations that could allow it to evade immunity. The latest data, presented by South African scientists on Thursday, revealed the variant also appears to be more transmissible and is already present in provinces throughout the country.

Ewan Birney, the deputy director general of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory and a member of Spi-M, which advises the UK government, called for urgent “code red” – or “red list-type” – travel restrictions to be placed on southern Africa while the new variant’s transmissibility is investigated, saying it posed a risk of the pandemic regaining momentum.

He urged countries not to repeat the mistake of failing to act quickly. “What we’ve learnt from the other situations like this – some have turned out OK and some haven’t – is that whilst we’re [investigating] you have to be reasonably paranoid,” he said.

The new strain, B.1.1.529 [now dubbed “nu” by the WHO], was identified after a surge of cases in Gauteng, an urban area containing Pretoria and Johannesburg. Initially the cluster of cases, centred on a university, was assumed to be due to an increase in socialising.

However, this week the variant was identified as a potential, more ominous, cause of the increase. The first detected cases of the variant were collected in Botswana on 11 November and a case has also been found in Hong Kong – a 36-year-old man who tested positive while in quarantine after a trip to South Africa.

In the past 48 hours, South African scientists reviewed PCR test data from the Gauteng region and discovered the new variant appeared to be behind the increase in cases, having risen to account for around 90% of cases in a matter of weeks.

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When have travel restrictions ever prevented these variants from spreading, though? Endemic, pandemic, this virus spreads. The concern is if this is even more infectious than delta. The UK government put South Africa on the “red list” – quarantine required – on Thursday evening. With that in mind, the next question is…
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Has the UK reached herd immunity? • Unherd

Tom Chivers:

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here’s the note of caution. Herd immunity isn’t a fact about the virus: it’s an interaction between the virus and our behaviour. As an epidemiologist told me the last time I wrote about Covid case numbers, it’s much harder to predict the course of a pathogen when R is near 1. You can get unpredictable outbreaks in local patches, sub-populations with lower vaccination levels. Minor behaviour changes (more people socialising indoors as it gets colder? Christmas?) can push R up and alter things significantly. 

In response to that piece of mine, the forecasting site Metaculus put together some predictions for what was going to happen in the coming months — will we have further restrictions like Plan B or something more extreme; how high will the number of people in hospital get over winter, that sort of thing. 

Metaculus’s forecasts have a pretty good record in the pandemic so far. They think that Plan B-style restrictions are more likely than not before February 2022, and that there’s a good chance (≈25%) of more stringent ones, including a ban on household mixing at Christmas (≈20% chance). They also think that hospitalisations are likely to go up fairly significantly from their current level. (You can see their other relevant predictions here and here.)

So while we may be at or near herd immunity, we’re also in a knife-edge situation where changes in behaviour could change things quite a lot, and change the threshold for what counts as herd immunity.

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My most dangerous climb 🧗🏽‍♀️climbing an E9 with next to no trad experience • YouTube

Anna Hazelnutt:

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Once Upon a Time in the Southwest is a beautiful, 50 meter slab on the Devonshire coast in England. It’s a benchmark E9 (6c) trad climb known for its exposure, world-class techy slab movements, and of course, its flakey holds!

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The grade – E9 – essentially means “this is Olympics-style difficult, but also with a risk of serious injury if you get things wrong”. And she does get things wrong, because it’s only her second or third time where she isn’t just clipping to bolts drilled into the rock. She’s hand-placing the “gear” into cracks in the rock, from which it can be prone to fall out if you mishandle the rope. As she does.
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Christmas shopping? Let me recommend Social Warming, my latest book, about the creeping effects of social media on society, politics and journalism.

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The US has put 27 Chinese companies on a blacklist for quantum computing technology, amid concerns that they could in future lead to military uses cracking encryption. CC-licensed photo by IBM Research 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. What have you done to my reactor? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How Maradona’s stardom and a jar of cocaine trapped Natalia Denegri online • Rest of World

Lucía Cholakian Herrera and Leo Schwartz:

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The year is 1997, but the backing band looks trapped in the ’80s, all gas station sunglasses and button-downs. Although they play their instruments, the synthetic pop music sounds like a karaoke track. [Natalia] Denegri bounces around in a black halter top and skin-tight jeans, clutching a microphone, then reaches the chorus. “Who gave it to me?” she belts. “That’s what I want to know.”

The reference is not lost on the off-screen crowd, which erupts in exaggerated laughter, drowning out Denegri. “Attention in the studio!” implores the host, but the audience is too far gone.

Today, Denegri is a celebrated Argentinian actress and TV host, but this video is from a darker chapter of her life, when she was a young socialite trapped in the intoxicating orbit of football demigod Diego Maradona. The year before her ill-advised performance, Denegri was caught up in a scandal that gripped the nation, involving Maradona’s agent and a jar filled with cocaine. Her song, “Who Gave It To Me,” was a dirty double entendre referencing the episode, which is why the audience responded with such glee. She was 21 years old at the time. 

“As the years went by, I realized how I was used. I was a minor,” Natalia Denegri told Rest of World. “I had no idea what I was saying.”

She would rather everyone forget about that period of her life, when she became the spectacle of Argentina — sexualized, ridiculed, and denigrated in every corner of pop culture. She wants the video of her performance, and other links associated with her past, to be de-indexed from Google — removed from the search giant’s pages, so that they won’t so easily be found. 

The result is a high-profile legal case on the “right to be forgotten” — the first such case in Argentina, and one that embodies an ongoing debate between individual privacy and public interest, in a country where memory holds a particularly special significance.

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There’s a special poignancy about this topic in a country where people were made to vanish by the government for a long time. And, as the story makes clear, the judges have been making distinctions in their rulings around precisely that point.

But it still revolves around one question: if the content still exists on the original sites (as happens here and in Europe), what has really been removed? Only the ease of finding it. Not its existence.
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US blacklists Chinese quantum computing companies • Financial Times

Demetri Sevastopulo:

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The US has placed a dozen Chinese groups involved in quantum computing and other advanced technologies on an export blacklist, saying they pose a risk of gaining access to critical American technologies for the People’s Liberation Army.

The move, which makes it almost impossible for US companies to sell technologies to the listed companies, targeted a total of 27 entities, including 12 in China and two affiliated firms in Japan and Singapore. In addition to quantum computing, the list included companies in the semiconductor and aerospace industries.

Eight of the Chinese groups were specifically targeted to prevent them from accessing sensitive quantum-related technology, the US commerce department said, arguing they could help the PLA improve counter-stealth and counter-submarine applications and facilitate efforts to break US encryption.

The actions mark the latest effort by the Biden administration to make it more difficult for China to secure cutting-edge technologies with military applications. Last month, US intelligence officials warned American companies about Chinese efforts to access technology in areas including quantum computing and artificial intelligence.

“This is a sensible move and an important reminder of the scope and scale of China’s efforts to achieve technological breakthroughs that erode US national security,” said Martijn Rasser, a former CIA official who heads the technology and national security programme at the Center for a New American Security think-tank.

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The concern about quantum computing being that it could crack encryption in the blink of an eye. But it’s so far still completely impossible to say whether it’s near or far from doing that.
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The thousands of vulnerable people harmed by Facebook and Instagram are lost in Meta’s ‘average user’ data • The Conversation

Joseph Bak-Coleman is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington:

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As a researcher who studies collective behavior, I see no conflict between the research (methodological quibbles aside), leaks and people’s intuition. Social media can have catastrophic effects, even if the average user only experiences minimal consequences.

To see how this works, consider a world in which Instagram has a rich-get-richer and poor-get-poorer effect on the well-being of users. A majority, those already doing well to begin with, find Instagram provides social affirmation and helps them stay connected to friends. A minority, those who are struggling with depression and loneliness, see these posts and wind up feeling worse.

If you average them together in a study, you might not see much of a change over time. This could explain why findings from surveys and panels are able to claim minimal impact on average. More generally, small groups in a larger sample have a hard time changing the average.

Yet if we zoom in on the most at-risk people, many of them may have moved from occasionally sad to mildly depressed or from mildly depressed to dangerously so. This is precisely what Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen reported in her congressional testimony: Instagram creates a downward spiraling feedback loop among the most vulnerable teens.

The inability of this type of research to capture the smaller but still significant numbers of people at risk – the tail of the distribution – is made worse by the need to measure a range of human experiences in discrete increments. When people rate their well-being from a low point of one to a high point of five, “one” can mean anything from breaking up with a partner who they weren’t that into in the first place to urgently needing crisis intervention to stay alive. These nuances are buried in the context of population averages.

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Subtle point, easily missed. Small average changes can mask big variations.
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Germany’s incoming government unveils plans to legalize cannabis and phase out coal • CNN

Sheena McKenzie, CNN:

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(CNN)Three German political parties have sealed a deal for a new government, with left-leaning Olaf Scholz the proposed next chancellor following lengthy coalition negotiations and a historic election that sees Angela Merkel stepping down after 16 years at the helm.

The incoming government’s vision for Germany includes plans to legalize cannabis. It also aims to phase-out coal by 2030 and have at least 15 million electric cars on the road by the same year. Mandatory Covid-19 vaccines would also be considered, amid soaring cases in the country.

Under the agreement announced in Berlin on Wednesday, Scholz, of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), will head a three-party coalition with partners the Greens and pro-business Free Democrats. It follows a close September election and two months of negotiations to form a new government.

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The stunning thing, though, is that they plan to phase out nuclear next year, and also aims to have 80% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030 (and have stopped its coal use at the same time). Utterly crazy: why not keep the nuclear plants going? Then you could stop the coal plants a lot sooner.

You have to ask: what are they smoking?
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UK risks Christmas alcohol shortage due to lack of drivers • Reuters (via Yahoo)

James Davey:

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Britain could face a shortage of alcohol this Christmas unless the government steps up its efforts to address a lack of heavy goods vehicle (HGV) drivers, the wine and spirits industry warned on Wednesday.

The prospect of limited alcohol lines follows panic buying at Britain’s fuel pumps, soaring heating prices and shortages of items ranging from consumer electronics to crisps and vegan sausage rolls.

The Wine and Spirit Trade Association (WSTA) said 49 businesses including Moët Hennessy UK, Laurent-Perrier UK, Pernod Ricard UK, C&C Group and Matthew Clark, had put their names to a letter to transport minister Grant Shapps calling on him to take urgent action over HGV driver shortages and freight disruption.

“There is mounting concern amongst our membership that unless urgent action is taken, we will fall deeper into delivery chaos,” said WSTA CEO Miles Beale.

“We are already seeing major delays on wine and spirit delivery times which is pushing up costs and limiting the range of products available to UK consumers.”

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Supply chain slippage: now it’s serious.
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India’s fertility rate drops below 2.1, contraceptive prevalence up: NFHS • Hindustan Times

Rhythma Kaul and Anonna Dutt:

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India’s Total Fertility Rate (TFR), or the average number of children a woman gives birth to in her lifetime, has declined from 2.2 to 2 while the Contraceptive Prevalence Rate (CPR) has increased from 54% to 67%, according data from the National Family Health Survey-5. The union health ministry released data for Phase-2 of the survey on Wednesday; data from Phase-1 was released in December 2020.

A TFR of 2.1 is termed the replacement rate, and means there will be neither an increase, nor a decrease in population.

As per the fourth edition of the survey conducted between 2015 and 2016, the TFR was 2.2. The fifth survey was conducted between 2019 and 2021 in two phases and reflects gains made in population control.

VK Paul, member (health), NITI Aayog, said NFHS-5 shows momentum towards achieving sustainable development goals is getting further accelerated. “Data from the survey would help the government achieve Universal Health Coverage,” he added.

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Indian population flatlines? You’d never have expected that. Put it together with China doing much the same and you have a strange, ageing world ahead.
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Meta delays encrypted messages on Facebook and Instagram to 2023 • The Guardian

Dan Milmo:

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The owner of Facebook and Instagram is delaying plans to encrypt users’ messages until 2023 amid warnings from child safety campaigners that its proposals would shield abusers from detection.

Mark Zuckerberg’s social media empire has been under pressure to abandon its encryption plans, which the UK home secretary, Priti Patel, has described as “simply not acceptable”.

The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) has said private messaging is the “frontline of child sexual abuse online” because it prevents law enforcement, and tech platforms, from seeing messages by ensuring that only the sender and recipient can view their content – a process known as end-to-end encryption.

The head of safety at Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, Meta, announced that the encryption process would take place in 2023. The company had previously said the change would happen in 2022 at the earliest.

“We’re taking our time to get this right and we don’t plan to finish the global rollout of end-to-end encryption by default across all our messaging services until sometime in 2023,” Antigone Davis wrote in the Sunday Telegraph. “As a company that connects billions of people around the world and has built industry-leading technology, we’re determined to protect people’s private communications and keep people safe online.”

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There’s an interesting thread by David Thiel, ex-Facebook, to be read alongside it: he says Facebook was rushing ridiculously to try to implement this.
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Wear OS shoots up the market-share charts, now in striking distance of Apple • Ars Technica

Ron Amadeo:

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Counterpoint Research has a new report detailing the smartwatch market, and Wear OS is a huge winner. Just three months ago, Google and Samsung teamed up to resurrect Wear OS, with the new Wear OS 3.0 debuting on the Galaxy Watch 4. Counterpoint’s latest data has the partnership down as a resounding success, with Wear OS market share rocketing from 4% in Q2 2021 to 17% in Q3 2021.

Google and Samsung’s team-up was a complete reboot of both companies’ smartwatch strategies. Google was floundering at the bottom of the sales charts, having seemingly lost interest in Wear OS for years. The last major OS release was Wear OS 2.0 in 2018, and that had been stagnating on the market for years.

The major Wear OS tech partners from the early days, like Samsung, LG, Sony, and Motorola, had left the platform, with only fashion brands like Fossil hanging around to make watches. Qualcomm was the main SoC provider, and while Apple was revolutionizing the power you can get from a smartwatch SoC, Qualcomm wasn’t really putting in a full effort and strangled the Wear OS market for years with sub-par chips.

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Basically, the market is less split – Wear OS now has all of what was Samsung’s share. However, Counterpoint doesn’t include absolute figures (which would anyway be estimates) so one can’t tell whether the overall market is growing or static.
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Do recipe apps keep my data private? • The Washington Post

Tatum Hunter:

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Paper-and-ink cookbooks come with a few advantages compared to recipe apps: extra information about origins and ingredients, not having to incorporate your beeping phone into any good-for-the-soul cooking time, says cookbook author and critic Paula Forbes.

There’s also a third benefit: Analog cookbooks aren’t sending streams of information about you to third-party advertisers.

A new report from Mozilla Foundation, creator of the “Privacy Not Included” holiday shopping guide, found personal data streaming out of popular Android recipe apps, including precise location, detailed device information as well as scrolling and tapping behavior. Allrecipes Dinner Spinner, Recipes Home — Easy Recipes and Shopping List and Food Network Kitchen were the worst offenders in terms of the number of data requests from advertisers, according to the report.

It’s the latest example of the constant, behind-the-scenes monitoring that powers many of the apps we know and love. App-makers give your data to ad companies, which then combine that information with your activity on totally separate apps to target you with better ads.

…The most egregious tracking came from Recipes Home, according to Becca Ricks, the Mozilla researcher behind the report. She observed several different trackers, including Google and Facebook, collecting data from the app. Some advertisers collected her phone’s battery level, whether it was charging and whether headphones were plugged in, she said. One tracker repeatedly asked the app for data on how long people look at different ads.

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Sometimes live audio apps for rich people…are worse • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick follows up on Business Insider’s piece about Clubhouse’s gradual submergence, and says he never liked its premise, unlike Facebook or Twitter or TikTok:

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These massive companies might now control the internet thanks to the network effect of their currently huge audiences, but those audiences were built by average users. The magic alchemy of populating a functioning social network was done outside of Silicon Valley. Though it’s being limited all the time, users still have some power over platforms. There is, at least in theory, a world were Facebook/Meta could cease to exist if enough people stop using their products.

Clubhouse, by the very fact both its initial user base and its subsequent hype was basically dreamt up by Silicon Valley insiders, was, in my opinion, a test of whether or not venture capitalists had enough influence to dream up a new — honestly, very bad — social network and force it upon the rest of the internet. And, though they got very close to making “fetch” happen, so to speak, they, thankfully, failed.

How can we determine Clubhouse has failed? Well, per The Verge’s Hot Pod newsletter, only 40,000 people tuned in to listen to Oprah earlier this month. Seems not great. Also, the best way to find out if your social network has failed is by looking at the successes of similar, but divergent apps. In this case, both Twitter Spaces and Discord have dominated the live audio space this year. And both have done it in ways that don’t feel tied to West Coast Peloton owners missing the intimacy of a conference call during quarantine. Twitter Spaces and Discord, also, most crucially, wait for it… had user bases built organically over many years!

It’s also weirdly fitting that the NFT and, now, DAO boom aren’t happening on Clubhouse, but Discord. It’s clearly a sign that Clubhouse — in its current form — is cooked, but, also, the entire blockchain mania right now is, in many ways, just the new Clubhouse gold rush.

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Does Windows on Arm have a future? • ZDNet

Mary Jo Foley:

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While Microsoft has continued to plod along the WoA [Windows on Arm] path for the past five years, it has little to show for its efforts. 

In 2016, Microsoft wanted to give Intel some incentive (probably on the price and performance fronts), so it signed up Qualcomm to help build the WoA platform. There have been several announcements and a handful of Windows Arm PCs since. But that’s about it. 

The Windows PCs out there with Arm processors don’t have compelling power/battery life stories, in spite of rather fantastical battery-life claims by some PC makers (including Microsoft). And Microsoft has struggled to get x64 app emulation to work on Arm PCs, limiting their appeal.

On the server front, things seem a bit more promising. Microsoft officials have publicly said the company has several server-side Arm partners (including Qualcomm) and is running Windows Server on Arm servers inside its own datacenters. Microsoft is reportedly working on its own Arm chip for servers.

To be clear: I haven’t heard any rumors about Microsoft throwing in the towel on Windows on Arm PCs. And this year, it got Office working on Windows 11 on Arm devices using its ARM64EC technology. 

I’m just not sure Arm’s promises are going to justify continued investments by Microsoft and its partners to make WoA PCs a real alternative to x64 PCs.

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Surprising, at least to me, that Apple should be so much better than Microsoft at code translation: it has now created two very successful translators, both called Rosetta, in the past 15-odd years, once for the transition to Intel from PowerPC (a similar instruction set concept to Arm), and now to Arm from Intel. I’m guessing that Microsoft would have to include 32-bit x86 programs to have any hope, whereas Apple has just thrown them overboard.
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If you want to buy someone a Christmas book, I’d recommend Social Warming, my latest book. Unsurprisingly.

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Ever wondered why Apple’s cheaper accessories cost $19 – not more, not less? Turns out there’s a psychological reason. CC-licensed photo by nsuan-iphone on Flickr.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Not available as an NFT. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Apple sues Israeli spyware maker NSO Group • The New York Times

Nicole Perlroth:

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Apple, for the first time, seeks to hold NSO accountable for what it says was the surveillance and targeting of Apple users. Apple also wants to permanently prevent NSO from using any Apple software, services or devices, a move that could render the company’s Pegasus spyware product worthless, given that its core business is to give government clients full access to a target’s iPhone or Android smartphone.

Apple is also asking for unspecified damages for the time and cost to deal with what the company argues is NSO’s abuse of its products. Apple said it would donate the proceeds from those damages to organizations that exposed spyware.
Since NSO’s founding in 2010, its executives have said they sell spyware to governments only for lawful interception, but a series of revelations by journalists and private researchers have shown the extent to which governments have deployed NSO’s Pegasus spyware against journalists, activists and dissidents.

Apple executives described the lawsuit as a warning shot to NSO and other spyware makers. “This is Apple saying: If you do this, if you weaponize our software against innocent users, researchers, dissidents, activists or journalists, Apple will give you no quarter,” Ivan Krstic, head of Apple security engineering and architecture, said in an interview on Monday.

“Thousands of lives were saved around the world thanks to NSO Group’s technologies used by its customers,” an NSO representative said in a statement Tuesday. “Pedophiles and terrorists can freely operate in technological safe-havens, and we provide governments the lawful tools to fight it.”

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Related: Technology Review says the French were close to buying Pegasus (the French deny it); and Facebook was given leave to sue NSO too a few days ago, over its hacking into WhatsApp.
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Why $19 is Apple’s favourite price for accessories • WSJ

Dalvin Brown:

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Analysts say $19 is also a sweet spot for well-to-do consumers willing to pay extra for basic tech products and services. “When you go below $20, those people don’t think twice about it, even if [the item] could be competitively priced at $1,” said Gene Munster, managing partner at venture-capital firm Loup Ventures.

The cost is also low enough to be an aspirational purchase for shoppers seeking products that make them feel special.

“Apple wants to make sure that their consumers constantly feel nice,” said Abir Syed, partner at e-commerce consulting firm UpCounting. Even if shoppers aren’t getting a good deal, he said, “they just feel fancy.”

But there’s a catch. Selling cables, adapters and polishing cloths far below $20 might put them in “cheap” territory. A lot of Apple’s success is based on its products’ positioning as an attainable luxury, something that costs a bit more but is justifiably worth it.

“At $19, you get the charm-pricing benefits [of a price ending in ‘9’], but it also sends the signal that this is a premium product,” Mr. Syed said.

Much of this pricing depends on where shoppers are doing their shopping. If you’re on Apple’s website or in an Apple store, you’re not bargain hunting the way you might be if you were shopping for a specific item on Amazon or at Walmart.

“A vast majority of people would say $20 is absurd for a dust cloth on Amazon,” Mr. Syed said. “At Apple, there’s a bit less of a comparison happening.”

In the case of Apple’s polishing cloth, selling it at $19 creates more demand than pricing it at $9, experts say. The $19 cloth became an internet meme shortly after Apple introduced it, which might help explain its hard-to-get status. And you likely won’t be paying less for it soon.

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Inside the rise and fall of Clubhouse, a poster child of pandemic hype • Business Insider

Kali Hays and Melia Russell:

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In May 2020, when the pandemic raged, the comedian and TV writer Marlena Rodriguez got an invite to a new app called Clubhouse that offered the homebound online masses a way to spend some of their suddenly abundant time.

In the ensuing months, Rodriguez jousted in a chat room with the celebrity Ashton Kutcher, gained more than 13,000 followers, and started a party room on Fridays that frequently swelled to over 1,000 people. She wrote a play, “Once Upon a Clubhouse,” and hired actors to perform it on the app. “I was in love,” she said.

Today, “I question why I’m even still on Clubhouse,” Rodriguez said. Her Friday-night room has dwindled to about 30 people.

More than any other startup, Clubhouse epitomizes the venture-capital-backed euphoria that swept the tech industry since lockdowns shut millions of people inside and pushed them online for connection, entertainment, and information. Marc Andreessen has called the app “the Athenian agora come to life,” referring to the hub of democracy in ancient Greece. It has raised more than $100m from his firm and other top VCs, garnering a $4bn valuation.

But with vaccinations rising and more people returning to normal life, Clubhouse has been hit particularly hard. Daily downloads of the app have plunged more than 90% since a peak in June, while daily average users are down almost 80% since February, Apptopia data indicated.

Insider interviews with creators, advertisers, VCs, and others in the tech industry show a platform struggling to build an audience and keep it. Moneymaking opportunities are also slim, which makes the app a tough sell for creators and users as there are many other options online and off.

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Plus it’s been copied on other platforms, notably Twitter with its Spaces offering. Nice while it lasted, Clubhouse.
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Europe must ban Bitcoin mining to hit the 1.5C Paris climate goal, say Swedish regulators • Euronews

Tom Bateman:

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Erik Thedéen, director of the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority, and Björn Risinger, director of the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, said cryptocurrency’s rising energy usage is threatening Sweden’s ability to meet its obligations under the Paris Climate Agreement.

Between April and August this year, the energy consumption of Bitcoin mining in the Nordic country rose “several hundred%,” and now consumes the equivalent electricity of 200,000 households, Thedéen and Risinger said.

In an open letter, the directors of Sweden’s top financial and environmental regulators called for an EU-wide ban on “proof of work” cryptocurrency mining, for Sweden to “halt the establishment” of new crypto mining operations and for companies that trade and invest in crypto assets to be prohibited from describing their business activities as environmentally sustainable.

…The growth of crypto mining brings with it an opportunity cost, Thedéen and Risinger said, as Sweden’s renewable energy is diverted away from industrial, transport and domestic uses, and into Bitcoin and other tokens.

“It is currently possible to drive a mid-size electric car 1.8 million kilometres using the same energy it takes to mine one single Bitcoin,” they said. “This is the equivalent of forty-four laps around the globe. 900 bitcoins are mined every day. This is not a reasonable use of our renewable energy”.

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This is going to become a recurrent refrain in the next few years, I think.
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The BABADEDA Crypter: an emerging crypter targeting the crypto, NFT, and DeFi communities • Morphisec Security

Hido Cohen and Arnold Osipov:

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As well as using cryptocurrency themselves to extract ransoms, cybercriminals are now also tailoring malware to exploit the booming market for NFTs and crypto games. In a discovery of critical importance to anyone familiar with this space, Morphisec Labs have encountered a new campaign of malware targeting cryptocurrency enthusiasts through Discord. 

Crucially, the crypter that this campaign deploys, which we have termed Babadeda (a Russian language placeholder used by the crypter itself which translates to “Grandma-Grandpa”), is able to bypass signature-based antivirus solutions. Although some variants of this crypter have been noted by other vendors, Morphisec is the first to fully disclose how it works.

For victims, this makes infections highly likely — and dangerous. We know that this malware installer has been used in a variety of recent campaigns to deliver information stealers, RATs, and even LockBit ransomware.

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They have a detailed breakdown of how the malware gets onto your (well, someone else’s) machine. It seems that it’s an empty shell that you can pour something into. Noteworthy that it’s the crypto field that’s being targeted now: fewer law enforcement types around. Though transfers are easier to track.
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About 600 Google employees sign manifesto against widened vaccine mandate • CNBC

Jennifer Elias:

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The Biden administration has ordered US companies with 100 or more workers to ensure their employees are fully vaccinated or regularly tested for Covid-19 by Jan. 4. In response, Google has asked its more than 150,000 employees to upload their vaccination status to its internal systems by Dec. 3, whether they plan on coming into the office or not, according to internal documents viewed by CNBC. The company has also said that all employees who work directly or indirectly with government contracts must be vaccinated – even if they are working from home.

“Vaccines are key to our ability to enable a safe return to office for everyone and minimize the spread of Covid-19 in our communities,” wrote Chris Rackow, Google VP of security, in an email sent near the end of October.

Rackow stated the company was already implementing requirements, so the changes from Biden’s executive order were “minimal.” His email gave a deadline of Nov. 12 for employees to request exemptions for reasons such as religious beliefs or medical conditions, and said that exceptions would be granted on a case-by-case basis.

The manifesto within Google, which has been signed by at least 600 Google employees, asks company leaders to retract the vaccine mandate and create a new one that is “inclusive of all Googlers,” arguing leadership’s decision will have outsized influence in corporate America. It also calls on employees to “oppose the mandate as a matter of principle” and tells employees to not let the policy alter their decision if they’ve already chosen not to receive the Covid-19 shot.

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Let’s see, 600 of 150,000 is 0.4%. Unless those people are in absolutely crucial positions (say, called Brin or Page), Google could just say buh-bye. There’s no halfway house between a presidential mandate requiring 100% compliance and, well, anything else. No different, in its way, from care home workers facing the same deadline – but at far lower salaries.
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AirTag competitor Tile getting acquired by location sharing app Life360 • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

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Tile, known for its range of Bluetooth-based tracking accessories that compete with the AirTag, is being acquired by location tracking service Life360, Tile announced today.

Tile will continue to be operated as a standalone brand under Tile CEO CJ Prober, but Tile says that when the acquisition is completed, it will be able to leverage Life360’s 33 million smartphone users to grow Tile’s Finding network by 10x. Tile’s network is the equivalent of Apple’s Find My network, leveraging nearby devices to locate lost items.

Life360 has what it calls a “family safety platform” that allows family members to keep tabs on one another with tracking software on smartphones. It’s primarily used by parents to track their children and teenagers, and it has raised privacy concerns.

With the Tile acquisition, Life360 founder Chris Hulls says that Life360 will be able to provide an “all-encompassing solution” for locating people, pets, and things with cross-platform tracking and combined service for tracking items and people.

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Acquisition price $205m. Which strikes me as a lot of money: I’ve never noticed Tile having much of an impact anywhere, and even if you use a 10x multiple that suggests it was doing $20m in revenue per year. Can’t think there are that many people using the Premium version (£30 per year). Especially not when Apple’s AirTags don’t need a subscription and have a bigger network.
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Facebook knew its algorithms were biased against people of colour • The Washington Post

Elizabeth Dwoskin, Nitasha Tiku and Craig Timberg:

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Last year, researchers at Facebook showed executives an example of the kind of hate speech circulating on the social network: an actual post featuring an image of four female Democratic lawmakers known collectively as “The Squad.”

The poster, whose name was scrubbed out for privacy, referred to the women, two of whom are Muslim, as “swami rag heads.” A comment from another person used even more vulgar language, referring to the four women of color as “black c—s,” according to internal company documents exclusively obtained by The Washington Post.

The post represented the “worst of the worst” language on Facebook — the majority of it directed at minority groups, according to a two-year effort by a large team working across the company, the document said. The researchers urged executives to adopt an aggressive overhaul of its software system that would primarily remove only those hateful posts before any Facebook users could see them.

But Facebook’s leaders balked at the plan. According to two people familiar with the internal debate, top executives including Vice President for Global Public Policy Joel Kaplan feared the new system would tilt the scales by protecting some vulnerable groups over others. A policy executive prepared a document for Kaplan that raised the potential for backlash from “conservative partners,” according to the document. The people spoke to The Post on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal matters.

The previously unreported debate is an example of how Facebook’s decisions in the name of being neutral and race-blind in fact come at the expense of minorities and particularly people of color. Far from protecting Black and other minority users, Facebook executives wound up instituting half-measures after the “worst of the worst” project that left minorities more likely to encounter derogatory and racist language on the site, the people said.

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Amazing how Kaplan’s name always pops up when right-wing interests are threatened, and subsequently they’re salved.
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If you want a deeper understanding of why we respond as we do to content on social networks, and what it’s doing to society, politics and journalism, read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

Qualcomm has an exclusivity deal with Microsoft for Windows on ARM – expiring soon • XDA Developers

Rich Woods:

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Last week, we reported that MediaTek is planning to build a chipset for Windows on ARM. As it turns out, the Windows on ARM chipset space could be even hotter than that, because there’s a reason that we’ve only seen Qualcomm SoCs in ARM PCs so far. Qualcomm actually has an exclusivity deal with Microsoft for Windows on ARM, and speaking with people familiar with it, we’ve learned that the deal is set to expire soon.

Other than the fact that Microsoft has publicly said that anyone who wants to can build a Windows on ARM chip, this really shouldn’t come as a surprise. Qualcomm didn’t just start building PC chips hoping that Microsoft would compile Windows to support it. No, these two companies worked together to make it happen. Because of that, Qualcomm gets to enjoy a bit of exclusivity.

One thing I wasn’t able to learn is when the deal will expire, only that it’s the thing holding back other chip vendors from competing in the space. It’s possible that Samsung might want to throw its hat into the ring with its Exynos processors too, especially given its recent partnership with AMD for graphics power. This is also presumably why Apple Silicon Macs aren’t officially supported for running Windows 11, so hopefully that will change as well.

…Between MediaTek’s Executive Summit and Qualcomm’s Investor Day, there’s been a very clear message that ARM SoC vendors absolutely believe that the ‘Wintel’ partnership is going to fade and that the transition to ARM isn’t just happening, it’s inevitable.

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‘Buy the Constitution’ aftermath: everyone very mad, confused, losing lots of money, fighting, crying, etc • Vice

Jordan Pearson and Jason Koebler:

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The community of crypto investors who tried and failed to buy a copy of the U.S. Constitution last week has descended into chaos as people are realizing today that roughly half of the donors will have the majority of their investment wiped out by cryptocurrency fees. Meanwhile, disagreements have broken out over the future of ConstitutionDAO, the original purpose of the more than $40m crowdfunding campaign, and what will happen to the $PEOPLE token that donors were given in exchange for their contributions.  

Over the weekend, the next steps of the project repeatedly changed. In the immediate aftermath of the Sotheby’s auction, in which ConstitutionDAO lost to hedge fund CEO Ken Griffin, the founders of the project asserted on its official Discord that, though they lost, “we still made history tonight.”  

“We have educated an entire cohort of people around the world—from museum curators and art directors to our grandmothers asking us what eth is when they read about us in the news —about the possibilities of web3,” an admin of the project posted on Thursday.

Many donors are indeed getting an education about Ethereum and web3, but it’s certainly not all positive as the community tries to quickly come up with a reason it should exist at all after failing in its initial goal.

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The problem being that if they try to get a refund, it’ll essentially get eaten up by “gas fees” – the charge for doing the transfer. Which we always get told isn’t an issue for cryptocurrencies compared to those Evil Fiat Currencies. (Update: the Constitution DAO is going to close down, and everyone can get refunded. Or try to.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

In the UK, the seventh-biggest energy supplier has gone into administration, leaving just six standing – and millions in limbo. CC-licensed photo by MIKI Yoshihito 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. Not identified as a shark. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Multiple marine biologists are telling you it’s not a shark • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick, once more, for dammit he’s insightful:

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What I think this whole episode does illustrate, however, is how, essentially, every mechanism on the internet is broken, possibly irreparably. Let’s summarize:

A content creator learns a fun fact about a shark. The content creator either googles the name of the shark and tweets out the first picture they see or they’re sent that photo from someone else. But it’s the wrong photo because an SEO farm run by random man from Wales has inserted the “misinformation” into Google’s search results. The content creator, though, has to mute the Twitter thread they’ve created because it’s gone too viral for anyone to actually follow.

It’s also still doing traffic, so the content creator, when they finally learn that the tweet is incorrect, doesn’t actually delete the tweet. Then dozens of verified experts attempt to debunk the incorrect tweet, except all they’ve done is trick Twitter’s trending algorithms to further promote the tweet because of the attention being driven to the post.

The current landscape of the internet is essentially a series of levers and automations because the largest companies responsible for how we use the web are operating at a scale that can no longer be properly moderated by human beings. Which means, increasingly, that if a glitch makes its way into the system — in this instance, a photo of a monkfish incorrectly labeled as a shark — there is no chance for that glitch to be removed. And, even more confoundingly, if human beings do try and intervene, it only makes the glitch worse. idk seems bad!

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Seems like the perfect way for this to end would be for the monkfish at issue to be officially reclassified as a shark.
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1997: The Long Boom: a history of the future, 1980–2020 • WIRED

Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden, writing in July 1997:

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A BAD MEME—A contagious idea—began spreading through the United States in the 1980s: America is in decline, the world is going to hell, and our children’s lives will be worse than our own. The particulars are now familiar: Good jobs are disappearing, working people are falling into poverty, the underclass is swelling, crime is out of control. The post-Cold War world is fragmenting, and conflicts are erupting all over the planet. The environment is imploding—with global warming and ozone depletion, we’ll all either die of cancer or live in Waterworld. As for our kids, the collapsing educational system is producing either gun-toting gangsters or burger-flipping dopes who can’t read.

By the late 1990s, another meme began to gain ground. Borne of the surging stock market and an economy that won’t die down, this one is more positive: America is finally getting its economic act together, the world is not such a dangerous place after all, and our kids just might lead tolerable lives. Yet the good times will come only to a privileged few, no more than a fortunate fifth of our society. The vast majority in the United States and the world face a dire future of increasingly desperate poverty. And the environment? It’s a lost cause.

But there’s a new, very different meme, a radically optimistic meme: We are watching the beginnings of a global economic boom on a scale never experienced before. We have entered a period of sustained growth that could eventually double the world’s economy every dozen years and bring increasing prosperity for—quite literally—billions of people on the planet. We are riding the early waves of a 25-year run of a greatly expanding economy that will do much to solve seemingly intractable problems like poverty and to ease tensions throughout the world. And we’ll do it without blowing the lid off the environment.

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It’s wonderfully wild and overdone: “In 2020, humans arrive on Mars… the four astronauts touch down and beam their images back…” The printed article has Ten Scenario Spoilers. Pretty much all of which, unlike the scenarios in the article, have in fact happened.
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We’re making the Facebook Papers Public. Here’s why and how • Gizmodo

Dell Cameron, Andrew Couts, and Shoshana Wodinsky:

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The documents, captured by whistleblower Frances Haugen and first reported by the Wall Street Journal, were also handed to members of a Senate Commerce subcommittee chaired by Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat of Connecticut who last month called Instagram “a breeding ground for eating disorders and self harm.” And it’s from here that Gizmodo and some 300 other mostly Western journalists derived their access.

We believe there’s a strong public need in making as many of the documents public as possible, as quickly as possible. To that end, we’ve partnered with a small group of independent monitors, who are joining us to establish guidelines for an accountable review of the documents prior to publication. The mission is to minimize any costs to individuals’ privacy or the furtherance of other harms while ensuring the responsible disclosure of the greatest amount of information in the public interest.

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[List of great and good omitted]

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While our group is itself largely American, our first decision was to require local experts when reviewing any document focused on another country. One of the committee’s chief responsibilities is to vet local experts to work alongside our reviewers.

The internet was a much smaller place when Facebook arrived in 2004. Back then, beyond hookups and house parties, the social network held little sway over events in the real world. Unrecognizable today from its origin as a dorm-room novelty, Facebook is now one of the richest and most influential companies on the planet and the most pervasive information platform ever created. A tentacular machine that has altered the face of politics and life itself on a global scale. At its best, Facebook is a tool that connects billions, narrowing the divide between disparate peoples and cultures in ways previously unimaginable. At its worst, it has served as history’s most efficient delivery system for toxic propaganda, empowering bigots and extremists to commit egregious crimes against humanity, quite literally being wielded as an instrument of war.

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Will this all have been squeezed dry by the news orgs by the time it reaches the general public? And the disinformation that will come out of making them public will be amazing to see.
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The role of Facebook and other social media in the disruption of elections, journalism and ordinary life is part of our modern landscape. Understand it better by reading Social Warming, my latest book, and find explanations – and more.

The UK government’s plan to reform data-protection laws are terrifying • openDemocracy

Alex Stobart:

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Personal data is personal. It’s about living human beings. But with its ‘reform’ proposals, the UK government aims to put citizens’ data up for sale on global markets. A commodity to be traded. Like pork bellies or copper or debt.

The ‘Data: A New Direction’ consultation, which ends this Friday (November 19), has introduced the biggest wholesale attack on the rights of UK citizens in decades.

In his ministerial foreward to the consultation paper, published in September, then culture secretary Oliver Dowden said reforms are needed because existing General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) inherited from Europe are “unnecessarily complex or vague”. He said the government wants to end the “persistent uncertainty” that has prevailed since their introduction. But it uses even greater vagueness, apparently deliberately: words like ‘responsible’ (which appears 52 times in the consultation) and ‘safeguards’ (95 times) every time it’s introducing an attack on citizen rights – which the consultation never bothers to define. And, if implemented, it will produce even more uncertainty, which will last much longer than just three years.

The government justifies its proposals on the grounds that it is tackling ‘consent fatigue’, encouraging research and promoting the benefits of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Consent fatigue stems from the relentless series of requests to a citizen to accept something, such as a privacy policy or cookies, with no real explicit sense or value, over and over again, to drive them into submission. Again, there are also users that show a tendency to simply accept the privacy policy without even reading it extensively, which is related to ‘consent fatigue’.

This focus ignores the vast majority of organisations in the UK that collect personal data for the purpose of providing a service, which is allowed for by GDPR if it is in performance of a contract, and where there is no evidence of a need for reform.

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This has been largely overlooked, because it’s described in such arcane and roundabout language. Dowden has since been fired, to be replaced by Nadine Dorries, who gives the impression she wouldn’t know data if it drove over her foot.
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Apple just provided the perfect example of why you can’t trust App Store review scores • The Verge

Sean Hollister:

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You pissed off people by somewhat breaking your app, and they’re leaving angry reviews. How can you salvage your reputation? Apple just found one incredibly effective way — get listeners to submit better reviews by interrupting their podcast experience with an in-app prompt to submit a rating.

That’s how the Apple Podcasts app went from a publicly embarrassing 1.8-star score all the way to 4.6 stars in a little over a month without any actual fixes, as developer and App Store watchdog Kosta Eleftheriou points out. And it’s still going up: according to AppFigures data, the app has been getting thousands of ratings every day since November 9th, with the vast, overwhelming majority of them issuing a 5-star score.

The app has made it to 4.7 stars overall as of this writing and is firmly the No. 1 App Store search result for “podcast.” It looks far more desirable to a new user than it might have before. AppFigures estimates 6,292 five-star ratings were submitted on November 17th alone.

If you think there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for this, you might be right — it could definitely be that people who bother to submit reviews tend to be angry, and a lot of people who love Apple Podcasts and never bothered to look it up in the App Store (remember, it’s preinstalled!) are finally balancing things out.

But do those people actually love Apple Podcasts? Because if you really look at the reviews, it seems like some funny business is going on. There are new, positive reviews, but they aren’t reviews of the Apple Podcasts app at all — they’re reviews of podcasts themselves.

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The Apple Podcasts app is absolutely, utterly, incredibly terrible. Forgets whether you’ve started listening to a podcast. Doesn’t play podcasts in the order you expect. Doesn’t let you easily reorder what you’re going to listen to. I hate it, but feel it would be Slog Work to shift over to another one (Marco Arment’s Overcast is the obvious alternative).
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Ableton: inside the music software company everyone wants to buy • Billboard

Steve Knopper:

»

Before Ableton Live, dance music pioneers like Richie Hawtin had to build up what Detroit electronic music festival promoter Jason Huvaere calls “a spaceship of gear,” from samplers to drum machines. After the software started to catch on, though, Huvaere recalls taking Hawtin to visit Skrillex, who blew his mind when he told him, “Yeah, I’m pretty much using Ableton.”

The software allowed DJs to use their laptops to load into Ableton Live samples, snippets of original music or effects, then manipulate them live while performing. They could speed up or slow down a track, or add buzzing effects or bass drops, all with a few clicks. This audio manipulation congealed into a new sound that Michaelangelo Matos described as “a crisp, computery flutter — the seemingly true voice of the tinny, bright machines making it,” in his 2015 history of electronic music, The Underground Is Massive. Matos says this latest generation of EDM stars, who improvise with Ableton Live, create “laptop music.”

By making it easier to manipulate music, Ableton Live also freed a new generation of DJs — Skrillex, deadmau5, Steve Aoki — from behind their decks to dance, jump and, in Aoki’s case, smash cakes into the faces of their fans. Skrillex emerged as the “f–king Herbie Hancock of Ableton,” as Diplo calls him, reimagining the potential of Ableton Live the way Jimi Hendrix reinvented the electric guitar. As with Auto-Tune, the impact of Ableton Live goes far beyond DJs and even electronic music.

“It created a completely new type of producer,” says Huvaere. “It gave access to a versatile tool that would do what people want without spending thousands and thousands of dollars and training.” In recent years, Ableton’s reach has grown beyond DJs and other electronic-music tinkerers to the entire community of artists and songwriters.

«

Ableton has turned down huge paydays in order to remain an independent company. (Paywalled article. Sadly, the Javascript on my browser broke, leaving me able to read it.)
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Prestigious UK Global Talent fast-track scheme for scientists hasn’t received any applications since it launched • New Scientist

Jason Arunn Murugesu:

»

Not a single scientist has applied to a UK government visa scheme for Nobel prize laureates and other award winners since its launch six months ago, New Scientist can reveal. The scheme has come under criticism from scientists and has been described as “a joke”.

In May, the government launched a fast-track visa route for award-winners in the fields of science, engineering, the humanities and medicine who want to work in the UK. This prestigious prize route makes it easier for some academics to apply for a Global Talent visa – it requires only one application, with no need to meet conditions such as a grant from the UK Research and Innovation funding body or a job offer at a UK organisation.

The number of prizes that qualify academics for this route currently stands at over 70, and includes the Turing Award, the L’Oréal-UNESCO for Women in Science International Awards, and various gongs awarded by professional or membership bodies both in the UK and elsewhere.

“Winners of these awards have reached the pinnacle of their career and they have so much to offer the UK,” said home secretary Priti Patel when the prestigious prize scheme launched in May. “This is exactly what our new point-based immigration system was designed for – attracting the best and brightest based on the skills and talent they have, not where they’ve come from.”

But a freedom of information request by New Scientist has revealed that in the six months since the scheme was launched, no one working in science, engineering, the humanities or medicine has actually applied for a visa through this route.

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Something something sunlit uplands.
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Bulb Energy enters ‘special administration’ after collapse • The Guardian

Jillian Ambrose:

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The energy regulator drew up plans over the weekend to put the company into a process designed to protect Bulb’s 1.7 million household customers and ensure continuity of supply, according to industry sources.

Bulb told its staff that it would continue to operate “with no interruption of service or supply to members” and urged customers not to worry “as your energy supply is secure and all credit balances are protected”.

The company’s collapse has been long expected by industry rivals after it struggled to find new investment, or a willing buyer, before the UK’s looming winter energy crisis.

“It has been like watching a zombie movie – you know they’re walking dead but you couldn’t be sure when they’d stop moving,” one senior industry source said. “They’ve long been dicing with death but the recent events in the energy market have been a catalyst for what would have happened anyway.”

Bulb blamed the surge in energy market prices ignited by the global gas crisis for scuppering its plans to raise funds to fuel its ongoing growth, which included new businesses in France, Spain and Texas.

“When we started exploring fundraising options, we were delighted to receive lots of interest from investors to fund our business plans and future growth,” the company said in a blogpost on Monday. “However, the rising energy crisis in the UK and around the world has concerned investors who can’t go ahead while wholesale prices are so high.”

«

What’s unusual here is that the energy regulator cannot persuade other (surviving) energy companies to take those customers on, because those companies would all lose money supplying them because of the price cap introduced by the regulator. Hence the “special administration” – aka a form of quiet nationalisation where the government pays the deficit.

Bulb is the biggest supplier to have gone bust out of the 21 (!!) to go out of business since the start of September. There are now only six left that are solvent.
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NFT makers are trying to build the next Disney • The Verge

Adi Robertson:

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In the online auction market OpenSea, you can pay around $600 to buy a portrait of a robot in streetwear — and, if you’re lucky, a stake in a new media empire.

The robot is called a TARS, and it’s part of the Voguverse, an elaborate 37th-century mythos involving space arcologies, a nuclear war, and interstellar travel. The portrait is one of countless digital assets being sold as non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. But by pairing its fictional universe with a blockchain-based ledger, the creators think they can tap into a new way to tell stories.

As NFTs explode in popularity, entrepreneurs are imagining an entire media industry that’s built around them. At its most ambitious, the vision is sometimes dubbed a “decentralized Disney”: a world of fictional crossovers like the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its many spinoffs but where different characters and creative properties are owned by a panoply of fans, not a single company. Talent agencies, comics authors, and countless NFT enthusiasts are buying in.

What does owned mean? Many are still figuring that out.

«

Many, it turns out, don’t understand the difference between having static ownership of an object, and having ownership of the copyrights and trademarks immanent in that object – the right to make derivative works, for example.

For an example of how loose their understanding is, they might want to consider their use of TARS, an acronym that more people would associate with a robot in the Christopher Nolan film Interstellar.
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How $6.6bn of billionaire Elon Musk’s fortune could overcome world hunger • World Economic Forum

Johnny Wood:

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Billionaire Elon Musk challenged the United Nations (UN) to show how $6bn of his fortune could be used to overcome world hunger, prompting the UN’s World Food Programme to produce a detailed plan.

Musk’s challenge was sparked by earlier comments from World Food Programme chief, David Beasley, who told CNN that 2% of Musk’s wealth could end world hunger.

In a tweet, the world’s richest man suggested he would sell stock in his electric car manufacturing company Tesla and donate the billion-dollar proceeds if the UN could demonstrate exactly how his money would be spent.

Responding to the tweet, Beasley urged billionaires like Musk to step up and support the fight against hunger, giving a breakdown of how $6.6bn could help avert catastrophe. The UN plan outlines how the money – a small percentage of Musk’s fortune estimated in the hundreds of billions – could support 42 million people threatened with famine in 43 of the world’s worst-hit countries for a year.

«

The WFP article detailing how the $6.6bn would be allocated is from November 3, and this article is from November 19.

Do we expect to see a Twitter poll by Musk on this one too, or will he just sell stock and fund it? If he does fund it, I think we could count it as one of humanity’s greatest successes, and all sparked by social media.
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April 2005: Effects of Skin Pigmentation on Pulse Oximeter Accuracy at Low Saturation • American Society of Anesthesiologists

Bickler et al in April 2005:

»

Results: At 60-70% Sao2, Spo2 (mean of three oximeters) overestimated Sao2 (bias +/- SD) by 3.56 +/- 2.45% (n = 29) in darkly pigmented subjects, compared with 0.37 +/- 3.20% (n = 58) in lightly pigmented subjects (P < 0.0001). The SD of bias was not greater with dark than light skin. The dark-light skin differences at 60-70% Sao2 were 2.35% (Nonin), 3.38% (Novametrix), and 4.30% (Nellcor). Skin pigment-related differences were significant with Nonin below 70% Sao2, with Novametrix below 90%, and with Nellcor at all ranges. Pigment-related bias increased approximately in proportion to desaturation.

Conclusions: The three tested pulse oximeters overestimated arterial oxygen saturation during hypoxia in dark-skinned individuals.

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Just pointing out that yesterday’s item about pulse oximeters overestimating blood oxygen levels in darker skins is not new; as Adrian M points out, this study (the first he could find on the topic) is 16 years old, and there are plenty of followups confirming the finding. Bickler, meanwhile, is still going strong, with a paper published earlier this year on Covid and low oxygen blood levels.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

We know that pulse oximeters work pretty well for measuring blood oxygen levels when used on white skin. But what about other groups? CC-licensed photo by slgckgc on Flickr.

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A selection of 10 links for you. Blue site returns. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation • MIT Technology Review

Karen Hao:

»

Before Instant Articles, articles posted on Facebook would redirect to a browser, where they’d open up on the publisher’s own website. The ad provider, usually Google, would then cash in on any ad views or clicks. With the new scheme, articles would open up directly within the Facebook app, and Facebook would own the ad space. If a participating publisher had also opted into monetizing with Facebook’s advertising network, called Audience Network, Facebook could insert ads into the publisher’s stories and take a 30% cut of the revenue. 

Instant Articles quickly fell out of favor with its original cohort of big mainstream publishers. For them, the payouts weren’t high enough compared with other available forms of monetization. But that was not true for publishers in the Global South, which Facebook began accepting into the program in 2016. In 2018, the company reported paying out $1.5 billion to publishers and app developers (who can also participate in Audience Network). In 2019, that figure had reached multiple billions.

Early on, Facebook performed little quality control on the types of publishers joining the program. The platform’s design also didn’t sufficiently penalize users for posting identical content across Facebook pages—in fact, it rewarded the behavior. Posting the same article on multiple pages could as much as double the number of users who clicked on it and generated ad revenue.

Clickbait farms around the world seized on this flaw as a strategy—one they still use today.

Clickbait actors cropped up in Myanmar overnight. With the right recipe for producing engaging and evocative content, they could generate thousands of US dollars a month in ad revenue, or 10 times the average monthly salary—paid to them directly by Facebook.

«

Did Facebook know about this? Yes, certainly from 2019, according to internal Facebook documents. A terrific piece which, again, points to the way that Facebook and Google don’t understand the disparities in income and attitude between the US and the global south.
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Since we’re on the topic of Facebook and Myanmar, I have a whole chapter on the topic in Social Warming, my latest book. It explains why social networks amplify outrage, and why we seem to like that. And much, much more.

Iranian hackers broke into newspaper publisher Lee Enterprises ahead of 2020 election • WSJ

Dustin Volz:

»

Iranian hackers last year infiltrated the computer systems of Lee Enterprises Inc., a major American media company that publishes dozens of daily newspapers across the U.S., as part of a broader effort to spread disinformation about the 2020 presidential election, according to people familiar with the matter.

On Thursday, the Justice Department said the alleged hackers broke in to the digital systems of an unnamed media company in fall 2020 and tested how to create false news content. People familiar with the matter on Friday identified the company as Lee Enterprises, a publicly traded company headquartered in Davenport, Iowa, and one of the largest newspaper chains in the U.S.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation warned the unnamed company about the intrusion, prosecutors said. The day after the November presidential election, the hackers tried to get back into the media company’s system but failed, prosecutors said. The federal charging document in the case doesn’t indicate the hackers successfully published fake information under the unnamed media company’s news brands.

«

Then again, after the 2020 election they didn’t have to worry – the Americans were generating all the misinformation and disinformation they could.
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‘Racist’ oxygen device may explain why Covid hit minorities so hard • The Sunday Times

Ben Spencer:

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what explains the remaining 33% to 50% of extra Covid deaths seen among minorities? Some might be due to the vulnerability of certain racial groups to diabetes and cardiovascular disease, which in turn raises the risk of Covid. But experts believe that a “structural racism”, an “unintentional racial discrimination”, is also to blame.

The way the health system is set up — both in Britain’s NHS and across the global medical sector — is tilted against those who do not happen to be white.

This is most strikingly seen in the design of pulse oximeters — the small devices clipped to the end of a finger to measure oxygen levels in the blood. Used in every ward in every hospital in Britain, as well as in GP surgeries and private homes, they are fundamental to the monitoring and diagnosis of patients.

Yet despite their ubiquity, oximeters do not work as well for patients with dark skin. They measure how light is absorbed by the tissue of a finger. But dark skin absorbs more light than light skin, skewing the results.

Scientists have warned for years of this problem, and in some areas doctors take it into account to mentally adjust the results at the bedside. But doctors acknowledge that awareness of the issue is patchy at best, and with so much monitoring now automated, these adjustments are not always possible.

Last year researchers at the University of Michigan found 12% of black patients who were considered to have safe oxygen levels were in fact dangerously hypoxic.

Of course, doctors do not rely on oximetry alone and can compensate for the problems. They use temperature, blood pressure, pulse rate and symptoms to form a picture of a patient’s health. But at the height of the pandemic, when hospitals were under strain and access to ventilators was limited, it is hard not to come to the conclusion that black and Asian people were denied lifesaving treatment because the device clipped to the end of their finger was designed for someone of a different race.

«

Again proving that technology is not good nor bad, but neither is it neutral.
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Steve Wozniak’s startup Privateer plans to launch hundreds of satellites to study space debris • Space

Mike Wall:

»

Orbital debris is already tracked by a number of organizations, including the US military and private companies such as LeoLabs. Privateer wants to contribute to these efforts and help ramp them up, eventually creating the “Google Maps of space,” as Fielding told TechCrunch last month.

To make this happen, Privateer, which is still in “stealth mode” at the moment, plans to build and analyze a huge debris dataset that incorporates information from a variety of sources.

“We want to basically be a company that’s focused on decision intelligence by aggregating massive quantities of disparate and heterogeneous information, because there’s something to be gained in the numbers,” said Jah, a space debris expert who’s also an associate professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin.

Privateer will purchase some of this information, crowdsource some of it and gather still more using its own satellites, Jah said. The first of those satellites is on track to launch this coming February, he added.

This information will lead to much more than a census of space junk, if all goes according to plan. The company intends also to characterize debris objects, nailing down their size, shape and spin rate, among other features.

“The catalogs of objects out there all treat things like they’re spheres,” Jah said. “We’re going to take it beyond the sphere, to what the thing more realistically looks like and is.”

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I feel that launching satellites in order to investigate satellite debris that can wreck satellites has an innate flaw, as concepts go.
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Norway is running out of gas-guzzling cars to tax • WIRED

Morgan Meaker:

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In Norway, the most progressive electric vehicle policies in the world started with a pop group, an environmentalist, and a small red Fiat Panda. It was 1988 when activist Frederic Hauge, along with fellow green campaigners from the band A-ha, traveled to the Swiss city of Bern, where they found the red Fiat. A previous owner had converted the car to run off a lead battery, and the group planned to use the vehicle to persuade the Norwegian government to encourage electric vehicle uptake.

The Fiat became the centerpiece of a nine-year campaign in which Hauge and members of A-ha drove the car on Norway’s toll roads without paying. The fines racked up, and when they remained unpaid, the vehicle would be impounded and sold at auction, where Hauge would buy it back and repeat the cycle of toll dodging. A-ha’s celebrity members added glitz to the crusade against toll fees for EVs and Hauge—who has led an environmental group called Bellona since 1986—courted press attention to demand incentives for electric cars. “By being a positive vigilante, he made the media and also the politicians aware of the electric car,” says Øyvind Solberg Thorsen, director of Norway’s Road Traffic Information Council, which publishes statistics about the country’s roads and vehicles.

Eventually, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the incentives the group campaigned for started to materialize, handing EVs a superior status on Norway’s roads. Rules were introduced that exempted EVs from all toll charges and parking fees and allowed them to skip traffic by using bus lanes. More meaningfully, purchases of new EVs were exempted from hefty taxes—including VAT and purchase tax—meaning a new Volkswagen e-Golf cost €790 ($893) less than a VW Golf with a combustion engine.

The problem was that people responded to the policy so well that it eradicated an important source of income for the government, says Anette Berve, spokesperson for the Norwegian Automobile Federation, a group representing car owners. “So this is a clash of two different goals.”

«

So now various car taxes are being reintroduced on EVs. Death and taxes: those two most certain things. (“And nurses,” as an Australian journalist I knew liked to say.)
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A look at the intimate details Amazon knows about us • Reuters News Foundation

Chris Kirkham and Jeffrey Dastin:

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As a Virginia lawmaker, Ibraheem Samirah has studied internet privacy issues and debated how to regulate tech firms’ collection of personal data. Still, he was stunned to learn the full details of the information Amazon.com Inc has collected on him.

The e-commerce giant had more than 1,000 contacts from his phone. It had records of exactly which part of the Quran that Samirah, who was raised as a Muslim, had listened to on Dec. 17 of last year. The company knew every search he had made on its platform, including one for books on “progressive community organizing” and other sensitive health-related inquiries he thought were private.

“Are they selling products, or are they spying on everyday people?” asked Samirah, a Democratic member of the Virginia House of Delegates.

Samirah was among the few Virginia legislators who opposed an industry-friendly, Amazon-drafted state privacy bill that passed earlier this year. At Reuters’ request, Samirah asked Amazon to disclose the data it collected on him as a consumer.

The company gathers a vast array of information on its U.S. customers, and it started making that data available to all upon request early last year, after trying and failing to defeat a 2018 California measure requiring such disclosures. (U.S. Amazon customers can obtain their data by filling out a form on Amazon.com.)

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(This is the UK equivalent for the data request. It’s under Account – Browse help topics (lower part of the page) – Privacy – Request Your Personal Information).

You wouldn’t be surprised that Amazon knows a lot about you, of course.It’s the extent. (Thanks G for the link.)
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Citadel CEO Kenneth Griffin outbid a group of crypto investors for copy of US Constitution • WSJ

Kelly Crow:

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Chicago hedge-fund billionaire Kenneth Griffin said he won a $43.2m first-edition copy of the US Constitution at a Sotheby’s auction on Thursday—and now he intends to lend it to a free Arkansas art museum.

The 53-year old founder and chief executive of Citadel caused a stir Thursday when he outbid a large group of cryptocurrency investors who had crowdfunded more than $40m earlier in the week in a frenzied attempt to win the document, the last surviving first edition in private hands.

The group, organized as ConstitutionDAO, pooled funds from more than 17,000 people over a 72-hour period, with the median donation hovering around $206. ConstitutionDAO said it sought to take the Constitution copy and make it accessible to the public.

“The US Constitution is a sacred document that enshrines the rights of every American and all those who aspire to be,” Mr. Griffin said in a statement issued by Sotheby’s. “That is why I intend to ensure that this copy of our Constitution will be available for all Americans and visitors to view and appreciate.”

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So it’s going to be accessible to the public, and Sotheby’s doesn’t have to quibble with crypto junk.
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Twitter rolls back AMP support, no longer sends users to AMP pages • Search Engine Land

Henry Powderly:

»

If you are noticing less traffic to your website’s AMP pages coming from Twitter, turns out there is a reason for that: Twitter has subtly updated its AMP guidelines page on its Developer site to say support for AMP will be phased out by the fourth quarter.

How that might affect you. Previously, if a mobile user clicked on a link to your site, Twitter would redirect them to the AMP version of that page if an AMP version was available. Now, that won’t happen and users will just load the native mobile/responsive version of your content.

We’ve heard anecdotally that publishers have been seeing AMP traffic fall, especially since Google started putting non-AMP pages in its Top Stories section. But it was David Esteve, audience development specialist and product manager at Marfeel, and technical SEO consultant Christian Oliveira who spotted the update in Twitter’s documentation.

Looking at our own data, we’ve seen sharp Twitter referral declines since August. But, traffic completely bottomed out in November suggesting the rollout is complete.

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SEL is turning off its own AMP pages because it’s no longer a requirement to appear in Google’s “Top Stories” carousel.

Can’t see AMP lasting that much longer on this basis. Announced October 2015, began appearing in mobile results February 2016. It’s just about survived five years, but the revelation that it was a key piece of manipulation for header bidding on ads makes it look doomed.
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How Twitter got research right • The Verge

Casey Newton talked to Twitter’s research team about their work, which included this:

»

Responsible AI is hard in part because no one understands fully understands decisions made by algorithms. Ranking algorithms in social feeds are probabilistic — they show you things based on how likely you are to like, share, or comment on them. But there’s no one algorithm making that decision — it’s typically a mesh of multiple (sometimes dozens) of different models, each making guesses that are then weighted differently according to ever-shifting factors.

That’s a major reason why it’s so difficult to confidently build AI systems that are “responsible” — there is simply a lot of guesswork involved. [Lead for machine learning ethics and responsibility at Twitter, Rumman] Chowdhury pointed out the difference here between working on responsible AI and cybersecurity. In security, she said, it’s usually possible to unwind why the system is vulnerable, so long as you can discover where the attacker entered it. But in responsible AI, finding a problem often doesn’t tell you much about what created it.

That’s the case with the company’s research on amplifying right-wing voices, for example. Twitter is confident that the phenomenon is real but can only theorize as to the reasons behind it. It may be something in the algorithm. But it might also be a user behavior — maybe right-wing politicians tend to tweet in a way to elicit more comments, for example, which then causes their tweets to be weighted more heavily by Twitter’s systems.

“There’s this law of unintended consequences to large systems,” said Williams, who previously worked at Google and Facebook. “It could be so many different things. How we’ve weighted algorithmic recommendation may be a part of it. But it wasn’t intended to be a consequence of political affiliation. So there’s so much research to be done.

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When the traffic firehose is pointed at you • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick dug into “Thinkarete”, which was one of the most-shared publishers on Facebook in Q3:

»

So let’s put it all together.

The “Thinkarete” online brand appears to have been created by a food blogger from Utah. Between 2013-2014, there was a flurry of activity around the web — a website publishing original recipes, the launch of the Thinkarete Lifestyle Facebook page, and bylines on other blogs. The Thinkarete Facebook page, however, slowly became more and more important, as the other parts of the Thinkarete brand atrophied. The Thinkarete Facebook even went through a period where it was posting freebooted BuzzFeed Tasty videos, likely to capitalize on the Facebook video boom. The Allfood and the Lynda’s Kitchen domains were both registered in 2014. And, in 2016, the operation incorporated.

Navigating the Thinkarete Facebook page is impossible now because of the spam from Lyndas Kitchen. In fact, CrowdTangle couldn’t even generate a decent report because of the amount of links being shared to the page. But, after scrolling through Thinkarete’s videos section and the Allfood Instagram page, what seems clear is that the blogger running these pages was experimenting — food videos, Pinterest-optimized recipes, E-commerce links, vaguely conservative memes. We even found what are likely family photos and videos buried deep in Thinkarete’s socials, which, we obviously aren’t linking to here, but they seem to have been forgotten about amid all the optimizing. The entire Thinkarete brand seemed to be this woman’s online side project, which had largely morphed over time into a drop-shipping scheme. Then, last summer, the Facebook firehose was pointed directly at the page.

This is an objectively terrifying idea. To pass no judgment on the blogger who was playing around with these tools — you know, get that passive income — but imagine if you woke up one day, posted something to your Facebook page, and suddenly had more viewers than the Super Bowl. Because that’s what appears to have happened here. Facebook flipped a switch, favoring comments and reactions over shares, and suddenly a food blogger from Utah became the largest publisher in the country, if not the world.

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Utterly random. That’s the world we now live in: there’s no sense to it because it’s all shaped by algorithms that have no idea what they’re actually dealing with.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Brent Bravo oil rig is decommissioned now, but as a functional rig its ramshackle nature led to two avoidable deaths. CC-licensed photo by Rab Lawrence on Flickr.

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A selection of 12 links for you. Overdue. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Social media creating virus of lies, says Nobel winner Maria Ressa • The Guardian

Rebecca Ratcliffe:

»

Social media platforms are biased against facts and creating “a virus of lies” that threatens all democracies, the Nobel peace prize-winning journalist Maria Ressa has said.

Ressa, one of the Philippines’ most prominent journalists, said social media platforms were “manipulating our minds insidiously, creating alternate realities, making it impossible for us to think slow”.

Focusing simply on moderating social media content was a distraction, she said, and it was the design of platforms, and the algorithms they used to promote content, that were in need of an overhaul.

Speaking at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Sydney Dialogue, Ressa accused social media companies of misusing arguments around freedom of speech. “It’s a freedom of reach issue, not a freedom of speech issue,” she said.

“There’s something fundamentally wrong with our information ecosystem. Because the platforms that deliver the facts are actually biased against the facts,” she added, pointing to Facebook as the world’s largest delivery platform for news.

«

Naturally I reference Ressa, and the experience of Rappler (her magazine in the Philippines) in Social Warming. The irony, of course, is that Rappler began on Facebook. And that the Philippines was probably the first place where Facebook was used to sway an election through all sorts of manipulation, bots and misinformation. When Ressa talks, it’s worth listening.
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Divorce does funny things • The Paris Review

Tabitha Lasley wrote a book, Sea State, about the men who work on offshore oil rigs, and this is a little extract:

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He smiled, displaying large, rounded teeth. Many of the men I’d met looked worn out by the physicality of their work, but this man emitted an air of wholesome good health. He must have been in his late forties, at least, to have worked on Piper Alpha, but in the dim light of the lobby, he appeared almost ageless.

“We’ve had a lot of deaths on the Brents over the years. We had the Chinook disaster forty-five people who’d left the Brent Delta. There were two guys killed down the leg of the Brent Bravo. During the last downturn.”

The man explained that oil companies were expected to deliver nominations—specific quantities of oil and gas—to the grid. Failure to do so incurred penalties. But there is a constant tension between production and compliance. Platforms become fatigued over time. Battered by the elements, their structures need continued maintenance. Routine maintenance often puts operations on hold, and during downturns, companies will deploy quick fixes. In 1999, it was alleged that Shell had a protocol known as TFA: “Touch Fuck All.” Permits apparently came with TFA scrawled across them, meaning workers should leave equipment alone, rather than risk a shutdown. Shell commissioned an internal audit, which corroborated the allegations and recommended immediate intervention. But the auditor was transferred, and the report did not surface again until 2006, shortly before a fatal accident inquiry into the Brent Bravo deaths.

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Do read the rest of the piece, and then discover the sheriff’s report into the two deaths in Brent Bravo. (You can probably begin reading that at item 12, “Events of 11 September 2003”.
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US regulator raises concerns over Nvidia’s acquisition of Arm • Financial Times

Richard Waters:

»

Nvidia disclosed the pushback from American regulators as it announced its latest quarterly earnings to Wall Street late on Wednesday. It said that the Federal Trade Commission had “expressed concerns” about the Arm transaction, and that it was in discussions with the agency about “remedies to address those concerns”.

The US chipmaker did not reveal what had prompted the opposition, or what concessions it had offered. The deal, which was announced 14 months ago, has attracted opposition from some big American tech companies that worry Nvidia will limit their access to Arm’s chip designs, giving it an unfair advantage in big chip markets such as data centres and cars.

Nvidia has already made an offer to UK and EU regulators to guarantee not to cut Arm’s customers off, or to change the list of Arm products they have access to, according to one person familiar with its position. But the offer was not sufficient to prevent London and Brussels from moving ahead with extended investigations, and the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has said it does not believe any “behavioural” remedies like this can be effective.

Nvidia could face further headaches in China, where some local chipmakers are reported to have complained to regulators about the deal. The company said on Wednesday that a formal antitrust process had not even started there yet, though it said the deal had been “under review” by Chinese authorities.

«

At least this is the first time that we’ve had some idea of what the regulators object to.
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The shareholder fight that forced Apple’s hand on repair rights • The Verge

Maddie Stone:

»

But Apple didn’t change its policy [on user repairs] out of the goodness of its heart. The announcement follows months of growing pressure from repair activists and regulators — and its timing seems deliberate, considering a shareholder resolution environmental advocates filed with the company in September asking Apple to re-evaluate its stance on independent repair. Wednesday is a key deadline in the fight over the resolution, with advocates poised to bring the issue to the Securities and Exchange Commission to resolve.

Apple spokesperson Nick Leahy told The Verge that the program “has been in development for well over a year,” describing it as “the next step in increasing customer access to Apple genuine parts, tools, and manuals.” Leahy declined to say whether the timing of the announcement was influenced by shareholder pressure.

Activist shareholders believe that it was. “The timing is definitely no coincidence,” says Annalisa Tarizzo, an advocate with Green Century, the mutual fund company that filed the right-to-repair resolution with Apple in September. As a result of today’s announcement, Green Century is withdrawing its resolution, which asked Apple to “reverse its anti repair practices” and evaluate the benefits of making parts and tools more available to consumers.

That’s exactly what Apple seems to be doing with its new Self Service Repair program.

«

Given how large companies operate, the idea that Apple rushed to do this when the resolution was brought forward is unlikely. Two months isn’t enough to get anything like this done. But it could have accelerated the announcement; Apple would have chosen to get ahead of the resolution, even while it tries to figure out the precise details of what it will do.
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Facebook isn’t telling you how popular right-wing content is on the platform • The Markup

Corin Faife:

»

Data from The Markup’s Citizen Browser project shows that during the period from July 1 to Sept. 30, 2021, outlets like The Daily Wire, The Western Journal, and BuzzFeed’s viral content arm were among the top-viewed domains in our sample. 

Citizen Browser is a national panel of paid Facebook users who automatically share their news feed data with The Markup.

To analyze the websites whose content performs the best on Facebook, we counted the total number of times that links from any domain appeared in our panelists’ news feeds—a metric known as “impressions”—over a three-month period (the same time covered by Facebook’s Q3 Widely Viewed Content Report). Facebook, by contrast, chose a different metric, calculating the “most-viewed” domains by tallying only the number of users who saw links, regardless of whether each user saw a link once or hundreds of times.

By our calculation, the top performing domains were those that surfaced in users’ feeds over and over—including some highly partisan, polarizing sites that effectively bombarded some Facebook users with content.

These findings chime with recent revelations from Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, who has repeatedly said the company has a tendency to cherry-pick statistics to release to the press and the public.

“They are very good at dancing with data,” Haugen told British lawmakers during a European tour.

«

Facebook’s response, in part: “The focus of the Widely Viewed Content Report is to show the content that is seen by the most people on Facebook, not the content that is posted most frequently.”

The question then is which is the better measure: if someone sees the same link three or four times, is that three or four impressions, or just one? And which has more effect?
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Facebook is bad at moderating in English. In Arabic, it’s a disaster • Rest of World

Marwa Fatafta:

»

Arab activists and journalists, many of whom use Facebook to document human rights abuses and war crimes, are routinely censored and booted off the platform — most commonly under the pretext of terrorism. 

This is especially pronounced in times of political crisis and violence. Let’s not forget Facebook’s mass censorship of Palestinian voices during the height of Israeli violence and brutality in the months of May and June 2021. Most notably, Facebook deleted content reporting on Israeli forces violently storming into Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam, throwing stun grenades and tear gas at worshippers, because company staff mistook “Al-Aqsa” for a terrorist organization. 

Such arbitrary mistakes are disturbingly common. Across the region, Facebook’s algorithms incorrectly deleted Arabic content 77% of the time. In one instance, Facebook’s Oversight Board overturned the erroneous removal of a post shared by an Egyptian user on the violence in Israel and Palestine from a verified Al Jazeera page. Not only was the content wrongfully removed for allegedly violating the platform’s Dangerous Individuals and Organisations (DIO) Community Standard, but the user was also disproportionately punished with a read-only account restriction for three days, disabling his ability to livestream content, and prohibiting him from using advertising products on the platform for 30 days. 

Digital rights advocates have demanded transparency on these designations. The Oversight Board also recommended Facebook to publish the list, but Facebook refused, citing safety concerns. The Intercept recently revealed the full list, and again, to no one’s surprise, “the DIO policy and blacklist … place far looser prohibitions on commentary about predominately white anti-government militias than on groups and individuals listed as terrorists, who are predominately Middle Eastern, South Asian, and Muslim.”

«

Long gone are the days when Zuckerberg eagerly believed that getting Israelis and Palestinians onto Facebook would mean they could resolve their differences.
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Hate speech in Myanmar continues to thrive on Facebook • Associated Press

Sam McNeil and Victoria Milko:

»

Years after coming under scrutiny for contributing to ethnic and religious violence in Myanmar, Facebook still has problems detecting and moderating hate speech and misinformation on its platform in the Southeast Asian nation, internal documents viewed by The Associated Press show.

Three years ago, the company commissioned a report that found Facebook was used to “foment division and incite offline violence” in the country. It pledged to do better and developed several tools and policies to deal with hate speech.

But the breaches have persisted — and even been exploited by hostile actors — since the Feb. 1 military takeover this year that resulted in gruesome human rights abuses across the country.

Scrolling through Facebook today, it’s not hard to find posts threatening murder and rape in Myanmar.

One 2 1/2 minute video posted on Oct. 24 of a supporter of the military calling for violence against opposition groups has garnered over 56,000 views.

“So starting from now, we are the god of death for all (of them),” the man says in Burmese while looking into the camera. “Come tomorrow and let’s see if you are real men or gays.”

«

These are part of what I think we’ll call the Haugen Documents, to which the AP has access. But really, Facebook: you’ve seen how it goes in Myanmar. You’ve been publicly shamed over it. Does nothing work?
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Votes for children! Why we should lower the voting age to six • The Guardian

Professor David Runciman:

»

Indeed, I believe there is a strong case for lowering the voting age to six, effectively extending the franchise to any child in full-time education. When I have made this case, as I have done in recent years in a variety of different forums, I am always struck by the reaction I get. It is incredulity. What possible reason could there be to do something so seemingly reckless and foolhardy? Most audiences recognise that our democracy is growing fractious, frustrated and frustrating. Our political divisions are wide and our institutions seem ill-equipped to handle them. But nothing surely could justify allowing children to join in. Wouldn’t it simply make everything worse?

It would not. In fact, it might make things better. But to understand why, we first need to understand the nature of the problems our democracy faces, and in particular, the generational divide that has become an increasingly important factor in politics over recent decades.

«

I’ve heard David (who I know) make this argument a few times. In case you think he’s some random guy on the internet, he’s also professor of politics at Cambridge University. And his point about demographics is key to this argument. After all, if some people are too young to vote, isn’t that also an argument that some people are too old to vote? Scoff at the headline all you like, but read the piece and see if you can refute his argument.
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Ford steps into the chips business • WSJ

Mike Colias:

»

The semiconductor shortage has scuttled output of millions of planned vehicles industrywide this year. Some car executives have said they are taking steps to get a better handle on their chip supplies, a critical piece of the supply chain into which they have had little visibility.

The parts crisis is also driving deeper cooperation between the semiconductor and auto industries with executives from both sectors establishing closer ties to address challenges and working together to introduce new products.

Ford’s move would go a step further by eventually bringing some chip development in-house. The Dearborn, Mich.-based auto maker said designing its own chips could improve some vehicle features—such as automated-driving capabilities or battery systems for electric vehicles—and potentially help Ford sidestep future shortages.

“We feel like we can really boost our product performance and our tech independence at the same time,” said Chuck Gray, Ford’s vice president of vehicle embedded software and controls.

Part of the agreement with GlobalFoundries is intended to enhance near-term chip supplies for Ford, which has been hit especially hard by the supply crunch relative to many other auto makers. The joint-development work is aimed at producing higher-end chips that would go into vehicles several years out, Mr. Gray said.

Semiconductors are used to electronically control many functions in cars, from engine calibration to steering and air-bag deployment. Those computer chips have been scarce this year as auto makers compete for supply with producers of other consumer goods, including electronics and appliances.

«

GlobalFoundries was founded in 2009 as a spinoff from AMD, but only went public this October. Of note: it’s the only semiconductor maker with operations in Europe and the US and Singapore. It’s also a “Trusted Foundry” for the US government. All down to Ford to design some good chips, then. (The link should make the article free to read, at least if you click through from the Overspill website; can’t promise what Mailchimp will do to it.)
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Hackers backed by Iran are targeting US critical infrastructure, US warns • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

»

In May, the attackers targeted an unnamed US municipality, where they likely created an account with the username “elie” to further burrow into the compromised network. A month later, they hacked a US-based hospital specializing in health care for children. The latter attack likely involved Iranian-linked servers at 91.214.124[.]143, 162.55.137[.]20, and 154.16.192[.]70.

Last month, the APT [advanced persistent threat] actors exploited Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities that gave them initial access to systems in advance of follow-on operations. Australian authorities said they also observed the group leveraging the Exchange flaw.

The hackers may have created new user accounts on the domain controllers, servers, workstations, and active directories of networks they compromised. Some of the accounts appear to mimic existing accounts, so the usernames are often different from targeted organization to targeted organization. The advisory said network security personnel should search for unrecognized accounts with special attention on usernames such as Support, Help, elie, and WADGUtilityAccount.

The advisory comes a day after Microsoft reported that an Iranian-aligned group it calls Phosphorous is increasingly using ransomware to generate revenue or disrupt adversaries. The group employs “aggressive brute force attacks” on targets, Microsoft added.

Early this year, Microsoft said, Phosphorus scanned millions of Internet IP addresses in search of FortiOS systems that had yet to install the security fixes for CVE-2018-13379. The flaw allowed the hackers to harvest clear-text credentials used to remotely access the servers. Phosphorus ended up collecting credentials from more than 900 Fortinet servers in the US, Europe, and Israel.

«

So we’re now at the stage where aggressive state hacking is background noise.
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Clubhouse launches bug bounty program with $3,000 on offer for critical vulnerabilities • The Daily Swig

Adam Bannister:

»

Clubhouse, the audio-based chatroom application, has rolled out a public bug bounty program on HackerOne.

Financial rewards for unearthing critical flaws are pegged at $3,000, while ‘high’ severity bugs will command bounties of $1,500. Bug hunters could get $500 and $100, respectively, for valid ‘medium’ and ‘low’ severity bugs.

In a blog post published to coincide with the program’s launch, Clubhouse said: “While many bug bounty programs promise high rewards for catastrophic-level discoveries, our approach keeps the scope broad so we can address as many bugs as possible. To that end, if you can help us fix bugs that could cause harm to our community, you’ll be eligible to earn a bounty.”

«

“Usage is dropping. What can we do to increase engagement?”

“How about encouraging hackers to spend more time using the platform?”

In its way, it is cheaper than a marketing drive. I’d love to know how Clubhouse’s financials are looking, because Google Trends suggests it’s fallen off people’s radar. Except, that is, in those hotbeds of social media familiar to everyone – Somalia and Mongolia.
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The chase for fusion energy • Nature

Philip Ball:

»

There are now more than 30 private fusion firms globally, according to an October survey by the Fusion Industry Association (FIA) in Washington DC, which represents companies in the sector; the 18 firms that have declared their funding say they have attracted more than US$2.4bn in total, almost entirely from private investments (see ‘Fusion funding’). Key to these efforts are advances in materials research and computing that are enabling technologies other than the standard designs that national and international agencies have pursued for so long.

The latest venture at Culham — the hub of UK fusion research for decades — is a demonstration plant for General Fusion (GF), a company based in Burnaby, Canada. It is scheduled to start operating in 2025, and the company aims to have reactors for sale in the early 2030s. It “will be the first power-plant-relevant large-scale demonstration”, says GF’s chief executive Chris Mowry — unless, that is, its competitors deliver sooner.

Designed by British architect Amanda Levete, GF’s prototype plant illustrates the way fusion research has shifted from gargantuan state- or internationally funded enterprises to sleek, image-conscious affairs driven by private companies, often with state support. (GF will receive some UK government funding; it has not disclosed how much.)

In this respect, advocates of fusion technology say it has many parallels with the space industry. That, too, was once confined to government agencies but is now benefiting from the drive and imagination of nimble (albeit often state-assisted) private enterprise. This is “the SpaceX moment for fusion”, says Mowry, referring to Elon Musk’s space-flight company in Hawthorne, California.

“The mood has changed,” says Thomas Klinger, a fusion specialist at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) in Greifswald, Germany. “We can smell that we’re getting close.” Investors sense the real prospect of returns on their money: Google and the New York City-based investment bank Goldman Sachs, for instance, are among those funding the fusion company TAE Technologies, based in Foothill Ranch, California, which has raised around $880m so far. “Companies are starting to build things at the level of what governments can build,” says Bob Mumgaard, chief executive of Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

«

Two points. First: JET, also in Culham, had perhaps $800m of funding (half to build it) during its lifetime. ITER, its successor, could cost between €20bn and €60bn. That’s multi-government funding, but it tends to be slow, and less urgently goal-driven than venture capital. Which is the second point: if VC money succeeds in giving us fusion, will it be too cheap to meter, or too expensive for any but the richest to use?
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: well OK you want to know why this is late. I did prepare all the links earlier on Thursday because I was, mirabile dictu, playing for the local squash team at an away match that involved a 150-mile round trip, and fully intended to then assemble and schedule the post when I got back, but somehow at 11.30pm didn’t have the presence of mind to do so. So this is late. Apologies. (I got thoroughly squashed, but the team won, thanks for asking.)

The nation of Singapore seems to be sliding towards becoming a surveillance state run by its ruling party. CC-licensed photo by maja kuzmanovic on Flickr.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Beginning next year, Apple will send you parts and tools to fix your iPhone and Mac at home • TechCrunch

Brian Heater:

»

Here’s a pleasant — and frankly unexpected — update from Apple. The company just announced Self Service Repair, a new program designed to let users perform common repairs on devices at home. Through the program, users with damaged devices will be sent “Apple genuine” tools and components — same as the ones they use at the Genius Bar.

The company will also be offering up online repair manuals (text, not video), accessible through the new Apple Self Service Repair Online Store. The system is similar to the one the company rolled out for Independent Repair Providers (of which there are currently 2,800 in the U.S. plus 5,000 Apple Authorized Service Providers), beginning with the iPhone 12 and 13, focused on display, battery and camera fixes. A similar service for M1 Macs will be launching “soon” after.

…Performing these tasks at home won’t void the device’s warranty, though you might if you manage to further damage the product in the process of repairing it — so hew closely to those manuals.

«

That’s quite the warning, isn’t it. A very big step by Apple, though it seems more likely this will enable a cottage industry of repairers (who previously existed but were stymied by Apple’s designs of the past few years) than everyone DIYing their cracked screens. But maybe it will create a whole new generation of Haynes manuals. Though iFixit is sort of like that already.
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Scientists say we need to look into solar geoengineering now—before it’s too late • Singularity Hub

Edd Gent:

»

One major plank of geoengineering is the idea of removing excess CO2 from the atmosphere, either through reforestation or carbon capture technology that will scrub emissions from industrial exhausts or directly from the air. There are limits to nature-based CO2 removal, though, and so-called “negative emissions technology” is a long way from maturity.

The other option is solar geoengineering, which involves deflecting sunlight away from the Earth by boosting the reflectivity of the atmosphere or the planet’s surface. Leading proposals involve injecting tiny particles into the stratosphere, making clouds whiter by spraying sea water into the atmosphere, or thinning out high cirrus clouds that trap heat.

In theory, this could reduce global warming fairly cheaply and quickly, but interfering with the Earth’s climate system carries unpredictable and potentially enormous risks. This has led to widespread opposition to even basic research into the idea. Earlier this year, a test of the approach by Sweden’s space agency was cancelled following concerted opposition.

But this lack of research means policymakers are flying blind when weighing the pros and cons of the approach, researchers write in a series of articles in the latest issue of Science. They outline why research into the approach is necessary and how social science in particular can help us better understand the potential trade-offs.

In an editorial, Edward A. Parson from the University of California, Los Angeles, notes that critics often point to the fact that solar geoengineering is a short-term solution to a long-term problem that is likely to be imperfect and whose effects could be uneven and unjust.

«

This really is one from the Department Of Bad Ideas. Don’t know what it will do, can’t reverse it, but hey, why not?
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YouTube co-founder predicts ‘decline’ of the platform following removal of dislikes • The Verge

James Vincent:

»

[Jawed] Karim has been getting his own message out in an unusual way: by editing the description to the first video ever uploaded to YouTube, a banal clip titled “Me at the zoo” which stars the 25-year-old Karim himself. Karim originally edited the description of the video a few days ago to read: “When every YouTuber agrees that removing dislikes is a stupid idea, it probably is. Try again, YouTube [face palm emoji].” But this morning he changed this description once again to give a more detailed condemnation:

“The ability to easily and quickly identify bad content is an essential feature of a user-generated content platform,” writes Karim. “Why? Because not all user-generated content is good. It can’t be. In fact, most of it is not good. And that’s OK. […] The process works, and there’s a name for it: the wisdom of the crowds. The process breaks when the platform interferes with it. Then, the platform invariably declines. Does YouTube want to become a place where everything is mediocre?”

It’s not the first time Karim has used the “Me at the zoo” video as an informal billboard for his opinions on the platform. In 2013, when YouTube announced it would use Google Plus to power comments — a move which many saw as a way for the search giant to force increased engagement for its doomed social network — Karim changed the video’s description to read: “why the fuck do i need a google+ account to comment on a video?”

«

Predicting the decline of YouTube is a brave move. Predicting it over the removal of visible dislikes, even braver.
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No links about the blue site today! But YouTube certainly counts as a social network. How do they affect us? What do social networks do to democracy and journalism? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

Notes on newsletters • Benedict Evans

He’s thinking about email, and Substack, and discovery:

»

How many lists can we all sign up to, after all? And who owns the reader?

The most striking thing for me, though, is that the history professor making $1m from her Substack (and note that ‘her Substack’ is their brand, not hers) reminds me almost exactly of the developer who put a Tetris clone on the iPhone app store in 2008 and made a fortune. Good luck trying that now. In every new, empty channel, the first people to offer something good can get rich. Once the channel fills up, the dynamics change. This happened to SEO, SEM, Facebook, Instagram, podcasts, D2C, Youtube, Tiktok and now newsletters. This is the cycle of life on the internet – any tool that makes it easy for everyone to create and reach an audience also means you’re competing with all the other everyones.

So, what does any content platform do when it has 100m users and 1m creators? The leader boards break, and search probably breaks too. Now what? Apple’s app store was paralysed by that for years. Yahoo’s directory was killed by search. FB built algorithms. Now see Substack. How does discovery work at scale? That isn’t just a high-quality problem – ‘what happens when there is more stuff on your platform than anyone can look at?’ is an essential, existential question. It can define the whole of what your product really means. What happens when email fills up – where does Substack’s own reader fit in?

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Singapore’s tech-utopia dream is turning into a surveillance state nightmare • Rest of World

Peter Guest:

»

It’s a place where pilot projects hint at a future — just over the horizon — where the intractable problems of today are automated out of existence. Where vertical farms and “NEWater” made from treated sewage cut the island’s reliance on neighbouring Malaysia for food and water. Where robots care for the elderly and drones service freighters. Where warehouses and construction sites are staffed by machines, obviating the need for the migrant workers who make Singapore function, but make Singaporeans uncomfortable. Technology keeps them safe, fed and independent; secure in a scary world, but connected to it through telecoms and air travel.

That safety requires constant vigilance. The city must be watched. The smart cameras that are being trialled in Changi [jail] are just a part of a nationwide thrust towards treating surveillance as part of everyday life. Ninety-thousand police cameras watch the streets. By the end of the decade, there will be 200,000. Sensors, including facial recognition cameras and crowd analytics systems, are being positioned across the city. The technology alone isn’t unique — it’s used in many countries. But Singapore’s ruling party sees dangers everywhere, and seems increasingly willing to peer individually and en masse into people’s lives. 

“What [technology] will do for people is make our lives a hell of a lot easier, more convenient, more easily able to plug into the good life,” Monamie Bhadra Haines, an assistant professor at the Technical University of Denmark, who studies the intersection between technology and society. “But … the surveillance is what is here, now.”

«

Very fine piece pointing out how easily this stuff slides from “for your own good” (surveilling prisoners in case they harm themselves) to “for our own good” (surveilling everyone in case they harm the ruling party).
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Amazon to stop accepting UK-issued Visa credit cards • The Guardian

Hilary Osborne:

»

James Andrews, from the comparison website money.co.uk, said the decision would come as a blow to the millions of UK shoppers who had Visa credit cards, including customers of Barclaycard and HSBC.

“With American Express also rejected by many UK retailers, that means people looking for rewards on their spending or trying to split the cost of shopping with a 0% purchase card on Amazon will be effectively forced to choose a Mastercard,” he said.

“Hopefully, Visa and Amazon work out their differences before the ban comes into force on 19 January but in the meantime it would be wise to check your cards now.”

Card fees have long been an issue of contention between providers and retailers, and this month Visa and Mastercard increased their quoted fees for “card-not-present” (CNP) payments on credit cards to merchants in the EU after the removal of caps post-Brexit.

The British Retail Consortium said companies faced an estimated £150m increase in the cost of accepting cross-border card payments, with British retailers shouldering an extra £36.5m in fees, equivalent to £100,000 every day.

The Federation of Small Businesses said its members had experienced soaring fees in recent years.

Its national chairman, Mike Cherry, said: “Small businesses are almost always charged more for card terminals than big corporates – so when online giants start throwing down the gauntlet, you know the situation is becoming critical.”

«

It’s not immediately obvious, but Amazon transactions are very CNP – you’re not even required to give your CVV (the three-digit number on the back). That means a lot of risk for Amazon. But it’s the interchange fees it’s annoyed about. If you want a truly financial wonkish take, Tom Noyes has it for you: the Amazon-Visa row isn’t just a UK thing, and it’s been going on for ages.
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Taiwan proposes maximum seven-year prison term for deepfake porn images • Taiwan News

Matthew Strong:

»

Producers and distributors of deepfake footage replacing the faces of pornographic actors with those of other people could receive a prison sentence of up to seven years, according to a proposal unveiled by the Ministry of Justice.

The authorities promised a crackdown after a web influencer faced charges for allegedly using the faces of celebrities in porn videos. He reportedly made NT$10m (US$359,000) in profits from the illegal venture.

The proposed legislation still foresaw different levels of prison sentencing depending on the nature of the crime, CNA reported. The seven-year maximum sentence would be reserved for the production and distribution of deepfake images with a profit motive, the Ministry of Justice said. It added that five years would be the maximum term if no payment was involved.

If a couple shot an intimate video and one of the partners distributed it without the other’s consent, the maximum prison sentence would be two years.

«

First mention here of deepfake porn: December 2017. I guess four years isn’t slow in legislative terms.
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Pulp Fiction’s Quentin Tarantino sued by Miramax over NFT project • CBR (Comic Book Resources)

Keegan Prosse:

»

Miramax filed a lawsuit against Quentin Tarantino following the Pulp Fiction director’s recent announcement he plans to sell NFTs based on the 1994 cult film.

“Tarantino’s conduct has forced Miramax to bring this lawsuit against a valued collaborator in order to enforce, preserve, and protect its contractual and intellectual property rights relating to one of Miramax’s most iconic and valuable film properties,” the company wrote in its lawsuit, according to THR. “Left unchecked, Tarantino’s conduct could mislead others into believing Miramax is involved in his venture.”

The production company further alleged that Tarantino’s plan to release Pulp Fiction NFTs “could also mislead others into believing they have the rights to pursue similar deals or offerings” and explained that “Miramax holds the rights needed to develop, market, and sell NFTs relating to its deep film library.”

While Tarantino’s attorney responded by arguing the director was acting within his “Reserved Rights,” Miramax accused Tarantino of intentionally disregarding the agreement he signed and attempting to devalue the NFT rights to Pulp Fiction moving forward.

…Tarantino announced in early November that he planned to auction off a number of uncut scenes and original scripts from Pulp Fiction as NFTs. Among the collectibles are seven uncut scenes, original handwritten scripts and exclusive audio commentary from Tarantino. The director said at that time the NFTs would be built by the blockchain ecosystem known as the Secret Network and would be auctioned off on the marketplace OpenSea. As with all NFTs, each offering would come with a unique certificate of ownership.

«

I like how the headline clarifies that it’s Pulp Fiction’s Quentin Tarantino, to distinguish him from all the other Quentin Tarantinos out there. However now that the lawyers for the film studios are involved in NFTs, things can only get worse.
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Peak phosphorus is worse than climate change • Climate Conscious

Dustin T. Cox:

»

Phosphorus is a nutrient that is key to life, but the world has a finite supply, and that supply is running perilously short. Some studies estimate that global phosphorus reserves will run out within 50–100 years. And, as early as 2030, world phosphorus production will likely reach its peak. When that happens, food prices will steadily climb in conjunction with rising fertilizer costs. When the supply runs out, crops will fail and the food web will collapse. Phosphorus depletion is, therefore, an extinction level emergency more pressing than even global warming.

Seven nations control 90% of the world’s phosphorus supply. Morocco alone controls 75%, while the US, China, and a handful of other nations each have considerable reserves. The price of phosphorus has increased dramatically in the last 60 years, rising from $80 per ton in 1961 to over $700 per ton in 2015. Given the uneven distribution of phosphorus throughout the world, wealthy nations will likely starve last, though political strife and wars for food could imperil even the most insulated countries. PRIO (Peace Research Institute Olso) rates hunger as one of the most “reliable predictors of civil war.” If that is true, then even relatively stable nations, like the US, can expect their citizens to one day fight for their food.

… all 94 million acres of American corn crops are fertilized with phosphorus. Furthermore, each crop is reared through “insurance based farming” — the practice of “heaping on” phosphorus at a rate nine times greater than what we consume in food. The left over phosphorus, rather than finding its way to innovative phosphorus capture systems in American sewage processing facilities, remains in the soil, washes to the sea, and pollutes rivers, lakes, and streams.

«

From the abstract of the linked article (from 2009):

»

modern agriculture is dependent on phosphorus derived from phosphate rock, which is a non-renewable resource and current global reserves may be depleted in 50–100 years. While phosphorus demand is projected to increase, the expected global peak in phosphorus production is predicted to occur around 2030.

«

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The government of Greenland is suspending oil exploration because it would contribute to climate change. CC-licensed photo by NASA on The Commons 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. Still not in orbit. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

ConstitutionDAO: a $20m stupid Ethereum trick • Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain

David Gerard:

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“DAO” stands for Decentralised Autonomous Organization. You get a pile of cryptocurrency, and holders with the right tokens to vote decide what to do with the crypto.

DAOs have a less than illustrious history of crashing and burning in fraud and hacks — it turns out that “code is law” is not very smart. So ConstitutionDAO is doing things more simply and elegantly — they’ve set up a multi-signature address with thirteen signers, where all the ETH gets deposited. It’s just a crowdfunding. The “DAO” bit’s connection to the money is more of an idea, you understand.

The completely and utterly centralised control of the project in all practical terms has led to some disappointment amongst those who bought the “DAO” pitch — but hey, it’s not like they can do anything about it.

The ConstitutionDAO founders say they’re setting up a Delaware LLC to front for this unincorporated bunch o’ guys who just got sent $5m of ETH. Everything is a gentleman’s agreement so far, worth only the paper it’s not written on. If ConstitutionDAO doesn’t win the auction, the funds will be returned via Juicebox, the platform they’re collecting the money on.

If ConstitutionDAO does win, what happens then? From the FAQ:

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Will the core team receive any of the raised funds for themselves or get compensated in any way from this?

The core team has not received or pre-minted any tokens. Following the purchase of the Constitution, we intend to submit a proposal to be voted on by the community. While this is unusual, we believe that it establishes a precedence of mutual trust between the core team and the backers of the ConstitutionDAO.

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Notice how this doesn’t answer the question.

On the ConstitutionDAO Discord chat, Will Papper, one of the multisig signers, says

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Delaware LLC. Minimal operating agreement for now while we finalize details. The LLC allows us to bid on the Sotheby’s auction. Sotheby’s does not allow DAOs themselves to bid. “ConstitutionDAO LLC” but it’s still being set up. Need to consult more with securities lawyers we work with on this (since fractionalized ownership could be a security).

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There’s a lot of misreporting around this. Essentially the LLC gets the money. Whether it gives it back or does anything trustworthy is up to them.
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Satellites discover huge amounts of undeclared methane emissions • Space

Tereza Pultarova:

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Huge amounts of uncounted emissions of highly warming greenhouse gas methane are being released by “super-emitters” all over the world, satellite observations reveal. 

Scientists have only recently worked out how to detect methane emissions from space, but what they have seen since has taken them by surprise. The greenhouse gas, which is 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide, is leaking from gas pipelines, oil wells, fossil fuel processing plants and landfills all over the world. It is frequently released through negligence and improper operations; the emissions, in many cases, are not accounted for in mandatory greenhouse gas inventories. 

“We see quite a lot of those super-emitters,” Ilse Aben, senior scientist at the Netherlands Institute for Space Research (SRON) told Space.com. “These are large emissions, and we see a lot of them on the global scale — much more than we had expected.”

Aben heads a team of experts working with data from an instrument called Tropomi (for TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument) that flies on the European Sentinel 5P satellite, which is part of the Earth-observing constellation Copernicus.

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So, after the recent report that emissions have been lower than we thought for a few years, we’re now discovering that emissions (and especially methane) have probably been higher than we thought. Which would explain the rapid warming. Right?
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Russia acknowledges anti-satellite test, but says it’s no big deal • Ars Technica

Eric Berger:

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it remains difficult to fully explain the country’s decision to destroy a satellite and create a cloud of debris that could very well threaten the International Space Station, as independent observations suggest.

Various theories have emerged to explain Russia’s actions, but as of Monday evening senior US officials were still scrambling to comprehend Russian motivations. Certainly, the selection of this satellite, in this orbit, was not made by chance. However, the decision to hit the Tselina-D satellite, also known as Cosmos 1408, may have been taken by Russia’s defense ministers without consulting the civil space operators of the space station.

One dark theory is that Russian President Vladimir Putin has now concluded that Russia’s space industry has fallen hopelessly behind the United States and China, and the gap will only further widen in future years. Because of this strategic and economic disadvantage, Putin has calculated that the best option for Russia is to deny certain orbits to these competitors. With Monday’s test, then, he sent his counterparts a message that he still retains some control in space—what you can destroy, Putin believes, you can control.

In the near term it seems likely that the US government, in concert with other spacefaring partners, will offer some sort of response. Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers have called the test unacceptable and said Russia must be held accountable for its actions. In the long term, this only heightens existing concerns about debris and the sustainability of high-trafficked orbits near Earth.

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Inside Reality Labs Research: meet the team that’s working to bring touch to the digital world • Facebook Research

Andrew Bosworth, in charge of Meta’s metaverse effort:

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Imagine working on a virtual 3D puzzle with a friend’s ultra-realistic 3D avatar. As you pick up a virtual puzzle piece from the table, your fingers automatically stop moving as you feel it within your grasp. You feel the sharpness of the cardboard’s edges and the smoothness of its surface as you hold it up for closer inspection, followed by a satisfying snap as you fit it into place.

Now imagine sitting down to work at a café and having a virtual screen and keyboard appear in front of you. The virtual keyboard conforms to the size of your hands and the space you have available, and it’s easily personalized to suit your preferences. You can feel the click of each keystroke, as well as the edges of the virtual keys on your fingertips, making it as easy as typing on a perfectly-sized physical keyboard.

How would these experiences enhance your connection to the virtual world? What would they do for your ability to be productive or perform any action in the metaverse?

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Here’s something I wrote in October 2002:

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The cube felt rubbery, although it didn’t strictly exist. As I moved the pencil-like mouse in my hand, a cursor moved too in the virtual room where the cube sat. A little manoeuvring and the cursor was beneath the cube. Move the pencil (called a “phantom”) upwards, and suddenly there was the sensation of weight, and the cube moved upwards on the screen. With a little practice, I could flip it upwards and catch it. The surface seemed to give, like rubber; the weight felt like a small ball, perhaps a golf ball.

A few minutes later another cursor appeared, and moved to the opposite side of the cube. Then we both pushed at the same time, and the cube rose. It was the first transmission of “touch” over the internet, demonstrated simultaneously in London and Massachusetts yesterday. The other cursor belonged to Jung Kim, a PhD student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s “Touch Lab” in Boston.

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Yes, that’s 19 years.
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The AGI hype train is running out of steam • The Next Web

Thomas Macaulay:

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The AGI hype train has hit some heavy traffic.

While futurists and fundraisers used to make bullish predictions about artificial general intelligence, they’ve become quieter lately. Peter Thiel — the tech billionaire and rumored vampire — says Silicon Valley big brains have lost enthusiasm for AGI.

“Elon’s not talking about it anymore and Larry [Page] is off to Fiji and doesn’t seem to be working on it quite as hard,” Thiel said at a recent event.

Thiel described Musk as “a weathervane for the zeitgeist,” who’s stopped talking about AGI because interest has declined.

Scientists are also increasingly skeptical. A recent study paper posited that AGI is “in principle impossible,” while other researchers have mocked the term’s proponents.

“I have yet to come across work on AGI that I can take seriously,” tweeted Abeba Birhane, a cognitive scientist based at University College Dublin.

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If like me you missed the “Larry Page is off to Fiji” bit, he’s hanging out a few miiles off Viti Levu.
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Qualcomm says it will have chips to take on Apple silicon in nine months • iMore

Stephen Warwick:

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Qualcomm says that it is going to release new chips next year that can keep up with M-series Apple chips like M1 Pro and M1 Max, and the M1 featured in devices like the MacBook Air with M1 and 13-inch MacBook Pro with M1.

Chief Technology Officer Dr. James Thompson spoke at Qualcomm’s 2021 investor event, where he revealed the plan.

Qualcomm supplies Apple with some hardware, providing modems for devices like the iPhone 13 and its other best iPhones.

Thompson said Qualcomm would release new “arm-compatible” SoC’s designed by Nuvia, which it bought for $1.4bn in 2021. The company boasts former Apple engineers who worked on Apple silicon, and in July Qualcomm chief executive Cristiano Amon said he thought Qualcomm could have the best chip on the market by next year. According to Thompson today, the new chips will be unveiled in about nine months, and be ready for devices in 2023.

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Ah, so what Thompson is really saying is that in 2023 Qualcomm will have chips that “can keep up” with chips Apple released in 2020 (since the M1 Pro/Max chips are just more-CPU-core-more-GPU-core versions of the M1). And of course Qualcomm has never produced a chip that can power a smartwatch as well as Apple’s. But maybe adding Nuvia will change that.
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Greenland suspends oil exploration because of climate change • Associated Press

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The left-leaning government of Greenland has decided to suspend all oil exploration off the world’s largest island, calling it is “a natural step” because the Arctic government “takes the climate crisis seriously.”

No oil has been found yet around Greenland, but officials there had seen potentially vast reserves as a way to help Greenlanders realize their long-held dream of independence from Denmark by cutting the annual subsidy of 3.4bn kroner ($540m) the Danish territory receives.

Global warming means that retreating ice could uncover potential oil and mineral resources which, if successfully tapped, could dramatically change the fortunes of the semiautonomous territory of 57,000 people.

“The future does not lie in oil. The future belongs to renewable energy, and in that respect we have much more to gain,” the Greenland government said in a statement. The government said it “wants to take co-responsibility for combating the global climate crisis.”

The decision was made June 24 but made public Thursday.

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Baby steps, but steps nonetheless.
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What it’s like living in the coldest town on Earth • WIRED

Jenna Garrett:

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It gets down to well below zero in Oymyakon, Russia, long known as the coldest inhabited place on Earth. If that kind of climate is hard to wrap your brain around, such a temperature is so cold that people here regularly consume frozen meat, keep their cars running 24/7 and must warm the ground with a bonfire for several days before burying their dead.

It’s hard to know why anyone would want to live in such a place, and harder still to imagine why anyone would want to visit. But photographer Amos Chapple just couldn’t resist.

“I shoot travel photos aimed at the news sections of papers and need a headline to hang a story on,” the New Zealander said. “‘The coldest place on Earth’ is pretty irresistible.”

He traveled more than 10,000 miles to reach this village of 500 residents tucked away in a remote corner of Siberia. It’s so nasty that planes can’t land during the winter, and it takes two days to arrive by car from Yakutsk, the nearest major city (it’s 576 miles away). Chapple spent several weeks shooting in Oymyakon and Yakutsk during the long, dark month of January in 2013 and 2014. His remarkable photos capture the cold, bleak landscape and the hardy residents who brave unimaginable conditions.

Oymyakon sits at a 63.4608° N, 142.7858° E latitude, just a few hundred miles from the Arctic Circle. It’s dark – completely, utterly dark – for up to 21 hours a day during the winter, and the temperature averages -58. That’s balmy compared to one February in 1933, when Oymyakon earned its title as the coldest place on Earth when the mercury plunged to -90.

Here arctic chill is simply a fact of life, something to be endured. People develop a variety of tricks to survive. Most people use outhouses, because indoor plumbing tends to freeze. Cars are kept in heated garages or, if left outside, left running all the time. Crops don’t grow in the frozen ground, so people have a largely carnivorous diet—reindeer meat, raw flesh shaved from frozen fish, and ice cubes of horse blood with macaroni are a few local delicacies.

Chapple found it difficult to speak with the people he encountered, as many people were rushing as fast as possible from one oasis of warmth to another. Those willing to chat warned him about the rampant alcoholism, particularly during the holiday months.

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Remains a complete puzzle why you would live there. Or even take a job there. Other places exist, after all.
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The ‘psychology of regret’ helps explain why vaccine mandates work • The Washington Post

Adam Galinsky is a professor of ethics:

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To combat vaccine hesitancy, we need to grasp its psychological roots. Alongside skepticism of institutions and experts, exposure to misinformation, and other often-cited reasons for resisting vaccines sits a clear emotional explanation: Many people are afraid that they’ll make a bad decision. They’re influenced by the psychology of anticipated regret. Understanding this reaction can help us get more shots into arms, removing one of the final obstacles to controlling the virus.

It’s widely understood that when humans make decisions, they engage in a cost-benefit analysis. But psychologists have shown that people also conduct a less-rational calculation involving the regret they might experience. When deciding which of two roads to go down, they not only consider the statistical probabilities but also implicitly imagine their reactions to worst-case scenarios. In these analyses, potential bad outcomes weigh heavier on the mind than equally likely positive possibilities.

When do people anticipate feeling the most regret? When outcomes will derive from actions they take (as opposed to the consequences of declining to act), research shows. Psychologists — notably Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize in economics for his work on decision-making — have demonstrated these tendencies in a series of experiments. For example, Kahneman found that people anticipate feeling more regret if they were to lose money by switching to a new stock vs. taking a loss on their current stock. And this regret is maximally intensified when we freely choose to take action — we are not ordered or coerced — and when it involves new or experimental activities. For example, Kahneman found that people anticipate more regret when imagining an accident that occurs while driving home along a new route compared with driving on one’s normal route. Anticipated regret is why people often prefer to stand still rather than move forward.

Anticipated regret sheds light on why vaccine-hesitant people seem more comfortable taking their chances with the virus rather than getting the shot, a decision that is not rational given the relative likelihood of experiencing severe effects of covid-19 vs. severe vaccine side effects.

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Awaiting with interest how many (or few) care home staff will choose not to be vaccinated, and hence fired, following the passage of their mandatory vaccination deadline in the UK. Early estimates suggested thousands would.
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Vizio’s profit on ads, subscriptions, and data is double the money it makes selling TVs • The Verge

Richard Lawler:

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It’s been less than a year since Vizio became a publicly traded company, and one consequence of that is we know more about its business than ever before. The TV maker released its latest earnings report on Tuesday and revealed that over the last three months, its Platform Plus segment that includes advertising and viewer data had a gross profit of $57.3m. That’s more than twice the amount of profit it made selling devices like TVs, which was $25.6m, despite those device sales pulling in considerably more revenue.

When Vizio filed to go public, it described the difference between the two divisions. While Devices is easy to understand — 4K TVs, soundbars, etc. — Platform Plus is a little more complicated. It counts money made from selling ad placements on its TV homescreens, deals for the buttons on remotes, ads that run on streaming channels, its cut from subscriptions, and viewer data that it tracks and sells as part of the InScape program.

The company says shipments of its TVs fell to 1.4m in 2021 compared to 2.1m in 2020, a drop of 36%. CEO William Wang told investors on the call that he sees “pretty healthy inventory” going into the holiday season, so anyone planning to pick up a value-priced TV or soundbar should have some decent options available.

That spike in Platform Plus revenue, which shot up 136% compared to last year, did a lot to help Vizio make up the difference as profits from TVs dipped compared to last year.

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Smart TVs in the sense that getting people to install them is a smart move.
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No examples of social networks putting people at loggerheads (thank goodness). But even so, why not buy my book Social Warming, to understand what they’re doing.

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified