The war in Ukraine is going to change our futures significantly. It’s already changing our experience of war. CC-licensed photo by Bartosz Brzezinski 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. “I don’t need a ride, I need ammunition.” I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Scammy Instagram ‘war pages’ are capitalizing on Ukraine conflict • Input Mag

Taylor Lorenz:

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Just hours after the first explosions rocked Ukraine Wednesday night, massive Instagram meme pages began promoting an account purporting to be that of a journalist live-streaming from the ground.

The posts urged fans to follow @livefromukraine to stay in the loop on the breaking news. “PUTIN DECLARES WAR: @livefromukraine is streaming the chaos now!!” one meme page with more than 3.7 million followers posted along with a carousel of videos supposedly showing Russian jets flying overhead and a missile hitting an airport.

A slew of other meme pages followed suit, promoting @livefromukraine — affiliated with a similar page called @POVwarfare — throughout the day yesterday. The bios for both accounts claimed that they were run by journalists in Ukraine. Instagram users flocked to the pages, which were set to private, hoping to gain any morsel of information on what was happening from the ground.

But @livefromukraine and @POVwarfare were not run by Ukrainian journalists — they were operated by a young meme admin in the U.S. who oversees a network of viral content across the web.

The accounts are what have become known as “war pages” on Instagram. They gather shocking battleground footage and videos depicting violence and repost them on Instagram with little to no context, often in an effort to leverage tragedy and conflict to gain followers. (War accounts such as @waraholics, @military_footage, and @war_strikes have all gained followers since the crisis in Ukraine heated up.) Some then monetize these followers by posting advertisements, often for OnlyFans creators.

“What I’m trying to do is get as many followers as possible by using my platform and skills,” the administrator for @livefromukraine and @POVwarfare, who calls himself Hayden, says when reached by phone yesterday. …“I don’t really know what’s going on with all this political tension,” Hayden says. “I’m just trying to document what’s going on.” His verification methods involve sussing out the comment sections of the videos and seeing if other people have claimed they are false. “I can’t really verify them myself,” he says of the videos he shares.

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War as a sort of spectator sport for Likes. Strange times. (Note that Lorenz has moved on from the NYTimes, where I think she didn’t get sufficient support for the sorts of stories she wrote – exposing sketchy behaviour by Silicon Valley types who had big megaphones that they’d use to go after her.)
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How the crisis in Ukraine may end • The Atlantic

Derek Thompson:

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There are now five ways that the aggression in Ukraine can end, according to Paul Poast, a professor of foreign policy and war at the University of Chicago. They are: a disastrous quagmire or retreat for Russia; violent regime change in Kyiv; the full conquest of Ukraine; the beginning of a new Russian empire; or a chaotic stumble into something like World War III.

In an interview for my podcast Plain English, Poast discussed these five scenarios in depth, the major factors that will shape the outcome of this crisis, the Biden administration’s response to Putin, why he feels this invasion is reminiscent of Japan’s attacks on Pearl Harbor, and the most important things to watch out for in the coming week. This is an edited and abbreviated transcript of our conversation.

…Thompson: Tell me what you are looking for in the next week to determine the most likely outcome of this crisis.

Poast: Two things. First, how is the actual military campaign going? Does Russia seem like they’re achieving quick success? That will tell us whether full conquest is still likely. And second, watch Poland. I really do think that Poland could be the flashpoint. What does the refugee situation in Poland look like? What is Russia saying about the refugees? Are there any hints about whether Russia is planning any kind of move against Poland? Anything along those lines would bring us closer to the nightmare scenario of war against NATO.

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I’m optimistic of something like disastrous quagmire/retreat where Putin is able (with a little help from those who don’t want escalation) to portray it, even to himself, as a success – eg securing some sort of corridor around Crimea. The expectation in the Kremlin certainly seems to have been that it would all be over by now.

I’d also recommend this analysis by Thomas Friedman at the NYT, who points out that since Russia took over the Crimea, Ukraine’s biggest trading partner has gone from being Russia to being the EU. Russia’s economy isn’t big enough to sustain it.
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Elon Musk activates Starlink satellites on Ukraine plea • Bloomberg

Natalia Kniazhevich:

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Elon Musk said his Starlink satellite service is up and running in Ukraine, responding to a plea from the deputy prime minister to supply satellite-based communications to help resist Russia’s invasion of the country.

More Starlink terminals are en route, Musk tweeted Saturday in reply to Mykhailo Fedorov’s entreaty, without explaining how the equipment would get there.

Musk’s SpaceX plans to take thousands of Starlink satellites into orbit, creating an internet-service constellation that would work as a low-cost alternative to remote land-based systems that are vulnerable to interruption. The billionaire previously donated 50 satellite terminals to restore the internet in Tonga, whose telecommunications network was severely disrupted by a tsunami this year.

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Getting the satellites oriented is one thing, but getting the terminals distributed in the country quite another. As with all the questions about supply of anything to Ukraine just now, it’s pretty mysterious. And while we’re on the subject of Mr Musk…
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Elon Musk promises full self-driving “next year” for the ninth year in a row • Jalopnik

Jason Torchinsky:

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It’s happened again! It’s incredibly predictable, sure, but that doesn’t make it any less glorious or wonderful! During Tesla’s earnings call yesterday, where the company very justifiably crowed about their record revenue and Model Y production at their new Texas factory, Tesla CEO and adorable optimist Elon Musk gave the world what they wanted and confidently predicted that Tesla would achieve “full self-driving” (FSD) — a term usually understood to refer to SAE Autonomy Levels 4 and 5, requiring no monitoring or input from whomever is in the car — less than a year from now. This makes the ninth year in a row he’s predicted full FSD coming in around a year! It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

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There’s now a neck-and-neck race as to which will happen first: Tesla cars achieve FSD, or we get usable fusion power. Place your bets.
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New research points to Wuhan market as pandemic origin • The New York Times

Carl Zimmer and Benjamin Mueller:

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Scientists released a pair of extensive studies on Saturday that point to a market in Wuhan, China, as the origin of the coronavirus pandemic. Analyzing data from a variety of sources, they concluded that the coronavirus was very likely present in live mammals sold in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in late 2019 and suggested that the virus twice spilled over into people working or shopping there. They said they found no support for an alternate theory that the coronavirus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan.

“When you look at all of the evidence together, it’s an extraordinarily clear picture that the pandemic started at the Huanan market,” said Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona and a co-author of both studies.

The two reports have not yet been published in a scientific journal that would require undergoing peer review.

…In a separate line of research, scientists at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention carried out a new analysis of the genetic traces of coronaviruses collected at the market in January 2020. Previous studies have shown that the viruses sampled from early cases of Covid belonged to two main evolutionary branches. The Huanan market samples included both branches, the scientists reported in a study they posted online on Friday.

Dr. Worobey, who said he was not aware of the study until it was made public, said that their findings are consistent with the scenario he and his colleagues put forward for two origins at the market.

“The beauty of it is how simply it all adds up now,” said Jeremy Kamil, a virologist at Louisiana State University Health Sciences, who was not involved in the new study.

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The puzzle of there being two ever so slightly different strains of SARS-Cov-2 seems to be answered by the hypothesis that they crossed to humans from two different animal species, at slightly different times (a few weeks apart). I’m sure this will finally end the debate. (OK, it won’t. Thanks G for the link.)
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Ex-ERCOT chief says Governor Abbott directed freeze blackouts to stop before decision to run up billions in bills • Houston Chronicle

James Osborne:

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The former head of the Texas power grid testified in court Wednesday that he was following the direction of Governor Greg Abbott when the grid manager ordered wholesale power prices to stay at the maximum price cap for days on end during last year’s winter storm and blackout, running up billions of dollars in bills for power companies.

Bill Magness, the former CEO of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, said even as power plants were starting to come back online, former Public Utility Commission Chair DeAnn Walker told him that Abbott wanted them to do whatever necessary to prevent further rotating blackouts that left millions of Texans without power.

“She told me the governor had conveyed to her if we emerged from rotating outages it was imperative they not resume,” Magness testified. “We needed to do what we needed to do to make it happen.”

…The decision to keep power prices at the maximum cap is now at the center of a bankruptcy trial waged by the Waco-based electric co-op Brazos Electric. Brazos contends that decision was made recklessly, adding up to a $1.9bn power bill from ERCOT that forced co-op into bankruptcy.

…The original order to raise power prices to the cap was made by the Public Utility Commission on Feb. 15. The aim was to provide incentives to get power plants back online and encourage large power users such as factories and petrochemical plants to stay offline. Even as power plants were starting to come back online on Feb. 17, ERCOT elected to keep prices at the cap another 32 hours, a decision that the Texas Independent Market Monitor criticized in a report last year as having “exceeded the mandate of the Commission.”

“This decision resulted in $16bn in additional costs to ERCOT’s market,” wrote Carrie Bivens, director of ERCOT’s Independent Market Monitor.

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This, you’ll recall, is the outcome of Texas refusing to become part of a federal power grid. Bad decisions about power tend to be over-reliance on single sources. See also: Germany and Russian gas.
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Inside ‘Project Tinman’: Peloton’s plan to conceal rust in its exercise bikes • Financial Times

Patrick McGee:

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In September last year, staff at Peloton warehouses, which receive high-end bikes originally manufactured in Taiwan, noticed that paint was flaking off some of the exercise machines.

The cause was a build-up of rust on “non-visible parts” of the bike — the inner frame of the seat and handlebars — and did not affect the product’s integrity, Peloton recently told the Financial Times.

Instead of returning the bikes to the manufacturer, executives hatched a plan, dubbed internally as “Project Tinman”, to conceal the corrosion and sent the machines to customers who had paid between $1,495 and $2,495 to purchase them.

The project was first revealed in FT Magazine last week but eight current and former Peloton employees across four US states have provided further details on the operation.

They described the plan as a nationwide effort to avoid yet another costly recall just months after the company’s most tragic episode — the death of a child due to the design of its treadmill.

Internal documents seen by the FT showed that Tinman’s “standard operating procedures” were for corrosion to be dealt with using a chemical solution called “rust converter”, which conceals corrosion by reacting “with the rust to form a black layer”. Employees said the scheme was called Tinman to avoid terms such as “rust” that executives decided were out of step with Peloton’s quality brand.

Insiders were also angered about enacting a plan that they argued cut across Peloton’s supposed focus on its users, who are called “members” to evoke a sense that buyers are more than customers and part of a broader community. Tinman also put a spotlight on the company’s quality control process versus meeting aggressive sales targets in the search for growth.

“It was the single driving factor in my beginning stages of hatred for the company that I had spent the previous year and a half falling in love with,” said an outbound team lead, who reviews products before they are shipped to customers.

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Totally cosmetic, no effect on performance or durability. Except at those prices you’d feel a bit miffed at flaky paint, surely.
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A technical note on access to Russia’s Ministry of Defence site • Topicbox

William Waites, on Dave Farber’s “interesting people/things” mailing list:

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Yesterday, as Russia began its invasion of Ukraine, some people on the Internet noticed a strange thing. I’m not going to comment on the big picture except to say that the situation is terrible, the invasion criminal and the failure of other countries to do anything meaningful to stop it, reprehensible. Nor will I attempt to expound on how the conditions for this to happen came to exist; there are plenty of people who know more about that than I do. Instead, I will examine this strange detail that will surely be just a minor footnote in this terrible conflict, try to explain what it means, and, at the end, indulge in some hopeful speculation into how it got there.

The web site of the Russian Ministry of Defence looks like it’s “down” from the perspective of nearly everyone outside of Russia and a small number of other countries. If you point a web browser at it right now, you’ll get a blank page. But the _way_ that it is down is interesting. If you look closely, you’ll see that it is producing an error code 418.

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You’re familiar with 404 Not Found, but 418? Like most people you’ve probably never heard of it. But it means “I’m A Teapot”. But why would the Russian defence ministry website be returning such a peculiar error code? Waites has an intriguing theory. (Though that may be from earlier in the conflict; I tried the same commands as him and simply got “reset by peer”, with no HTTP code.)
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Randy Russian soldiers bombard Ukrainian girls with flirty Tinder requests • The Sun

Nick Parker:

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When Dasha [Synelnikova] asked outright whether Andrei was a Russian soldier, he replied with a cheeky “gif” video of Hollywood star Jim Carrey, as if to say: “Oops!”

In the space of one hour, Dasha’s Tinder trawl unearthed a steady stream of Russian admirers, all appearing to be among Putin’s force massing north of Kharkiv.

Ukrainian military intelligence said last night that the sheer volume of troops there pointed to an attack on the city in the coming hours.

Soldiers looking for love included bearded “Black” — a 33-year-old Chechen fighter who posted a snap of himself in bed clutching a pistol — and another cuddling a kitten.

Alexander, 29, posed in a beret with his sunglasses tucked in his tight blue and white striped vest.

Uniformed Gregory, 25, seemed keen to show off his military watch in another snap.

Another Russian was Alexander, 31 — a possible Russian spy. He revealed he was working in the “Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation.”

Dasha said: “These guys are just the same as anyone else on Tinder — they want love or companionship. So it’s kind of hard to imagine that they could be coming here to attack us. I hope it won’t happen.”

Russian units have been ordered to switch off mobile phones in preparation for an invasion, it has emerged. Advanced units of the 1st and 2nd Army Corps are said to have received the order.

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Tinder as a route to discovering intel about the opposing forces? Wouldn’t have happened if Hitler were in charge. (There’s a picture of Synelnikova holding her phone to prove it, in case you’re dubious. I found this story via a tweet linking to the FT linking to the NY Post linking to The Sun, which seems to be the origin.)
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You should switch to a browser with ‘vertical tabs’ • Debugger

Clive Thompson:

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I’m a pretty extravagant tab-hoarder. Currently I’ve got 94 tabs open — and that’s on the low side, since the number is usually well over 150. This is probably way more than the average person, I grant you! As this decade-old study of Firefox users would suggest, most people probably have a single-digit number of tabs open. Not me. I go for broke.

Why do I have so many tabs open? Because my work is research-intensive, and also longitudinal: If I’m working on a story for a few months, I might open 25 tabs in a flurry of research one evening, then leave half of them open as mental reminders for the weeks to come — oh, yeah, I should follow up on that. Seeing those weeks-old tabs, as I flit about doing my work, is a mental trigger to keep thinking about that subject.

It’s much like the cognitive value of leaving stacks of paper on your desk for months. When you idly glance at the corner of a document, peeking out from an unruly stack, it helps refresh that document in your mind. It keeps subjects from vanishing from your attention, and encourages your backbrain to ruminate on those subjects for weeks, months, or years. (This, indeed, was one of the findings in the insanely interesting book The Myth of the Paperless Office.) Having a document or tab lurk around the edges of your work for a long, long time can be crucial to doing long-term thinking.

Now, I know there are people who hate having cluttered desks and cluttered browsers. They find it distracting and mentally chaotic. That’s cool; this piece is not aimed at you! It’s for those of us who get deep value from having a sprawling amount of info arrayed before us.

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I’m often a terrible tab hoarder, and make every effort to close them and get them out of the way; I “save” them by having my browser history go back a year, meaning I can easily find a closed tab if I can remember some part of the headline or URL. So I don’t agree with this piece; but in case you’re a tab hoarder too, his recommendation is that you switch to Vivaldi, as it offers vertical tabs. I can see the point of that. It feels like a necessary next step in browser UI evolution.)
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If you want to watch multiple news video streams at once (maybe desirable just now?) there’s a website for you. CC-licensed photo by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center 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. It’s Friday, James. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Biden has been presented with options for massive cyberattacks against Russia • CNBC

Ken Dilanian and Courtney Kube:

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President Joe Biden has been presented with a menu of options for the US to carry out massive cyberattacks designed to disrupt Russia’s ability to sustain its military operations in Ukraine, four people familiar with the deliberations tell NBC News.

Two US intelligence officials, one Western intelligence official and another person briefed on the matter say no final decisions have been made, but they say US intelligence and military cyber warriors are proposing the use of American cyberweapons on a scale never before contemplated. Among the options: disrupting internet connectivity across Russia, shutting off electric power, and tampering with railroad switches to hamper Russia’s ability to resupply its forces, three of the sources said.

“You could do everything from slow the trains down to have them fall off the tracks,” one person briefed on the matter said.

The sources said the options presented include pre-emptive responses to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, irrespective of whether Russian launches its own cyberattacks on the US in retaliation for sanctions. They said most of the potential cyberattacks under consideration are designed to disrupt but not destroy, and therefore fall short of an act of war by the United States against Russia. They say the idea is to harm networks, not people. Officials are debating the legal authorities under which the attacks would take place — whether they would be covert action or clandestine military activity. Either way, the US would not publicly acknowledge carrying out the operations, the sources say. US Cyber Command, the National Security Agency, the CIA and other agencies would have a role to play in the operations, the sources said. 

“Our response will be harsh and measured, but not so severe as to encourage Putin to take more drastic steps,” one US official said.

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More drastic steps such as.. what? Cyberattacks on other countries besides Ukraine, perhaps? But…
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Russia unleashed data-wiper virus on Ukraine, say cyber experts • The Guardian

Dan Milmo:

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Cyber experts have identified a new strain of computer-disabling malware unleashed on Ukrainian targets as part of Russia’s offensive, as the UK government and banks said they were on alert for online attacks.

Russia was widely expected to launch a cyber assault alongside its military campaign, and the run-up to the invasion of Ukraine was marked by the deployment of a “wiper” virus. A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, which paralyses websites by bombarding them with spurious information requests, also hit Ukrainian government sites.

On Wednesday, ESET Research Labs, a Slovakia-based cybersecurity company, said it had detected a new piece of data-wiping malware on hundreds of machines in Ukraine.

ESET said large organisations had been affected, while security experts at Symantec’s threat intelligence team said the malware had affected Ukrainian government contractors in Latvia and Lithuania and a financial institution in Ukraine. ESET has called the malware, which renders computers inoperable by disabling rebooting, HermeticWiper.

The NotPetya attack of 2017, which devastated Ukrainian businesses, was a wiper attack that encrypted computers irretrievably and spilled over into other countries, causing $10bn (£7.5bn) of damage worldwide.

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VidGrid: a news channel multiview in your browser

Matt Taylor:

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VidGrid is a free multiviewer built for news channels by Matt TK Taylor. It uses YouTube-sourced and other publicly listed and unprotected playlist (m3u8) HLS streams provided by broadcasters to the internet in order to provide streams. It cannot play protected streams such as those protected by YouTube’s embedding policy, or by web standards like Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) protection.If you are a broadcaster who would like your stream removed, please contact me, I’d be happy to do so. I am also open to helping your teams implement the protections suggested to prevent others from doing this.This is a personal side-project and no infringement of rights is intended. Streams are not hosted, generated, or proxied by this service but instead come directly from publicly accessible and generally broadcaster-endorsed links.

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Lots of choice for those who aren’t sufficiently distracted by one picture-in-picture element.
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Sotheby’s NFT sale, expected to hit $30m, suddenly cancelled • The New York Times

Zachary Small:

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At Sotheby’s on Wednesday night, a single lot of NFTs — 104 digital art assets known as CryptoPunks — was expected to sell for as much as $30m. But after a delay of 25 minutes past the auction’s expected start time, the sale was off.

The consignor had withdrawn the pixelated collectibles and posted a meme on Twitter mocking the auction house.

Audiences inside a packed Sotheby’s salesroom were shocked, according to two attendees. The evening began with people drinking Champagne and ended with a stunned shuffle back home.

Derek Parsons, a Sotheby’s spokesman, said in a statement Wednesday night that “the lot was withdrawn prior to the sale following discussions with the consignor,” but he did not share details of how the deal fell apart.

“People were extremely upset,” said Kent Charugundla, a telecom investor and NFT collector who attended the event.

“This is so bad for the NFT community,” he added, explaining that the market needed strong sales to continue its momentum.

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A cloud no bigger than a man’s fist.
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CNN removes ‘squeezeback’ ads from Ukraine invasion coverage following online outcry • AdWeek

Jason Lynch:

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CNN has removed “squeezeback” ads from its ongoing coverage of Russia’s Ukraine invasion, after the jarring juxtaposition of carefree advertising messages alongside somber images of Ukraine under siege sparked an online outcry earlier in the day.

Several Twitter users began noticing that instead of cutting away for its advertising breaks as usual, CNN was running split-screen ads alongside its continuing coverage, which led to what we’ll charitably call mixed messaging. Those included an Applebee’s spot celebrating “a little bit of chicken fried” and “cold beer on a Friday night,” as well as an ad for Sandals Resorts, set to Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds,” which includes the lyrics, “Don’t worry ‘bout a thing/Cause every little thing gonna be all right!”

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The pictures are amazing. This video is the classic American insistence that advertising must be everywhere at all times. (Applebees blamed CNN for running the advert.)
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Publishers move to abandon Google-supported mobile web initiative • WSJ

Alexandra Bruell:

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Companies including Vox Media LLC, BuzzFeed Inc.’s Complex Networks and Bustle parent BDG said they have started testing or are considering using their own versions of mobile-optimized article pages, instead of building them using the Accelerated Mobile Pages framework, which Google introduced in 2015 and is supported by an open-source working group. The Washington Post has gone a step further, abandoning AMP last summer.

A potential exit from AMP would make media companies slightly less reliant on Google, whose dominance in digital advertising has strained its relationship with publishers and been referenced in a December 2020 lawsuit by state attorneys general alleging anticompetitive behavior.

A recently unredacted version of the lawsuit alleged that AMP pages—which are hosted on Google’s servers—have been specifically designed to make it more difficult for ad space to be auctioned on platforms other than Google’s ad exchange. It also alleged that Google made ads that didn’t use AMP load with a one-second delay.

A Google spokesman at the time said the lawsuit’s claims about AMP were false and said its engineers designed the system to load webpages faster.

Media executives have said dropping AMP would give them more control over their page designs and ad formats, and make it easier for them to sell ad space in auctions that include a greater number of ad marketplaces through a system known as header bidding, ultimately boosting competition and prices for their ad space.

Google said it is possible for publishers to sell ad space on AMP pages through header bidding, but the practice has its downsides, including using more data and causing webpages to load more slowly.

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Gradually, then suddenly: AMP is dying. It’s taken just over six years. (The full article should be visible if you click the link.)
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Bitcoin donations to Ukrainian military soar as Russia invades • CNBC

MacKenzie Sigalos:

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Bitcoin donations to the Ukrainian army are soaring after Moscow launched a large-scale offensive against Ukraine early Thursday.

New data from blockchain analytics firm Elliptic shows that over a 12-hour window Thursday, nearly $400,000 in bitcoin was donated to Come Back Alive, a Ukrainian nongovernmental organization providing support to the armed forces.

The fresh round of crypto donations capitalizes on a trend seen in recent weeks, in which donations totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars have flooded into Ukrainian NGOs and volunteer groups working to stave off a Russian offensive, according to Elliptic.

Activists have deployed the crypto for a variety of purposes, including equipping the Ukrainian army with military equipment, medical supplies, and drones, as well as funding the development of a facial recognition app designed to identify if someone is a Russian mercenary or spy.

“Cryptocurrency is increasingly being used to crowdfund war, with the tacit approval of governments,” said Tom Robinson, chief scientist of Elliptic, which sells blockchain analytics tools to banks and cryptocurrency platforms.

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You win some…
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Financial sanctions are easier than ever for Russians to evade. Thank bitcoin • CNN

Allison Morrow:

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The West’s initial salvo of financial sanctions against Russia failed to deter President Vladimir Putin from launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Now the United States is taking a punitive approach, announcing another round of sanctions meant to tighten the screws on Russian banks and “corrupt billionaires.”

But some experts say those measures, which so far do not target Putin himself, are becoming increasingly easy to evade, thanks in part to a surge of cryptocurrency adoption in Russia.

The US and EU sanctions rely heavily on banks to enforce the rules. If a sanctioned business or individual wants to make a transaction denominated in traditional currencies such as dollars or euros, it’s the bank’s responsibility to flag and block those transactions.

But digital currencies operate outside the realm of standard global banking, with transactions recorded on a public ledger known as the blockchain.

“If the Russians decide — and they’re already doing this, I’m sure — to avoid using any currency other than cryptocurrency, they can effectively avoid virtually all of the sanctions,” said Ross S. Delston, an expert on anti-money laundering compliance.

The US Treasury is well aware of this problem. In an October report, officials warned that digital currencies “potentially reduce the efficacy of American sanctions” by allowing bad actors to hold and transfer funds outside the traditional financial system. “We are mindful of the risk that, if left unchecked, these digital assets and payments systems could harm the efficacy of our sanctions.” 

As Exhibit A, look no further than Eastern Europe, which has one of the highest rates of crypto transaction volume associated with criminal activity, according to research by Chainalysis. Websites used for illicit trades known as darknet markets brought in a record $1.7bn worth of cryptocurrency in 2020, most of it in bitcoin.

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Not sure that all the Russian banks would really be able to do all their work using bitcoin rather than the SWIFT interbank network. And KYC (know your customer) requirements on crypto exchanges can be a big roadblock. Not to mention the general cash-strappedness of crypto exchanges, which hate handing out fiat (real) money (when they’re not getting zapped by the SEC).
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Meta AI: company builds translation engine for the metaverse • Protocol

Janko Roettgers:

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Meta wants you to understand anyone, from anywhere, no matter which language they speak. To achieve this the company is looking to build a universal, instantaneous speech translator, capable of translating any language to any other language — including languages that are primarily spoken.

Mark Zuckerberg announced this goal during an AI-focused event Wednesday, describing it as a key step toward a world-encompassing metaverse. “The ability to communicate with anyone in any language — that’s a superpower people have dreamed of forever, and AI is going to deliver that in our lifetimes.”

Meta’s ambitious universal translation project is part of a broader push to build out the company’s translation capabilities for the metaverse. “This is going to be especially important when people begin teleporting across virtual worlds and experiencing things with people from different backgrounds,” Zuckerberg said.

As part of these efforts, Meta’s AI researchers have begun to build an AI model called “No Language Left Behind” that is supposed to be able to learn new languages with less training data than existing machine translation models to more easily understand languages like Luganta, a language spoken by an estimated 2 million people in Uganda.

Going even further, the company’s “Universal Speech Translator” is supposed to be able to translate speech directly to speech without first transcribing it.

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Can I point out, as I did in Social Warming, that many of the problems in Myanmar were amplified because Facebook’s systems were set up in Unicode, and Myanmar used a home-grown character system called Zawgyi. And Facebook still isn’t any good at translating and moderating inflammatory language in Ethiopia, where there are multiple ethnicities.

Don’t have a lot of confidence about this.
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How an obscure far-right website with three employees dominates Facebook in 2022 • Popular Info

Judd Legum:

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Most people have probably never heard of the website Conservative Brief. It employs just three writers and it does not produce any original reporting. Nearly all of its articles are aggregations of Tweets, YouTube videos, or other media websites, presented with a far-right spin. Recent headlines include “More Damning Evidence Surfaces Against Hillary Clinton in Durham Probe,” and “Trump Gives Love To Mike Lindell, Showers Him With Praise For The Good He Has Done.” Conservative Brief has been cited repeatedly for publishing false claims. 

Yet Conservative Brief has emerged in 2022 as a dominant force on Facebook. It has recently become more popular on the platform than the New York Times and the Washington Post. 

How did this happen? Popular Information has uncovered evidence strongly suggesting that Conservative Brief is paying a network of large Facebook pages, including several controlled by prominent conservative political personalities, to post its content. This conduct, if it is indeed occurring, is in direct violation of Facebook’s rules. 

Conservative Brief’s engagement on Facebook has exploded over the last year. According to data provided to Popular Information by NewsWhip, an independent social media analytics firm, in February 2021, Conservative Brief attracted about 2,500 engagements (a combination of likes, reactions, comments, and shares) per article. Today, each article posted by Conservative Brief attracts well over 30,000 engagements. 

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Urgh.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

We regret to inform you that conspiracy theorists are attempting to milkshake DuckDuckGo, the search engine. CC-licensed photo by Ivan Radic 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. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How Facebook twisted Canada’s trucker convoy into an international movement • The Verge

Ryan Broderick:

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For many Canadians, it’s an overdue end to a chaotic protest that has stifled trade and brought alarming weaponry into otherwise quiet communities. But right-wing supporters have a wildly different view of events: figures like Tucker Carlson have portrayed the convoy as a working-class rebellion, and Trudeau’s response has been treated as enacting martial law, leading Elon Musk to tweet (and then delete) a meme comparing Trudeau to Adolf Hitler.

It’s a shocking split, arguably the single most important factor in the protests, and much of it originates in the fractured way information travels online. Convoy supporters are getting their news from a tangle of Facebook groups, Telegram channels, and random influencers, which is all then amplified and expanded by right-wing broadcasters like Carlson, The Daily Caller, or Canadian right-wing media network Rebel News. These channels promote a sanitized version of movements like the Freedom Convoy, amplifying its hashtags and turning its obscure extremist leaders into celebrities.

This pipeline — from physical protest to social media to establishment outlets — is what has helped the convoy evolve from a local standoff into a televised event that can raise millions from supporters thousands of miles away. Almost all of that infrastructure pre-dates the convoy itself, drawing from anti-vaxx groups, QAnon, and other fringe communities. And while the convoy itself may soon be broken up by the Canadian government, those online pathways are much stickier.

To understand how this echo chamber works, we have to start with the Ottawa protest itself. The “Freedom Convoy’’ started as a loosely affiliated group of Canadian truck drivers led by a group called Canada Unity, founded by far-right activist and QAnon conspiracy theorist James Bauder. But over the last 30 days, Bauder has managed to build a coalition of fed-up truck drivers, fringe Canadian political party members, neo-Nazis, anti-vaxxers, and an international coterie of scammers, grifters, and low-level online creators that has been able to generate major headlines around the world.

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Broderick is excellent at navigating the labyrinth (as he calls it) of social networks. As ever, Facebook’s algorithms and their love for amplifying “engagement” – for which read “controversy where people may be trying to correct desperately wrong content, whose efforts are ignored but which pushes it to more people who believe it” – bear a big responsibility. (Via John Naughton.)
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There is no cyber ‘shock and awe’: plausible threats in the Ukrainian conflict • War on the Rocks

Lennart Maschmeyer and Nadiya Kostyuk:

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The empirical record of cyber conflict… suggests that what is feasible in practice is far more limited. Ukraine has been a “giant test lab” where Russia, one of the world’s foremost cyber powers, has experimented with cyber operations for eight years. Yet these operations have failed to produce significant strategic value either as force complements or standalone tools.

The substitutability argument — that states can or do substitute cyber operations for the use of force — has little empirical support since Russia levied no major cyber operations against Ukraine in the runup to the military escalation of the conflict in 2014. While it is possible that we do not know about such operations given their veil of secrecy, it is clear that any attempted but undetected cyber surprise strike failed to produce any measurable effects.

Evidence supporting the complementarity perspective is similarly sobering. One of us has examined the role of low-level disruptive cyber operations in the military conflict and their relevance for battlefield events (and outcomes). Disruptive attacks can directly affect military operations as they seek to sabotage an opponent’s ability to fight. For example, the Russia-backed separatists in the Donbas and Luhansk regions used malware to retrieve data from mobile devices on the locations of Ukrainian artillery troops, facilitating better reconnaissance against these troops. Pro-Ukrainian hackers hijacked CCTV cameras behind enemy lines to obtain intelligence on the movement of Russian artillery in the separatist-controlled territories.

Focusing on the period of the most intense fighting, between 2014 and 2016 — the time when, if cyber tools are an effective complement to armed force, Russia would have been most likely to use them — we applied a series of statistical tests to thousands of cyber and military operations. The findings showed a strong, escalatory dynamic between military operations by both sides but no significant correlation in either direction between military and cyber operations, and no reciprocity between cyber operations. This evidence demonstrates that in one of the first armed conflicts where both sides used low-level cyber operations extensively, digital operations unfolded independently from the events on the ground and had no discernible effect on them.

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Of note: there’s been ongoing cyber attacks against Ukraine for at least the past week, to a greater or lesser extent.
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Bill Bailey reimagines the Doctor Who theme as Belgian jazz • YouTube

Alors, c’est la musique qu’il vous faut pour commencer votre journée: les Daleks et la boîte plus grande à l’intérieur qu’à l’extérieur, utilisée par Doctor Qui. Pas du guerre, trés tranquil.
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Saudi energy minister touts pink hydrogen made by “emancipated young ladies” • Climate Change News

Joe Lo:

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Saudi Arabia is touting hydrogen exports as a win for the climate and gender equality, as the petropower seeks to diversify its economy away from oil.

Energy minister Abdulaziz bin Salman told the online World Economic Forum this week the kingdom was pursuing blue, green and pink hydrogen development, the colours representing the way it is made – some cleaner than others.

He said the EU was interested in green hydrogen, made with renewable electricity, and joked that pink – to be generated with planned nuclear power plants – was of particular interest to women in the industry.

“We are recruiting, by the way, young Saudi ladies that are happy to see the pink coming along,” said bin Salman. “We have started being very conscious of taking care of our female new recruits and new cadets. We’re becoming an extremely well emancipated society.”

However the bulk is likely to be blue, made from methane gas and emitting carbon dioxide in the process, some of which may be captured and stored.

“We will have a field day with blue hydrogen because again, we’re the cheapest cost producer of gas,” bin Salman said. “We’re doing a huge investment in shale gas in Saudi Arabia and we will be dedicated to have that gas to be used for producing blue hydrogen.”

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It says so much, doesn’t it, what sort of things you think are funny, even in your non-native language. As he already knows, “pink” hydrogen is produced by splitting water using nuclear power. (Green comes from renewable electrolysis, blue from cracking oil and methane.)

It’s a “joke” that might have been funny about the same time the creatures that became the oil and shale were wandering about. And these are the folks deciding how things will be.
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Adding injury to insult • The Critic Magazine

James Chalmers:

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How has a thirty-six year old man from Glasgow ended up with a criminal record for sending a “gratuitous insult” about Captain Sir Tom Moore on Twitter? And how exactly is this Clement Attlee’s responsibility?

The offence of which Joseph Kelly was convicted, following his response to Captain Tom’s death, is found in section 127 of the Communications Act 2003. That section criminalises a person who “sends by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character”. (The court’s decision that the message was “grossly offensive” has not deterred multiple media outlets such as the BBC, Daily Mail and Independent from quoting it in full online.)

At first sight, this legislation might look like Parliament reacting to the challenges of the electronic age. But like so much of the British statute book, it is a rehash and reworking of a much older decision — in this case, where Parliament was concerned for the sensibilities of telephonists.

…As is often the case with individual prosecutions like Kelly’s, the full context is not public. We cannot know exactly what persuaded the prosecutor that charging him was in the public interest. There is something odd, at least, that in a criminal offence based on publishing an offensive tweet to the world at large, one of the witnesses was his former neighbour, who said the message “left a bad taste” (would a tweeter without an offended neighbour have escaped prosecution?). In court, the prosecutor argued that if Kelly had stood in public and shouted his comments, “there would have been little difficulty in breach of the peace charges being brought against him”.

But Kelly did not do that, and that difference matters. The Scottish offence of breach of the peace criminalises conduct which is “genuinely alarming and disturbing”, and perhaps the police might have felt constrained to arrest someone behaving that way in public to prevent a brawl breaking out. But as the Scottish courts have pointed out, breaches of the peace are criminalised because of the “real risk of disturbance” rather than any “perceived unpleasant or disgusting character” in someone’s actions. What was the risk of disturbance from Kelly’s tweet?

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Fact check: the BBC either didn’t quote the tweet, or later removed it. The Independent used it as a subhead – the thing you read directly after the headline. What a ridiculous case, especially given the investigation now ongoing into possible misuse of money given to the connected charity.
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Johnson tells City of London to prepare for tough new sanctions on Russia • Financial Times

George Parker, Stephen Morris and Laura Hughes:

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Johnson has been stung by criticism that his first “barrage” of measures against Russia was too weak and left Britain trailing the US and EU in the scope and scale of its reprisals.

The prime minister on Wednesday convened leading City figures including senior executives from HSBC, Barclays, Goldman Sachs and Lloyd’s of London to tell them that he wanted the next “wave” of sanctions to “really bite”. Trading exchanges and regulators were also represented at the meeting in Number 10.

The City executives told Johnson they were already carrying out stress-testing on their business models to assess the impact of what Johnson claims will be robust sanctions.

“We want the toughest possible next tranche and I do think that will make a difference and change the outcome,” Johnson told the meeting. “Putin must fail.”

However, some of the bankers at the meeting bluntly told Johnson that they did not believe the UK sanctions had gone far enough, according to two people familiar with the discussion.

They praised the German decision to suspend the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project as an example of what needed to be done to have an impact.

Others stressed that the government should also consider widening the scope of sanctions to include real assets, such as property, owned by Russian citizens in the UK, not just financial instruments and bank accounts.

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Seems to me the headline should have been “City of London tells Johnson to prepare tougher new sanctions”. The UK sanctions were utterly milquetoast, and criticised even within the Conservative party. Coincidentally*, the Conservative party has received quite a lot of donations from Russian [x]illionaires.

*perhaps not coincidentally
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Fed up with Google, conspiracy theorists turn to DuckDuckGo • The New York Times

Stuart Thompson:

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On an episode of Joe Rogan’s popular podcast last year, he turned to a topic that has gripped right-wing communities and other Americans who feel skeptical about the pandemic: search engines.

“If I wanted to find specific cases about people who died from vaccine-related injuries, I had to go to DuckDuckGo,” Mr. Rogan said, referring to the small privacy-focused search engine. “I wasn’t finding them on Google.”

Praise for DuckDuckGo has become a popular refrain during the pandemic among right-wing social media influencers and conspiracy theorists who question Covid-19 vaccines and push discredited coronavirus treatments. Some have posted screenshots showing that DuckDuckGo appears to surface more links favorable to their views than Google does.

In addition to Mr. Rogan, who has recently been at the centre of an outcry about misinformation on his podcast, the search engine has received ringing endorsements from some of the world’s most-downloaded conservative podcasters, including Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino.

“Google is actively suppressing search results that don’t acquiesce to traditional viewpoints of the left,” Mr. Shapiro claimed last March. “I recommend you install DuckDuckGo on your computer, rather than Google, to combat all this.”

The endorsements underscore how right-wing Americans and conspiracy theorists are shifting their online activity in response to greater moderation from tech giants like Google.

…The New York Times reviewed the top 20 search results on Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo for more than 30 conspiracy theories and right-wing topics. Search results can change over time and vary among users, but the comparisons provide a snapshot of what a single user might have seen on a typical day in mid-February.

For many terms, Bing and DuckDuckGo surfaced more untrustworthy websites than Google did, when results were compared with website ratings from the Global Disinformation Index, NewsGuard and research published in the journal Science. (While DuckDuckGo relies on Bing’s algorithm, their search results can differ.)

Search results on Google also included some untrustworthy websites, but they tended to be less common and lower on the search page.

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Ugh. Get off my search engine, you insects. (Also, you don’t “install” DuckDuckGo. You select it. Unsurprising I guess from the guy who reckoned that the solution to coastal cities being overwhelmed by rising seas was to sell the threatened property. You may be able to spot a logical flaw there.)

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City exclusive: London court issues arrest warrant for high-profile venture capitalist Julie Meyer • City AM

Louis Goss:

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The High Court has issued an arrest warrant for Julie Meyer, the founder and CEO of Swiss investment fund Viva Investment Partners (VIP), after she failed to attend a court hearing last week.

The decision to issue a warrant for Meyer’s arrest comes after the High Court this month handed the high-profile businesswoman a six-month suspended sentence, following a dispute with the Royal Family’s go-to law firm, Farrer & Co, over almost £200,000 in unpaid solicitors’ fees.

The sentence was handed down after the Swiss-American venture capitalist failed to hand over financial documents and refused to attend multiple court hearings, as she claimed she was unable to travel to the UK from her home in Switzerland due to having conjunctivitis and not being vaccinated against Covid-19.

City A.M. understands the courts have now issued a warrant for Meyer’s arrest, after she failed to attend a hearing on 14 February, despite being ordered by the High Court to attend the hearing in person.

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Older readers might be thinking “Julie Meyer? Rings a distant bell.” That’s because she was one of the people behind First Tuesday, which she co-founded in London back in the dotcom boom years of 1998. It was an event on the first Tuesday of each month where would-be investors and would-be dotcom enterpreneurs (and a few journalists) got together and tried to make things happen.

Her CV since then though is an absolute train wreck of court cases and shady three card monte-style “investment funds”. Her being unvaccinated is just the cherry on the top.
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Unfortunately, we can’t hire you after seeing that 2010 photo of you drinking a beer when you were 16 • McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

Rachel Keller:

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Dear Applicant:

Thank you for applying to our advertising firm. Unfortunately, just as you were forewarned by your parents and teachers back in 2010, we have decided not to proceed with your application because our online background check revealed a photo of you drinking what is unmistakably beer in a red solo cup at Alex Sorenson’s house party when you were 16 years old.

You were very high on our list to be our new junior manager. Your educational background, your skills, and your interview were all superb. Sadly, we just can’t choose someone to join our team that hasn’t heard that the internet is forever. You were also holding a Kesha CD in the photo, and the lyrics to her song “TiK ToK” are too profane for our company.

We had the papers to hire you drawn up, but when we did a quick ten-hour search online, we found that beer-drinking photo from your high school friend Rob Danport’s profile. You may have asked Rob to untag you all those years ago, but we still can find anything online. Rob says hi, by the way.

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Don’t say Eric Schmidt didn’t warn you.
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Why Spotify bought Chartable & Podsights • On my Om

Om Malik:

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For those not familiar, these companies work with podcasters and networks to include unique tags that give them insights into podcast listening behavior. Podsights help advertisers understand the effectiveness of their advertising, while Chartable provides valuable insights into the listeners and their behavior. 

Both these acquisitions add up to a smart move by Spotify. The company is trying hard to become the most significant player in the “hearing” attention economy and build a sizeable advertising business. Podcasts are a vital part of this business as they cost less and allow the company to keep a significant chunk of its revenues. In comparison, it has to share the money with record labels, who continue to have a draconian hold over the company.

…Podsights and Chartable would allow Spotify to know which podcasts are most effective or have tailwinds and could get famous shortly, giving them an excellent opportunity to either lock up that content into exclusive deals or bring them in-house. And remember, they could use the same data to create copy-cat podcasts — much like how Netflix creates copypasta versions of hit shows from other networks that get popular on its platform. Since Spotify controls the “attention spigot,” it can direct it at in-house podcasts and turn them into big hits.

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“Lock up content” is certainly the phrase. There’s a lot of longstanding podcasters looking over their shoulders at what’s coming up behind them: more analytics, targeted ads (moving on from dynamically inserted ads), and particularly walled-garden content. Google can’t really justify putting walls up around previously open content, and Apple doesn’t want the headache of overseeing the generation of third-party audio content (it’s happier limiting it to games and TV, thanks) so this may be Spotify’s route to real profitability, which music never could be.

For a deeper analysis of this move, read Alex Hern’s take at The Guardian. And I’m not just recommending it because he happened to quote me, though obviously doing so Proves That He’s Right.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The FBI wants us to approach QR codes found in the wild “with caution”. It’s mostly good advice, but how many people will follow it? CC-licensed photo by Individual Design 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. Storm? What storm? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Thoughts on shitpost diplomacy – The Scholar’s Stage

Tanner Greer:

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Approximately three hours ago, the official twitter account of the United States Embassy in Kiev posted this meme.

The meme is idiotic at even the surface level: in face of Russian claims that Ukraine is a 20th century political fiction artificially dividing the Russian people into national categories that would not have made sense to any European who lived before Lenin, and that this cradle of Russian culture should not be allowed to fall within the geopolitical ambit of a hostile anti-Russian alliance, the American embassy tweets a meme that highlights Kiev’s role as the origin point of Russian civilization. This is not hard. A Russian sixth-grader could explain why celebrating the glories of Kievan Rus does not subvert Putin’s claims about the history of the Russian nation so much as reinforce them.

The American diplomat who posted this meme should have known this. He or she was almost certainly a Foreign Service Officer in the Public Diplomacy cone; a public diplomat’s first charge is learning how to communicate persuasively to the people of the region stationed in. It is not that this officer lacked the raw intelligence to fulfill this role: four out of every five applicants fail the Foreign Service’s selective entrance tests. It is what this diplomat did after receiving his or her post that mattered. This diplomat did not study. Memes like these are the product of a culture that retweets more than it reads.   

The internet operates on its own logic. In the world of Twitter, Twitch and Tiktok, fame is the aim and exposure the goal. The influence of an influencer is measured in retweets, reblogs, and runaway memes. The internet-addled man glories in the hashtag that takes on its own life; he revels in the image that entire subcultures make their own. His battleground is “the discourse.” In this ethereal realm of images and threads, prestige comes from being clever, being funny, and being first. One’s internet enemies are to be cancelled where possible, and lampooned when not. The social media addict knows victory when the right words are used by the right sorts.

But not all enemies can be cancelled.

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“We’ll bombard them with memes, and then our third infantry of tweeters will start blocking them.”
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‘Frozen’ bitcoin tied to Canadian protests lands at Coinbase, Crypto.Com • Coindesk

Anna Baydakova and Sam Reynolds:

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Cryptocurrency tied to the Canadian truckers protesting COVID-19 restrictions has been on the move, in defiance of the authorities’ orders to freeze funds, blockchain analysis shows.

Nearly all of the roughly 20 BTC (about $788,000 U.S. at current exchange rates) sent to the Tallycoin fundraiser is gone from that address, with only 0.11 BTC left, according to Blockchain.com data.

Most of the 30 bitcoin wallets identified by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) as being attached to the fundraising have been drained as well, with only 0.01 BTC combined between them, on-chain data shows.

Whether the recipients will be able to use the funds to buy goods or services remains to be seen, however.

A CoinDesk review of the public ledger shows that four small portions of the roughly 20 bitcoin raised – about 0.14 BTC each – ended up at two centralized exchanges, Coinbase and Crypto.com. It is not clear whether the funds were cashed out for fiat or frozen at those platforms.

The situation highlights the limitations of a government’s ability to thwart transactions through decentralized, censorship-resistant systems – but also the limitations of those systems to circumvent such sanctions.

…Centralized exchanges’ approaches to wallets sanctioned or blacklisted by authorities can vary, Crystal Blockchain’s head of data intelligence, Nicholas Smart, told CoinDesk.

“First off, does the exchange have to apply the sanctions? They may not if they are not facing the sanctioning market and don’t do business there,” Smart said.

Coinbase and Crypto.com both do business in Canada (although they are not listed among financial institutions ordered to freeze funds by the Mareva injunction in the private lawsuit).

“Second, did they know about the listing, and at what point did they find out?” Smart went on. “This will change if they will stop a transfer and report it or if they simply will report the activity. That detection is also dependent on how good their transaction monitoring system is.”

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The average person doesn’t have a chance with the smart home • TechCrunch

Owen Williams:

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Smart devices are everywhere, embedded in practically everything — but actually making a smart home that works in harmony is a nightmare that the average person is unlikely to be able to navigate on their own. 

I’ve been navigating this myself lately as someone who just purchased their first home, eager to make the most of the best of this smart tech now that I’m able to rip out light switches and cut holes in my walls when I want to. If you’re intentional about what you buy, the smart home can be magical, and I was ready to invest in that.

My plan was to go into the smart home eyes wide open and take my time to only buy devices that complement each other. I knew from my time renting that cobbling together a bunch of random smart devices without much thought grew increasingly annoying over time. Over the last few months I’ve spent hours researching things like smart light switches, sensors and blinds before spending any money. 

But, even as someone who works in technology, it has amazed me just how complicated the smart home still is: it’s full of jargon and incompatible standards. Before buying anything, people who want to get into the “smart home” need to choose their ecosystems and technologies wisely from the outset or they’ll be fidgeting with it for years — but no device maker is upfront with this. 

The basic goal of anyone building a smart home should be: which device do I want to primarily manage these things through? For most people, the best route is likely via a smart speaker like the Google Home, Amazon Alexa or Apple’s HomePod, all of which will allow you to control those devices with your voice as well as a single app on your phone. 

The problem, however, is that the need for a single app or device to control all the smart things isn’t obvious until you end up with a few different devices that it’s annoying to switch between via different apps to control each of your light bulbs.

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The fact that you have to pick devices that will work with your ecosystem, which is probably determined by your phone, only heightens the confusion. (I use Ikea light bulbs, which interact well, and Hive for heating control.)
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What went wrong with Horizon: learning from the Post Office trial • Evidence Critical Systems

Steven J. Murdoch:

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What seems to be a simple problem – keeping track of how much money and stock is in a branch – is actually much harder than it appears. Considering the large number of transactions that Horizon performs (millions per day), inevitable hardware and communication failures, and the complex interactions between systems, it should have been obvious that errors would be a common occurrence.

In this video, I explained the basics of double-entry accounting, how this must be implemented on a transaction system (that provides atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability – ACID) and gave some examples of where Horizon has failed. For this video, I had to abbreviate and simplify some of the aspects discussed, so I wrote this blog post to refer to the Post Office trial judgement that talked about the situations in which Horizon has been identified to fail.

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There’s a lot here: so many ways in which Horizon could and did go wrong. (That’s Horizon the Post Office system, not Horizon the Facebook system – that still has some runway before it’s decided to have caused the wrongful convictions or deaths of dozens of people.
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The failure paradox • Ingenuism

Don Watkins:

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The aviation industry connected the important players to create a supportive environment that fosters sharing information, maximizing learning, and consistently using best practices. The result is astonishingly safe air travel where past failure sowed the seeds for the current success.

When we celebrate failure, what we are actually celebrating is its role in the learning process. But why should learning require failure? In school, after all, failure isn’t celebrated. The valedictorian isn’t the person who failed the most or even learned the most from failure—she’s the one who failed the least. Failure is treated as something we can avoid and, if we fail, it’s because we didn’t study hard enough, or pay attention enough, or aren’t smart enough. But is it?

Interestingly, one of the most successful approaches to education, the method pioneered by Maria Montessori, takes a completely different approach to failure. Believing that “Every great cause is born from repeated failures and from imperfect achievements,” Montessori created self-correcting classroom materials that let the child know when he’s made an error. Using these materials, a child doesn’t experience failure as a punishment, but as feedback that promotes learning.

But even when education encourages a healthier attitude toward failure, the school environment is unique. Its goal is to impart already discovered knowledge. In the real world, we’re seeking to apply discovered knowledge to new situations and to discover new knowledge. And it’s here that failure is most obviously inescapable.

You cannot fly billions of people through the sky without mistakes. You cannot create new products or launch new business ventures knowing they’ll work. Human beings aren’t omniscient or infallible. We acquire knowledge over time, and certain facts only reveal themselves in the midst of a journey into unexplored territory.

And so the question is not, to fail or not to fail? The question is: how to respond to inevitable failures?

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Frequently Asked Questions for Windows on an Apple Silicon Mac • getwired.com

Wes Miller:

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As I worked on my last blog post, it hit me that there are a ton of “frequently asked questions” that I’ve already seen around Windows on ARM running on Apple silicon Macs. I’ll try to keep these somewhat updated as I can, as things will likely change over time.

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His focus is on the Windows licensing question (especially if you virtualise it, which is your only option on ARM at present). Apple doesn’t have a lot of incentive just yet to get Windows running natively on ARM, as it’s just coming off a year in which it sold more Macs than ever, and most of those were ARM-based, and none of them could run Windows directly. So what’s Apple’s motivation to get Windows running on ARM? It could just keep a few models running on Intel for those who really, really want to run Windows natively on Mac hardware. But it probably won’t.

Equally, Microsoft doesn’t have that much reason to let Apple ARM hardware run Windows: it’s more hassle, another platform to support, and not an eager OEM.
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Firefighters struggle to douse fire on luxury cars vessel off Azores islands • Reuters

Catarina Demony and Victoria Waldersee:

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Firefighters are struggling to put out a fire that broke out on Wednesday on a vessel carrying thousands of luxury cars, which is adrift off the coast of Portugal’s Azores islands, a port official said, adding it was unclear when they would succeed.

The Felicity Ace ship, carrying around 4,000 vehicles including Porsches, Audis and Bentleys, some electric with lithium-ion batteries, caught fire in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on Wednesday. The 22 crew members on board were evacuated on the same day. read more

“The intervention (to put out the blaze) has to be done very slowly,” João Mendes Cabeças, captain of the nearest port in the Azorean island of Faial, told Reuters late on Saturday. “It will take a while.”

Lithium-ion batteries in the electric vehicles on board are “keeping the fire alive”, Cabeças said, adding that specialist equipment to extinguish it was on the way.

It was not clear whether the batteries sparked the fire.

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However, the vessel is now officially salvage, so if you want to nab yourself a slightly scorched premium EV, launch your boat.
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Peloton is down, so you might have to exercise alone • The Verge

Victoria Song:

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If you were hoping to use the Slack outage to sneak in a Peloton ride, there’s bad news: the popular connected fitness company is also “currently investigating an issue with Peloton services.”

On Peloton’s status page, it appears that users cannot access logins, live classes, on-demand classes, leaderboards, or activate services on Peloton bikes and treadmills. On Twitter, the company said this may also impact users’ ability to access Peloton’s websites. However, as of this writing, the only Peloton site suffering a major outage is the member profile/workout history page. According to DownDetector, people began reporting Peloton outages at around 10AM ET.

While the outage isn’t necessarily Peloton’s fault, it does highlight one of the pitfalls of connected fitness. Without software and connectivity, the expensive hardware you just bought suddenly isn’t quite as useful.

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Can’t even ride it on the road outside. Troubles don’t come singly for Peloton, they come in a.. pack.
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The FBI is alarmed by the spike in fake QR code usage • ExtremeTech

Adrianna Nine:

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according to the FBI, QR codes found out in the physical world (versus the virtual one) should be approached with caution. The agency warns that cybercriminals have begun tampering with QR codes to redirect those who scan them to malicious websites. Some of these websites are said to install malware onto victims’ phones and redirect otherwise innocent payments to the criminal. Others prompt victims to enter their financial institution credentials, giving the criminal access to the victim’s bank accounts. While virtual QR codes are tougher to tamper with, bad actors can easily stick altered codes over pre-existing ones in physical environments. And without more than just a glance, a hungry diner who’s just been seated at their favorite eatery might not notice the difference. 

It’s important to note that the FBI isn’t asking the public to do away with QR codes completely; after all, the codes have proved an excellent way for individuals and businesses to connect without contact and improve operational efficiency.

Instead, the FBI is asking people to look twice before scanning physical codes. The agency recommends that before engaging with a QR code’s destination site, individuals inspect the URL for any typos or misplaced letters; avoiding app downloads and payments via QR code can be a helpful practice, too, since both can usually be conducted through a more trustworthy source, like a mobile app store or official company website.

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“Look twice before scanning physical codes”? We’re meant to be able to decipher QR codes with our bare eyes now? In fact the FBI advice is more nuanced, and includes the good advice not to download a QR code scanner app – because that could be poisoned.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

If you’re planning to film indoors, consider whether there are fluorescent lights. It could make a big difference to the result. CC-licensed photo by Tom Page on Flickr.

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

A selection of 10 links for you. Still a bit windswept. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The elaborate con that tricked dozens into working for a fake design agency • BBC News

Leo Sands, Catrin Nye, Divya Talwar and Benjamin Lister:

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Gemma Brett, a 27-year-old designer from west London, had only been working at Madbird for two weeks when she spotted something strange. Curious about what her commute would be like when the pandemic was over, she searched for the company’s office address. The result looked nothing like the videos on Madbird’s website of a sleek workspace buzzing with creative-types. Instead, Google Street View showed an upmarket block of flats in London’s Kensington.

Gemma contacted an estate agent with a listing at the same address who confirmed her suspicion – the building was purely residential. We later corroborated this by speaking to someone who’d worked in the building for years. They had never seen Ali Ayad. The block of flats was not the global headquarters of a design firm called Madbird.

Gemma shared her discovery with another Madbird employee she had got to know and trust – Antonia Stuart, who was leading the company’s expansion into Dubai.

Using online reverse image searches they dug deeper. They found that almost all the work Madbird claimed as its own had been stolen from elsewhere on the internet – and that some of the colleagues they’d been messaging online didn’t exist.

They thought about their options. One was to leave quietly without causing a stir. They had no idea who was behind this con, or the scale of it. They were scared. On the other hand, they worried if the truth wasn’t exposed innocent staff could end up in trouble if they completed deals for Madbird based on lies. Deals were just days away.

In the end, they decided to send an all-staff email from an alias – Jane Smith.

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Terrific piece of work. It’s also a TV show on BBC3. And raises the question: how do you know your job is real?
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I was wrong, we need crypto • Hey.com

David Heinemeier Hansson:

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First the Ottawa police department got GoFundMe to confiscate donations with the intention of redirecting them to other causes [this is not true – Overspill Ed], then after an outcry, they backed down to merely blocking the money for 7-10 days before refunding. That seemed like a draconian escalation completely at odds with the tens of millions of dollars raised for social justice causes during the protest summer of 2020. But at the time, I thought it was something another fund-raising platform – one less likely to collaborate with the Canadian authorities – could route around. And GiveSendGo indeed started doing just that.

Turns out the concern over the donations was quickly rendered insignificant, as just a few days later, the Canadian prime minister imposed martial law on the protestors. Through powers intended for catastrophic events, he took to freeze the bank accounts of both Canadian protestors and donors, to compulsorily demand that tow-truck operators clear the streets, and forced insurance companies to drop policies for the protestors.

That “worked”. Together with police storming the protests with pepper spray and stun grenades, the area in front of parliament was cleared. But even that wasn’t enough. Even with the protests cleared out, the police vowed to press their new financial powers against anyone involved for months to come.

«

So wrong, in so many ways. Canada is nearly the most vaccinated country in the world. The protesters are a foreign-funded unpopular minority who have been indulged while they disrupt daily life. That’s not political protest; it verges on insurrection.

More to the point. Hansson hasn’t considered that even if the protesters were being paid in bitcoin (etc), they’d still need to convert it to dollars. Guess what? That goes through money laundering checks, ie banks. (The Canadian government has flagged 253 bitcoin addresses as part of its investigations of foreign funding.) And you can’t buy fuel, or other things, with cryptocurrency. Maybe a blessing.
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COVID-19 genetic risk variant we inherited from Neanderthals • Medical Express

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In the autumn of 2020, Hugo Zeberg at Karolinska Institutet and MPI-EVA [Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology] and Svante Pääbo at MPI-EVA showed that we inherited the major genetic risk factor for severe COVID-19 from Neanderthals.

In the spring of 2021, the same researcher duo studied this variant in ancient human DNA and observed that its frequency has increased significantly since the last ice age. In fact, it has become unexpectedly common for a genetic variant inherited from Neanderthals. Hence, it may have had a favourable impact on its carriers in the past.

“This major genetic risk factor for COVID-19 is so common that I started wondering whether it might actually be good for something, such as providing protection against another infectious disease,” says Hugo Zeberg, who is the sole author of the new study in PNAS.

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See if you can guess what the other infectious disease – which predates Covid by quite some time – is before you click through.
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Apple Stores employees make effort to unionise • The Washington Post

Reed Albergotti:

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Before officially filing, Apple Store organizers have been informally gauging interest among the staff, hoping that more than half of the employees will vote to unionize, people familiar with the matter say, the threshold needed to gain official legal standing with the NLRB.

In at least one case, store employees hoped to gain at least 80% support before officially filing to form a union. That’s because the organizers expect that Apple will try to convince employees to vote against the union.

To avoid detection by managers at the stores, employees have been meeting in secret and communicating with encrypted messaging, sometimes using Android phones, the competitor to Apple’s iOS operating system, to avoid any possible snooping by Apple.

Apple Store employees at one store said managers have already begun pulling employees aside and giving speeches about how unions will hurt employees, lower their wages and force Apple to take away benefits and opportunities, such as the “career experience” that Herbst described. Managers try to eavesdrop on employees, they said, while pretending to do something else.

«

It’s probably better for workers to be in a union than not, but I’m interested in the “sometimes using Android phones” bit. If these people work in the Apple Stores they can’t possibly think that Apple is spying on their phones, unless they have phones provided by Apple which has MDM (mobile device management) software on it. If so, OK, there’s a tenuous possibility. But a personal iPhone running WhatsApp or Signal is going to be secure: your messages won’t leak. Are they using Android phones because those are their personal phones? Or, just possibly, the Android phones are PAYG – in effect “burners” so the phone number isn’t listed as a named contact on others’ phones, to show who’s organising if the phone somehow gets compromised? (Quite paranoid thinking now.)

I like the thing about managers eavesdropping. Everyone eavesdrops. It’s just sometimes you’re more paranoid about it.
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The people of the metaverse • ROUGH TYPE

Nick Carr:

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It’s revealing that, before the arrival of the net, people didn’t talk about “authenticity” as we do today. They didn’t have to. They understood, implicitly, that there was something solid behind whatever show they might put on for public consumption. The show was not everything. The anxiety of the deep fake had not yet taken hold of the subconscious. The reason we talk so much about authenticity now is because authenticity is no longer available to us. At best, we simulate authenticity: we imbue our deep fakeness with the qualities that people associate with the authentic. We assemble a self that fits the pattern of authenticity, and the ever-present audience applauds the pattern as “authentic.” The likes roll in, the views accumulate. Our production is validated. If we’re lucky, we rise to the level of influencer. What is an influencer but the perfection of the deep-fake self?

I know, I know. You disagree. You reject my argument. You rebel against my “reductionist” speculations. You think I’m nuts. I can almost hear you screaming, “I am not a deep fake! I am a human being!” But that’s what you would think, and that’s what you would scream. After all, you have created for yourself a deep fake that believes, above all else, that it is real.

The metaverse may not yet have arrived, but we are prepared for it. We are, already, the people of the metaverse.

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The internet is Tokyo • Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick, in a joint post with Josh Kramer’s “New Public” newsletter, noting how a leakd Facebook document suggests there’s more use of Facebook Groups in rural areas than urban ones:

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We can only speculate, but why might rural folks use Facebook Groups more? If they’re like my wife’s Boomer aunt, they just want a place to talk about their interests (in her case, two elderly pugs named Thelma and Louise). Perhaps, because rural America is more conservative, this finding actually means that conservative users are more active in Groups. Or, maybe users in cities just have more options, and are using apps like Nextdoor instead.

But here’s my favorite theory, as expressed by a Facebook staffer with their name blacked out: “My hypothesis is that people in cities have compelling offline alternatives to whatever value FB Groups provide. But that seems a bit simplistic.” Actually, anonymous staffer, it suggests something really complicated — that population density is a factor affecting behavior on social platforms. This is fascinating to think about, and central to our mission at New_ Public.

Offline, density can manifest in rich, varied experiences that make cities worth living in. Our Co-director, Eli Pariser, previously of MoveOn and Upworthy, explained in WIRED why he loves living in crazy dense New York City, near Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn:

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The park serves as an early-morning romper room, midday meeting point, festival ground, and farm stand. There are house-music dance parties, soccer games during which you can hear cursing in at least five languages, and, of course, the world-famous Great Pupkin Halloween Dog Costume Contest. In short, the park allows very different people to gather, see each other, and coexist in the same space. When it’s all working, Fort Greene Park can feel like an ode to pluralistic democracy itself.

«

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Pariser, of course, is famous as the author of The Filter Bubble. The idea that population density (or lack of it) leads to different behaviour on social networks is probably overlooked, but it’s been emerging from academic research for some years.
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The myth of tech exceptionalism • Noema

Yäel Eisenstat and Nils Gilman:

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All business leaders dislike being regulated (who likes rules?), but many tech leaders believe “tech” is fundamentally different from “mature” industries, like those that create chemicals or cars, whose goods and harms are eventually well understood and therefore regulatable. Tech’s identity, on the other hand, was defined around the constant creation of the radically new or the disruption of the outdated, for which the proper regulatory framework could not be anticipated in advance. Would-be tech regulators were derided as dull bureaucrats, would-be killers of the golden goose, applying rules based on systems that tech itself, if left alone, would soon supersede anyway.

In any other industry, the sorts of harms produced by Big Tech would long ago have spurred the standard response: government regulation. But the tech titans and their stalwarts have shielded themselves by resorting to two basic arguments — really, rhetorical strategies — to fend off the regulators. First, many in the tech world insist that whatever harms technology creates, it is more than outweighed by the good in the present. In a September podcast interview, for example, Instagram head Adam Mosseri argued: “We know that more people die than would otherwise because of car accidents, but by and large, cars create way more value in the world than they destroy. And I think social media is similar.” Of course, Mosseri was roundly mocked for this line — he seemed unaware that, in fact, the auto industry is one of the most heavily regulated in the U.S. and Europe.

«

Terrific essay (not short), via John Naughton. Eisenstat in particular knows very much whereof she speaks: a former CIA officer, she went to work for Facebook in the belief that they were hiring her to find and root out election disinformation. On Day 2 (after Day 1, orientation) she discovered that that wasn’t their intent at all. She left soon after, and is strong Facebook critic.
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Electric car prices could be about to plummet – here’s why • Sky News

Victoria Seabrook:

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Battery electric vehicle (EV) prices have already fallen dramatically and are expected to reach parity with petrol or diesel cars between 2025 and 2027 – and be cheaper very soon after.

The average motorist should save £700 a year in fuel costs by switching, according to New Automotive, a research group aiming to accelerate the shift to electric.

The price drop is partly due to advancements in the batteries, set to tumble further still, as well as carmakers producing more mass market cars.

“International agreements on climate change mean car companies understand that there is a global transition to clean transport under way,” said Ben Nelmes from New Automotive.

“They are racing to increase the number of electric models they are selling to secure a share of tomorrow’s car market,” he said.

Now that the auto industry is designing EVs from scratch – rather than adapting existing design structures known as “platforms” – they are improving both performance and cost.

Government plans to set targets for manufacturers to sell more EVs should help prices fall further.

For now, the car industry is calling for increased incentives for buyers until EV prices match those of combustion engine cars.

«

Fun fact: around two-thirds “of people” in the UK have driveways and so could charge at home. I don’t know if that’s meant to equate to households or not, but it’s a lot more than one would expect. And the reason why prices could soon plummet is that a wave of secondhand EVs will hit the market, having been owned by fleets for a couple of years.
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How to avoid flickering video with fluorescent lights • Untamed Science

Rob Nelson:

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Essentially the problem has everything to do with understanding how fluorescent lights work. They’re not “on” all the time. Instead they flicker on and off at a certain frequency. They do this so fast that our eyes can’t sense it…

We’ll discuss how to get around this frequency. However, as we go through, understand that the frequency of AC currents differs depending where you are. In much of North and South America it’s 60 Hz and in Europe, Africa and Asia, it’s 50Hz…

If you set your camera up to capture a still frame at a certain frequency, it may mess you up. Here’s why. If you’re always capturing an image at the top of the curve [of illumination] (for example), you’re fine. However, if you start capturing video frames when the fluorescent light is putting out different intensities of light, you’ll run into trouble.

To get around this problem you have to match your frame rate with the frequency of the lights you are in. You need to shoot at frame rates that are divisible by the number of light pulses. So, in a 60 Hz AC area, you’ll need to shoot at 30, 60 or 120 fps.

However, If your camera is set up for European PAL shooting, you may not be able to get these frame rates. You can get around it by simply shooting at different shutter speeds.

«

Mains frequency turns out to be useful for crime solving and a pain for filming. What else? (Thanks Matt L for the link.)
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The CDC isn’t publishing large portions of the Covid data it collects • The New York Times

Apoorva Mandavilli:

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For more than a year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has collected data on hospitalizations for Covid-19 in the United States and broken it down by age, race and vaccination status. But it has not made most of the information public.

When the CDC published the first significant data on the effectiveness of boosters in adults younger than 65 two weeks ago, it left out the numbers for a huge portion of that population: 18- to 49-year-olds, the group least likely to benefit from extra shots, because the first two doses already left them well-protected.

The agency recently debuted a dashboard of wastewater data on its website that will be updated daily and might provide early signals of an oncoming surge of Covid cases. Some states and localities had been sharing wastewater information with the agency since the start of the pandemic, but it had never before released those findings.

Two full years into the pandemic, the agency leading the country’s response to the public health emergency has published only a tiny fraction of the data it has collected, several people familiar with the data said.

Much of the withheld information could help state and local health officials better target their efforts to bring the virus under control. Detailed, timely data on hospitalizations by age and race would help health officials identify and help the populations at highest risk. Information on hospitalizations and death by age and vaccination status would have helped inform whether healthy adults needed booster shots. And wastewater surveillance across the nation would spot outbreaks and emerging variants early.

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Pretty bad. By contrasts the UK effort has been laudable – a triumph for open data. (Thanks G for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

There turns out to be a surprising use for tracking the mains frequency in your home. Just hope you never have to call on it. CC-licensed photo by Richard Ash 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 featured in Wordle. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

New EU antitrust frontier emerges for Microsoft and Google: spam ads • POLITICO

Samuel Stolton:

»

A new claim that Microsoft and Google are gaming the online advertising market to the detriment of smaller rivals threatens to set up a new antitrust clash in Europe, according to previously unseen data.

The two U.S. giants appear to be flooding smaller search engine partners with spam ads and keeping some of the most valuable ads for themselves, according to data reviewed by POLITICO, in a move that draws parallels with the infamous €2.4bn Google Shopping case.

While EU competition chief Margrethe Vestager’s 2015 offensive against Google’s abuses in the search market got the backing of the EU General Court in November, there are some who say that blind spots in the case have allowed for certain violations to continue — illustrated by Swedish price-comparison site PriceRunner’s decision earlier this month to sue Google for €2.1 billion in damages.

And now, according to the same data, both Google and its closest rival in the search engine space, Microsoft, are siphoning off so-called spam ads to smaller search engines that use their search results, as well as limiting the quantity of higher-value ads that appear on these partner search engines.

Spam ads are regarded as those that have little relevance to the original search, direct users to less reputable online sources and generate little value for the search engine. In the long term, such ads may turn users away from using alternative search engines like Qwant, Ecosia and DuckDuckGo, and drive them back to the likes of Bing and Google, thereby negatively affecting the smaller players’ bottom lines.

The data, compiled by researchers working in the adtech space who wish to remain anonymous for fear of damaging commercial relations between Microsoft or Google and smaller search engines, indicates that the two internet giants fob off low-value and irrelevant ads to their downstream syndication partners — smaller search engines that rely on both gatekeepers’ huge web page indexes.

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NFTs, cryptocurrencies and web3 are multilevel marketing schemes for a new generation • WSJ

Christopher Mims:

»

In a recent ad for cryptocurrency exchange FTX, Tom Brady asks seemingly everyone in his contact list, “You in?” As in, are you going to join him in buying some crypto, and not, presumably, in being a football star married to a supermodel. The pitch is straightforward celebrity-endorsement fare, designed to capitalize on the FOMO that is the standard psychological tactic of those who are already invested in cryptocurrencies and related technologies, and who would like the rest of us to come aboard. Mr. Brady has an equity stake in FTX.

A “You in?”-style pitch is also typical of successful multilevel marketing companies. Both make a virtue of the fact that our getting “in” will obviously enrich those urging us to do so, by driving up the value of their own holdings or network. And then, hey, the same could be true for us!

It’s a siren song as old as the promise of attaining financial freedom by selling herbal supplements, cosmetics or leggings from the comfort of your home, enhanced and refined by the ways in which modern communications systems can rapidly elevate ideas and movements from the fringe to the center of national and global conversation.

But how does owning or trading crypto, which is after all just data—infinitely reproducible, supposedly nearly free thanks to the internet—make one rich? Or for that matter, owning or trading other digital assets like NFTs (or “nonfungible tokens”) that have become all the rage among celebrity art collectors? The straightforward premise: by using the blockchain—a type of public database that anyone can access and everyone can (supposedly) trust—it is possible to create a chunk of data, known as a token, that is unique in the world, and cannot be reproduced. In other words, it is possible to make a digital object, be it a piece of art or a crypto coin, scarce.

«

He’s absolutely right. Usually MLM schemes thrive in times of hardship, but the NFT MLM has grown up in a time of plenty because there was so much money sloshing about for the past few years that grifters were looking for some way to siphon it in their direction. Hmm, what if you made something that isn’t rare, “rare”? Don’t enquire too much about the quote marks, just pay me.
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Futures spun and stolen in the metaverse • Noema

Tim Maughan:

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Like every young kid with an IG account he’d tried minting a few of the images as NFTs. None had sold. Well, not until yesterday, when I got some bots to buy a few. But like every artist that got in after the initial goldrush, Fragileman had realized there was no real money in tokenizing your work when you were starting out. The days of buying any tokenized art you saw just for the novelty or some mystical potentials were long gone; now only established artists, artists with connections and influence and a recognizable brand, made serious money selling their work. 

No, as a new artist there was little point wasting money and carbon on having your work minted when you could tokenize something far more valuable: yourself. Pay an exchange to mint you into an NFT, split it into thousands of shards, and then put those up for sale. Suddenly you were there, legitimately part of the real art world: a line on a chart. 

The artist as tradable financial product, your artistic value ranked by the automated exchanges, subreddit day traders, stonks hustlers, hedge fund analysts and high-frequency trading algorithms. They — the critics, the holdouts, the no-coiner ludds — they keep telling us we’d finally destroyed art, reduced it all to nothing but stocks and shares, meaningless toy money for the world’s rich to play with. Of course, the truth was that’s what art had always been, for centuries if not longer. We just made it more ubiquitous, more efficient, more technologically mediated. We made it faster.

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Maughan wrote the fascinating SF book Infinite Detail, about a world where the internet (and hence any supply chain that relies on it, ie all of them) has broken down irrevocably. Now he’s looking around at the scenery he sees more recently.
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The adorable love story behind Wikipedia’s ‘high five’ photos • Input Mag

Annie Rauwerda:

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One reason I love the Wikipedia article for “high five” is that it’s one of those entries about an utterly basic aspect of everyday life that reads like it was written by a group of aliens observing human beings: “Its meaning varies with the context of use but can include as a greeting, congratulations, or celebration.”

But the high-five Wikipedia page is among my very favourites not because of its writing, but because of its iconic photos — specifically the ones in the section on the “too slow” variation. [High fives offers “up high, down low, too slow!]

I love the aughts fashion, the use of the word “victim,” and the fact that “finger-guns” gets a hyperlink in the last caption. The woman in the photo gives an Oscar-worthy performance in the final image — she looks like she’s on the verge of tears — and her male counterpart couldn’t look more smug. The pictures are endearing and capture a kind of humanity you don’t find in your average stock photo.

The sequence was uploaded on August 14, 2008 by Bgubitz, a user who describes themself as an accountant who likes “sunsets and long walks on the beach.” Today, photos from the “too slow” series are featured on Wikipedia pages in eight languages and get more than 200,000 annual views.

A quick search of “high five wikipedia photo” shows that the images are an object of fascination for many others besides me. People around the world have noted that the pair looks a lot like Rachel and Chandler from Friends. But not everyone is a fan. In 2020, one particularly passionate Wikipedia user named Kugihot suggested the photos be removed because they were “simply a waste of precious Wikipedia public bytes.”

Writing on the article’s talk page, the forum where editors discuss the article at hand, the critic went on: “My main concern that is especially out of place to me is the final image which depicts the use of finger guns, which is arguably completely and utterly irrelevant in the context of different variations of high fives.”

To me, the fact that the photos inspired such extreme pedantry speaks to their power.

«

And so she decided to try to find the two people in the article. Were they an article then before they became part of an article? Might they be now? Being an icon can be a lot of pressure down the years.
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Electrical network frequency analysis • Wikipedia

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Electrical network frequency (ENF) analysis is an audio forensics technique for validating audio recordings by comparing frequency changes in background mains hum in the recording with long-term high-precision historical records of mains frequency changes from a database. In effect the mains hum signal is treated as if it were a time-dependent digital watermark that can help identify when the recording was created, detect edits in the recording, or disprove tampering of a recording. Historical records of mains frequency changes are kept on record, e.g., by police in the German federal state of Bavaria since 2010 and the United Kingdom Metropolitan Police since 2005.

The technology has been hailed as “the most significant development in audio forensics since Watergate.” However, according to a paper by Huijbregtse and Geradts, the ENF technique, although powerful, has significant limitations caused by ambiguity based on fixed frequency offsets during recording, and self-similarity within the mains frequency database, particularly for recordings shorter than 10 minutes.

More recently, researchers demonstrated that indoor lights such as fluorescent lights and incandescent bulbs vary their light intensity in accordance with the voltage supplied, which in turn depends on the voltage supply frequency. As a result, the light intensity can carry the frequency fluctuation information to the visual sensor recordings in a similar way as the electromagnetic waves from the power transmission lines carry the ENF information to audio sensing mechanisms.

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Since I was wondering last week what use monitoring your mains frequency would be.. at least it’s useful to some people. (Still not sure that personally monitoring your own has that much benefit.) (Thanks @Reynolds.)
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Coronavirus: as BA.2 subvariant of Omicron rises, lab studies point to signs of severity • CNN

Brenda Goodman:

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The BA.2 virus – a subvariant of the Omicron coronavirus variant – isn’t just spreading faster than its distant cousin, it may also cause more severe disease and appears capable of thwarting some of the key weapons we have against Covid-19, new research suggests.

New lab experiments from Japan show that BA.2 may have features that make it as capable of causing serious illness as older variants of Covid-19, including Delta.

And like Omicron, it appears to largely escape the immunity created by vaccines. A booster shot restores protection, making illness after infection about 74% less likely. BA.2 is also resistant to some treatments, including sotrovimab, the monoclonal antibody that’s currently being used against Omicron.

The findings were posted Wednesday as a preprint study on the bioRxiv server, before peer review…

“It might be, from a human’s perspective, a worse virus than BA.1 and might be able to transmit better and cause worse disease,” says Dr. Daniel Rhoads, section head of microbiology at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. Rhoads reviewed the study but was not involved in the research.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is keeping close watch on BA.2, said its director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky.

“There is no evidence that the BA.2 lineage is more severe than the BA.1 lineage. CDC continues to monitor variants that are circulating both domestically and internationally,” she said Friday.

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There’s no evidence in humans. The Japanese paper infected hamsters and looked “surrogate markers for bronchoconstriction or airway obstruction”. Very unconfirmed.
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Why I will never buy another Samsung device • Medium

Juhani Lehtimäki:

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I needed to replace my aging Pixel 4 and after watching Marques’ video I decided to face my old dislike and go for a Samsung device. The [foldable] form factor definitely made the phone interesting, although costly.

The phone arrived and to my surprise Samsung software had become bearable, even likable over the years since I last tried it. I swapped out my Pixel and the Flip became my daily driver. I started to really like the phone. Foldables will definitely have a place in the future line-up of smartphones. All was looking good and in 3 months in I was happy with my purchase. But then…

One day, I took the phone out of my pocket and the screen had a black part in the middle and the top half no longer responded to touch. When I got home the black part has expanded and kept growing. The screen clearly had failed from the fold. But hey, no worries, I had not dropped the phone, it was in case and I’ve only used the phone the way I’ve always used my other phones.

So I’ll just send it to Samsung for repairs and all is good. Folding is still new tech so shit happens, I didn’t really mind.. until I received a response from Samsung repair:

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We regret that your Samsung SM-F711BZGEEUB could not be repaired under warranty.
Based on the information you have provided, we have contacted our service partner to obtain more detailed information regarding the repair.
During the technical inspection of your device, the technician was able to determine that in addition to the display, the frame is also broken and that this damage is due to a mechanical impact, such as a fall, bending or excessive pressure.

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It’s pretty dramatically bad for a phone that cost €1,099. Samsung will fix the screen for €304. But his real argument is that for such an early product, making early adopters bear the downside won’t encourage adoption.
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Google should kill Stadia • Ars Technica

Ron Amadeo:

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Google CEO Sundar Pichai opened the Stadia announcement by touting the worldwide scale of Google’s cloud, saying:

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Our custom server hardware and data centers can bring more computing power to more people on planet Earth than anyone else. Today, we are in 19 regions and in over 200 countries and territories connected by hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber optic cables.

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Google is a massive cloud computing company that has servers all over the world. So Stadia is available all over the world, right?

Not exactly. Stadia certainly isn’t available in “over 200 countries.” It’s available in just 22 countries, or about 10% of the scale Pichai heavily implied Google could work at.

Until recently, Stadia’s home inside Google has been the hardware division, with project leader Phil Harrison reporting to Google Hardware SVP Rick Osterloh. Google is actually pretty bad at competing on an international scale, and every Google Hardware product is capped at about 20 countries. It is strange that Stadia, a cloud service, ended up in the hardware division, but that’s where Google decided to put it. The company really wants people to use its game controller and Chromecast media players, so Stadia is limited to the small list of countries Google is willing to sell hardware in. (If you compare the Google Hardware country list to the Stadia country list, they are essentially the same.)

To be fair, international business is hard. Can any of Google’s competitors match Stadia’s 22-country distribution list?

Nvidia’s GeForce Now is available in 82 countries. Xbox Cloud Gaming—which is still labeled a “beta”—is available in 26 countries. Google is in third place. PlayStation Now—the most neglected service on our list (though it is reportedly due for a big update)—works in 19 countries. Google has Amazon Luna soundly beat, at least. That service is still in an invite-only “early access” and is available in one country, the United States.

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Amadeo is frequently brutal about Google products and services, which must hurt the Google PR folk as he’s Ars Technica’s Google correspondent. There’s a lot more to this article, but he develops his case solidly.
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Being a Facebook Metaverse ‘Community Guide’ seems like a nightmare job • Vice

Emanuel Maiberg:

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Imagine you had to moderate a Facebook comment thread, only each commenter was able to come up to you, wave their hands in your face, and scream whatever they want.

That’s what some moderators of Facebook virtual reality platform Horizon Worlds are dealing with, and it looks just as nightmarish as it sounds. 

“Trying to not smash my headset, like in frustration,” one Horizon Worlds Community Guide with the screen name Peanutbutter can be heard saying in a TikTok uploaded by @vrpranksters after interacting with a bunch of kids fighting and screaming over a virtual boomerang. 

“Shhhh, can you guys stop?” Peanutbutter asks the screaming kids as he floats away to a quiet corner and attempts to help an older man navigate Horizon Worlds’ menus. “Please, I’m trying to actually help an adult here.” 

Peanutbutter sighs loudly and approaches the group of kids. “You guys know you’re not supposed to hit each other in here and yet you’re doing it?” he asks.

Most people don’t know this because they don’t have virtual reality headsets, but Facebook isn’t just talking about the “metaverse” and selling Oculus devices. It is actively letting people create virtual reality spaces and hosting its own with a flagship VR platform it calls Horizon Worlds.

Facebook says that Horizon Worlds allows users to find and create “communities” in VR, which understandably requires what the company calls “Community Guides,” people who appear in these spaces in order to help users who are new to VR and also do some basic moderation. 

«

You can see the video at this tweet. It does indeed look like a nightmarish task.
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EU accuses China of ‘power grab’ over smartphone technology licensing • Financial Times

Andy Bounds:

»

The EU is taking China to the World Trade Organization for alleged patent infringements that are costing companies billions of euros, as part of what officials in Brussels claim is a “power grab” by Beijing to set smartphone technology licensing rates.

Businesses, including Sweden’s Ericsson, Finland’s Nokia and Sharp of Japan, have lost money after China’s supreme court banned them from protecting their patents by securing licensing deals in foreign courts, the European Commission said.

Chinese courts set licence fees at around half the market rate previously agreed between western technology providers and manufacturers such as Oppo, Xiaomi, ZTE and Huawei, it added.

“It is part of a global power grab by the Chinese government by legal means,” said a European Commission official. “It is a means to push Europe out.”

Smartphone makers have agreed global standards for telecommunications networks. In return, technology manufacturers must license their patents to others. If they cannot agree on a price, they go to court to set it. Chinese courts generally set prices at half the level of those in the west, meaning their companies pay less for the technology from overseas providers.

In August 2020, China’s Supreme People’s Court decided that Chinese courts can impose “anti-suit injunctions”, which forbid a company taking a case to a court outside the country. Those that do are liable for a €130,000 daily fine and the judgments of courts elsewhere are ignored.

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Patents are a sort of intellectual property supply chain for smartphones in particular, and the disputes get very vicious and nationalistic.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Has Covid become like smoking – a personally avoidable cause of illness and death? CC-licensed photo by Susan Jane Golding 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. In search of the missing link? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

How a Saudi woman’s iPhone revealed hacking around the world • Reuters via Yahoo

Joel Schectman and Christopher Bing:

»

A single activist helped turn the tide against NSO Group, one of the world’s most sophisticated spyware companies now facing a cascade of legal action and scrutiny in Washington over damaging new allegations that its software was used to hack government officials and dissidents around the world.

It all started with a software glitch on her iPhone.

An unusual error in NSO’s spyware allowed Saudi women’s rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul and privacy researchers to discover a trove of evidence suggesting the Israeli spyware maker had helped hack her iPhone, according to six people involved in the incident. A mysterious fake image file within her phone, mistakenly left behind by the spyware, tipped off security researchers.

The discovery on al-Hathloul’s phone last year ignited a storm of legal and government action that has put NSO on the defensive. How the hack was initially uncovered is reported here for the first time.

Al-Hathloul, one of Saudi Arabia’s most prominent activists, is known for helping lead a campaign to end the ban on women drivers in Saudi Arabia. She was released from jail in February 2021 on charges of harming national security.

Soon after her release from jail, the activist received an email from Google warning her that state-backed hackers had tried to penetrate her Gmail account. Fearful that her iPhone had been hacked as well, al-Hathloul contacted the Canadian privacy rights group Citizen Lab and asked them to probe her device for evidence, three people close to al-Hathloul told Reuters.

After six months of digging through her iPhone records, Citizen Lab researcher Bill Marczak made what he described as an unprecedented discovery: a malfunction in the surveillance software implanted on her phone had left a copy of the malicious image file, rather than deleting itself, after stealing the messages of its target.

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Again, the NSO Group’s work is – viewed without context – amazing. But the uses made of it are depressing.
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Latest success from Google’s AI group: controlling a fusion reactor • Ars Technica

John Timmer:

»

Since setting the AI loose on actual hardware during the training process could be a disaster, the team started out with a tokamak simulator specific for the Swiss Plasma Center hardware. This was largely accurate, and they programmed limits into the AI that kept it from directing the plasma into a configuration where the simulator produced inaccurate results. DeepMind then trained a deep-reinforcement-learning program to reach a variety of plasma configurations by letting it control the simulator.

During training, an intervening layer of software provided a reward function that indicated how close the plasma’s properties were to the desired state. Another algorithm, termed a “critic,” learned the expected rewards for various changes to the tokamak’s control magnets. These were used by the actual control neural network to learn which actions it should take.

The critic was elaborate and computationally expensive, but it was only used during the training portion. When training was done, the control algorithm had learned which actions to take to reach a variety of states, and the critic could be discarded.

In order to allow real-time performance, the trained controller was bundled as an executable. The standard control software would be used to activate the tokamak and bring a plasma up to high energies. Once the plasma was stable, it handed off control to the AI.

The resulting software performed pretty much as you would want it to when set loose on actual hardware. The software could control experimental runs that targeted different conditions over time—in one test case, it ramped up the energy, held the plasma steady, then altered the plasma’s geometry, then relocated the plasma within the tokamak before ramping the energy back down. In another, it held two separate plasma structures in the same tokamak simultaneously.

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Here’s the Nature paper on the work. Though isn’t the real target to let the AI find entirely new ways to do things, so it surpasses what humans can program directly (as with Go)? You want to trammel it so it doesn’t loose the plasma on the surroundings, but who knows what the right way to control a tokomak really is?
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COVID is more like smoking than the flu • The Atlantic

Benjamin Mazer:

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The pandemic’s greatest source of danger has transformed from a pathogen into a behavior. Choosing not to get vaccinated against COVID is, right now, a modifiable health risk on par with smoking, which kills more than 400,000 people each year in the United States. Andrew Noymer, a public-health professor at UC Irvine, told me that if COVID continues to account for a few hundred thousand American deaths every year—“a realistic worst-case scenario,” he calls it—that would wipe out all of the life-expectancy gains we’ve accrued from the past two decades’ worth of smoking-prevention efforts.

The COVID vaccines are, without exaggeration, among the safest and most effective therapies in all of modern medicine. An unvaccinated adult is an astonishing 68 times more likely to die from COVID than a boosted one. Yet widespread vaccine hesitancy in the United States has caused more than 163,000 preventable deaths and counting. Because too few people are vaccinated, COVID surges still overwhelm hospitals—interfering with routine medical services and leading to thousands of lives lost from other conditions. If everyone who is eligible were triply vaccinated, our health-care system would be functioning normally again. (We do have other methods of protection—antiviral pills and monoclonal antibodies—but these remain in short supply and often fail to make their way to the highest-risk patients.) Countries such as Denmark and Sweden have already declared themselves broken up with COVID. They are confidently doing so not because the virus is no longer circulating or because they’ve achieved mythical herd immunity from natural infection; they’ve simply inoculated enough people.

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The US, by contrast, hasn’t, which is quite the example of how political polarisation and wilful refusal to understand things can hold a country back.
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Mean screens • VideoWeek

Evan Shapiro:

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The data shows pretty clearly that the era of “Connected TV Devices” is coming to an end, and the era of “Connected TVs ONLY” has started. Last year the largest growth for streaming content, by far, was on smart TVs, with direct connections to web-based apps. All but one of the connected TV devices lost streaming market share in 2021. Streaming devices, as a whole, lost two percentage points of the streaming share market last year, whereas CTVs as a group increased by 37%.

Yes, Roku includes dongles in their universe of 55 million CTV homes and commands a huge share of the streaming TV market, with 31.8% worldwide, 41% in the US, and 12% growth in 2021. But a good percentage of Roku’s streaming use comes from their Roku-powered TCL CTVs, which do not use the Roku dongle, but rather their operating system inside the TVs. Considering the overall loss of share among the device cohort, we can extrapolate that their increase was weighted heavily towards the CTVs.

Meanwhile, Samsung and LG CTVs saw substantial increases, and Android/Google TV garnered the largest increase at 42%. Consumers are buying new TVs, and each comes out of the box with the most-used apps pre-installed and ready to use. The downside of the inexpensive dongles sold in the last five years is that they are easily forsaken when a new, shiny TV arrives. Considering those 250 million sets sold every year, and the billion to come out by the end of 2025, this shift from dongles and devices to smart TVs and operating system platforms is quite likely not an anomaly, but a trend that will accelerate every month of each year.

Beyond this major development, though, there are some significant signs of major battle fronts in the screen wars. Roku’s partner TCL launched six new Google TVs in August 2021. Additionally, Sony launched a slew of Google TV powered sets last year. Chromecast saw zero% growth in 2021 and has been losing market share steadily for years. It seems quite clear that Alphabet has moved on from their dongle and is now focusing nearly exclusively on their CTV OS. I have spoken to regional CTV makers around the world, who emphatically confirm this strategy, reporting significant deals with Google, and huge increases in TV sales share for Google-powered sets.

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The unreasonable math of Type 1 diabetes • Maori Geek

Graham Jenson:

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In January 2022, our 18 month old son, Sam, was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes (T1D). This was stressful, sad, and scary as we spent 5 days in hospital with him while he recovered from Diabetic Keto Acidosis (DKA). Within an hour of him being diagnosed a wonderful diabetes nurse gave us a literal backpack filled with books and information we needed to learn to keep him alive. We started to read and try to understand what it takes to manage T1D. Immediately the massive cognitive overhead it takes to just survive with this condition hit us.

I find the best way to learn something is to try explain it to someone else. This post is me trying to explain the maths involved in managing T1D, with a few small rants about how crap it is.

Insulin is a molecule created by the pancreas that lets glucose from blood enter cells to be used as energy. T1D is an autoimmune disease where the immune system attacks the insulin creating cells until the pancreas stops creating insulin altogether. T1D means you have a faulty pancreas; there is no cure, no diet that fixes it and you don’t grow out of it. It is a lifelong condition that you have to manage 24 hours a day.

Glucose enters the blood when you eat basically anything, but especially carbohydrates. Without insulin glucose will build up in the blood, eventually causing your body to enter a state called Diabetic Keto Acidosis (DKA), then coma, then death. Insulin must be added to lower the amount of glucose in the blood. Too much insulin and your glucose level will go too low and you go Hypoglycaemic (hypo), then coma, then death.

Managing T1D is walking on a knifes edge between DKA and Hypoglycemia by balancing blood glucose levels with insulin.

«

He illustrates this by explaining how there are different units for all this, and you have to figure it out in a dynamic system where different foods are absorbed at different rates. Maddening. Unless…
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FDA clears first smartphone app for insulin delivery • The Verge

Nicole Westman:

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The Food and Drug Administration cleared a smartphone app from Tandem Diabetes Care to program insulin delivery for its t:slim X2 insulin pump, the company announced Wednesday. It’s the first phone app for both iOS and Android to able to deliver insulin, the company said in a statement. Previously, delivery had to be handled through the pump itself.

With this update, pump users will be able to program or cancel bolus doses of insulin, which are taken at mealtimes and are crucial in keeping blood glucose levels under control. “Giving a meal bolus is now the most common reason a person interacts with their pump, and the ability to do so using a smartphone app offers a convenient and discrete solution,” John Sheridan, president and CEO of Tandem Diabetes Care, said in a statement.

The change could be a big improvement for people who prefer not to have pumps out in pubic settings or attach them to undergarments like bras.

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Impressive. Now all that needs to happen is for insulin prices in the US to be reduced.
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New FBI unit will focus on cryptocurrency exploitation • Decipher

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the FBI is forming a new unit dedicated to investigating abuses of cryptocurrencies, and the Department of Justice is launching a new International Virtual Currency Initiative to work with law enforcement, prosecutors, and cryptocurrency platforms to trace ransom payments and develop regulations and anti-money laundering legislation.

The new initiatives mark a further escalation of the U.S. government’s campaign against ransomware groups, which has accelerated quite a bit in the last year. In October, the Justice Department announced the formation of the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team (NCET), a group that now comprises 12 attorneys. On Thursday, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco announced that Eun Young Choi, a highly experienced cybersecurity prosecutor, has been appointed the director of the NCET, which will work closely with the new Virtual Asset Exploitation unit at the FBI.

Monaco pointed to the department’s seizure last week of more than $3.6bn in Bitcoin that was stolen during the hack of Bitfinex several years ago as the type of work that the new teams can do.

“We’re focusing our collective efforts on the abuse of cryptocurrencies. A unified effort on things like money laundering requires our combined efforts and multiple eyes from law enforcement on these issues,” Monaco said during a keynote at the Munich Security Conference.

“Given what we did last week, we are sending the clear message that cryptocurrencies should not be considered a safe haven.”

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There’s a good thread by Felix Salmon (on one page) about how the $3.6bn seizure was enabled by KYC/AML (know your customer/anti-money laundering) regulations that have been placed around the crypto exchanges which mean you can buy crypto, but selling it for fiat (especially dollars) is a different matter.
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The EU’s AI rules will likely take over a year to be agreed • AI News

Ryan Daws:

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Rules governing the use of artificial intelligence across the EU will likely take over a year to be agreed upon.

Last year, the European Commission drafted AI laws. While the US and China are set to dominate AI development with their vast resources, economic might, and light-touch regulation, European rivals – including the UK and EU members – believe they can lead in ethical standards.

In the draft of the EU regulations, companies that are found guilty of AI misuse face a fine of €30m or 6% of their global turnover (whichever is greater). The risk of such fines has been criticised as driving investments away from Europe.

The EU’s draft AI regulation classifies systems into three risk categories:

• Limited risk – includes systems like chatbots, inventory management, spam filters, and video games
• High risk – includes systems that make vital decisions like evaluating creditworthiness, recruitment, justice administration, and biometric identification in non-public spaces
• Unacceptable risk – includes systems that are manipulative or exploitative, create social scoring, or conduct real-time biometric authentication in public spaces for law enforcement.

Unacceptable risk systems will face a blanket ban from deployment in the EU while limited risk will require minimal oversight.

Organisations deploying high-risk AI systems would be required to have things like:

Human oversight; a risk-management system; record keeping and logging; transparency to users; data governance and management; conformity assessment; government registration.

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One year is pretty rapid by EU standards. There’s a huge gap between the “limited” and “high” risk systems there. One wonders what the edge cases will be.
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My journey down the rabbit hole of every journalist’s favorite app • POLITICO

Phelim Kine on otter.ai, a fabulous transcription app that saves journalists huge amounts of time transcribing interviews:

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“The fact that these AI-powered services exist and can turn a couple hours of audio into a reasonable written transcript often in a matter of minutes is a complete game changer,” Susan McGregor, researcher at Columbia University’s Data Science Institute, said of transcription apps. “These run on machine learning, which means that they expose your data to the algorithm that is both transcribing your text and almost certainly using your text and audio to improve the quality of future transcription.”

Otter and its competitors, which include Descript, Rev, Temi and the U.K.-based Trint, are digital warehouses whose advantages of speed and convenience are bracketed by what experts say can be lax privacy and security protections that may endanger sensitive text and audio data, the identities of reporters and the potentially vulnerable sources they contact.

Trint, Otter, Temi and Rev all claim compliance with all or part of the user data protection and storage standards of the European Union’s flagship data privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation. But cybersecurity experts say that the sharing of user data with third parties creates privacy and security vulnerabilities.

Otter “shares your personal data with a whole host of people, including mobile advertising tracking providers, so it strikes me that there’s an awful lot of personal data and the potential for leakage of sources for journalists,” said Paul Rosenzweig, former deputy assistant secretary for policy in the Department of Homeland Security, and founder of Red Branch Consulting. “They also quite clearly say that they respond to legal obligation [law enforcement data requests], so any journalist who transcribes an interview with a confidential source and puts it up on Otter has got to live with the possibility that Otter will wind up giving that transcript to the FBI.”

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But, as Otter also explained, it might do that for law enforcement in other countries. Caveat transcriptor.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A number of people who, like Six Million Dollar Man Steve Austin, got bionic eyes have had them fail after the company lost interest. CC-licensed photo by Mike Mozart on Flickr.

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

A selection of 11 links for you. Very windswept. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Why you can’t rebuild Wikipedia with crypto • Platformer

Casey Newton interviews Molly White, creator of web3 Is Going Just Great:

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Newton: You’re a longtime editor and administrator of Wikipedia, which is often presented by crypto people as a web3 dream project: a decentralized public good operated by its community. And yet something tells me you think about decentralization and community very differently than they do. How do your experiences at Wikipedia shape the way you view web3? 

White: I think my experiences with the Wikimedia community have given me a pretty realistic view of how wonderful but also how difficult community-run projects can be. There are some issues that community-driven projects are prone to running up against: deciding issues when the community is split, dealing with abuse and harassment within the community, handling outside players with a strong interest in influencing what the community does. I think this is partly why some of the best critics of web3 have backgrounds in communities like Wikimedia and open source—they are familiar with the challenges that community governance and decentralization can bring. When I watch DAOs spring into existence and encounter a lot of the same difficulties we’ve seen over and over again, I often find myself wondering how many members have ever been involved in community-run projects in the past. I think a lot of people are dipping their toes in for the first time, and learning a lot of things the hard way, with very high stakes.

Web3 also adds an enormous amount of complexity on top of the already-complex types of issues that the Wikimedia community has faced, because there’s money involved. The non-profit Wikimedia Foundation handles most of the finances with respect to Wikipedia, and so although the community has input, it’s largely not a day-to-day concern. There also aren’t really intrinsic monetary incentives for people to contribute to Wikipedia, which I think is a very good thing.

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It certainly is notable that strong critics of web3 (David Gerard, White) are longtime Wikipedia contributors. As she says, they know how this all goes wrong.
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Their bionic eyes are now obsolete – and unsupported • IEEE Spectrum

Eliza Strickland and Mark Harris:

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Barbara Campbell was walking through a New York City subway station during rush hour when her world abruptly went dark. For four years, Campbell had been using a high-tech implant in her left eye that gave her a crude kind of bionic vision, partially compensating for the genetic disease that had rendered her completely blind in her 30s. “I remember exactly where I was: I was switching from the 6 train to the F train,” Campbell tells IEEE Spectrum. “I was about to go down the stairs, and all of a sudden I heard a little ‘beep, beep, beep’ sound.”

It wasn’t her phone battery running out. It was her Argus II retinal implant system powering down. The patches of light and dark that she’d been able to see with the implant’s help vanished.

Terry Byland is the only person to have received this kind of implant in both eyes. He got the first-generation Argus I implant, made by the company Second Sight Medical Products, in his right eye in 2004 and the subsequent Argus II implant in his left 11 years later. He helped the company test the technology, spoke to the press movingly about his experiences, and even met Stevie Wonder at a conference. “[I] went from being just a person that was doing the testing to being a spokesman,” he remembers.

Yet in 2020, Byland had to find out secondhand that the company had abandoned the technology and was on the verge of going bankrupt. While his two-implant system is still working, he doesn’t know how long that will be the case. “As long as nothing goes wrong, I’m fine,” he says. “But if something does go wrong with it, well, I’m screwed. Because there’s no way of getting it fixed.”

…After Second Sight discontinued its retinal implant in 2019 and nearly went out of business in 2020, a public offering in June 2021 raised $57.5m at $5 per share. The company promised to focus on its ongoing clinical trial of a brain implant, called Orion, that also provides artificial vision. But its stock price plunged to around $1.50, and in February 2022, just before this article was published, the company announced a proposed merger with an early-stage biopharmaceutical company called Nano Precision Medical (NPM). None of Second Sight’s executives will be on the leadership team of the new company, which will focus on developing NPM’s novel implant for drug delivery.

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Quite the dilemma for people who could benefit from this. (And a terrific piece of reporting by Strickland and Harris.) It’s why you’d want a bigger health organisation as an intermediary between patient and company to guarantee some sort of pipeline. (In the UK, the NHS usually fulfils that role.)
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Meta CEO Zuckerberg promotes Nick Clegg to lead on policy issues • Reuters

Elizabeth Culliford:

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Meta Platforms Inc CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post on Wednesday that he had promoted policy chief Nick Clegg into a larger role to lead on all policy matters, signaling less involvement from Zuckerberg in the area.

“We need a senior leader at the level of myself (for our products) and Sheryl (for our business) who can lead and represent us for all of our policy issues globally,” Zuckerberg wrote, referring to Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg.

Clegg, who was a British deputy prime minister from 2010 to 2015, joined Facebook in 2018 to run its global policy organization. He has led on issues like Facebook’s content policy and elections and spearheaded its establishment of the company’s independent content oversight board.

“Nick will now lead our company on all our policy matters, including how we interact with governments as they consider adopting new policies and regulations, as well as how we make the case publicly for our products and our work,” Zuckerberg said in the post.

The CEO said the change would allow him to focus more on leading the company as it builds new products while Sandberg focused on the success of its business.

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So two people above him, both more powerful. Essentially the same dynamic as when he was deputy, and the much smarter George Osborne was Chancellor and David Cameron, the better politician, was PM.

Clegg has climbed the not-so-greasy pole at Facebook very quickly by being a magnificent sponge – he’s the one rolled out to be punched in the press, and soon no doubt in Congress – but he’s never going to be in Sandberg’s role. Or Zuck’s, of course.
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Revealed: the 11 slides that finally convinced Boris Johnson about global warming • Carbon Brief

Daisy Dunne, Josh Gabbatiss, Leo Hickman, Robert McSweeney and Ayesha Tandon:

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A scientific briefing that UK prime minister Boris Johnson says changed his mind about global warming has been made public for the first time, following a freedom-of-information (FOI) request by Carbon Brief.

Last year, on the eve of the UK hosting COP26 in Glasgow, Johnson described tackling climate change as the country’s “number one international priority”. He also published a net-zero strategy and told other countries at the UN General Assembly to “grow up” when it comes to global warming.

However, just a few years earlier, Johnson was publicly doubting established climate science. For example, in a Daily Telegraph column published in 2015 he claimed unusual winter heat had “nothing to do with global warming”. And, in 2013, he said he had an “open mind” to the idea that the Earth was heading for a mini ice-age.

Last year, acknowledging his past climate scepticism, Johnson told journalists that he had now changed his mind, largely due to a scientific briefing he received shortly after becoming prime minister in 2019.

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It is definitely a scientific briefing (there’s an explanation of each slide too), and there’s also a useful set of emails from the runup where the scientists are discussing what to include. Quite a good example of “figure out who you’re trying to persuade, of what” though they could also have done “his new squeeze is probably going to be helpful in persuading him.”
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Meta’s Foo Fighters SuperBowl VR concert failed in the most basic ways • TechRadar

Hamish Hector:

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Most online events, particularly those on a grand scale like this Foo Fighters concert [on Sunday night], allow people to enter a virtual waiting room before the officially posted start time – typically opening this up about 30 minutes before showtime. 

This prevents there being a huge impact on the servers with users flooding in all at once, which reduces the likelihood of participants experiencing crashes.

Meta decided to opt for a different strategy. As reported by Bye, no one could join the event until the well-advertised 8pm PT start time rolled around, and the pre-recorded concert began just five minutes later at 8:05pm. 

At 8pm, more than 61,000 eager people would have received an invite to join the Foo Fighter’s After Show (roughly the number of people who registered their interest ahead of time), and, unsurprisingly, the lobby crashed due to the influx of users who tried to join in one big push.

Bye highlighted that there were other ways to jump into the concert through the Horizon Venues app, but this seems to have not been an intuitive solution for users or issues persisted there. At its peak, the max number of VR viewers only reached around 13,000 – less than a quarter of the people who wanted to attend.

Quest users who were able to join found themselves watching a prerecorded video of a concert, with sub-optimal viewing angles and camera operators walking about the stage. This made some feel like the Foo Fighters After Show was not the VR-first experience that had been promised. 

In response to complaints on Twitter the VP of Horizon, Vivek Sharma, cited that problems were caused by “unprecedented” demand. Adding that further opportunities to see the show would be available for those who missed out the first time.

However, we find these excuses to be pretty weak coming from a multi-billion dollar company – especially one that has been heavily advertising this concert and its VR services in the run-up to, and during, the Super Bowl.

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Makes the metaverse even weirder if gigs start on time there.
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A crucial clue in the $4.5bn bitcoin heist: a $500 Walmart gift card • WSJ

James Fanelli, Ben Foldy and Dustin Volz:

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Every transaction of bitcoin is recorded in a public ledger for anyone to see—resulting in huge volumes of data. Analyzing their patterns can reveal groups that seem to share a common source or connection. Court documents show federal agents used software tools to sift through the data in search of connections and patterns, a process called cluster analysis.

One cluster of bitcoin addresses, identified in court filings as 36B6mu, caught investigators’ attention.

On May 3, 2020, a fraction of a bitcoin went from the cluster to an exchange that sells prepaid gift cards. In return, a $500 gift card for Walmart was sent to a Russian-registered email. The transaction, however, was conducted via an IP address linked to a cloud service provider in New York that investigators linked to Mr. Lichtenstein, according to the agents.

Portions of the gift card, filings said, were then redeemed through Walmart’s phone app. Three purchases were conducted online using Ms. Morgan’s name, using one of her emails, and the couple’s apartment address was provided for delivery.

Between February of 2019 and December 2020, bitcoin worth about $7.8 million today flowed through the cluster to and from accounts at various crypto exchanges that investigators said in court documents are tied to Mr. Lichtenstein and Ms. Morgan.

Investigating agents in January 2021 asked U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui in Washington to issue a warrant to search email accounts connected to the couple. Judge Faruqui approved the warrant in August, noting the public nature of the blockchain ledger meant that those using it had no constitutional right to privacy.

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Great thing when you’re committing your crimes in full sight, and it’s only the names that need to be found.
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Google Search is dying • DKB

“dkb”:

»

If you’ve tried to search for a recipe or product review recently, I don’t need to tell you that Google search results have gone to shit. You would have already noticed that the first few non-ad results are SEO optimized sites filled with affiliate links and ads.

Google still gives decent results for many other categories, especially when it comes to factual information. You might think that Google results are pretty good for you, and you have no idea what I’m talking about.

What you don’t realize is that you’ve been self-censoring yourself from searching most of the things you would have wanted to search. You already know subconsciously that Google isn’t going to return a good result.

I’m far from the only one who thinks Google is dying…

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Yes, you’ve heard it a few times before. But there’s a Redditor who has a fairly good explanation:

»

I think I understand what this article is trying to say. It’s not saying that Google’s search technology is worse or that people don’t use Google to search. It’s saying that people trust less of the results Google shows compared to seeing discussions of it on Reddit.

For instance, if I’m looking to see reviews of the Honda Civic 2022 or whatever, I actually do find myself typing “Honda Civic review reddit” instead of “Honda Civic review”. This is because I want to see what real people and enthusiasts (on r/cars or whatever) are talking about the car, rather than the top results at Google which are basically just paid reviews advertising the car anyway.

Even though I kinda know people in Reddit are just as capable of spouting BS that are completely wrong, I find the discussions more authentic anyway than the corporate speak the “big websites” have on their articles that Google shows me.

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Google plans Android privacy change similar to Apple’s • CNBC

Jessica Bursztynsky:

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Google said it’s developing new privacy-focused replacements for its advertising ID, a unique string of characters that identifies the user’s device. The digital IDs in smartphones often help ad-tech companies track and share information about consumers.

The changes could impact big companies that have relied on tracking users across apps, like Facebook-parent Meta. Apple’s tweaks hit Meta particularly hard, for example. Meta said earlier this month Apple’s privacy changes will decrease the social media company’s sales this year by about $10 billion. That news contributed to wiping $232bn from the company’s market cap in a single day, eventually pushing the company’s below $600bn. Meta was worth more than $1 trillion back in June 2021.

But while Meta fought against Apple’s changes, it seems supportive of the way Google plans to implement its privacy tweaks.

“Encouraging to see this long-term, collaborative approach to privacy-protective personalized advertising from Google,” Graham Mudd, vice president of product marketing, ads and business at Facebook said on Twitter.

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Maybe curb your enthusiasm on this, as it’s not coming for (at least) two years. And Facebook’s reaction – well, don’t forget that Google and Facebook are presently facing a lot of scrutiny over solid-looking claims that they colluded over ad pricing.
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Accurately track your mains frequency • Hackaday

Jenny List:

»

Depending upon where in the world you live, AC mains frequency is either 50Hz or 60Hz, and that frequency is maintained accurately enough over time that it can be used as a time reference for a clock. Oddly it’s rarely exactly that figure though, instead it varies slightly with load on the network and the operators will adjust it to keep a constant frequency over a longer period. These small variations in frequency can easily be measured, and [jp3141] has created a circuit that does exactly that.

It’s a surprisingly straightforward device, in which a Teensy takes its power supply from a very conventional if now a little old-school mains transformer, rectifier, and regulator. A sample of the AC from the transformer passes through a low-pass filer and a clamp, and thence to the Teensy where it is fed into one of the on-board comparators from which its period is measured using one of the timers.

«

You absolutely are not recommended to try this, unless you’re pretty confident about messing about with mains power. Also, this might be more for the US than UK/Europe.

What I find telling about it though is the implicit desire it fulfils to measure absolutely everything that can be measured, no matter whether it makes the slightest difference to your life, or whether you can do anything about it.
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Fantastical update adds cloud-based scheduling features • Six Colours

Jason Snell:

»

Finding a common time when a group of people can meet has been a recurring theme of my life for a couple of decades now. Back in the old days, it was often finding common times for project meetings at work. For more than a decade, it has also included scheduling podcast episodes with a disparate group of panelists. And as an independent type person, I often need to schedule Zoom meetings with a random collection of people in different time zones with different schedules.

My calendar app has never really done this job well, so I’ve used a bunch of web-based tools to facilitate this work, most notably Doodle and (more recently) StrawPoll. As of last week, though, my calendar app does do this—because last week Flexibits announced Fantastical 3.6, an update to its subscription-based calendar app that adds a new web-based scheduler.

Fantastical’s scheduler works both ways. If you’re trying to find a common time, you can create an event with multiple possible times, and then generate a link to send to potential participants. They can respond on the web with the times they’re available, and—this is maybe my favorite part—you can see their responses right within Fantastical.

«

I’ve been using Fantastical (it’s a Mac app) for years – I like the fact that it gives you a little calendar accessible from the menu bar, into which you can add appointments etc. I don’t greatly like its determination to parse any use of “at” or similar prepositions into a location, or attempts to deduce dates I haven’t entered, but it’s tolerable for that.

Adding scheduling (it previously added weather) seems like another step closer to the point where, like all apps, it adds messaging.
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Happy Valentine’s Day from Facebook. Here’s a photo of you and your ex • McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

Emily Kling:

»

You really loved that wine bar. Look at how happy you were. And is it just us or is your body snatched in this pic? Do you still own that blouse? Oh, right, it doesn’t fit anymore. Just like your ex, it’s gone now.

What happened anyway? I mean, we’re Facebook; we, of course, know what happened. We’ve read the private messages between your ex-boyfriend and your best friend. Pretty steamy. But also, what happened to you? Bummer that you never fully moved on.

Wonder how your ex is doing? Just hover over his name to enlarge his new profile picture. He is still cute and athletic. Did you know he was training to run the marathon? You were always trying to convince him to get back into running. Well, he’s finally done it. And yes, he’s still with your best friend. Sorry, ex-best friend! Our bad.

Here are some pics of them at that vineyard you love. You were right about that place. So romantic. The perfect spot to get engaged. No argument there from your ex. Check out that diamond. Talk about blinding. Quite the rock. And on such a dainty little finger too.

«

Satire so sharp you could cut your wrists on it. (Via John Naughton)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: Barry T points out, re yesterday’s article about the man with Covid for 14 months, that immunocompromised people aren’t the only way that variants emerge (and possibly not even the major way). There’s also human-animal-human passage, and others.

In Siberia, global heating is turning permafrost into occasional slush – with dramatic results for buildings and the future climate. CC-licensed photo by Adam Jones 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. Windswept. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation • Slow Boring

Matthew Yglesias:

»

When I went on The Joe Rogan Experience in early December of 2020, he surprised me by veering way off-topic to do vaccine-skeptical takes.

Since this is not what my book is about and isn’t something I had professional background covering, I was not prepared to rebut his talking points effectively. That’s especially true because, at the time, the Covid-19 vaccines were loosely Trump-branded, so I wasn’t really expecting this to be a controversial issue and hadn’t looked into it. Which is just to say that Rogan was actually much better informed about the vaccine issue than I was. He (correctly) said the common, non-severe side-effects were considerably worse than I realized. And he also correctly said that the Phase III clinical trials were not long enough to gauge how enduring the protection the vaccines offered was. He, as a vaccine skeptic, had sought out a lot of vaccine skeptic talking points, and many of those talking points were factually true.

I, a normal sane individual who supports vaccination efforts, never bothered to look into anything about it other than when was I going to be able to get my shots.

But this is actually the general pattern in life. A normal person can tell you lots of factual information about his life, his work, his neighborhood, and his hobbies but very little about the FDA clinical trial process or the moon landing. But do you know who knows a ton about the moon landing? Crazy people who think it’s fake. They don’t have crank opinions because they are misinformed, they have tons and tons of moon-related factual information because they’re cranks. If you can remember the number of the Kennedy administration executive order about reducing troop levels in Vietnam, then you’re probably a crank — that EO plays a big role in Kennedy-related conspiracy theories, so it’s conspiracy theorists who know all the details.

More generally, I think a lot of excessive worry about “misinformation” is driven by the erroneous belief that more factual information would resolve political disputes.

«

Certainly echoes a lot of what I found in researching Social Warming. But the difference now is that there are recommendation engines helpfully pulling together the cranks, who can then crankify themselves even further into CrankWorld.
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The Great Siberian thaw • The New Yorker

Joshua Yaffa visits the land where the ice beneath the ground always used to be frozen – but now isn’t:

»

Soviet engineers came to treat vechnaya merzlota [literally “eternal frost”] as exactly that: eternal, stable, unchanging. “They believed they had conquered permafrost,” Dmitry Streletskiy, a professor at George Washington University, said. “You could construct a five- or nine-story building on top of piles and nothing happened. Everyone was happy.” But, Streletskiy went on, “that infrastructure was meant to serve thirty to fifty years, and no one could imagine that the climate would change so dramatically within that span.”

By 2016, a regional official had declared that sixty% of the buildings in Norilsk were compromised as a result of permafrost thaw. On May 29, 2020, a fuel-storage tank belonging to Norilsk Nickel, one of Russia’s largest mining companies, cracked open, spilling twenty-one thousand tons of diesel into nearby waterways and turning the Ambarnaya River a metallic red. Executives at the company said that the damage had been contained. But Georgy Kavanosyan, a hydrogeologist based in Moscow, who has a popular YouTube channel, travelled to Norilsk and took samples farther north, from the Pyasina River, which empties into the Kara Sea. He found pollutant concentrations two and a half times permitted levels, threatening fish stocks and ecosystems for thousands of miles.

The Kremlin could not ignore the scale of the disaster, which Greenpeace compared to the Exxon Valdez oil spill. In February, 2021, the state ordered Norilsk Nickel to pay a two-billion- dollar fine, the largest penalty for environmental damage in Russian history. The company had said that the piles supporting the tank failed as the permafrost thawed. An outside scientific review found that those piles had been improperly installed, and that the temperature of the soil was not regularly monitored. In other words, human negligence had compounded the effects of climate change. “What happened in Norilsk was a kind of demonstration of how severe the problem can be,” Vladimir Romanovsky, a professor of geophysics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said. “But it’s far from the only case. Lots of other accidents are happening on a smaller scale, and will continue to.”

«

As it melts – irreversibly? – everything is changing.
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Turk sets unenviable COVID record by testing positive for 14 straight months • Reuters

Yesim Dikmen:

»

When Muzaffer Kayasan first caught COVID-19, he thought he was destined to die since he was already suffering from leukemia. Fourteen months and 78 straight positive tests later, he is still alive – and still battling to shake off the infection.

Kayasan, 56, has Turkey’s longest recorded continuous COVID-19 infection, doctors say, possibly due to a weakened immune system from the cancer. Despite being in and out of hospital since November 2020, his spirits have been high.

“I guess this is the female version of COVID – she has been obsessed with me,” Kayasan joked last week as he found out that his latest PCR test was, yet again, positive.

Nine months in hospital and five months mostly alone in his flat have separated him from much of the outside world, including his granddaughter, Azra, who stays in the garden while visiting, talking through the glass back door.

“I will play with you when I get well,” he told her through a mask after giving her a plastic toy telephone.

«

This is how variants emerge: the weakened immune system can’t quite kill the infection, but can squash it again and again until a mutation emerges that escapes the immune system and flourishes, and goes on to infect others.
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HMRC seizes NFT for first time in £1.4m fraud case • BBC News

»

HMRC said the suspects in its fraud case were alleged to have used “sophisticated methods” to try to hide their identities including false and stolen identities, false addresses, pre-paid unregistered mobile phones, Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), false invoices and pretending to engage in legitimate business activities.

Nick Sharp, deputy director economic crime, said the first seizure of an NFT “serves as a warning to anyone who thinks they can use crypto assets to hide money from HMRC”.

“We constantly adapt to new technology to ensure we keep pace with how criminals and evaders look to conceal their assets.”

HMRC said it had secured a court order to detain the seized crypto assets worth about £5,000 and three digital artwork NFTs, which have not been valued, while its investigation continues.

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Google lets you install Chrome OS on PCs and Macs • Forbes

Barry Collins:

»

Google has released Chrome OS Flex, a version of its Chromebook operating system that can be installed on PCs and Macs.

Flex is being pitched at businesses who are managing fleets of old Windows machines or Macs. Google describes Chrome OS Flex as “a free and sustainable way to modernize devices you already own”.

Google is clearly trying to draw a comparison between the sluggish performance users often experience with older PCs, compared to the slick performance on offer from the more limited Chrome OS on ageing hardware. The hope being that businesses will decide they can do all they need on actual Chromebooks the next time they get to a hardware refresh.

Google recently snapped up Neverware, a company that was offering a version of the Chrome OS called CloudReady, which could be installed on PCs. That, however, had the disadvantage of no official support from the Google Play Store.

Google is also trying to play up the green credentials of switching to Chrome OS Flex, arguing that it will “refresh your older devices with a modern OS and extend their lifespan to reduce e-waste”. Given that chip shortages are currently limiting the supply of some computer brands, especially in the corporate space, it might also allow companies to get another year or two out of their existing hardware fleet.

«

I can see the benefit in installing it on old PCs, but I’d have thought old Macs that were still in use had some software with specific utility. From the outset, I’ve always thought that ChromeOS’s benefits were to corporations, not particularly consumers. Yet the marketing doesn’t seem directed like that, perhaps because of Windows licencing pitfalls.
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Are we at risk of over-estimating the neo-climate sceptics? • BusinessGreen Blog Post

James Murray:

»

Perhaps the most pertinent forerunner to this campaign [against the UK government’s 2050 net zero target] is not Brexit, but the various campaigns previously pedalled by [“Brexit hard man” Steve] Baker’s friends at the Global Warming Policy Foundation and the accompanying network of ‘free market’ think tanks and media titles.

Over the past decade this loose grouping has argued against renewables, only to watch them become the lowest cost form of new power capacity and backbone of the energy system. They’ve argued against electric vehicles, only to watch them become the driving force in the auto market. They’ve argued against net zero goals on the grounds no other countries have them, only to watch 90% of the global economy adopt such targets. And they’ve argued for fracking, only to watch it get itself banned. It’s quite the track record.

In fact, their only genuinely successful campaign of the past decade was the one that helped push David Cameron to cut energy efficiency funding schemes and shelve zero carbon home standards. According to recent analysis, that genius move has cost the UK around £2.5bn in higher bills, or £60 per household.

I was reminded of this litany this weekend while reading the letter from a small band of MPs arguing reviving fracking would restore a sense of community in northern England, and Andrew Neil’s bold suggestion that he had discovered “the answer to the energy crisis”. [Shale gas – Overspill Ed.]

When you unpack their manifesto the paucity of it is genuinely staggering. It goes something like this: blame the ‘green blob’ and ‘mad’ politicians; suggest there is a simple solution to a complex energy crisis; quote highly contestable projections for fracking production and jobs; make no mention of the negligible impact UK gas production would have on domestic prices without export bans or nationalisation; big up the potential of new nuclear projects, but make no mention of cost implications; make no mention of energy efficiency; and most of all, in no way engage with what to do about the increased emissions and climate risks that would come with the expansion of gas infrastructure. And that’s it.

The public is not stupid. None of this passes the sniff test, even before you consider the neo-climate denial it is built upon.

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A network of fake test answer sites is trying to incriminate students • The Markup

Colin Lecher:

»

One feature from [online proctoring service] Honorlock especially piqued [computer science student Kurt] Wilson’s interest. The company, according to its materials, provides a way to track cheating students through what Honorlock calls “seed sites” or others call “honeypots”—fake websites that remotely tattle on students who visit them during exams.

Wilson pored over a patent for the software to learn more, finding example sites listed. By looking for common code and the same test questions over the past year, Wilson eventually turned up about a dozen honeypots apparently linked to Honorlock, five of which are still operating.

“It kind of became an obsession at one point,” said Wilson, who hasn’t tracked the honeypots in some months but was at one point checking for them daily.

The sites Wilson found are bare bones. They have names like “gradepack.com” and “quizlookup.com.” They’re largely a catalog of thousands of apparent test questions that are sometimes bizarrely specific. “In which part of the digestive system does chemical digestion begin?” one post asks. A multiple-choice question requests using “VSEPR theory to predict the molecular geometry around the carbon atom in formaldehyde, H2CO.”

Click on the “show answer” button below any of the questions and you won’t get help but will be rewarded with a digital chiming noise and no answer. But visitors to the sites are having detailed information about their mouse movements and even typing transmitted to an Honorlock server.

In the patent, recently flagged, along with an Honorlock honeypot site, by student media at Arizona State University, the company explains that its sites can track visitor information like IP addresses as evidence that a student was looking up answers on a secondary device.

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Some academics think it’s simply entrapment. I still find an educational system that assumes that in the world of work we won’t be able to instantly look things up, and crowdsource information, to be bizarre.
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The New York Times has changed Wordle’s solutions • The Verge

James Vincent:

»

Wordle’s acquisition by The New York Times has already stirred up controversy, from broken streaks to accusations the game has become harder. [It hasn’t – Overspill Ed.] But here’s a big change the NYT isn’t shouting about: it’s altered Wordle’s solutions. As of Tuesday, February 15th (game number 241), the New York Times version of Wordle and the original version hosted at powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle have diverged and will now continue forever out of step.

Changes to Wordle’s word list by the NYT were spotted last week by a number of sources, including BoingBoing. Although some thought these changes only applied to the words you could guess, it turns out the Times also altered the list of possible solutions. (The Verge made this mistake as well — we regret the error.) This confusion wasn’t helped by the fact that the Times itself was running round telling publications that everything was the same in Wordle land. As NYT comms director Jordan Cohen told The Guardian: “Nothing has changed about the game play.” Which is really not true!

Sure, the game plays the same, but the Times has not only removed rude words like “pussy” and “whore” from possible guesses, it’s also changed the game’s future solutions. And surely for a game all about guessing words this counts as a change to gameplay.

«

Well.. no? I’d take “gameplay” to refer to “how it does things”, not “what the solutions are”. Apparently the solution at Powerlanguage was too exotic so it was unceremoniously dumped. No doubt resynchronisation of the two will be on Vladimir Putin’s list of demands to be fulfilled before his troops retreat.
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My family is trapped in the metaverse • WIRED

Adrienne So:

»

It didn’t start out this way. I first got the Meta Quest 2 as a loaner in November, to try coworking with my colleagues and experiment with briefings. For work or relaxation, I found the headset utterly unsatisfying. If I want to meditate, I will take my dog on a walk; if I want to blow off steam, I go for a run. “The killer app is reality!” my husband crowed, as he saw the headset sit dusty and unused on my desk for about a month.

That was until Christmas, when both sides of my family visited and we reinstituted strict social distancing to protect older family members in the middle of the Omicron surge. Trapped in my house with no escape from all of my loved ones, I downloaded Puzzling Places one night. Meditative music plays as you manipulate small pieces of landmarks, clothes, and places in a 3D space around you. The satisfying click and glow as I put each small piece into its place was addictive.

I downloaded a few more games. Then a few more. Getting used to the headset didn’t come easy. The headset is much lighter and easier to use than older iterations, but it’s still heavy and awkward. Getting plopped down into empty space with no legs is still disorienting; I bought myself a big bag of the same ginger gummy chews I used to combat nausea during pregnancy. 

Still, I persisted. In all honesty, I would not have if I were able to do literally anything else. A coworker suggested playing Beat Saber and FitXR. I organized a game of Blaston. My skeptical husband found that he also loved Puzzling Places, and my six-year-old demanded a (short) turn. My 4-year-old still doesn’t want to try it, but it’s only a matter of time. 

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The new chief executive of Peloton says it isn’t going to be sold; it also seems to be developing new exercise machines. At least one of those ideas is bad. CC-licensed photo by Dana L. Brown on Flickr.

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

A selection of 9 links for you. So clickable, so very clickable. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Meta wouldn’t tell us how it enforces its rules in VR, so we ran a test to find out • Buzzfeed News

Emily Baker-White:

»

In a matter of hours, we built a private Horizon World festooned with massive misinformation slogans: “Stop the Steal!” “Stop the Plandemic!” “Trump won the 2020 election!” We called the world “The Qniverse,” and we gave it a soundtrack: an endless loop of Infowars founder Alex Jones calling Joe Biden a pedophile and claiming the election was rigged by reptilian overlords. We filled the skies with words and phrases that Meta has explicitly promised to remove from Facebook and Instagram — “vaccines cause autism,” “COVID is a hoax,” and the QAnon slogan “where we go one we go all.” Time and time again, Meta has removed and taken action on pages and groups, even private ones, that use these phrases.

We did not release this toxic material to the larger public. Only a handful of BuzzFeed News reporters were given access to the Qniverse, which was created using an account in the real name of a BuzzFeed News reporter and linked to her Facebook account. We kept the world “unpublished” — i.e., invitation only — to prevent unsuspecting users from happening upon it, and to mimic the way some Meta users seeking to share misinformation might actually do so: in private, invitation-only spaces.

The purpose of our test was to assess whether the content moderation systems that operate on Facebook and Instagram also operate on Horizon. At least in our case, it appears they did not.

«

They even reported it to the Meta moderation team, who said it was A-OK. However:

»

Perhaps the moderators left the Qniverse up because the world contained only violative content, and not violating behavior. Beyond the act of creating the misinformation slogans, we did not speak or otherwise interact with the content in the world. Without that context, maybe content moderators took it to be a parody.

We went to Meta’s comms department, a channel not available to ordinary people. We asked about its content moderators’ decisions: how could a world that shares misinformation that Meta has removed from its other platforms, under the same Community Guidelines, not violate Horizon’s policies?

The following afternoon, the experimental world disappeared. The company had reversed its original ruling.

«

Earlier this month I spoke to an ex-Facebook employee, who said she felt that Meta was just leaving behind the mess of Facebook in order to move on to the new shiny. And so the cycle repeats.
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New Peloton chief dismisses suggestions company will be sold • Financial Times

Patrick McGee and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson:

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[New CEO at Peloton, Barry] McCarthy said his growth strategy would focus on content, explaining that “where the magic lives” at Peloton is on its digital screens, not its connected bikes or treadmills. Expanding the digital community and enhancing content could make Peloton “a very fast-growing business with very high margins”, he said.

His “playbook” will include developing “product line extensions” so customers could own multiple machines, McCarthy said. He added, however, that “an entirely different pricing structure” could replace the $39 monthly subscription fee which has been static since the company sold its first bikes via Kickstarter.

The FT has separately obtained details of two hardware launches under development at Peloton.

One, codenamed Project Caesar, is a connected rower that gives feedback on the user’s form. According to photographs and spec details seen by the FT, the rower features the same tablet as Peloton’s Bike+ product, operates with magnetic resistance and will feature classes taught by instructors in studios and on the water.

In recent months some employees have been testing the rower in their homes. Two people familiar with the matter said it could be announced before or at “Homecoming”, an annual event for Peloton fans to be held on May 13.

Project Cobra would deliver Peloton’s first dedicated strength product. It is designed to rival Tonal, a cable-pulley weight system manufactured by a Peloton competitor. Unlike Tonal, Cobra does not attach to a wall and pairs with a television rather than a touch screen. The product does not appear to be as imminent as the rower.

«

The hardware is going to be an anchor that will drag them down until they abandon it. Exercise machinery is a commodity market (as with most hardware), and that isn’t anyway where Peloton’s USP lies – it is, as McCarthy correctly recognises, the screens that connect you to other people taking part. And magnetic resistance for a rower? Sure it will never wear out, but it’s going to be pricey, might need power (electromagnets; permanent magnets would be super-expensive and hard to calibrate?) and there are good-enough alternatives already, using air or water.
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Worldle

Teuteuf, a developer:

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Guess the WORLDLE in 6 guesses.

Each guess must be a valid country, territory, …

After each guess, you will have the distance, the direction and the proximity from your guess and the target country.

«

Come on, I think this has a way to go. There could be a Chemicable (what’s the chemical), Equationable (name the physics equation), Medicable (name the medical condition..)
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Here’s what actually happens to all your online shopping returns • Rest of World

Meaghan Tobin, Wency Chen and Abubakar Idris:

»

Refunds for the three items were issued as soon as the items were scanned into a New Jersey warehouse, which shares an address with a Chinese furniture company called Loye. (A Shein spokesperson said in an email that the company did not own the New Jersey warehouse or have any relationship with the furniture company but does operate a warehouse in Los Angeles.) 

Over the month of January, the two items with AirTags attached [by the writers] sat for approximately two weeks at the New Jersey warehouse before making their way by vehicle through the U.S. Postal Service to suburbs of California and Florida respectively. Both appeared to be at residential addresses — the last received signal before the AirTag pings disappeared. The spokesperson for Shein did not directly answer written questions around whether returns in the U.S. were resold to new customers in the country.

According to Shobert, returns cost retailers about two-thirds of an item’s original selling price. That means the $20 sweater purchased by Rest of World could cost a company $13 to take back.

“They have basically built their profit model — that if they have to throw away all that’s unsold, it’s calculated into their model,” explained Juliana Prather, chief marketing officer at Edited. 

American consumer spending through the holiday season at Shein alone increased nearly fivefold since 2019. By mid-2021, the Chinese fashion app had almost surpassed Zara and H&M combined to account for the largest share of the American fast-fashion market. “So on one hand, that creates incredible power but [also] incredible focus on getting [products] out there,” Prather said. 

The spokesperson for Shein did not answer a question about whether unsold stock was calculated in the company’s profit model, saying in a written response that they do not disclose “proprietary business data.”

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Take that as a yes, then. It’s hard to think this is sustainable.
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Apple buys startup that makes music with artificial intelligence • Bloomberg via Yahoo

Mark Gurman:

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Apple acquired a startup called AI Music that uses artificial intelligence to generate tailor-made music, according to a person with knowledge of the matter, adding technology that could be used across its slate of audio offerings.

The purchase of AI Music, a London-based business founded in 2016, was completed in recent weeks. The company had about two dozen employees before the deal.

Technology developed by AI Music can create soundtracks using royalty-free music and artificial intelligence, according to a copy of its now-defunct website. The idea is to generate dynamic soundtracks that change based on user interaction. A song in a video game could change to fit the mood, for instance, or music during a workout could adapt to the user’s intensity.

On its LinkedIn page, AI Music said its goal is to “give consumers the power to choose the music they want, seamlessly edited to fit their needs or create dynamic solutions that adapt to fit their audiences.” The startup had earlier deals with advertising companies to create more engaging ads that played different music depending on the audience.

A representative of Cupertino, California-based Apple declined to comment.

While relatively small, the deal is one of the tech giant’s few acquisitions in the past year. Apple’s last reported purchase was also for a music company: Primephonic. That startup ran a classical music streaming service that Apple intends to turn into an app tied to Apple Music this year.

«

“AI-built” music is fast becoming A Thing. I searched on the term “AI Music” and got this, which is owned by picture company Shutterstock. Though AI Music doesn’t seem to be listed on the “top 10 music generators” in January 2020.

Would Apple want to include it in Garageband, though, or save it for ProTools?
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Crypto, libertarianism and externalities • Pluralistic

Cory Doctorow:

»

I’ve just read one of the most lucid, wide-ranging, cross-disciplinary critiques of cryptocurrency and blockchain I’ve yet to encounter. It comes from David “DSHR” Rosenthal, a distinguished technologist whose past achievements including helping to develop X11 and the core technologies for Nvidia.

Rosenthal’s critique is a transcript of a lecture he gave to Stanford’s EE380 class, adapted from a December 2021 talk for an investor conference. It is a bang-up-to-date synthesis of many of the critical writings on the subject, glued together with Rosenthal’s own deep technical expertise. He calls it “Can We Mitigate Cryptocurrencies’ Externalities?”

The presence of “externalities” in Rosenthal’s title is key. Rosenthal identifies blockchainism’s core ideology as emerging from “the libertarian culture of Silicon Valley and the cypherpunks,” and states that “libertarianism’s attraction is based on ignoring externalities.”

«

Doctorow provides an excellent precis which is worth reading for itself. A point worth reflecting on is that society has now reached enough of a comfort point that there’s room for libertarianism – which is utterly hopeless in a crisis; self-interest only works until you’re the loser – to attempt to flourish.
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Researchers find the NFT economy is just as unequal as the real one • Vice

Maxwell Strachan:

»

One recent study, which a team of researchers published in the leading science journal Nature, for example, found that “the top 10% of traders alone perform 85% of all transactions and trade at least once 97% of all assets.” All things considered, the top 10% of “buyer–seller pairs” are as active as everyone else combined. All in all, the research paints a picture of the NFT market almost completely captured by “whales,” or deep-pocketed players in crypto. 

“You have a very concentrated market,” Andrea Baronchelli, one of the researchers, told Motherboard.  

Baronchelli, an associate math professor at City, University of London and the lead of the token economy group at the Alan Turing Institute, added that the research appears to push back against the arguments typically made that the NFT market is a democratizing and “totally open” economic system where “trade is brought to the masses.”

The team analyzed 6.1 million trades of 4.7 million NFTs using 160 separate cryptocurrencies between June 2017 and April 2021. The primary crypto currencies used were Ethereum and WAX, which bills itself as an eco-friendly alternative. 

The study did have some limitations. The researchers got their data from a variety of sources, including APIs for OpenSea and Decentraland, and data from NonFungible Corporation, which tracks historical NFT sales. Because data was not directly scraped from the Ethereum or WAX blockchains, they “likely missed a number of ‘independent’ NFT producers,” according to the study. But overall, their research provides evidence that such platforms, as of now, are largely controlled by dominant whales.

…Though Baronchelli said his research doesn’t “prove” the existence of wash trading [where the same person buys and sells a product to raise its perceived value], the concentrated pattern they observed is “compatible” with such practices, as well as money laundering.

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Had no idea that NFTs were being traded in 2017. I thought they were, at worst, a 2020-era thing.
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Supercomputer helps Canadian researcher uncover thousands of viruses that could cause human diseases • CBC News

Lauren Pelley:

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Tracking pathogens that could spark future pandemics is no easy feat, but thanks to the help of a supercomputer, a Canadian researcher is among a team of scientists who’ve uncovered thousands of viruses that might one day pose a threat to humans.

Dubbed the Serratus Project, the international collaboration recently shared its findings in the journal Nature — which included the discovery of nearly 10 times more RNA-based viruses than were previously known, totalling more than 130,000 new species, all lurking in more than a decade’s worth of publicly available genetic data.

Those types of pathogens are known for causing a wide variety of human diseases, ranging from COVID-19 to Ebola to the common cold. And this knowledge could “improve pathogen surveillance for the anticipation and mitigation of future pandemics,” the team wrote in their paper, which was published at the end of January.

Artem Babaian, a former University of British Columbia (UBC) post-doctoral research fellow, spearheaded the work, which relied on cloud-based supercomputing power provided by Amazon Web Services in collaboration with UBC through the school’s Cloud Innovation Centre. 

“We reanalyzed all public sequencing data — so this is genetic data from pretty much every corner of the planet you can think of,” Babaian told CBC News. “It has soil samples from Vancouver… all the way down to anal swabs from penguins in Antarctica.”

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That’s… a long way down. That they pulled this out of already known data is impressive.
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Super Bowl crypto commercials failed to hijack the game • Fast Company

Jeff Beer:

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As marketing goes, a year ago most everyday people couldn’t name a crypto brand. Over the past 12 months there has been an explosion in marketing, particular in sports. FTX’s arena deal with the Miami Heat in early 2021 triggered a flood of other crypto brands jumping into the space. Coinbase became the official crypto partner of the NBA and WNBA. Binance sponsored the African Cup of Nations soccer tournament. Crypto.com, of course, replaced Staples as the name on the arena of the Los Angeles Lakers, and then signed on both LeBron James and star-studded soccer club Paris Saint-Germain as partners.

For those who bought into the Crypto Bowl hype, consider it buying in early. Back in 1999, only two dotcom brands had Super Bowl commercials. The next year, there were 17. Today, we don’t even blink when Amazon is a perennially popular Super Bowl advertiser.

One of the challenges for crypto brand marketers is effectively communicating the complexity, potential, and details of an incredibly complicated business. Is it cryptocurrency? Is it blockchain tech? Is it an NFT? Isn’t it all just a scam? Too deep a dive will have people’s eyes glazing over, while too little information will only feed into their confusion and mistrust. So how did this year’s crypto advertisers meet all these challenges?

I didn’t write a white paper outlining how I’d evaluate these ads, nor did I have to put anything on the blockchain. I focused on three questions: Does the ad tell a crypto newbie anything about what it does and why they should care? Does the ad make that person predisposed to like the company? Does the ad inspire them to look into it further?

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As Beer points out, there were 17 dot-com-boom advertisers. I think two of them are still going, and to some extent that’s because they weren’t directly doing dot-com things.
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