A peculiar idea popular among some Gen Zers is that birds aren’t real. But is it a conspiracy theory, or something quite different? CC-licensed photo by Phil Fiddyment 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. It’s not a work meeting, it’s a party. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Inside Apple Park: first look at the design team shaping the future of tech • Wallpaper*

Jonathan Bell (and photos by Jason Schmidt):

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For Apple Watch, the team had to design, build, and implement a physical notification system. How strong? How long? What felt natural? ‘We knew that the Watch was going to be the most intimate, the most personal product that we’ve ever made,’ says Hankey. ‘We also knew it needed to get your attention at some point.’ It was Duncan Kerr, a long-standing member of the Design Team, who suggested the idea of the ‘tap’. ‘It’s such a lovely simple thing, but we had no idea how to bring that to life,’ Hankey says. Through a series of clunky prototypes and the work of haptics expert Camille Moussette, the ‘tap’ was refined and perfected.

Industrial design is by its nature multidisciplinary, although individual expertise is obviously hugely valuable. There are team members who are as adept at coding as they are at three-dimensional design, but in general, the most useful quality – beyond skill and aptitude – is a sense of curiosity. ‘We have this tradition of making things for one another at Christmas,’ says Hankey. ‘It’s about that joy of making and joy of giving. It’s something that’s come from the culture of the team.’

An awareness of craft and construction is essential, for there is an acute responsibility that comes with shaping objects that will be made in the hundreds of millions. The economies of scale and the power of the brand give Apple a powerful platform from which to implement change.

Yet even something as superficially simple but environmentally beneficial as removing the plastic shrink-wrap from an iPhone box induces a paroxysm of self-examination within the team. How can the unboxing experience be maintained? Can it be made more accessible? The problem was mulled over, pulled apart and ultimately solved with an elegant paper tab mechanism. The change will save around 600 metric tonnes of plastic over the life of the product.

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This is not an article where Evans Hankey and Alan Dye are taken to task over butterfly keyboards (neither word appears). Everything is wonderful and brilliant and keyboard designs that infuriated people and led some to delay purchases for years (🙋‍♂️) are just gentle bumps in the delightful road. And yet, there’s a lot of insight into what goes on. Plus the photos are amazing.
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Face computers are coming. Now what? • The New York Times

Shira Ovide:

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Apple has a reputation for making up-and-coming technology go mass market. We’ll see, but it’s clear that there will be a lot of activity and attention on face computers and immersive technologies in all forms. (Counterpoint: Some tech experts have predicted the rise of face computers for most of the past decade.)

What I want all of us to do — whether we don’t get the fuss over virtual reality, or love it — is to begin deliberating over where we want to focus the promise of this technology and limit the risks.

I’m mindful of what has gone wrong when we allowed technology to wash over us and tried to figure out the details later.

Partly through an unwillingness or inability to imagine what could go wrong with technology, we have websites and apps that track us everywhere we go, and that sell the information to the highest bidders. We have carmakers that sometimes protect us with clever tech that helps offset human frailties, and other times seem to exacerbate them. We have the best aspects of human interactions online, and the worst.

We should think about this stuff now, before we might all be wearing supercomputers on our faces.

What do we want from this technology? Can we imagine schools, offices or comedy clubs in virtual reality? What do we want from the next generation of immersive internet for our kids? Do we want to drive while our headgear flings tweets into our fields of vision? Do we even want to erase the gap between digital life and real life?

It might be misguided to establish norms and laws around technologies that might take many years to become big. But tech companies and technologists aren’t waiting. They’re molding their imagined future of the internet now. If we don’t engage, that puts the companies in the driver’s seat. And we’ve seen the downside of that.

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A privacy law would be a good idea, as she has suggested elsewhere. When you consider Life360 essentially selling location data to any bidder at all, you have to think that the US has a big problem with privacy.
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Birds Aren’t Real, or are they? Inside a Gen Z conspiracy theory • The New York Times

Taylor Lorenz:

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It might smack of QAnon, the conspiracy theory that the world is controlled by an elite cabal of child-trafficking Democrats. Except that the creator of Birds Aren’t Real and the movement’s followers are in on a joke: they know that birds are, in fact, real and that their theory is made up.

What Birds Aren’t Real truly is, they say, is a parody social movement with a purpose. In a post-truth world dominated by online conspiracy theories, young people have coalesced around the effort to thumb their nose at, fight and poke fun at misinformation. It’s Gen Z’s attempt to upend the rabbit hole with absurdism.

“It’s a way to combat troubles in the world that you don’t really have other ways of combating,” said Claire Chronis, 22, a Birds Aren’t Real organizer in Pittsburgh. “My favorite way to describe the organization is fighting lunacy with lunacy.”

At the center of the movement is Peter McIndoe, 23, a floppy-haired college dropout in Memphis who created Birds Aren’t Real on a whim in 2017. For years, he stayed in character as the conspiracy theory’s chief believer, commanding acolytes to rage against those who challenged his dogma. But now, Mr. McIndoe said in an interview, he is ready to reveal the parody lest people think birds really are drones.

“Dealing in the world of misinformation for the past few years, we’ve been really conscious of the line we walk,” he said. “The idea is meant to be so preposterous, but we make sure nothing we’re saying is too realistic. That’s a consideration with coming out of character.”

Most Birds Aren’t Real members, many of whom are part of an on-the-ground activism network called the Bird Brigade, grew up in a world overrun with misinformation. Some have relatives who have fallen victim to conspiracy theories. So for members of Gen Z, the movement has become a way to collectively grapple with those experiences. By cosplaying conspiracy theorists, they have found community and kinship, Mr. McIndoe said.

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I wonder, though. You think everyone is in on the joke, but things like this can be taken over from the inside by slightly madder people.
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What will happen to Arm now? • Digits to Dollars

Jonathan Greenberg:

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Surprising almost no one, the US Federal Trade Commission has moved to block Nvidia’s acquisition of Arm. We have written a lot about this deal and Arm in general, and wanted to touch on the topic in light of this news.

We will save the background on this deal for that prior piece, but a few things stand out. Arm is seen by regulators as being too important to not be neutral. No other chip company can buy the company, as no one wants to compete with this key supplier of semiconductor intellectual property (IP), and almost every major chip company is now an Arm licensee, one way or another. So what will happen to the company now?

…we have to think that Softbank would still like to exit. They almost made a pile of cash and having it snatched away is the kind of factor that spurs the brain to think of alternatives. The most likely outcome is an IPO of at least a minority stake of Arm. Prior to the Nvidia deal, Softbank seems to have gone far down this path. However, Softbank faced the problem that the public markets would have likely valued Arm less than what Softbank hoped (or possibly even what they paid for it) and far less than what Nvidia offered. The capital markets are in a different place today, and Arm is likely to attract a much higher valuation because semis are hot now in a way they have not been for a long time. One wrinkle for this plan is that an IPO will take some time to arrange. We would guess at least six months, possibly longer. No idea what the markets will look like then, and it leaves Arm in limbo when they should be doing all that R&D investment.

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This small tech company SpiffyTech may actually be a ransomware front group • Daily Beast

Shannon Vavra:

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It seems innocent enough: a little-known Canadian company that offers an array of tech and consulting services. But a certificate from that company—a sort of signature that can be tacked onto malware—showed up in two pieces of ransomware last month and leading experts told The Daily Beast they believe the small company is actually a front for at least two Russian ransomware gangs.

The company—cheerily named “SpiffyTech”—has a number of red flags. For one, if you want to look at SpiffyTech’s leadership team, you’re out of luck. They don’t exist.

The site does list four top staffers next to their stylish headshots. But the SpiffyTech operators appear to have stolen each and every photo.

A reverse image search on Google shows the headshots come from a professional photographer’s website. The photographer, Kirill Tigai, confirmed the photos in question were part of a shoot for a different company and said he did not give SpiffyTech permission to use them.

“I think… this website SpiffyTech is a fraud,” Tigai told The Daily Beast. “They just use photos that I made for my clients under different names.”

Another reason experts believe “SpiffyTech” is a front is far more technical.

Hackers frequently steal certificates from actual businesses in order to help their attacks fly under the radar and trick computers into thinking their malware is legitimate. And while it’s possible the hackers did the same here—or tricked a real company into sharing a legitimate “cert”—the shadiness of the site, and its apparent connection to ransomware, leads cybersecurity analysts to believe SpiffyTech is a disguise for something more sinister.

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The real puzzle – which isn’t quite answered – is why a ransomware group would want to have a website, even a fake one, unless it’s for the certificate mentioned above. Which has now been revoked by the certification authority. The whack-a-mole goes on.
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The Pandora Papers: how journalists mined terabytes of offshore data to expose the world’s elites • Computer Weekly

Bill Goodwin:

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The data team [at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, ICIJ] turned to open source software to build a dedicated free-text search engine using Blacklight, a tool widely used by libraries for searching documents, and Apache Solr, an open source enterprise search tool.

Over time, the data team switched to another technology, Elasticsearch, which allowed faster searches.

“Elasticsearch is much more powerful – it has a huge open source community and has a lot of features that are very useful to these investigations,” said [ICIJ chief technology officer Pierre] Romera.

That project resulted in the creation of Datashare, which Romera describes as the most important tool used by ICIJ journalists during collaborations. It allows journalists to search vast archives of documents quickly and securely.

One of the most useful features of Datashare is its ability to perform bulk searches of data. Journalists can upload files containing, for example, lists of politicians, members of royalty or celebrities to find stories within the vast archives of data.

Datashare is also scalable, allowing Romera to add more servers to provide computing power needed to analyse bigger leaks and support larger teams.

During the Pandora Papers project, the ICIJ had the capability to deploy 15-20 servers. This made it possible for over 600 journalists to conduct key-word searches on the data – a step up from the 370-plus journalists who worked on the Panama Papers. “Because we are trying to find the highest number of stories in the documents, we really need to use this search engine intensively,” said Romera.

Datashare is designed to be simple and fast to use and is, said Romera, essentially a lightweight interface built on top of Elasticsearch. But it can also take software plug-ins and extensions. One of the most useful is a plug-in that extracts the names of people, organisations and place names automatically from the documents.

“Datashare is at the very centre of everything we do at ICIJ,” said Romera. “It is the most important tool we have.

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There were working on 2.9 terabytes of unstructured data, a tiny bit in spreadsheets and most in PDFs. What a horrendous task – yet crucial to expose the corruption that goes on.
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Pixel prevented me from calling 911 • GooglePixel forums on Reddit

A Pixel user complained on Reddit:

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I had to call an ambulance for the grandmother on Friday as she appeared to be having a stroke. I got off a phone call with my mom, and proceeded to dial 911 just by typing and calling on my pixel. My phone got stuck immediately after one ring and I was unable to do anything other than click through apps with an emergency phone call running in the background. This is all while the phone informed me that it had sent my location to emergency services. Sadly I couldn’t tell the person on the other end what apartment I was in, or what the actual emergency was as I was unable to speak to a human.

As my phone had clearly just been working from a phone call perspective, my best guess is the extra step of trying to send my location caused it to freeze. It then prevented me from hanging up and trying to call any phone number again.

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Nine days later, Google came back with its answer:

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Based on our investigation we have been able to reproduce the issue under a limited set of circumstances. We believe the issue is only present on a small number of devices with the Microsoft Teams app installed when the user is not logged in, and we are currently only aware of one user report related to the occurrence of this bug. We determined that the issue was being caused by unintended interaction between the Microsoft Teams app and the underlying Android operating system.

Because this issue impacts emergency calling, both Google and Microsoft are heavily prioritizing the issue, and we expect a Microsoft Teams app update to be rolled out soon – as always we suggest users keep an eye out for app updates to ensure they are running the latest version. We will also be providing an Android platform update to the Android ecosystem on January 4.

Out of an abundance of caution, in the meantime, we suggest users with Microsoft Teams installed on any Android device running Android 10 and above take the following steps…

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(Basically, sign in to Teams. The problem occurs when signed out.)
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Nine months into trials at the UK Police, Tesla Model 3 bears great results: report • Tesla Oracle

Iqtidar Ali:

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The United Kingdom Police have been running a Tesla Model 3 as a patrol car on trials for the last nine months. Max Toozs-Hobson, account manager and Emergency Services lead at Tesla, has shared the latest development update of this trial program via his LinkedIn profile.

According to Max Toozs, Tesla Model 3 has brought some great results to the table in the 9-month long testing trials as a police cruiser.

Tesla Model 3 was able to perform over 200 miles of Blue Light advanced driving on a single charge. While the average blue light runs in the UK are 7 – 15 minutes long; the customized Model 3 police cruiser for this program delivered the longest run of four hours on a single charge.

Blue light driving in an emergency response vehicle has its own set of requirements. It’s not like driving in normal conditions. Responsible driving is required while overtaking other traffic, performing high-speed manoeuvres, and keeping other road users’ safety in mind at the same time.

…Testing the Tesla Model 3 electric police cruiser is part of the UK government’s Road to Zero 2030 policy. This is an aggressive plan by the UK government to electrify almost all of the country’s transportation by 2030 and emergency response vehicles are a large part of this transition. The government of London announced back in 2019 that by 2025, the city alone will have 50,000 electric vehicle charge points.

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The other point being that the acceleration (and top speed?) would outpace pretty much any other car on the road. However, plenty of gloomsayers in the comments on the LinkedIn update.
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If I were in charge of Ofcom… • The Spectator

Paul Dacre is the former editor of the Daily Mail, the furiously right-wing tabloid. Earlier this year there were strong rumours the Tory government was trying to rig the appointment of the new chair of the communications regulator Ofcom so Dacre would get the job. Ministers denied this in multiple interviews. Over to you, Mr Dacre:

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‘You can appoint your own chief executive,’ boomed the PM [prime minister] over a rather sad bottle of wine. He was asking if I would like to chair the media regulator Ofcom because, he declared, he was determined to do something to end the usual suspects’ control of our public bodies. It was soon apparent that I couldn’t appoint my own chief executive. Or take people with me. And as all the key positions at Ofcom are chosen by ‘independent’ panels, the chairman’s role is heavily circumscribed.

So why bother? The answer was I was fascinated by the societal implications of the Online Safety Bill that Ofcom will implement. If I could help prevent paedophiles, hate preachers and terrorists exploiting the internet, protect young vulnerable minds from emotional manipulation, eradicate the malicious trolling of individuals (often from minorities) that is poisoning private and public discourse, eliminate fake news and preserve freedom of speech, well, that sounded a pretty good swansong to a magical career in journalism.

After all, in 28 years as an editor, I’d spent much time with ministers, judges and regulators trying to define the thin line between protecting the innocent and damaging freedom of speech. I’d also chaired the Editors’ Code of Practice Committee which — by balancing the rights of the individual and the public’s right to know — writes the rules for best journalistic practice that are emulated around the world. And I’d made a significant contribution to launching the world’s biggest English-language popular newspaper website. The problem is that the Bill is a dog’s dinner. There aren’t enough lawyers in the cosmos to define ‘legal but harmful’ content. How do you stop Facebook’s algorithms deleting legitimate news stories? But the real problem is the insidious anonymity behind which the web’s malfeasants skulk — an issue that, despite the civil-rights implications, is going to have to be addressed.

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I think Dacre would have been clueless about regulating internet content, as this braindump shows. A narrow miss, but a dangerous slide toward Trumpist appointment of incompetents.
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Nothing about the blue site! But do buy Social Warming, my latest book, and find out how social networks affect society, politics and the media.

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: didn’t see anything particularly interesting from the Mosseri testimony, but if you think different, drop me a link.

Is the “Great Resignation” a real thing across the economy, or is it concentrated in a few sectors? New data tells us the answer. CC-licensed photo by Stephen Edmonds 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 from Outer Space. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Getting married in the Metaverse • The New York Times

Steven Kurutz:

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Traci and Dave Gagnon met in the cloud, so it only made sense that their wedding took place in it. On Labor Day weekend, the couple — or rather, their digital avatars — held a ceremony staged by Virbela, a company that builds virtual environments for work, learning and events.

Ms. Gagnon’s avatar was walked down the aisle by the avatar of her close friend. Mr. Gagnon’s avatar watched as his buddy’s avatar ambled up to the stage and delivered a toast. And 7-year-old twin avatars (the ring bearer and flower girl) danced at the reception.

How the immersive virtual world known as the metaverse, which few of us understand, will change the traditional wedding is, at the moment, anyone’s guess. But the possibilities of having an event unfettered by the bounds of reality are interesting enough to consider.

Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, technology is already being incorporated into ceremonies more than ever. Zoom weddings have taken place, and some in-person ceremonies now feature a livestream component for guests who cannot be there. Last year, a couple whose wedding was canceled because of the pandemic staged a (nonlegal) ceremony within Animal Crossing, a popular video game.
Like a ceremony within a video game, though, it is important to note that any weddings that occur solely in the metaverse are currently not legal. (Even virtual weddings by videoconference, which many states allowed during the height of the pandemic shutdowns, have since been outlawed in New York State and elsewhere.) Still, the metaverse will take these virtual celebrations much, much further, experts say, and offer almost boundless possibilities to couples.

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This stuff goes through a predictable cycle: sex (or hookups), meetings, marriages. Here’s “virtual world, real emotions“, about Second Life in 2008. (Where affairs could also lead to divorces.) Plus there have been Zoom weddings.

And here we are at the early stage of the cycle with the Metaverse. Or metaverse. (Former for the proprietary one, latter for multiple ones.)
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Facebook’s dangerous experiment on teen girls • The Atlantic

Jonathan Haidt is a professor at New York University:

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Correlation does not prove causation, but nobody has yet found an alternative explanation for the massive, sudden, gendered, multinational deterioration of teen mental health during the period in question.

To be sure, there is evidence on the other side. Dozens of studies and several meta-analyses (studies of groups of studies) have examined the relationship between greater digital-media use and worse teen mental health, and most have found just small correlations, or none at all. The most widely cited of these studies, published in 2019, analyzed 355,000 teens across three large data sets from the U.S. and U.K. The authors found only a tiny correlation—no larger than the correlation of bad mental health with self-reports of “eating potatoes.” Facebook cites this research in its defense.

But here’s the problem with these studies: most lump all screen-based activities together (including those that are harmless, such as watching movies or texting with friends), and most lump boys and girls together. Such studies cannot be used to evaluate the more specific hypothesis that Instagram is harmful to girls. It’s like trying to prove that Saturn has rings when all you have is a dozen blurry photos of the entire night sky.

But as the resolution of the pictures increases, the rings appear. The subset of studies that allow researchers to isolate social media, and Instagram in particular, show a much stronger relationship with poor mental health. The same goes for those that zoom in on girls rather than all teens. Girls who use social media heavily are about two or three times more likely to say that they are depressed than girls who use it lightly or not at all. (For boys, the same is true, but the relationship is smaller.) Most of the experiments that randomly assign people to reduce or give up social media for a week or more show a mental-health benefit, indicating that social media is a cause, not just a correlate.

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Haidt’s objection to the apparent lack of correlation (through lumping screen-based activities together) is the same one I had when I looked at this. The chapter I wrote about the effects of social media on children didn’t appear in Social Warming, but it carries much of the same thinking that Haidt outlines in this article.

(Instagram’s Adam Mosseri was testifying to Congress on Wednesday; we’ll see what came of it in the next issue.)
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How TikTok reads your mind • The New York Times

Ben Smith:

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The document explains frankly that in the pursuit of the company’s “ultimate goal” of adding daily active users, it has chosen to optimize for two closely related metrics in the stream of videos it serves: “retention” — that is, whether a user comes back — and “time spent.” The app wants to keep you there as long as possible. The experience is sometimes described as an addiction, though it also recalls a frequent criticism of pop culture. The playwright David Mamet, writing scornfully in 1998 about “pseudoart,” observed that “people are drawn to summer movies because they are not satisfying, and so they offer opportunities to repeat the compulsion.”

To analysts who believe algorithmic recommendations pose a social threat, the TikTok document confirms their suspicions.

“This system means that watch time is key. The algorithm tries to get people addicted rather than giving them what they really want,” said Guillaume Chaslot, the founder of Algo Transparency, a group based in Paris that has studied YouTube’s recommendation system and takes a dark view of the effect of the product on children, in particular. Mr. Chaslot reviewed the TikTok document at my request.

“I think it’s a crazy idea to let TikTok’s algorithm steer the life of our kids,” he said. “Each video a kid watches, TikTok gains a piece of information on him. In a few hours, the algorithm can detect his musical tastes, his physical attraction, if he’s depressed, if he might be into drugs, and many other sensitive information. There’s a high risk that some of this information will be used against him. It could potentially be used to micro-target him or make him more addicted to the platform.”

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There’s a quote too from a professor of computer science who is puzzled by why people keep asking him about TikTok: “most of what I’ve seen seems pretty normal”, he says, and it’s true, at least in this description. What’s different is how rapaciously it pulls in data, and how furiously it segments users to show them specific videos to appeal to their very particular matrix of interests. *That’s* abnormal.
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The behaviours and attitudes of US adults on Twitter • Pew Research Center

Colleen Mcclain, Regina Widjaya, Gonzalo Rivero and Aaron Smith:

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The analysis also reveals another familiar pattern on social media: a relatively small share of highly active users produces the vast majority of content. An analysis of tweets by this representative sample of US adult Twitter users from June 12 to Sept. 12, 2021 finds that the most active 25% of US adults on Twitter by tweet volume produced 97% of all tweets from these users.

High-volume tweeters differ from less prolific tweeters in important ways. A majority visit the site daily, and roughly one-in-five say they do so too many times to count on a typical day. Their use of Twitter also carries a more overtly political valence: They are more likely than others to say the site has increased how politically engaged they feel in the past year. 

They also respond differently to the presence of certain negative interactions on the platform. High-volume tweeters are roughly twice as likely as others to say they have personally experienced harassing or abusive behavior on the platform (24%, vs. 11% of less active tweeters). But they are less likely to view the overall tone or civility of discussions on the site as a major problem (by a margin of 27% to 42%).

Among the other key findings of this research:
• Although they produce the vast majority of content, highly active tweeters produce relatively few original tweets and receive little engagement from the broader Twitter audience. From June 12 to Sept. 12, 2021, original posts comprised just 14% of tweets from the top quarter of US adults on Twitter by tweet volume. The vast majority of posts produced by this group were either retweets (49% of the total) or replies to other users (33%).

• Posts from this group also receive little engagement from other users in the form of likes or retweets. Despite producing 65 tweets of any type per month on average during the period under observation, US adults in the top 25% of users based on tweet volume received an average of just 37 likes and one retweet per month.

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Network effects, Pareto’s law, the power law, whatever you want to call it: that’s how it is. The popular and noticed get more popular and noticed; the rest mostly don’t.
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If you want to understand how social networks drag users in and keep them there, read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. (The power law, and the explanation for why it occurs again and again online, also makes a number of appearances.)

Apple reaches quiet truce over iPhone privacy changes • Financial Times

Patrick McGee:

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Apple has allowed app developers to collect data from its 1bn iPhone users for targeted advertising, in an unacknowledged shift that lets companies follow a much looser interpretation of its controversial privacy policy.

In May Apple communicated its privacy changes to the wider public, launching an advert that featured a harassed man whose daily activities were closely monitored by an ever-growing group of strangers. When his iPhone prompted him to “Ask App Not to Track”, he clicked it and they vanished. Apple’s message to potential customers was clear — if you choose an iPhone, you are choosing privacy.

But seven months later, companies including Snap and Facebook have been allowed to keep sharing user-level signals from iPhones, as long as that data is anonymised and aggregated rather than tied to specific user profiles.

For instance Snap has told investors that it plans to share data from its 306m users — including those who ask Snap “not to track” — so advertisers can gain “a more complete, real-time view” on how ad campaigns are working. Any personally identifiable data will first be obfuscated and aggregated.

Similarly, Facebook operations chief Sheryl Sandberg said the social media group was engaged in a “multiyear effort” to rebuild ad infrastructure “using more aggregate or anonymised data”.

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Seems fair enough: Apple does that sort of obfuscated tracking for itself, so this is only reasonable.
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Apple CEO Tim Cook reportedly signed a secret $275bn deal with China in 2016 to skirt challenges with government regulators • Business Insider via Yahoo

Sarah Jackson on the story first reported by The Information, which fills in some gaps that hadn’t been clear from previous reports in the NY Times and others:

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Apple’s government affairs team in China created a memo of understanding with the country’s National Development and Reform Commission to sweeten relations with Chinese leaders, and company leaders made it a priority to meet with top Chinese officials after the 2016 crackdown hit iTunes books and movies, a person familiar with the deal told The Information.

The deal included commitments from Apple to help Chinese manufacturers build “the most advanced manufacturing technologies” and train workers. It also included vows to tap Chinese suppliers for more parts for Apple devices, strike deals with Chinese software companies, work with Chinese universities on technology, and invest “many billions of dollars more” than Apple was already pouring into China, according to The Information. Some investments were to go toward Chinese technology companies; other outlined beneficiaries included new retail stores, renewable energy projects, and research and development centers.

In line with China’s 13th Five-Year Plan, Apple further committed to “grow together with Chinese enterprises to achieve mutual benefits and a win-win situation,” help develop China’s IT industries, and promote science, technology, education, and environmental protection, according to The Information. In exchange, China agreed to offer “necessary support and assistance.”

Outside of the deal, Apple made other concessions with the Chinese government to keep business running. By early 2015, China’s State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping had directed Apple Maps to make the Diaoyu Islands, or Senkaku Islands, which China and Japan both claim to own, look big even when zoomed out; regulators said they’d refuse to approve the Apple Watch if Apple didn’t comply, according to internal documents viewed by The Information.

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Quite the leverage China has there. Apple doesn’t have anything much to fight it with; the best it can hope for is symbiosis.
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Apple gets appeals court to delay App Store changes in Epic Games Fortnite case, for now • CNET

Ian Sherr:

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Apple scored another win in its legal battles with Fortnite maker Epic Games when the US District Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit agreed Wednesday to delay a judge’s order to make changes to the way app developers accept payments in Apple’s App Store. Apple now has until its appeals process with Epic concludes, which could take years.

“Apple has demonstrated, at minimum, that its appeal raises serious questions,” two judges from the court of appeals wrote. 

The ruling follows a flurry of competing filings from Epic and Apple arguing about how much control the iPhone maker should have over its App Store. Epic unsuccessfully argued to a US District Judge in California that Apple should be forced to allow app developers more freedom, both in how they offer apps to iPhone and iPad owners and how they charge customers. 

If Apple hadn’t prevailed in its request, it would’ve been forced to allow people to pay a developer directly when seeking to pay for extra lives in a game or a new look for their character, rather than using Apple’s in-app purchase system. That service, which Apple has operated since 2008, charges developers up to a 30% commission on any digital items bought within apps.

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“Could take years”. The revolution has been delayed, again.
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Boris Johnson moves to Plan B to control Omicron spread • Financial Times

Sebastian Payne, George Parker, Laura Hughes and Oliver Barnes:

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[Prime Minister Boris] Johnson added that following the media reports, he had been repeatedly told that there had been no Downing Street party and no Covid rules had been broken. He said any relevant evidence from Case’s inquiry would be handed over to the Metropolitan Police.

However, the inquiry will not examine reports of other Downing Street parties on November 13 and November 27, which would have also breached Covid restrictions on gatherings.

The Metropolitan Police on Wednesday announced it would not investigate the party allegations due to an “absence of evidence” and the force’s policy not to investigate retrospective breaches of coronavirus regulations.

The new restrictions and Johnson’s handling of the row over Christmas parties has tarnished his standing in the Conservative party. One minister described the situation as “completely appalling”, adding: “I feel really quite repulsed by it and cannot believe they allowed it to get this place.”

The minister added that MPs were increasingly discussing whether Johnson’s time in power could be drawing to a close. “In a way I haven’t heard before, colleagues I wouldn’t have expected are talking about what the end-game might be for the PM.”

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In the UK, this is the hottest possible topic. There are now reports of at least four parties in 10 Downing St, at least one of which Johnson attended, while the rest of the country was in hefty lockdown. This is going to continue; more heads will roll.
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Three myths of the Great Resignation • The Atlantic

Derek Thompson:

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One problem with the term Great Resignation is that resignation sounds like a pure subtraction. If I told you, “My company suffered a great resignation last year,” you’d probably think that the company had lost a lot of workers. If I continued, “And the firm grew by 20 percent!” you might be very confused.

But that’s what’s happening in the broader economy. The increase in quits is mostly about low-wage workers switching to better jobs in industries that are raising wages to grab new employees as fast as possible. From the quitter’s perspective, that’s a job hop. The low-wage service-sector economy is experiencing the equivalent of “free agency” in a professional sports league. That makes it more like the Big Switch than the Big Quit.

Let’s zoom in on one sector: the accommodations and food-services industry. Mostly composed of restaurants and hotels, this sector has seen more quits than any other part of the economy. But it’s not bleeding jobs. Quite the opposite: Accommodation and food services added 2 million employees in 2021, more than any other subsector I could identify.

(2) …quits aren’t rising much in finance, real estate, or the broad information sector, which includes publishing, software, and internet companies. This year, quits for leisure and hospitality workers have increased four times faster than for the largest white-collar sector, which is professional and business services.

I’m not saying “Stop talking about burnout; it’s just for rich people.” I’m suggesting that we shouldn’t conflate white-collar burnout with whatever’s driving lower-wage service workers to hop around.

«

Seems the real “Great Resignation” comes from those aged over 65 finally checking out of the workforce, at least in the US.
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Omicron weakens vaccine protection, but boosters revive defenses, early data finds • Ars Technica

Beth Mole:

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The freshest data comes from preliminary results reported online Wednesday morning by Pfizer and BioNTech.

The companies conducted laboratory experiments that pitted antibodies from the blood serum of vaccinated people against a pseudovirus engineered to mimic the omicron variant. The experiments specifically measured the activity of neutralizing antibodies, which are a subset of antibodies that can bind to SARS-CoV-2 virus particles in such a way that the virus is prevented from entering human cells. Neutralizing antibodies are the most potent at preventing infection, but the immune system also produces a diverse array of other antibodies that can help fight an infection. Additionally, the immune system has protective cell-based responses that are not captured in these types of laboratory experiments.

In experiments using the blood sera of people fully vaccinated with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine (two doses), neutralizing antibody levels fell 25-fold against the omicron-mimicking pseudovirus compared with levels seen against a pseudovirus mimicking an older version of the virus. But when the companies looked at blood sera from fully vaccinated people one month after they received a vaccine booster shot (three doses), neutralizing antibody levels rebounded 25-fold against omicron, making them comparable to neutralizing antibody levels seen against older versions of the virus.

“Although two doses of the vaccine may still offer protection against severe disease caused by the omicron strain, it’s clear from these preliminary data that protection is improved with a third dose of our vaccine,” Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said in a statement. “Ensuring as many people as possible are fully vaccinated with the first two-dose series and a booster remains the best course of action to prevent the spread of COVID-19.”

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The story of the bitcoin-filled hard drive in a Welsh landfill is well known; but what has losing it done to its owner? CC-licensed photo by 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. Nearly Christmas. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The vice president should not be using Bluetooth headphones • The Verge

Corin Faife:

»

Yesterday, Politico opened its newsletter with an article on Vice President Kamala Harris’ aversion to using Bluetooth headphones. The VP was “Bluetooth-phobic,” the story claimed, “wary” of her AirPods and cautious with her technology use to an extent former aides described as “a bit paranoid.” Proof could be seen in her televised appearances: wires dangling from her ears in an interview with MSNBC’s Joy Reid or clutched in her hand during the famous “We did it, Joe” call.

But for a high-profile public official, this is a lot more reasonable than you might think. As security researchers were quick to point out, Bluetooth has a number of well-documented vulnerabilities that could be exploited if a bad actor wanted to hack, say, the second most powerful person in the US government.

Some of these attacks come down to the basic mechanics of how the Bluetooth protocol works. With Bluetooth switched on, a phone, laptop or other smart device is constantly broadcasting a signal that can be detected by other devices in range — which provides an unnecessary vector for attack that can easily be eliminated by simply keeping Bluetooth off. Assuming Bluetooth is enabled, a smartphone user generally gets a prompt from any unknown device trying to connect. But in certain cases this can be skirted, as with one exploit that impersonates a trusted Bluetooth device already known to the user in order to connect to the phone, at which point the attacker can request or send data via Bluetooth.

«

The CVE [notified vulnerabilities database] program lists 459 current and historic vulnerabilities involving Bluetooth. But this also reveals something about modern reporting: easier just to write than check. (Even though there were three people on the story.) And they notice that her husband does use Bluetooth headphones. Could it possibly be because he’s not involved with top secret information?
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Svulstig Last Christmas – Wien 2014 • YouTube

:

You asked for Swedish opera singers doing a George Michael classic? Happy to help!
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Evergrande’s debt deadline passes as Kaisa adds to China’s property crisis • Reuters

Clare Jim, Scott Murdoch and Andrew Galbraith:

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Some offshore bondholders of China Evergrande Group did not receive coupon payments by the end of a 30-day grace period, five people with knowledge of the matter said, pushing the cash-strapped property developer closer to formal default.

Adding to a liquidity crisis in China’s once bubbling property market, smaller peer Kaisa Group Holdings was also unlikely to meet its $400m offshore debt deadline on Tuesday, a source with direct knowledge of the matter said.

Failure by Evergrande to make $82.5m in interest payments due last month would trigger cross-default on its roughly $19bn of international bonds and put the developer at risk of becoming China’s biggest defaulter – a possibility looming over the world’s second-largest economy for months.

Non-payment by Kaisa would push the 6.5% bond of Kaisa, China’s largest holder of offshore debt among developers after Evergrande, into technical default, triggering cross defaults on its offshore bonds totalling nearly $12bn.

«

Evergrande is like those giant container ships that slip silently through the Suez Canal: when they go off course, things go enormously wrong. This could create quite a domino effect: Evergrande has $300bn of liabilities, and small companies that were reliant on it are getting squashed out of existence. But they’re only in China (so far?) which knows how to contain a problem.
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Rohingya sue Meta/Facebook for $150bn over Myanmar genocide • Gizmodo

Shoshana Wodinksky:

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Facebook’s then-head of telecoms, Paul Webster, told one Asia-focused advertising publication in 2015, “In this business if you are not one step ahead, you are actually moving backwards.” That approach still holds true today, with the company continuing to aggressively push into building out telecom partnerships—and hell, literal telecom infrastructure—into these “emerging markets.” And while we don’t know what kind of a cut Facebook’s taking from these deals (the company doesn’t publicize that information), we do know that making “Connectivity” and “Facebook” synonymous is a move that’s translated into a surge of those all-important daily active users across those regions.

And to Facebook, a daily active user is a daily active user, even if those daily active users are being targeted by a genocidal regime. In present-day Myanmar, for example, some analysts say there were roughly 22 million Facebook users region-wide—or roughly 40% of the country’s entire population.

This 40%, just like the rest of Facebook’s users around the globe, get targeted with ads across their various feeds, and when those users interact with those ads in some way, the advertisers payout, and Facebook earns its cut.

In other words, Facebook doesn’t care that close to 25% of Myanmar natives live below the poverty line, or that those poverty figures will almost certainly go up, thanks to the global pandemic and an ongoing military coup. First and foremost, it cares about its advertisers. It always has. And those brands—for whatever ghoulish reason—still see profits to be made in Myanmar. Meanwhile, because Facebook is the internet across that country, those advertisers are stuck cutting checks for a company that’s openly admitted to providing platforms for generals the United Nations says should be tried for genocide.

«

I linked to another piece about the lawsuit previously, but Wodinsky gets to the heart of things: Facebook liked whatever revenue it got from Myanmar, and didn’t want to waste that on moderators. (Though there’s no way to be sure if “22 million users” is an undercount or overcount, for reasons I explain in my book.)
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• Why do social networks drive us a little mad?
• Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see?
• How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online?
• What can we do about it?
Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

Half a billion in bitcoin, lost in the dump • The New Yorker

DT Max goes to meet James Howells, who threw away a hard drive that he’d used to mine 8,000 bitcoin back in its early days, which is now somewhere in a Newport landfill and worth around half a billion dollarss:

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We went to the dump. It was a bucolic site between an estuary and docks where, many years ago, ships had been loaded with Welsh coal. Derricks stood idle. To get to the landfill, we had to drive past some city offices—“the enemy,” Howells joked. Newport felt rickety: faded signs on small businesses, empty land where factories had once stood. As he drove, Howells mused on why the local officials had refused to allow him to dig up his hoard. He theorized that the dump had not been following environmental regulations, and that unearthing a section of landfill could embarrass the city and make it vulnerable to lawsuits. “Who knows how many dirty baby nappies are buried out there?” he asked.

He drove to the area where he had estimated that his hard drive would likely be. We passed through an open gate and stopped in a paved lot. This large, empty space looked like it was destined for some sort of industrial development by the city, but Howells wanted it to serve first as the command headquarters for his excavation project. We got out. “This plot of land is called B-21,” he said—a propitious number. “How many bitcoins exist? Twenty-one million!”

The sun was shining, an unusual occurrence in Wales in the fall. He pointed at an incline about a hundred feet away: at the top was a tufted hill with gauges inserted in it, to measure gas release. “The total area we want to dig is two hundred and fifty metres by two hundred and fifty metres by fifteen metres deep,” he told me, with excitement. “It’s forty thousand tons of waste. It’s not impossible, is it?”

«

Howells has tried all sorts, but the local council won’t budge; won’t allow it. (Reasons not provided; surprisingly, Max doesn’t seem to have asked.) What if someone was known to be dead under there?

But it’s also a study in what happens to someone who has riches wafted under their nose, and then put beyond reach. Hard to know how many of us could bear that. And – sidenote – cruel too that the story doesn’t namecheck Alex Hern, who broke the story in The Guardian eight years ago through his assiduous reading of Reddit, followed by some excellent journalism to track down which of the many James Howells out there was the one who binned the wrong hard drive.
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Miami jury rules in favour of Craig Wright, claimed bitcoin inventor • CNBC

MacKenzie Sigalos:

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Australian computer scientist Craig Wright implied in a 2016 blog post that he was Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym used by the person or persons who developed bitcoin. Many in the crypto community are skeptical of Wright’s claim, in part because he has not moved any of the early bitcoin presumed to have been mined by Satoshi.

On Monday, Wright prevailed in a Miami civil case that pitted him against the family of his late business partner and computer forensics expert, David Kleiman. At stake was half of the 1.1 million bitcoin mined and held by Satoshi, a cache currently worth around $54bn. The estate also claimed rights to some of the intellectual property behind early blockchain technology.

The prosecution argued that Kleiman was a co-creator of bitcoin, alongside Wright, entitling him to half of Satoshi’s assumed fortune. A federal jury in West Palm Beach sided with Wright and declined to award any of the bitcoin to Kleiman’s estate.

However, Wright was ordered to pay $100m in compensatory damages over a breach in intellectual property rights related to W&K Info Defense Research LLC, a joint venture between the two men. That money will go to W&K directly, rather than to the Kleiman estate.

«

Complicated: Wright owns half of W&K, though Kleiman’s estate would have a call on the other half. But the jury seems to have decided that Wright is Nakamoto. And Wright said that he would give much of that (humungous!) fortune to charity.

A couple of tricky points: if he proves he’s Nakamoto by moving some of the cache, the value could plummet because he would have control of a giant tranche of bitcoin – he could move the market by selling any amount at any time. And if he doesn’t, where’s he going to find $100m?
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Raising the standard for protecting teens and supporting parents online • Instagram blog

Adam Mosseri is CEO:

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At Instagram, we’ve been working for a long time to keep young people safe on the app; as part of that work, today we’re announcing some new tools and features to keep young people even safer on Instagram.

We’ll be taking a stricter approach to what we recommend to teens on the app, we’ll stop people from tagging or mentioning teens that don’t follow them, we’ll be nudging teens towards different topics if they’ve been dwelling on one topic for a long time and we’re launching the Take a Break feature in the US, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, which we previously announced.

We’ll also be launching our first tools for parents and guardians early next year to help them get more involved in their teen’s experiences on Instagram. Parents and guardians will be able to see how much time their teens spend on Instagram and set time limits. And we’ll have a new educational hub for parents and guardians.

«

I suppose you could say that Instagram has been working for a long time to keep young people safe on the app, though it’s not as long as Instagram has been going. Teenagers will be able to notify parents if they report someone (else). The “educational hub”, well, I’m sure that’s going to be as wildly popular as anything labelled “educational” is with children.

Meanwhile, Mosseri goes up in front of Congress on Wednesday (today for most of you), where Frances Haugen’s whistleblower testimony is going to be a key feature.
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Microsoft seizes domains used by “highly sophisticated” hackers in China • Ars Technica

Dan Goodin:

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Microsoft said it has seized control of servers that a China-based hacking group was using to compromise targets that align with that country’s geopolitical interests.

The hacking group, which Microsoft has dubbed Nickel, has been in Microsoft’s sights since at least 2016, and the software company has been tracking the now-disrupted intelligence-gathering campaign since 2019. The attacks—against government agencies, think tanks, and human rights organizations in the US and 28 other countries—were “highly sophisticated,” Microsoft said, and used a variety of techniques, including exploiting vulnerabilities in software that targets had yet to patch.

…Microsoft will now “sinkhole” the traffic, meaning it’s diverted away from Nickel’s servers and to Microsoft-operated servers, which can neutralize the threat and obtain intelligence about how the group and its software work.

“Obtaining control of the malicious websites and redirecting traffic from those sites to Microsoft’s secure servers will help us protect existing and future victims while learning more about Nickel’s activities,” Tom Burt, the company’s corporate vice president of customer security and trust, wrote in a blog post. “Our disruption will not prevent Nickel from continuing other hacking activities, but we do believe we have removed a key piece of the infrastructure the group has been relying on for this latest wave of attacks.”

Targeted organizations included those in both the private and public sectors, including diplomatic entities and ministries of foreign affairs in North America, Central America, South America, the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa. Often, there was a correlation between the targets and geopolitical interests in China.

Targeted organizations were located in other countries including Argentina, Barbados, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, Colombia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, France, Guatemala, Honduras, Hungary, Italy, Jamaica, Mali, Mexico, Montenegro, Panama, Peru, Portugal, Switzerland, Trinidad and Tobago, the United Kingdom, and Venezuela.

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That’s a pretty comprehensive list of countries. And imagine chasing a hacking group for six years.
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Art for money’s sake • Forbes

David Birch:

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markets can’t operate without clear property rights: before someone can buy a good, it has to be clear who has the right to sell it, and once a buyer comes along, there must be a mechanism to transfer ownership from the seller to the buyer. NFTs solve this problem by providing the mechanism to establish and transfer ownership in a decentralised manner.

This is actually a pretty radical step in the history of stuff and here’s a quick explanation as to why this is the case (from Andreessen Horowitz). It begins by noting that there are two types of tokens: fungible (e.g., interchangeable) and NFTs (e.g., unique). They fill different niches.

Money is fungible, so fungible tokens will be used for digital currencies (this is one of the reasons why Bitcoin, whatever it is, isn’t money) whereas the non-fungible ones will be used to create a wide range of what a16z call “internet-native” business models centred on collectibles, rewards, achievements and, as a16z note, these deliver a sense of identity, status and belonging. And despite the fact that the current NFT market appears to be based on people selling pictures of chimpanzees with sunglasses on to themselves for millions of dollars, there are great many people (eg, me) who think that NFTs are a very serious business indeed.

One reason is because, as Kaczynski and Kominers point out, smart contracts and programmability means that they can deliver utility in both digital spaces and the physical world and this is what has long interested me about them.

A good example of this utility is event ticketing. Some years ago I worked on project for a blockchain provider. They had teams looking at a few different use cases, most of which never went anywhere, but one of the use cases that had substance was ticketing. Event tickets are unique and should not be clone-able or counterfeitable. They should belong to one and only one owner, And they should be able to be transferred between owners. NFTs are the perfect way to implement them (and, indeed, I even attended a concert in which a pilot token ticket system was trialled).

«

The jumping-off point for this is the work of James Stephen George Boggs, who used to pay for stuff with hand-drawn “dollar bills” that were unique and, hence, not money. Dave (who I’ve now known for decades) always cuts through the noise to the key, useful points.
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Samsung heir launches management shake-up • Financial Times

Song Jung-a:

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Samsung Electronics has reshuffled its management for the first time in four years as it steps up its push into non-memory chips and artificial intelligence.

The shake-up comes as Lee Jae-yong, the group’s third-generation heir, has started playing an active management role four months after being released from prison.

Lee, who spent 19 months in jail for bribing former president Park Geun-hye, still faces charges of stock manipulation linked to the 2015 merger of two Samsung units engineered to consolidate his control.

He is expected to meet customers of Samsung’s 5G telecommunications and construction businesses on a trip this week to the Middle East following a high-profile visit to the US last month.

After Lee’s trip, Samsung announced it would build a $17bn chip plant in Texas to help Washington expand US chip production, a national security priority for Joe Biden’s administration.

Lee’s shake-up outlined on Tuesday included merging Samsung’s consumer electronics and mobile divisions to take on competitor Apple, which boasts a fully integrated line of devices. He promoted Han Jong-hee, head of Samsung’s visual display business, to take charge of the new division.

Han, an expert in television research and development, has played a critical role in maintaining Samsung’s leadership in the global TV market for the past 15 years, and helped the group achieve explosive sales growth during the coronavirus pandemic.

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“Just spitballing here, but what if we set Succession in the place where they did Squid Game?”
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Hey, office nerd! You could earn six figures a day if you get onto TikTok and teach people how to use Microsoft Excel! CC-licensed photo by Microsoft Sweden 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. Not gaseous. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The popular family safety app Life360 is selling precise location data on its tens of millions of users • The Markup

Jon Keegan and Alfred Ng:

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Life360, a popular family safety app used by 33 million people worldwide, has been marketed as a great way for parents to track their children’s movements using their cellphones. The Markup has learned, however, that the app is selling data on kids’ and families’ whereabouts to approximately a dozen data brokers who have sold data to virtually anyone who wants to buy it. 

Through interviews with two former employees of the company, along with two individuals who formerly worked at location data brokers Cuebiq and X-Mode, The Markup discovered that the app acts as a firehose of data for a controversial industry that has operated in the shadows with few safeguards to prevent the misuse of this sensitive information. The former employees spoke with The Markup on the condition that we not use their names, as they are all still employed in the data industry. They said they agreed to talk because of concerns with the location data industry’s security and privacy and a desire to shed more light on the opaque location data economy. All of them described Life360 as one of the largest sources of data for the industry. 

“We have no means to confirm or deny the accuracy” of whether Life360 is among the largest sources of data for the industry, Life360 founder and CEO Chris Hulls said in an emailed response to questions from The Markup. “We see data as an important part of our business model that allows us to keep the core Life360 services free for the majority of our users, including features that have improved driver safety and saved numerous lives.”

A former X-Mode engineer said the raw location data the company received from Life360 was among X-Mode’s most valuable offerings due to the sheer volume and precision of the data.

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Life360 in 2020 made $22m (about a quarter of its revenue) from selling that data, or from data partnerships. And does that get sold on? It doesn’t know.

This is the company that’s buying location tracker device maker Tile. Wonder if it will be able to sell the data about where your car is.
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How an Excel TikToker manifested her way to making six figures a day • The Verge

Nily Patel:

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Kat Norton is a Microsoft Excel influencer. She has over a million followers on TikTok and Instagram, where she goes by the name Miss Excel, and she’s leveraged that into a software training business that is now generating up to six figures of revenue a day. That’s six figures a day. And she’s only been doing this since June 2020.

Kat is a one-woman operation, with no staff or management layer. She uses her iPhone and consumer software to make her videos, and I’ve got to say, she has one of the healthiest relationships with the social platforms of maybe any creator I’ve ever talked to: she thinks of them purely as marketing channels for the video courses she sells elsewhere. That’s a big flip from the traditional creator business model, which is usually aimed at monetizing the platforms directly. Kat’s just not doing that.

But where this conversation really got me was when Kat said she firmly believed in manifestation and energetics, and that she draws a repeated connection between the work she’s done there and the success she’s had as a creator and entrepreneur. Just listen in this conversation how easily and quickly Kat can go back and forth between talking about her core business metrics and strategies and harnessing her energy to connect with viewers across devices and platforms. I have spoken to a lot of creators and a lot of executives on this show; I have never met one like Kat.

«

The money that people at the top of these pyramids can make is just incredible. But is this increasing income for everyone, or increasing wealth disparity?
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New EU hydrogen policy: the good, the bad, and the expensive • CleanTechnica

Steve Hanley:

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According to the IEA, the world consumed about 90m tons of hydrogen in 2020 — virtually all of it made from methane, one of the most powerful of all greenhouse gases. The current market price of such “gray” hydrogen is around €2.00 ($2.28) per kilogram. Green hydrogen can be made by passing a strong electrical current through water to split it into its component molecules, hydrogen and oxygen, but the cost is roughly triple that of grey hydrogen.

In remarks in Brussels last week, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said that by 2030, green hydrogen could be produced at a cost of around €1.80 per kilogram, which would make it less expensive than grey hydrogen. “This goal is within reach,” she said, according to Reuters.

“This new partnership builds on years of cooperation promoted by the Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Joint Undertaking,” she said, according to Euracitiv. “Clean hydrogen will have a central place in the climate-neutral economy of the future,” von der Leyen said, citing the EU’s leadership position in the manufacturing of new-generation electrolysers designed to be powered by renewable energy. “We have to scale up clean hydrogen production, expand its applications, and create a virtuous circle where demand and supply feed each other and bring the prices down,” she added.

There’s only one problem. To reach the goal of under €2 per kilogram hydrogen, Europe will need to have 80 GW of electrolyzers in place by 2030. Today, there are only 0.3 GW of electrolyzers available worldwide, according to the IEA. EU climate policy chief Frans Timmermans isn’t worried. “The stars are made of hydrogen, so let’s reach for the stars,” he said.

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Got to wonder what Timmermans is smoking. Not near the hydrogen store, Mr Timmermans!

If you leave it to the market, the market will never move to renewables (“green” hydrogen).
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Rohingya sue Facebook for £150bn over Myanmar genocide • The Guardian

Dan Milmo:

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Facebook’s negligence facilitated the genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar after the social media network’s algorithms amplified hate speech and the platform failed to take down inflammatory posts, according to legal action launched in the US and the UK.

The platform faces compensation claims worth more than £150bn under the coordinated move on both sides of the Atlantic.

A class action complaint lodged with the northern district court in San Francisco says Facebook was “willing to trade the lives of the Rohingya people for better market penetration in a small country in south-east Asia.”

It adds: “In the end, there was so little for Facebook to gain from its continued presence in Burma, and the consequences for the Rohingya people could not have been more dire. Yet, in the face of this knowledge, and possessing the tools to stop it, it simply kept marching forward.”

A letter submitted by lawyers to Facebook’s UK office on Monday says clients and their family members have been subjected to acts of “serious violence, murder and/or other grave human rights abuses” as part of a campaign of genocide conducted by the ruling regime and civilian extremists in Myanmar.

It adds that the social media platform, which launched in Myanmar in 2011 and quickly became ubiquitous, aided the process. Lawyers in Britain expect to lodge a claim in the high court, representing Rohingya in the UK and refugees in camps in Bangladesh, in the new year.

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This will be one to watch, because (as my book makes clear) Facebook was warned again and again and again that it was contributing to problems there. (Link via Doug Young, my agent. Hi Doug!)
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There’s an entire chapter about Facebook’s missteps in Myanmar in Social Warming, my latest book. There’s plenty more, about media, politics and other countries such as Ethiopia – plus favourites such as the US, UK and Brazil.

Twitter’s new privacy policy could clash with journalism • Columbia Journalism Review

Mathew Ingram on the potential impact of Twitter’s new policy about removing certain images:

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If Twitter determines the person in question is a public figure, it may still remove images or videos if it believes the content was shared in order to “harass, intimidate, or use fear to silence them”—though, once again, how Twitter will determine whether the images were posted in order to harass, intimidate, or silence an individual is unclear. The company says it will “try to assess the context in which the content is shared,” including whether the image is publicly available, whether it is being covered by traditional media, and whether it adds value to the public discourse or is “relevant to the community.” The policy adds that media shared about private individuals is acceptable provided it “contains eyewitness accounts or on the ground reports from developing events.”

The latter appears to be an attempt to create an exception for journalism, but how the company will balance newsworthiness and the public interest with its desire to protect individual privacy is unknown. Some photojournalists say they are concerned that the new policy, and the lack of clarity around its terms, could make their jobs even more difficult. Mickey Osterreicher, general counsel for the National Press Photographers Association, said the policy change shows a lack of understanding that “a person photographed in a public place has NO reasonable expectation of privacy.” If the company chooses to enforce the new rules, Osterreicher said, it will be “undermining the ability to report newsworthy events by creating nonexistent privacy rights.”

«

It’s a strange new non-judicial minefield, given how Twitter is used as an outlet for journalism. But the policy was weaponised within days by right-wingers claiming photos of them that journalists had taken in public places (eg roads) were somehow harassing, intimidating or silencing them.

The bigger problem is that unlike a court case, there’s no public forum where Twitter’s reason for doing it can be aired and tested and explained.
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52 things I learned in 2021 • Fluxx Studio Notes

Tom Whitwell:

»

4. 10% of US electricity is generated from old Russian nuclear warheads. [Geoff Brumfiel]

5. Some South African students sell school Wi-Fi passwords for lunch money. Residents walk up to 6km to connect to schools because 4G data is so expensive. [Kimberly Mutandiro]

6. Productivity dysmorphia is the inability to see one’s own success, to acknowledge the volume of your own output. [Anna Codrea-Rado]

7. The world’s second most popular electric car (after the Tesla Model 3) is the Wuling HongGuang Mini, which costs $5,000 and outsells vehicles from Renault, Hyundai, VW and Nissan. [Brad Anderson & José Pontes]

8. Airline Food is a programming language whose programs look like Jerry Seinfeld stand-up routines. [Jamie Large]

«

Every year, this list is amazing. Meant to include it on Monday, but it’s so worth bookmarking (or even – gasp! – printing out) and poring over.
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Inside Tesla as Elon Musk pushed an unflinching vision for self-driving cars • NY Times

Cade Metz and Neal E. Boudette:

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some who have long worked on autonomous vehicles for other companies — as well as seven former members of the Autopilot team — have questioned Tesla’s practice of constant modifications to Autopilot and F.S.D. [full self driving], pushed out to drivers through software updates, saying it can be hazardous because buyers are never quite sure what the system can and cannot do.

Hardware choices have also raised safety questions. Within Tesla, some argued for pairing cameras with radar and other sensors that worked better in heavy rain and snow, bright sunshine and other difficult conditions. For several years, Autopilot incorporated radar, and for a time Tesla worked on developing its own radar technology. But three people who worked on the project said Mr. Musk had repeatedly told members of the Autopilot team that humans could drive with only two eyes and that this meant cars should be able to drive with cameras alone.

They said he saw this as “returning to first principles” — a term Mr. Musk and others in the technology industry have long used to refer to sweeping aside standard practices and rethinking problems from scratch. In May of this year, Mr. Musk said on Twitter that Tesla was no longer putting radar on new cars. He said the company had tested the safety implications of not using radar but provided no details.

Some people have applauded Mr. Musk, saying that a certain amount of compromise and risk was justified as he strove to reach mass production and ultimately change the automobile industry.

But recently, even Mr. Musk has expressed some doubts about Tesla’s technology.

«

OK, people have only two eyes, but they can’t see through fog, while radar can. And they don’t have 360º vision either. Plus humans are better at this than machines, usually.
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As the Lock Rattles · London Review of Books

John Lanchester reviews five books about the pandemic:

»

What the UK needed in early 2020, more than anything else, was for the pandemic to be taken seriously. We needed someone willing to look at what had happened in Wuhan and Lombardy, and make the most of the few weeks’ notice the UK had providentially been granted.

Unfortunately, in Johnson it had a prime minister whose entire personality and philosophy are based on not taking things seriously. This was to have tragic consequences. In the early months of 2020, when the news about Sars-CoV-2 was emerging and getting rapidly, frighteningly worse, Johnson failed to chair five consecutive meetings of Cobra, the government’s crisis committee. It is almost unknown for the prime minister not to chair Cobra when he or she is in London. According to David King, the former government chief scientific adviser, Blair and Brown never failed to chair a Cobra meeting. Johnson failed five times in a row, always on the subject of Covid.

The reason isn’t far to seek: he didn’t understand it and didn’t take it seriously. In the early months of 2020, the UK government had 25,000 civil servants working on Brexit, which Johnson was well aware lay somewhere on the spectrum between a mistake and a disaster. His private life was on the same spectrum. In the months after becoming prime minister, Johnson became the first holder of that office to get divorced, get married and have a baby, more or less simultaneously. Covid was not a priority. It’s amazing he showed up to any Cobra meetings at all.

«

(Via John Naughton. Always interesting, when great pieces like these get handed around, to see which extracts one chooses. I’m sure someone smarter than me could tease out all sorts of insights from them. He picked an earlier one, which points out that the All England Club, aka Wimbledon, had learned the lessons of SARS in 2002 and got pandemic insurance. I bet the underwriter for that laughed a bit at the easy millions they were raking in from 2003 to 2019.)
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Italian man tries to avoid getting Covid jab with fake silicone arm • Vice

Carlo Casentini and Sophia Smith Galer:

»

A man in northern Italy brought a silicone arm to his COVID-19 vaccination in an attempt to obtain a green pass without actually getting the vaccine.

A green pass is Italy’s digital COVID-19 certificate which allows the holder, who has been vaccinated, has recently tested negative for the virus or has recently recovered, to enter busy indoor spaces as well as workplaces. 

The 50-year-old, who arrived at the clinic in Biella, Piemonte, was questioned after a healthcare worker became immediately suspicious about the colour and feel of his arm. 

He was asked to show his entire arm – and then promptly reported to the carabinieri, the Italian police, for fraud.

“This case borders on being ridiculous, were it not for the fact that we’re talking about an extremely serious act,” said the president of the Piemonte Region Alberto Cirio and the councillor for health Luigi Genesio Icardi in a joint statement, calling it “unacceptable in light of the sacrifice that the pandemic is making everyone in our community pay.” 

«

Points for effort, sir. None for, well, anything else.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Using an Apple AirTag to track your car keys is probably wise. But what if criminals hide an AirTag in your car with a view to stealing it later, because they’ll know where it is? CC-licensed photo by ajay_suresh 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. Projected onto your brain. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Apple’s iPhone successor comes into focus • WSJ

Christopher Mims:

»

Accomplishing full AR [augmented reality] in a lightweight, easily worn device is a technical challenge that has defeated all comers, but this won’t be the case forever, says Hugo Swart, vice president of XR and the metaverse at Qualcomm. (“XR” is an industry term that encompasses augmented, mixed and virtual reality.) In 10 years, we will be close to the “holy grail” of augmented-reality glasses that are both light enough for prolonged and everyday use, and as capable as today’s bulky AR and VR headsets, he adds.

Mr. Swart has a unique vantage point on the industry, since he oversees the division at Qualcomm that provides the microchips that power devices including Meta’s latest Oculus Quest 2 headset, Vuzix’s Shield glasses, Microsoft’s HoloLens 2, and Niantic’s forthcoming device, among others.

Mr. Swart thinks one solution for AR is to have a lot of the required computing happen on a device everyone already has—their smartphone—and connecting with the headset via the new Wi-Fi 6e standard. That could enable fast, high-bandwidth connection between the two that allows the phone to do most of the processing work.

Mr. Hanke says Niantic and other companies are working on such solutions, in order to bring full AR to a glasses-like form factor. “Doing this means a fair amount of mass and heat dissipation that doesn’t have to go on your head anymore,” he adds.

That approach also would play to Apple’s strengths, given the iPhone’s popularity. And, if Apple does opt to offload much of the necessary processing to the iPhone to keep its smart glasses svelte, it could further entrench the iPhone as the dominant mobile device in many markets, says Mr. Boland, the analyst. As growth in demand for smartphones slows, Apple’s strategy has been to sell more and more accessories, like watches and headphones, and adding smart glasses to that growing list just makes sense, he adds.

«

AR has been around for quite a while: I was trying AR ski goggles back in early 2012, and they were a lot more convenient than trying to operate a phone with ski gloves on. At the time, everyone thought AR glasses were just around the corner; turned out Google Glass was a bust (mostly), but batteries and chip efficiencies, especially Apple’s, have moved on a lot since then.

Best guess is a launch of some sort by the end of 2022 – though remember that the Apple Watch was announced but not released for months, and its v1 was dire. This could be the same: a slow burn to success.
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Earth is getting a black box to record our climate change actions, and it’s already started listening • ABC News

Nick Kilvert:

»

When an aeroplane crashes, it’s left to investigators to sift through the wreckage to recover the black box. It’s hoped the recorded contents can be used to help others avoid the same fate.

And so it is with Earth’s Black Box: a 10-metre-by-4-metre-by-3-metre steel monolith that’s about to be built on a remote outcrop on Tasmania’s west coast.

Chosen for its geopolitical and geological stability, ahead of other candidates like Malta, Norway and Qatar, the idea is that the Tasmanian site can cradle the black box for the benefit of a future civilisation, should catastrophic climate change cause the downfall of ours.

If that sounds unhinged, it’s worth remembering that we’re currently on track for as much as 2.7C of warming this century. Ask any climate scientist what happens when warming breaches 2C, and they’ll almost invariably tell you it’s not worth thinking about. Plenty of past civilisations and empires have collapsed in the face of less.

So what is this black box? Artistic installation? Academic experiment? Or something else?

The project is completely non-commercial, and the guiding design principle is functionality, according to Jim Curtis from Clemenger BBDO. “Obviously it’s really a powerful concept when you say to someone, ‘Earth’s got a black box’. Because they’re like, ‘Why does it need a black box?'” said Mr Curtis, who’s collaborating on the project with University of Tasmania researchers, among others. “But first and foremost, it’s a tool.”

The box will be made from 7.5-centimetre-thick steel, cantilevered off granite, according to Jonathan Kneebone, co-founder of artistic collective the Glue Society, which is also involved. “It’s built to outlive us all,” he said. “If the worst does happen, just because the power grids go down, this thing will still be there.”

The box will be filled with a mass of storage drives and have internet connectivity, all powered by solar panels on the structure’s roof. Batteries will provide backup power storage. When the sun is shining, the black box will be downloading scientific data and an algorithm will be gleaning climate-change-related material from the internet. 

«

The artist’s impression makes it look as though it fell from the sky. Good call not siting it in Malta or Qatar. That must have been a tough call, looking at their geopolitical and geological stability. Ahem.
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China-based Covid disinformation operation pushed fake Swiss scientist, Facebook says • NBC News

Kevin Collier:

»

China-based propagandists created an elaborate online disinformation campaign this year centered on an internet persona claiming to be a Swiss biologist to mislead the public about the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, Facebook researchers said Wednesday.

Going by the name Dr. Wilson Edwards, the persona wrote on Facebook that the U.S. was putting undue political pressure on the World Health Organization to blame China for the coronavirus. But Edwards isn’t a real person, which Switzerland’s embassy in Beijing made clear in August.

Facebook researchers said they found evidence that the person was the creation of a Chinese cybersecurity company.

Although the character got little attention in the West, he was credulously cited in Chinese state-sponsored media as a whistleblower on world health policy.

Facebook said it had traced that account’s creation to Sichuan Silence Information Technology, a company in central China. According to its website, Silence was founded in 2000 and offers a wide range of information security services — and it counts China’s Ministry of Public Security among its customers. An inquiry sent to an email address on the company’s website bounced back as undeliverable.

A spokesperson for China’s embassy in Washington, Liu Pengyu, said in an email that “China has shown a scientific, professional, serious and responsible attitude from the very beginning” in global efforts to research the origins of Covid-19, but did not address specifics about the Facebook account.

«

Other nonexistent people: the fake professor who died from Covid; the nonexistent columnist who wrote on geopolitics, part of a Middle East propaganda campaign.
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Google contractor says she was fired for talking about pay • Protocol

Anna Kramer:

»

A contractor at Google staffing firm Modis claims she was fired from her job for “ungoogley” behavior after asking about holiday pay at a meeting with management, according to a charge filed with the National Labor Relations Board by a lawyer for the Alphabet Workers Union.

Tuesday Carne said in an interview with Protocol that she was fired after just nine days of working in the data contracting facility in South Carolina. Carne’s termination letter (which Protocol reviewed) called her behavior at the meeting “unacceptable and ‘ungoogley'” and claimed that her behavior was the reason for her firing.

Modis Engineering faced a similar charge from former Google contractor Shannon Wait, who was terminated after posting on Facebook about pay and working conditions at a South Carolina data center in February. Modis almost immediately gave Wait her job back and was forced to settle the charges in April, agreeing to post large signs in the Berkeley County facility where she worked that said workers have the right to ask questions about and discuss pay and working conditions. Google relies heavily on temporary, vending or contract staff (TVCs) to fill positions in its data centers and has long received criticism from those workers, who feel as if they are treated like second-class Google citizens.

«

Yes, me too: WTH is “ungoogley” (or unGoogle-y) behaviour, exactly?
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Welcome to Mars! Frequently Asked Questions • New Yorker

Nicky Guerreiro and Ethan Simon:

»

What do I do for work?
Like all Mars residents, you will be employed by The Corporation. You will enjoy an exciting career in a fast-paced and collaborative mine shaft.

I don’t want to work in a mine shaft.
Sounds like someone should have finished dental school.

Do I get paid?
Good news! As a utopia, Mars has no need for money. In exchange for the lithium you mine, The Corporation will provide you with a daily ration of gruel. The amount of gruel you receive will be determined by how much lithium you extract, and by whether you can curry favor with a small group of benevolent billionaires.

Is this slavery?
You worry too much.

«

Satire, but sometimes reality has a strange habit of getting on the same bus as satire.
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Apple AirTags linked to increasing number of car thefts, Canadian police report • MacRumors

Hartley Charlton:

»

Apple’s AirTags are being used in an increasing number of targeted car thefts in Canada, according to local police.

As outlined in a news release from York Regional Police, investigators have identified a new method being used by thieves to track down and steal high-end vehicles that takes advantage of the AirTag’s location tracking capabilities. While the method of stealing the cars is largely conventional, the purpose of the AirTag is to track a high-end car back to a victim’s residence where it can be stolen from the driveway.

Since September 2021, police officers in York Region alone have investigated five incidents where suspects used AirTags in thefts of high-end vehicles. Thieves target any particularly valuable vehicles they find in public places and parking lots, placing an AirTag in an out-of-sight area, such as in the tow hitch or fuel cap, in the hope that it will not be discovered by the car’s owner.

Thieves have no way to disable Apple’s anti-tracking features that alert users when an unfamiliar nearby AirTag is tracking their location, but not all victims receive or act on the notification, or have an iPhone.

«

Clever – really, properly innovative! – use of AirTags, though there’s a lot more to it: from the York police release:

»

Thieves then track the targeted vehicles to the victim’s residence, where they are stolen from the driveway.

Thieves typically use tools like screwdrivers to enter the vehicles through the driver or passenger door, while ensuring not to set off alarms. Once inside, an electronic device, typically used by mechanics to reprogram the factory setting, is connected to the onboard diagnostics port below the dashboard and programs the vehicle to accept a key the thieves have brought with them.

«

“While ensuring not to set off alarms” covers a lot of ground there. John Gruber ponders the broader question: how do the police know that AirTags were used?
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A mysterious threat actor is running hundreds of malicious Tor relays • The Record

Catalin Cimpanu:

»

Since at least 2017, a mysterious threat actor has run thousands of malicious servers in entry, middle, and exit positions of the Tor network in what a security researcher has described as an attempt to deanonymize Tor users.

Tracked as KAX17, the threat actor ran at its peak more than 900 malicious servers part of the Tor network, which typically tends to hover around a daily total of up to 9,000-10,000.

Some of these servers work as entry points (guards), others as middle relays, and others as exit points from the Tor network.

Their role is to encrypt and anonymize user traffic as it enters and leaves the Tor network, creating a giant mesh of proxy servers that bounce connections between each other and provide the much-needed privacy that Tor users come for.

Servers added to the Tor network typically must have contact information included in their setup, such as an email address, so Tor network administrators and law enforcement can contact server operators in the case of a misconfiguration or file an abuse report.

However, despite this rule, servers with no contact information are often added to the Tor network, which is not strictly policed, mainly to ensure there’s always a sufficiently large number of nodes to bounce and hide user traffic.

But a security researcher and Tor node operator going by Nusenu told The Record this week that it observed a pattern in some of these Tor relays with no contact information, which he first noticed in 2019 and has eventually traced back as far as 2017.

Grouping these servers under the KAX17 umbrella, Nusenu says this threat actor has constantly added servers with no contact details to the Tor network in industrial quantities, operating servers in the realm of hundreds at any given point.

«

Briefly and approximately: traffic arriving in the Tor network is encrypted by each successive server until it hits its target server, and then the encryption is unwound as the message pings back. Like layers of an onion (hence The Onion Router), each in theory unviewable by the previous one. But if you control a lot of the paths through, you can unwrap the encryption as you like. State actor, do we think?
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Xinjiang: Twitter closes thousands of China state-linked accounts spreading propaganda • The Guardian

Helen Davidson:

»

Twitter has shut down thousands of state-linked accounts in China that seek to counter evidence of human rights abuses in Xinjiang, as part of what experts called an “embarrassingly” produced propaganda operation.

The operations used photos and images, shell and potentially automated accounts, and fake Uyghur profiles, to disseminate state propaganda and fake testimonials about their happy lives in the region, seeking to dispel evidence of a years-long campaign of oppression, with mass internments, re-education programs, and allegations of forced labour and sterilisation.

The networks were found to share themes and content, but often used repurposed accounts dedicated to pornography or Korean soap operas with little engagement except when they were amplified by Chinese diplomats and officials. Twitter is banned inside China but officials frequently operate accounts overseas.

According to analysts at thinktank the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), the content from the 2,160 accounts that Twitter closed down was often “embarrassingly” produced but provided a level of “implausible deniability” which muddied the waters around the issue.

The accounts linked to Chinese operations were in two sets, the largest being a network of 2,048 accounts amplifying the Chinese Communist party’s narratives related to Xinjiang, and the second set of 112 accounts connected to “Changyu Culture,” a private company that ASPI said appeared to be contracted by the Xinjiang regional authority to create videos of Uyghurs supporting the government.

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‘Patience is crucial’: why we won’t know for weeks how dangerous omicron is • Science

Kai Kupferschmidt:

»

a private lab called Lancet Laboratories had noticed that routine polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests for SARS-CoV-2 were failing to detect a key target, the S gene, in many samples, a phenomenon previously seen with Alpha, another variant of concern. When Lancet sequenced eight of these viruses, it found out why: The genome was so heavily mutated that the test missed the gene.

Lancet shared the genomes with the Network for Genomics Surveillance in South Africa (NGS-SA), which called an urgent meeting on 23 November. “We were shocked by the number of mutations,” says Tulio de Oliveira, a virologist at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and NGS-SA’s principal investigator. After the meeting, de Oliveira says, he called South Africa’s director general of health and “asked him to inform the minister and president that a potential new variant was emerging.” The team sequenced another 100 randomly selected sequences from Gauteng in the next 24 hours. All showed the same pattern. After informing the government, de Oliveira and his colleagues presented their evidence at a press conference on the morning of 25 November. On 26 November, the World Health Organization (WHO) designated the virus a “variant of concern” and christened it omicron.

…One reason for concern about omicron is that sequenced samples indicate it has rapidly replaced other variants in South Africa. But that picture might be skewed. For one, sequencing might have been focused on possible cases of the new variant in recent days, which could make it appear more frequent than it is. PCR data provide broader coverage and a less biased view, but there, too, samples with the S gene failure indicate a rapid rise of Omicron.

The rising frequency could still be due in part to chance. In San Diego, a series of superspreading events at a university resulted in an explosion of one particular strain of SARS-CoV-2 earlier this year, [infectious disease researcher at Scripps Research, Kristian] Andersen says: “It was thousands of cases and they were all the same virus.” But the virus wasn’t notably more infectious. South Africa has seen relatively few cases recently, so a series of superspreading events could have led to the rapid increase of Omicron. “I suspect that a lot of that signal is explained by that and I desperately hope so,” Andersen says. Based on a comparison of different omicron genomes, Andersen estimates the virus emerged sometime around late September or early October, which suggests it might be spreading more slowly than it appears to have.

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Exclusive: US State Department phones hacked with Israeli company spyware • Reuters

Christopher Bing and Joseph Menn:

»

The iPhones of at least nine US State Department employees were hacked by an unknown assailant using sophisticated spyware developed by the Israel-based NSO Group, according to four people familiar with the matter.

The hacks, which took place in the last several months, hit US officials either based in Uganda or focused on matters concerning the East African country, two of the sources said.

The intrusions, first reported here, represent the widest known hacks of US officials through NSO technology. Previously, a list of numbers with potential targets including some American officials surfaced in reporting on NSO, but it was not clear whether intrusions were always tried or succeeded.

Reuters could not determine who launched the latest cyberattacks.

NSO Group said in a statement on Thursday that it did not have any indication their tools were used but canceled the relevant accounts and would investigate based on the Reuters inquiry.

“If our investigation shall show these actions indeed happened with NSO’s tools, such customer will be terminated permanently and legal actions will take place,” said an NSO spokesperson, who added that NSO will also “cooperate with any relevant government authority and present the full information we will have.”

NSO has long said it only sells its products to government law enforcement and intelligence clients, helping them to monitor security threats, and is not directly involved in surveillance operations.

«

Let’s figure out how this story appeared: the “four people” are in the US State Department or those who look after their phones, and this story didn’t leak accidentally; the implication in the story is that Apple told the State Department, which is as a result angry. The US is gunning for NSO now; the new export ban announced is probably at least in part the result of this.
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Christmas shopping? You could do worse than getting yourself (or a friend; or both of you, why not?) a copy of Social Warming, my latest book, about how the incessant use of social networks is affecting society, politics and the media.

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: we’re now at the stage where it’s not even worth bothering with a $150m cryptocurrency heist because you know there’ll be a bigger one along tomorrow.

The top YouTubers are spending seven-figure amounts on their videos – such as MrBeast’s recreation of Squid Game which offered $456,000 of prizemoney. CC-licensed photo by Marco Verch Professional Photographer 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. And here we are again. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

MrBeast is changing the economics of YouTube • Simon Owens’s Media Newsletter

Simon Owens:

»

If you want a snapshot of how much the YouTuber ecosystem has matured in recent years, look no further than MrBeast’s latest video: “$456,000 Squid Game In Real Life!”

Posted on November 24, it’s the fastest non-music video to reach 100 million views, but that’s not what makes it remarkable.

Let’s first consider what went into making the video. As MrBeast explains in the beginning, “I recreated every single set from [Netflix’s] Squid Game in real life, and whichever one of these 456 people survives the longest wins $456,000.”

And these weren’t hastily thrown together props. From watching the video, it’s clear that his team built elaborate sets that spanned tens of thousands of square feet. They also fabricated hundreds of costumes and pulled together a sophisticated tech infrastructure that allowed them to track who had been eliminated. Their devotion to the original source material is extraordinary.

Then there’s the prize money. We’re not just talking about the $456,000 grand prize. After the second elimination round, he informs the 90 people who were eliminated that they will each leave with $2,000. A few minutes later, in an effort to thin out the herd, he offers up $4,000 to anyone who will voluntarily leave. Several dozen take him up on his offer. At some point in the video, he reveals that he spent $3.5m to produce it. According to some estimates, that’s more than what it costs to produce an average episode of a cable drama.

While this may be MrBeast’s most expensive video to date, it’s by no means an anomaly. In a recent episode of the Colin and Samir Show, he detailed all the expenses that go into each video, from the full-time production crews to the custom-built sets to the money he gives away to contestants. Oh, and he also bought two huge warehouses for $10m.

«

But did he recoup his investment? That’s the question we’re not seeing answered. YouTube won’t tell.
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Crypto fork uses dog meme to raise $60 million, then the funds go missing • The Block

Tim Copeland:

»

A newly launched crypto project that raised $60m overnight appears to have lost the funds in what may have been a phishing attack.

The project was called AnubisDAO and it was promoted as a fork of OlympusDAO — a cryptocurrency backed by the assets in its treasury. AnubisDAO was first announced on October 28 with the launch of a Discord server and a Twitter account, which ended up only making a few tweets. The supposed fork was themed around Anubis, an egyptian god of death that has a dog’s head, a branding similar to other dog-themed memecoins.

Despite the lack of website, investors plowed into the token sale, putting $60m in ETH into it.

The token sale was supposed to continue, with more investors putting in ETH and receiving anubis tokens (ANKH) in return, for a 24 hour period.

But at 11:58 UTC — around 20 hours into the sale — the liquidity in the pool (which enables investors to buy and sell the tokens) was removed. The $60m in ETH that had been put into the token sale so far was then sent to a different address.

«

On one level: how completely stupid would you have to be. On another: they’re just meaningless nonexistent “tokens” and a lot of that $60m will have been transferred from other meaningless nonexistent tokens. At least, I really hope so.
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The coronavirus in a tiny drop • The New York Times

Carl Zimmer and Jonathan Corum:

»

To better understand the coronavirus’s journey from one person to another, a team of 50 scientists has for the first time created an atomic simulation of the coronavirus nestled in a tiny airborne drop of water.

To create the model, the researchers needed one of the world’s biggest supercomputers to assemble 1.3 billion atoms and track all their movements down to less than a millionth of a second. This computational tour de force is offering an unprecedented glimpse at how the virus survives in the open air as it spreads to a new host.

“Putting a virus in a drop of water has never been done before,” said Rommie Amaro, a biologist at the University of California San Diego who led the effort, which was unveiled at the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis last month. “People have literally never seen what this looks like.”

How the coronavirus spreads through the air became the subject of fierce debate early in the pandemic. Many scientists championed the traditional view that most of the virus’s transmission was made possible by larger drops, often produced in coughs and sneezes. Those droplets can travel only a few feet before falling to the floor.

A 3-D simulation of a cough producing both large droplets and tiny aerosols.The New York Times
But epidemiological studies showed that people with Covid-19 could infect others at a much greater distance. Even just talking without masks in a poorly ventilated indoor space like a bar, church or classroom was enough to spread the virus.

Those findings pointed to much smaller drops, called aerosols, as important vehicles of infection. Scientists define droplets as having a diameter greater than 100 micrometers, or about 4 thousandths of an inch. Aerosols are smaller — in some cases so small that only a single virus can fit inside them. And thanks to their minuscule size, aerosols can drift in the air for hours.

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(Thanks G for the link.)
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How much has quantum computing actually advanced? • IEEE Spectrum

Dan Garisto:

»

There’s now a new behemoth quantum computing company, “Quantinuum” thanks to the merger of Honeywell Quantum Solutions and Cambridge Quantum. And today, Google’s Sycamore announced another leap toward quantum error correction.

A curmudgeon might argue that quantum computing is like fusion, or any promising tech whose real rewards are—if even achievable—decades off. The future remains distant, and all the present has for us is smoke, mirrors, and hype.

To rebut the cynic, an optimist might point to the glut of top-tier research being done in academia and industry. If there’s new news each week, it’s a sign that sinking hundreds of millions into a really hard problem does actually reap rewards.

For a measured perspective on how much quantum computing is actually advancing as a field, we spoke with John Martinis, a professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the former chief architect of Google’s Sycamore.

«

I read this interview and was none the wiser about how much quantum computing has actually advanced. I couldn’t tell whether it can do anything, everything or nothing.
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The FTC is suing to block Nvidia’s $40bn purchase of Arm • The Verge

Chaim Gartenberg:

»

Nvidia’s $40bn acquisition of Arm just ran into another massive hurdle: the Federal Trade Commission, which announced on Thursday that it’s suing to block the merger from going through due to concerns that the combined companies would “stifle competing next-generation technologies.” The suit comes after an FTC investigation into the deal following complaints from Google, Microsoft, and Qualcomm shortly after the merger was announced.

“The FTC is suing to block the largest semiconductor chip merger in history to prevent a chip conglomerate from stifling the innovation pipeline for next-generation technologies,” said FTC Bureau of Competition director Holly Vedova in a statement. “Tomorrow’s technologies depend on preserving today’s competitive, cutting-edge chip markets. This proposed deal would distort Arm’s incentives in chip markets and allow the combined firm to unfairly undermine Nvidia’s rivals. The FTC’s lawsuit should send a strong signal that we will act aggressively to protect our critical infrastructure markets from illegal vertical mergers that have far-reaching and damaging effects on future innovations.”

The FTC’s complaint notes that Nvidia already uses Arm-based products for several areas, including high-level advanced driver systems for vehicles, Arm-based CPUs for cloud computing, and DPU SmartNICs (networking products used in datacenters). The concern is that by acquiring Arm, Nvidia would gain an unfair advantage in those markets.

«

For my money, a better first three paragraphs than the NY Times version of the same story.
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Ex-Google workers sue company, saying it betrayed ‘Don’t Be Evil’ motto • NPR

Bobby Allyn:

»

Three former Google employees have sued the company, alleging that Google’s motto “Don’t be evil” amounts to a contractual obligation that the tech giant has violated.

At the time the company hired the three software engineers, Rebecca Rivers, Sophie Waldman and Paul Duke, they signed conduct rules that included a “Don’t be evil” provision, according to the suit.

The trio say they thought they were behaving in accordance with that principle when they organized Google employees against controversial projects, such as work for US Customs and Border Protection during the Trump administration. The workers circulated a petition calling on Google to publicly commit to not working with CBP.

Google fired the three workers, along with a fourth, Laurence Berland, in November 2019 for “clear and repeated violations” of the company’s data security policies. The four deny they accessed and leaked confidential documents as part of their activism.

In the lawsuit filed in Santa Clara County Superior Court on Monday, Rivers, Waldman and Duke argue that they should receive monetary damages because the company allegedly retaliated against them when they tried to draw attention to Google’s “doing evil,” the suit states.

«

Yet more evidence that the US is oversubscribed with lawyers willing to take on anything, no matter how stupid. Even if “Don’t be evil” was a provision for employees (and I’d expect even that to be challenged, if Google really feels like it), that doesn’t mean it applies to the company. They’d have to show that particular employees who implemented those projects they don’t like were breaching the contract.
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Interesting research, but no, we don’t have living, reproducing robots • Ars Technica

John Timmer:

»

Scientists on Monday announced that they’d optimized a way of getting mobile clusters of cells to organize other cells into smaller clusters that, under the right conditions, could be mobile themselves. The researchers call this process “kinematic self-replication,” although that’s not entirely right—the copies need help from humans to start moving on their own, are smaller than the originals, and the copying process grinds to a halt after just a couple of cycles.

So, of course, CNN headlined its coverage “World’s first living robots can now reproduce.”

This is a case when something genuinely interesting is going on, but both the scientists and some of the coverage of the developments are promoting it as far more than it actually is. So, let’s take a look at what has really been done.

…Being inherently lazy, the researchers decided to model their behavior using computers, implementing an evolutionary algorithm that created variations of shapes that were then tested for their ability to herd cells using a physics simulator.

(Unfortunately, a researcher involved in the work who is in the Department of Computer Science told CNN that this combination of algorithm and modeling is an AI. If scientists want the public to understand what they’re doing better, it would help if they actually gave the public accurate information.)

«

Seems like this is a.. relief? Overhyped work misunderstood by someone. (Thanks Clive H for the link.)
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Gucci digitally outfits Gen-Z in metaverse foray with Roblox • AP News

Colleen Barry:

»

Anyone whose virtual alter ego is wandering around the Roblox online game platform these days might run into other avatars sporting Gucci handbags, sunglasses or hats.

The digital-only items were part of a limited Gucci collection for Roblox, a step by the fashion house that prides itself on Italian craftsmanship to enter an expanding virtual space where many of its youngest admirers already are at home.

Players in the metaverse — where virtual worlds, augmented reality and the internet meet — say the big-name fashion collaboration represents a new era of virtual-real world interplay, a space in which smart product placement meets the desire of consumers to express their personalities in the virtual world.

While the Gucci Garden space on Roblox was open for two weeks last month, the platform’s 42 million users could spend from $1.20 to $9 on collectible and limited-edition Gucci accessories. Items were hidden in the virtual Gucci Garden, which echoed real-world Gucci Garden exhibitions in Florence and other global cities.

«

No, no, no, no. Can we blame this on quantitative easing or something? It feels as though there is far too much money sloshing around desperately looking for something, anything to be spent on, however pointless. Although it has been noted that the vile Gucci jacket worn by the character Kendall Roy at his party in Succession in this week’s episode costs something like $6,900. So maybe Roblox players are getting off lightly.
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Instagram is Facebook now • Embedded

kate lindsay:

»

Because I like and follow a contestant from the latest season of Love Island, Instagram decided to interrupt my feed with a picture from a UK retailer called B&M (whose top trending product is currently a gin bottle shaped like a high heel). The post it recommends is a blocky, boomer-esque text meme about a man named “Jeff Snowball” that I’d like to see fact checked. It is, put plainly, ugly and out-of-place and I don’t want it on my feed. 

Not all of the suggested posts are that bad, but they do appear every eight or so images—not including the handful of sponsored posts that show up in between. I’m getting almost as much content that I didn’t choose to see as content I did, and that is not Instagram. That’s Facebook. 

Instagram and Facebook are of course both part of the same company, Meta, and so I guess it was inevitable that this day would come. As Casey Lewis of After School recently told me, “I feel like [how] when I was just out of college I had to be on Facebook because that’s sort of where people’s birthdays were, Instagram is sort of that for [Gen Z], where they don’t really want to.” And Instagram knows this. Which is I guess why I’m confused that they’ve opted for the same strategy that made Facebook a boomer breeding ground. 

Mostly, it’s weird to recognize that my time on Instagram is coming to an end, and that what I’m looking at now will be an internet artifact I stumble upon years from now. Or worse, never recover at all. 

«

There’s a certain air of desperation to the way that Instagram now throws absolutely anything it “thinks” (OK, calculates) you might be interested in at you. The reason must be that “engagement” is dropping off, so the “you might be interested” algorithms have been turned up to 11. The effect for me, as for Lindsay, is to make me wish even more fervently for a reverse-chronological option. Instagram doesn’t offer that, however.
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Executive leading Meta’s faltering digital currency project quits • Financial Times

Dave Lee:

»

David Marcus, the Meta executive tasked with launching its faltering digital currency project, has announced that he will leave the company at the end of the year.

The departure comes after Meta, Facebook’s parent company, suffered a string of setbacks in its attempts to launch ambitious cryptocurrency products, including a new digital token, Diem.

In a series of tweets posted on Tuesday morning, Marcus [aged 48] said he planned to launch “something new” outside the social networking giant, and that his “entrepreneurial DNA has been nudging me for too many mornings in a row to continue ignoring it”.

…Diem, first announced in 2019 under the name Libra, immediately attracted the attention of financial regulators and politicians concerned about broad issues associated with cryptocurrencies such as money laundering. It was also launched against the backdrop of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and other privacy missteps at Facebook.

Early backers of the project, including Mastercard and PayPal, abandoned the initiative as regulatory pressures mounted.

In May, the Diem Association, an independent body set up to run the currency, said it would significantly narrow its scope, dropping its application to the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority to operate as a global payments service and focusing instead on the US.

«

The concern (maybe only my concern? But I bet I wasn’t alone) was that if Facebook became the issuer and regulator and overseer of a global currency, everything we’d seen before in terms of manipulation and disinformation would look like a vicarage tea party. The regulatory pressure makes an interesting contrast with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, where there’s less leverage feasible.
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• Why do social networks drive us a little mad?
• Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see?
• How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online?
• What can we do about it?
• Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016?

Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: glad so many people found the “film dialogue” link helpful. Let me know the other things that bug you and maybe a solution will pop up.

Is the Million Dollar Homepage the real precursor of NFTs? It’s certainly redolent of one new scheme. CC-licensed photo by charlene mcbride 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. Found in many countries. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The real reason China is pushing “digital sovereignty” in Africa • Rest Of World

Yinka Adegoke:

»

it is the evolution of the “Digital Silk Road,” a term coined by Xi in a 2015 state white paper, that has quietly become a contentious topic for China-Africa watchers. The Digital Silk Road (DSR) includes everything from cross-border e-commerce, smart cities, and fintech apps through to big data, internet of things, smartphones, and undersea cables. These projects don’t grab headlines like shiny new Chinese-built airports and railways or spark panicked fears of China’s “debt trap diplomacy.” But the unfettered influence of Chinese firms developing every step of the digital ecosystem in nearly all African countries has become a growing point of concern, particularly for China’s rivals in the United States.

As Motolani Agbebi, a researcher at Tampere University in Finland, told Rest of World, significant Chinese involvement in Africa’s telecoms sector actually predates DSR. Between 1999 and 2001, Huawei and ZTE first started working consistently on the continent, supported by China’s “go out policy,” which promoted the internationalization of Chinese companies.

But the ongoing pandemic, which has forced African governments and their citizens online to participate in remote work, schooling, and delivery of government services, has underscored Africa’s dependence on Chinese tech. “There’s no doubt that technology infrastructure and the broader Digital Silk Road initiative are far more important to China today in regions like Africa than they were even just a few years ago,” said Eric Olander, managing editor of The China Africa Project.

«

Earlier this week the head of MI6 – that’s the chief of the UK’s counterintelligence service – spoke in public for the first time, and on China he warned about “data traps” and “debt traps”. This seems a bit like both together.
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WTA suspends tournaments in China amid concern for Peng Shuai • The Guardian

Vincent Ni:

»

The Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) has announced the suspension of all tournaments in China amid concerns about the safety of the Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai, following weeks of a high-profile row with Beijing over the player’s wellbeing.

“With the full support of the WTA Board of Directors, I am announcing the immediate suspension of all WTA tournaments in China, including Hong Kong,” said the WTA chairman, Steve Simon, announcing the decision in a statement on Wednesday.

“In good conscience, I don’t see how I can ask our athletes to compete there when Peng Shuai is not allowed to communicate freely and has seemingly been pressured to contradict her allegation of sexual assault. Given the current state of affairs, I am also greatly concerned about the risks that all of our players and staff could face if we were to hold events in China in 2022.”

Early last month , 35-year-old Peng, a former doubles world No 1, used a post on Chinese social media website, Weibo to accuse 75-year-old Zhang Gaoli, a former Chinese vice-premier, of having coerced her into sex . Her lengthy post was quickly deleted by the censors, and Peng disappeared from public for more than two weeks as the WTA and colleagues said they were unable to reach her.

«

What’s been notable throughout this saga has been how the WTA hasn’t had to be pushed into taking this position. Even though there’s a lot of money at stake, which usually leads to sharp intakes of breath from sponsors, it has been forthright about this in a way that shames US basketball’s pusillanimous stance over a tweet referencing Taiwan by one of its bosses.
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The metaverse, latency, and metalatency • Domos

Magnus Olden:

»

Are you annoyed by timing issues, like two people starting to talk simultaneously on video conference calls? Well, you are in for a new magnitude of frustration. Or maybe you are thinking that Video Conferences work surprisingly well and that the step from Video Conference to Interactive VR is easy?

This blog points out some facts around why delivering any Metaverse will be near impossible over the internet. Some of the technological building blocks and incentive structures of the internet are poorly suited for a Metaverse (or anything massively interactive). I will describe why:

• The Metaverse is different: Massive interactive VR will have more demanding network requirements than current applications, especially latency-wise. And there will be latency! 

• We create latency for each other. End-to-end Congestion Controls, the core mechanism for self-regulation of usage over the internet, relies on inducing latency. Additionally, the internet runs on shared infrastructure or frequencies, and Internet Services Providers have no incentives or simple means to change that.

• We create latency for ourselves. This is amplified in shared networks. Guaranteed latency propositions ignore these limitations and a couple of other elephants in the room.

• Removing that last 10% of variable latency is orders of magnitude more complex than removing the first 90%. It’s like asking Usain Bolt to shave another second off his 100 meter time.

«

Although, although, we used to think that the internet was just Full Up and we couldn’t get anything down the pipes and voice calls were impossible and video calls moreso, yet things improve. It might be that the real improvement needs to happen at the centres – the servers – rather than the edge, once fibre is ubiquitous.
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Qualcomm’s new always-on smartphone camera is a privacy nightmare • The Verge

Dan Seifert:

»

“Your phone’s front camera is always securely looking for your face, even if you don’t touch it or raise to wake it.” That’s how Qualcomm Technologies vice president of product management Judd Heape introduced the company’s new always-on camera capabilities in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 processor set to arrive in top-shelf Android phones early next year.

Depending on who you are, that statement can either be exciting or terrifying. For Qualcomm, it thinks this new feature will enable new use cases, like being able to wake and unlock your phone without having to pick it up or have it instantly lock when it no longer sees your face.

But for those of us with any sense of how modern technology is used to violate our privacy, a camera on our phone that’s always recording images even when we’re not using it sounds like the stuff of nightmares and has a cost to our privacy that far outweighs any potential convenience benefits.

Qualcomm’s main pitch for this feature is for unlocking your phone any time you glance at it, even if it’s just sitting on a table or propped up on a stand. You don’t need to pick it up or tap the screen or say a voice command — it just unlocks when it sees your face. I can see this being useful if your hands are messy or otherwise occupied (in its presentation, Qualcomm used the example of using it while cooking a recipe to check the next steps). Maybe you’ve got your phone mounted in your car, and you can just glance over at it to see driving directions without having to take your hands off the steering wheel or leave the screen on the entire time.

The company is also spinning it as making your phone more secure by automatically locking the phone when it no longer sees your face or detects someone looking over your shoulder and snooping on your group chat. It can also suppress private information or notifications from popping up if you’re looking at the phone with someone else.

«

A follow-on from yesterday’s piece about concerns over surveillance. Here it comes down the road, sooner than you expected.
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Cutting a Banksy into 10,000 (digital) pieces • The New York Times

Robin Pogrebin:

»

In the latest example of art market disruption, a prominent former auction executive teamed up with cryptocurrency experts in May to purchase the 2005 Banksy painting “Love Is in the Air” for $12.9m and now plans to sell off 10,000 pieces of it as NFTs, or nonfungible tokens.

The executive, Loic Gouzer, who upended the traditional auction format while he was at Christie’s — most notably orchestrating the sale of a $450.3 million Leonardo da Vinci painting in a contemporary art auction in 2017 — has helped found the company Particle, a platform that merges art and technology with a goal of reaching a broader pool of potential buyers.

…If successful, the venture could help fuel a burgeoning category of competition in the art market, with consortiums of multiple buyers challenging the pre-eminence of billionaire collectors at a time when the pandemic has accelerated online commerce. NFTs have become increasingly popular, accounting for one-third of online sales, or two% of the overall art market, according to the database Artprice.

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Aiming for a $1,500 price tag on each (not very big) square. You know, they could do much the same with a blank web page where each pixel (or collection of them) was sold off to bidders – you could probably get a million dollars or so, easy.
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Omicron found in US — plus 23 other countries in 5 of 6 global regions • Ars Technica

Beth Mole:

»

The omicron coronavirus variant has now been detected in at least 24 countries in five of six global regions—and as of this afternoon, that includes the United States.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed this afternoon that the first US case was detected in a person in California who had returned to the US from South Africa on November 22 and tested positive on November 29. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco carried out genomic sequencing identifying the omicron variant in the person, and the CDC confirmed that sequencing.

The CDC reported that the person was fully vaccinated and had only mild symptoms that are improving. In a press briefing Wednesday afternoon, top infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci said it appeared the person had not yet received a booster shot. Public health experts suggest that booster shots will significantly improve protection against the new, still poorly understood variant.

All of the person’s close contacts are being followed, Fauci added, and all have tested negative so far.

The detection of omicron in the US is unsurprising to health officials. “It was just a matter of time before the case of omicron would be detected in the United States,” Fauci said. But, “we know what we need to do to protect people,” he added, listing vaccination, boosting, and masking.

«

Turned out it wasn’t a vaccination drive in rich countries that defeated delta. It was a new variant. Nature defeating us yet again. (Side note: apparently the initial and second “O” in omicron should be short – like in “hot”, not “lone”.)
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A different kind of Covid vaccine is about ready to roll • NPR

Joe Palca:

»

When Operation Warp Speed began spending billions of dollars to facilitate the development of a COVID-19 vaccine, it chose three vaccine technologies to back: mRNA vaccines being developed Pfizer and Moderna, a viral vector vaccine proposed by Johnson & Johnson, and protein subunit vaccines to be made by Sanofi and Novavax.

The first two technologies were successful, and there are now billions of vaccine doses in this country and around the world.

A year ago, Novavax was confident its vaccine would also be out there.

“We have a massive number of people working on scaling up our vaccine,” Gregg Glenn, Novavax’s president of research and development said in an interview in September 2020. “I am very optimistic by the year-end we’ll have a lot of product and we’re talking about more than 2 billion doses in 2021.”

But Glenn’s optimism was misguided. A large study of the vaccine took longer to complete than was hoped, and the company ran into manufacturing problems.

«

You’re wondering what a subunit vaccine is. From a link in the story:

»

Rather than injecting a whole pathogen to trigger an immune response, subunit vaccines (sometimes called acellular vaccines) contain purified pieces of it, which have been specially selected for their ability to stimulate immune cells. Because these fragments are incapable of causing disease, subunit vaccines are considered very safe. There are several types: protein subunit vaccines contain specific isolated proteins from viral or bacterial pathogens; polysaccharide vaccines contain chains of sugar molecules (polysaccharides) found in the cell walls of some bacteria; conjugate subunit vaccines bind a polysaccharide chain to a carrier protein to try and boost the immune response. Only protein subunit vaccines are being developed against the virus that causes COVID-19.

Other subunit vaccines are already in widespread use. Examples include the hepatitis B and acellular pertussis vaccines (protein subunit), the pneumococcal polysaccharide vaccine (polysaccharide), and the MenACWY vaccine, which contains polysaccharides from the surface of four types of the bacteria which causes meningococcal disease joined to diphtheria or tetanus toxoid (conjugate subunit).

«

Different from mRNA, which has code (the RNA) telling your cells how to make bits of the virus.
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Here’s why movie dialogue has gotten more difficult to understand (and three ways to fix it) • Slashfilm

Ben Pearson:

»

I reached out to several professional sound editors, designers, and mixers, many of whom have won Oscars for their work on some of Hollywood’s biggest films, to get to the bottom of what’s going on. One person refused to talk to me, saying it would be “professional suicide” to address this topic on the record. Another agreed to talk, but only under the condition that they remain anonymous. But several others spoke openly about the topic, and it quickly became apparent that this is a familiar subject among the folks in the sound community, since they’re the ones who often bear the brunt of complaints about dialogue intelligibility. 

“It’s not easy to mix a movie,” says Jaime Baksht, who took home an Oscar for his work on last year’s excellent “Sound of Metal” and previously worked on Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma.” “Everybody thinks you’re just moving levers, but it’s not like that.”

This problem indeed goes far beyond simply flipping a switch or two on a mixing board. It’s much more complex than I anticipated, and it turns out there isn’t one simple element that can be singled out and blamed as the primary culprit.

“There are a number of root causes,” says Mark Mangini, the Academy Award-winning sound designer behind films like “Mad Max: Fury Road” and “Blade Runner 2049.” “It’s really a gumbo, an accumulation of problems that have been exacerbated over the last 10 years … that’s kind of this time span where all of us in the filmmaking community are noticing that dialogue is harder and harder to understand.”

Join me and these industry experts as we sort through that “gumbo” and identify some of the most prominent reasons it has become more difficult to, in the paraphrased words of Chris Tucker’s Detective Carter in “Rush Hour,” understand the words that are coming out of characters’ mouths.

«

Great news for subtitle writers though.
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DeepMind AI software collaborates with humans on mathematical breakthroughs • New Scientist

Matthew Sparkes:

»

AI software has collaborated with mathematicians to successfully develop a theorem about the structure of knots, but the suggestions given by the code were so unintuitive that they were initially dismissed. Only later were they discovered to offer invaluable insight. The work suggests AI may reveal new areas of mathematics where large data sets make problems too complex to be comprehended by humans.

Mathematicians have long used computers to carry out the brute force work of large calculations, and AI has even been used to disprove mathematical conjectures. But creating a conjecture from scratch is a far more complex and nuanced problem.

To disprove a conjecture an AI simply needs to churn through vast numbers of inputs to find a single example that contradicts the idea. In contrast, developing a conjecture or proving a theorem requires intuition, skill and the stringing together of lots of logical steps.

UK-based AI company DeepMind, owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, has previously had success in using AI to beat humans at games of chess and Go, as well as solving the structures of human proteins. Now the firm’s scientists have shown that AI can provide human mathematicians with promising leads to develop theorems. That work has led to a conjecture in the field of topology and representation theory, and a proven theorem about the structure of knots.

Unlike most neural network research, in which an AI is fed large amounts of examples and learns to spot or create similar inputs, the AI here examined existing mathematical constructs for patterns. DeepMind says that its AI found both previously known and novel patterns and guided human mathematicians toward new discoveries.

«

Centaurs: humans and machines working together. (There’s also a series of Reith Lectures on BBC Radio 4 about AI. Definitely worth your time, as are the programmes by [Adam] Rutherford and [Hannah] Fry examining the ideas from the lectures further.)
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Why subscription Twitter is a terrible idea, Twitter bans sharing private photos and videos, Twitter and free speech • Stratechery

Ben Thompson:

»

I promised that I was going to be ok with being wrong more often, and this week very well may be an excellent example! What are all of the reasons why a new business model for Twitter might be a bad idea?

Retention: This is the most obvious issue. Would that many people who use Twitter actually pay? I threw out the possibility that Twitter would lose a third of its users, but lots of folks think that Twitter would lose far more, even up to 90%. This would obviously be fatal, not simply from a revenue perspective, but from a content perspective.

The question is where all of those people would go; there obviously would be significant market demand for a free alternative. Another startup is probably the best guess, but I do wonder the extent to which the relatively idealistic world into which Twitter launched in 2006 was a critical factor in building a platform that is ground zero for information for nearly everything, from every point of view. That is what will be hard to replicate (and, as someone who was there in the early days noted, Twitter did evolve very rapidly in its early days, so saying it was “perfect” right off the bat isn’t quite right).

«

He also says that Growth (how do you add users?) and Risk (adding the Retention and Growth downsides together means a potentially big risk) are the other two problems. (This is from the subscription version of the newsletter, so not open to everyone.)
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• Why do social networks drive us a little mad?
• Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see?
• How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online?
• What can we do about it?
• Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016?

Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more.

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Sure, you could use a cheap sticker to cover your webcam. But isn’t that just paranoia, and aren’t there cameras always on everywhere already? CC-licensed photo by Quinn Comendant 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. Very much here with you. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

What can the metaverse learn from Second Life? • IEEE Spectrum

Edd Gent:

»

IEEE Spectrum: Second Life was almost like a proto-metaverse. Why do you think it didn’t break through to the mainstream?

[Former chief architect of Second Life, Philip] Rosedale: It’s interesting to note that Second Life is, in my opinion, still the largest and the closest thing to a metaverse that we have as it relates to grown-ups. The environments that are used by kids, such as Roblox, are very interesting as well but very different in terms of what they offer. If you talk about people wanting to go to a live concert, or wanting to go shopping or something like that, I think Second Life is still US $650 million a year in transactions and a million people using it. But Second Life didn’t grow beyond about a million people. It’s been growing more with COVID, but as you say, it didn’t break out, it didn’t become a billion people. And the hope that Facebook has is that there’ll be a billion people using a metaverse.

So I think the reason why it didn’t, and this reason is still very true today, is simply that most adults are not yet comfortable engaging with new people, or engaging socially, in a multi-player context online. I’ve worked on this a lot and it’s been incredibly rewarding for the people for whom it has worked. And even work we did more recently with High Fidelity, which was very similar—a full VR environment, but with the headsets rather than with desktop—there are small groups of people that have gotten immense pleasure or opportunity to make money, and things like that, out of these environments.

But they’re still not for everybody. People are not able to communicate with facial and body language yet, in a way that is anywhere near adequate. And I think that it’s a very steep cliff. If you have the alternative, to have your social life happen in the real world, I think a great majority of people make that choice, and it’s a binary choice. They don’t split their social life partly between the real world and partly online. I think that’s the reason why we don’t see the breakout yet, and nothing that Facebook has said or demonstrated changes what I just said.

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The point about facial expressions is a big one that I hadn’t thought of before, but we take so much from how people respond facially in a meeting. Even the annoyance of Zoom does let you get some of that information. A half-body avatar, nope.
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Omicron variant was in the Netherlands a week before South Africa reported it • NPR

Bill Chappell:

»

The omicron coronavirus variant was already in the Netherlands a week before South Africa reported the new variant to the World Health Organization, according to a Dutch health agency.

The variant was recently identified in retests of samples that were taken on Nov. 19 and 23, the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, or RIVM, announced on Tuesday.

Revelations about the variant’s existence in Europe before it was reported in Africa add a new twist to questions about where and how the variant originated — and whether travel bans on South Africa and its neighbors are an appropriate response to the variant.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa says his country is being punished for detecting the variant and informing global health authorities about it.

“You do not try and contain a virus through imposing bans unscientifically and indiscriminately,” Ramaphosa said on Tuesday, adding that measures such as testing all travelers are the best tools for combating the pandemic.

South African officials raised the alarm about the heavily mutated variant, B.1.1.529, on Nov. 24. Two days later, the WHO classified it as a variant of concern and dubbed it omicron.

«

Clear that there has been community transmission for ages (relative to incubation). Where it really originated is anyone’s guess. But it certainly strengthens the case for not naming variants after the places where they were first identified.
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Why you should cover your webcam • The Washington Post

Tatum Hunter, with a pretty daft (and paranoid) article – judge by the headline – which does nevertheless have this interesting observation:

»

it’s only a matter of time before smart glasses are part of our everyday lives, according to [CEO and fcofounder of nonprofit security company XR Safety Initiative, Kayya] Pearlman. And that’s not to mention the camera-enabled connected devices springing up in our homes, cities and workplaces.

We’re heading toward an era of “constant reality capture,” she said, in which people and companies will be recording wherever we go. It raises privacy questions we haven’t yet tackled.

“What happens to our privacy when these [webcam] covers are just completely a historical phenomenon, and nobody cares anymore because everything is recorded anyway?” she said. “We’re moving into this culture where the question of ‘Should I have a mechanical cover to shut off any camera that could be spying on me?’ is moot.”

For Pearlman, real privacy is a matter of context, control and choice: In what context am I willing to be recorded? What control do I get over the data that’s captured? And was I given a choice to opt out?

Right now, companies make those types of privacy decisions, not consumers. In the future, that needs to change, Pearlman said.

“I think we need to open, decentralize and make these decisions collectively so that billions of people don’t feel powerless when these choices are taken away,” she said.

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Doesn’t matter whether you decentralise it or not. What matters is what the default is: if it’s on by default, it’ll stay on for over 90% of users. Ditto for off. (Unless somehow you make users choose one or the other with neither preferred early on.) In effect, companies always make the decision.
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Eleven cities that have joined the car-free revolution • Fast Company

Adele Peters:

»

Commuters in Los Angeles now spend 119 hours each year stuck in unmoving traffic; in Moscow, they spend an average of 210 hours, or nine entire days. There are as many as 2 billion parking spaces in the U.S. (eight times more than there are cars), often on valuable urban land that could otherwise be used—along with excess road space—for housing or parks. Pollution from tailpipes is linked to hundreds of thousands of deaths globally each year. SUVs, alone, now emit more than 700 megatons of greenhouse gases annually, more than the total emissions of the U.K. and the Netherlands. More than 1.25 million people are killed in road crashes each year.

In response, some cities and neighborhoods are beginning to rethink where cars can go—and redesigning streets to prioritize other uses, from public transportation to parks. It’s happening around the world, including on major streets in cities like San Francisco and New York, but happening at the largest scale in several European cities. Here are a few of the most interesting examples.

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She starts with “Amsterdam”, and then says that it’s not actually car-free, which is definitely an annoying way to start a list of car-free cities. It’s going car-fewer, which is progress at least.
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When is a new tech ‘ahead of its time’ — or just doomed? • OneZero

Clive Thompson:

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There are two related questions here: a) Could this new prototype ever work well enough and affordably enough that it could be in wide(r) use? And more alchemically, b) does it offer enough people a sufficiently interesting and useful new ability that they’d change their behavior around it? Do we desire this new thing?

I think b) is, of the two, the much harder question to answer. There are a lot of convoluted reasons why a technology becomes desirable. Sometimes it’s because the tech solves a problem that’s low on Maslow’s pyramid, like clean-water engineering. Everyone wants that. (Indeed, many technologies that are critical to basic existence are often infrastructural and civic.) But even with many consumer technologies — i.e. when you’re buying something that isn’t for basic survival — you can detect when a new tech triggers a novel, previously latent desire.

Personal cameras did that. In the late 19th century, people were very familiar with photography, but the demand for owning and carrying around a camera wasn’t obvious until the Brownie came out. Suddenly, everyday people discovered photography was delightful for personal expression, and a way to document the arc of their lives.

But other times in consumer tech, b) is much trickier to discern. GPS chips in our phones: Did people really want that? On the one hand, GPS gives your phone enormous utility, as with turn-by-turn maps. On the other hand, GPS lets authorities track your every move, which most people find icky. Worse, the market tends to seal off options, making it difficult to know whether people really prefer the current state of affairs.

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A lot of these questions are more easily analysed by what Steven Johnson calls “adjacent technologies” – finding what things are easily integrated or repurposed for an existing need. GPS had been around a long time before it found its way into phones; the adjacent technology was chip fabs capable of turning out chips that could analyse them by the multimillion. But to know what the adjacent technologies are, you need to be really immersed in all of them.
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World’s first living robots can now reproduce, scientists say • CNN

Katie Hunt:

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The US scientists who created the first living robots say the life forms, known as xenobots, can now reproduce — and in a way not seen in plants and animals.

Formed from the stem cells of the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis) from which it takes its name, xenobots are less than a millimeter (0.04in) wide. The tiny blobs were first unveiled in 2020 after experiments showed that they could move, work together in groups and self-heal.

Now the scientists that developed them at the University of Vermont, Tufts University and Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering said they have discovered an entirely new form of biological reproduction different from any animal or plant known to science.

“I was astounded by it,” said Michael Levin, a professor of biology and director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University who was co-lead author of the new research.

“Frogs have a way of reproducing that they normally use but when you … liberate (the cells) from the rest of the embryo and you give them a chance to figure out how to be in a new environment, not only do they figure out a new way to move, but they also figure out apparently a new way to reproduce.”

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Has anyone there read Jurassic Park? Frogs tend to be important to Life Finding A Way.
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Moorfields patient receives world’s first 3D printed eye • Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust

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A Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust patient was the first person in the world to be supplied solely with a fully digital 3D printed prosthetic eye on 25 November 2021. He first tried his eye on 11 November alongside a traditional acrylic prosthetic. By going home on 25 November with just his printed eye, he is the first patient to use a 3D printed eye as their sole prosthetic.

A 3D printed eye is a true biomimic and a more realistic prosthetic, with clearer definition and real depth to the pupil. Unlike traditional methods, it uses scans of the eye instead of an invasive mould of the eye socket, so difficult for children that they can need a general anaesthetic.

Crucially, the production process is much faster. Traditional acrylic prosthetic eyes are hand-painted and take about six weeks to complete. With 3D printing, once a scan has been taken, the prosthesis can be printed within two and a half hours. It is then sent to an ocularist to finish, polish and fit. The whole process takes just two to three weeks.

Steve Verze, the first patient, is an engineer in his 40s from Hackney.

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Given the way 3D printing has fallen out of the public consciousness, it’s worth remembering that it does actually have great uses. It’s widely used for reconstructive surgery (teeth and skulls) and, of course, for eyes too now.
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Amazon couldn’t protect your data, internal documents show • Reveal News

Will Evans:

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According to internal documents reviewed by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting and WIRED, Amazon’s vast empire of customer data – its metastasizing record of what you search for, what you buy, what shows you watch, what pills you take, what you say to Alexa and who’s at your front door – had become so sprawling, fragmented and promiscuously shared within the company that the security division couldn’t even map all of it, much less adequately defend its borders.

In the name of speedy customer service, unbridled growth and rapid-fire “invention on behalf of customers” – in the name of delighting you – Amazon had given broad swathes of its global workforce extraordinary latitude to tap into customer data at will. It was, as former Amazon chief information security officer Gary Gagnon calls it, a “free-for-all” of internal access to customer information. And as information security leaders warned, that free-for-all left the company wide open to “internal threat actors” while simultaneously making it inordinately difficult to track where all of Amazon’s data was flowing.

To be clear: This story is not about Amazon Web Services, the cloud-computing wing that manages data for millions of enterprises and government agencies, which has its own, separate information security apparatus. It’s about the online retail platform used by hundreds of millions of ordinary consumers. And on that side of Amazon’s business, InfoSec staffers warned of an unnerving “inability to detect security incidents.”

By the time DeVore started testifying about Amazon’s long-standing commitment to privacy and security, the dangers that the security division had identified weren’t just theoretical. According to Reveal and WIRED’s findings, they were real, and they were pervasive. Across Amazon, some low-level employees were using their data privileges to snoop on the purchases of celebrities, while others were taking bribes to help shady sellers sabotage competitors’ businesses, doctor Amazon’s review system and sell knock-off products to unsuspecting customers. Millions of credit card numbers had sat in the wrong place on Amazon’s internal network for years, with the security team unable to establish definitively whether they’d been unduly accessed.

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Though I suppose you could sort of intuit some of it from the way that they’re so quick on the chat function to go over your purchases and find what you’ve got a problem with. The “God Mode” is so commonplace in startup companies it’s hard to remove once they grow.
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‘I am not gonna die on the internet for you!’: how game streaming went from dream job to a burnout nightmare • The Guardian

Keza MacDonald:

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The fact is that, especially for up-and-coming streamers trying to make it in the crowded world of playing video games on the internet, the camera is almost never off. Sticking to a regular schedule is the best way to build an audience on Twitch, and those schedules regularly involve at least eight hours of continuous streaming, five days a week or more. “My sleep schedule shifted into the North American time zone because most of the people who were viewing my channel at the time were there,” says 36-year-old Cassie, a founder of the Black Twitch UK network, who has been streaming for five years under the name GeekyCassie. “I would do my day at work, nap a bit, and then stream for up to eight to 12 hours at night-time. I’d be absolutely beat, and then get up and do my work again … People burn out and then they don’t enjoy it any more.”

At that time Cassie was living at home with her mum, whose cooking and care enabled these ridiculous hours. “There’s absolutely no way that I would do that now. I don’t really feel like we should be encouraging it,” she says. “I see [young streamers] do things like 24‑hour live gaming marathons, then have an hour’s sleep, and then later that day I’ll see photos of them skating outside on Insta. I’m like: ‘How are you doing this? What is going on!?’”

“Burnout is an incredibly real thing in gaming,” says Imane Anys, AKA Pokimane, who has put in thousands of hours to become the most popular female streamer on Twitch, with 8.4 million subscribers. “A streamer sets their own work hours and it can be easy to fall into the trap of streaming eight to 12 hours a day, seven days a week. It’s frightening because people grind crazy long hours, and see results – hence why so many do it. I’ve veered away from doing extreme hours of livestreaming in an effort to upkeep my mental health and I’ve found that it aids in the longevity of my career.” Now she streams in shorter bursts, but even so, she only “usually” takes a day off a week to spend with friends or relaxing.

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Twitter has a new CEO; what about a new business model? • Stratechery

Ben Thompson has a modest proposal:

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one of the biggest challenges facing would-be Twitter clones is not simply that a complete lack of moderation leads to an overwhelming amount of crap, but also that the sort of person who thrives on Twitter very much wants to know everything that is happening in the world, including amongst those outside of their circle. Being stuck on a text-based social network that only has some of the information to be consumed is lame; having access to anyone and everything, for better or worse, is a value prop that only Twitter can provide.

This, then, is the other thing that often baffles analysts: Twitter has one of the most powerful moats on the Internet. Sure, Facebook has ubiquity, Instagram has influencers, and TikTok has homegrown stars, but I find it easier to imagine any of those fading before Twitter’s grip on information flow disappears (in part, of course, because Twitter has shown that it’s a pretty crappy business).

So let’s review: there is both little evidence that Twitter can monetize via direct response marketing, and reason to believe that the problem is not simply mismanagement. At the same time, Twitter is absolutely essential to a core group of users who are not simply unconcerned with the problems inherent to Twitter’s public broadcast model (including abuse and mob behavior), but actually find the platform indispensable for precisely those reasons: Twitter is where the news is made, shaped, and battled over, and there is very little chance of another platform displacing it, in large part because no one is economically motivated to do so.

Given this, why not charge for access?

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: just me, or was there not really that much informed followup on Jack Dorsey leaving Twitter? Or maybe it was in the wrong part of the news cycle.